The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature 1107140277, 9781107140271, 9781316495605

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTMODERN LITERATURE

The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of the field, from its emergence in the mid-twentieth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media and the visual and fine arts have characterized the historical development of postmodernism. Covering subjects from the Cold War and countercultures to the Latin American boom and magic realism, this History traces the genealogy of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to postmodern literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but will also serve as a definitive reference for years to come. brian mchale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Constructing Postmodernism, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He also coedited, with Inger H. Dalsgaard and Luc Herman, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012). len platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of Joyce and the Anglo-Irish; Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake; and James Joyce: Texts and Contexts. He also edited Modernism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and, with Sara Upstone, Postmodern Literature and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTMODERN LITERATURE BRIAN MCHALE Ohio State University

LEN PLATT Goldsmiths, University of London

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107140271 © Brian McHale and Len Platt 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Cambridge history of postmodern literature / edited by Brian McHale, Len Platt. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-14027-1 (Hardback) 1. Postmodernism (Literature) 2. Literature, Modern–20th century–History and criticism. 3. Postmodernism–Social aspects. I. McHale, Brian, editor. II. Platt, Len, editor. pn98.p67c36 2016 8090 .9113–dc23 2015032526 isbn 978-1-107–14027-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTMODERN LITERATURE

The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of the field, from its emergence in the mid-twentieth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media and the visual and fine arts have characterized the historical development of postmodernism. Covering subjects from the Cold War and countercultures to the Latin American boom and magic realism, this History traces the genealogy of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to postmodern literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but will also serve as a definitive reference for years to come. brian mchale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Constructing Postmodernism, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He also coedited, with Inger H. Dalsgaard and Luc Herman, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012). len platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of Joyce and the Anglo-Irish; Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake; and James Joyce: Texts and Contexts. He also edited Modernism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and, with Sara Upstone, Postmodern Literature and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTMODERN LITERATURE BRIAN MCHALE Ohio State University

LEN PLATT Goldsmiths, University of London

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107140271 © Brian McHale and Len Platt 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Cambridge history of postmodern literature / edited by Brian McHale, Len Platt. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-14027-1 (Hardback) 1. Postmodernism (Literature) 2. Literature, Modern–20th century–History and criticism. 3. Postmodernism–Social aspects. I. McHale, Brian, editor. II. Platt, Len, editor. pn98.p67c36 2016 8090 .9113–dc23 2015032526 isbn 978-1-107–14027-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTMODERN LITERATURE

The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of the field, from its emergence in the mid-twentieth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media and the visual and fine arts have characterized the historical development of postmodernism. Covering subjects from the Cold War and countercultures to the Latin American boom and magic realism, this History traces the genealogy of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to postmodern literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but will also serve as a definitive reference for years to come. brian mchale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Constructing Postmodernism, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He also coedited, with Inger H. Dalsgaard and Luc Herman, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012). len platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of Joyce and the Anglo-Irish; Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake; and James Joyce: Texts and Contexts. He also edited Modernism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and, with Sara Upstone, Postmodern Literature and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF POSTMODERN LITERATURE BRIAN MCHALE Ohio State University

LEN PLATT Goldsmiths, University of London

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32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107140271 © Brian McHale and Len Platt 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Cambridge history of postmodern literature / edited by Brian McHale, Len Platt. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-14027-1 (Hardback) 1. Postmodernism (Literature) 2. Literature, Modern–20th century–History and criticism. 3. Postmodernism–Social aspects. I. McHale, Brian, editor. II. Platt, Len, editor. pn98.p67c36 2016 8090 .9113–dc23 2015032526 isbn 978-1-107–14027-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Contributors

page viii

General introduction

1

Brian McHale and Len Platt

part i postmodernism before postmodernity?

15

Introduction Postmodernism – rupture, tradition, historical reason?

17

Len Platt

1 Postmodernism and its precursors

25

Joe Bray

2 After the Holocaust

39

Robert Eaglestone

3 Empire’s ebb

52

Theo D’haen

4 Cold War culture at the mid-century

67

Alan Nadel

part ii the long sixties, 1954–1975

83

Introduction On or about the year 1966

85

Brian McHale

5 Mass mediation

95

John Johnston

6 Countercultures

112

David R. Shumway v

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Contents

vi 7

New novels: from the 1950s to 1970

127

Randall Stevenson

8

The Latin American boom and the invention of magic realism

143

Wendy B. Faris

9

Rise of theory

159

Thomas Docherty

part iii the major phase: peak postmodernism, 1973–1991

173

Introduction Branding

175

Brian McHale

10 The architectural paradigm

185

Brian McHale

11

The dematerialization of the art object  a conversation

199

Michael Mercil and Amanda Gluibizzi

12 The New Hollywood cinema and after

214

John Hellmann

13 Second-wave feminism and after

230

Robyn Warhol

14 Gay and lesbian subcultures from Stonewall to Angels in America

247

Martin Dines

15 The “post” in postcolonial

262

Sara Upstone

16 Celtic postmodernism – Scotland and the breakup of Britain

278

Len Platt

17 Historiographic metafiction

293

Amy Elias

18 High and low, or Avant-Pop

308

Brian McHale

19 The Oulipo, language poetry, and proceduralism

324

Andrew Epstein

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Contents 20 From punk rock to the politics of pop

vii 339

Barry Shank

21 The cyberworld is (not) flat: cyberpunk and globalization

353

Elana Gomel

22 The art market and the revival of painting in the 1990s

369

Frazer Ward

23 Hip-hop is (not) postmodern

383

James Braxton Peterson

part iv interregnum, 1989–2001

397

Introduction After the fall, 1989

399

Brian McHale and Len Platt

24 Postmodern Japan and global visual culture

405

Takayuki Tatsumi

25 Digital culture and posthumanism

419

David Ciccoricco

26 Culture wars at the turn of the millennium

434

Ellen G. Friedman

27 Second-generation postmoderns

450

Stephen J. Burn

28 Postmodern China

465

Wang Ning

29 Postmodernism, cosmodernism, planetarism

480

Christian Moraru

Epilogue 2001, 2008, and after

497

Andrew Hoberek

Index

515

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Contributors

joe bray is Reader in Language and Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (2003), The Female Reader in the English Novel: From Burney to Austen (2009) and co-editor of, amongst others, Mark Z. Danielewski (2011) and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012). His latest monograph, The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period, will be published in 2016. stephen j. burn is the author or editor of five books about American fiction, including Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008). He is currently editing American Literature in Transition: 1990–2000, and writing a monograph entitled Neurofiction: The Mind of the American Novel. He is Reader in Post-45 American Literature at the University of Glasgow. david ciccoricco is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the author of Reading Network Fiction (2007) and Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2015). theo d’haen is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of many publications on (post)modernism, (post)colonialism, and world literature. Recent publications include The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (2012); The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited with David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (2012); World Literature: A Reader, edited with César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (2013); and American Literature: A History, with Hans Bertens (2014). martin dines is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University London. His research focuses on the place of the suburbs viii

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Contributors

ix

in Anglo-American writing, queer domesticities and the interconnections between national identity, space and sexuality. He is the author of Gay Suburban Narratives in American Literature and Culture: Homecoming Queens (2009) and co-editor with Timotheus Vermeulen of New Suburban Stories (2013). He is currently Vice President of the Literary London Society. thomas docherty is Professor of English and of Comparative Literature in the University of Warwick, having previously held the Chair of English in Trinity College Dublin and Chair of English in Kent. He is the author of many books, including most recently, Aesthetic Democracy (2008), The English Question (2008), Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency (2012), For the University (2011) and Universities at War (2015). He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Culture and Democracy. robert eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London and Deputy Director of the Holocaust Research Centre there. He is the author of several books including Ethical Criticism (1997), The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004) and The Very Short Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (2013). amy elias is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Principal founder of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, her many publications include Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (2001); The Planetary Turn: Relationality, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st Century, edited with Christian Moraru (2015); and Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, edited with Joel Burges (2015). andrew epstein is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (2006) and the forthcoming Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. wendy b. faris recently retired as Distinguished Research Professor in and former Chair of the English Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is the author of Carlos Fuentes (1983), Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction (1988) and Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (2004); she co-edited with Lois Parkinson

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x

Contributors Zamora Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995). She has just published an article on Ben Okri, and is currently working on the relations between modernist painting and literature.

ellen g. friedman is Professor of English, Women’s Studies and Holocaust Studies at the College of New Jersey. She has published Morality USA with Corinne Squire, Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction with Miriam Fuchs, as well as books on Joyce Carol Oates and other topics. Her essays have appeared in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies and other journals. Friedman serves on editorial boards and has taught in Frankfurt and Paris. She has been keynote speaker in the US, Europe and Russia, and has appeared on public radio and television. She is currently finishing a family memoir entitled The Seven, A Family Story. amanda gluibizzi teaches contemporary art and design history at the Ohio State University and has published essays in Word & Image, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Visual Culture in Britain and elsewhere. elana gomel is an Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel-Aviv University. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton, Stanford and University of Hong Kong. She is the author of six books and numerous articles on subjects such as postmodernism, narrative theory, science fiction, Dickens and Victorian culture. Her latest books are Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (2014) and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (2014). john hellmann is Professor of English at the Ohio State University, where he is a member of the Interdisciplinary Film Studies Program. His books include American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (1986) and The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (1997). His current book-length project examines key literary, cinematic and musical texts within the contexts of major movements that defined the 1960s. andrew hoberek is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where he teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture. He is the author of The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (2005)

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Contributors

xi

and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy (2015). His book Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics (2014) was nominated for an Eisner award. john johnston is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Emory University, where he teaches literature and science, media theory and technology. He is the author of Carnival of Repetition, Information Multiplicity (1989) and The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (2008) as well as the editor of Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997), a collection of essays by media theorist Friedrich Kittler. He is currently working on a book about technothrillers, networks and new forms of agency. brian mchale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015). He co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006), Teaching Narrative Theory (2010), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012) and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012). michael mercil lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. Mercil’s art explores the realms of “the near, the low, the common” in works somewhere close to  if not always within  the categories of sculpture, drawing, painting, landscape architecture, film, performance and agriculture. His occasional writing has appeared in PLACES magazine, Public Art Review and TriQuarterly. christian moraru is Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including the collection Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination (2009) and the monograph Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011). His co-edited essay volume is The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (2015). Moraru’s latest book, the monograph Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology, is forthcoming. alan nadel, William T. Bryan Chair in American Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky, is the author of several books,

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xii

Contributors including Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (1995), Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America (1997) and Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (2005). His essays have appeared in numerous scholarly journals, and he has won prizes for the best essay in Modern Fiction Studies and the best essay in PMLA.

james braxton peterson is Associate Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University. A founder member of Hip Scholar LLC, he has written numerous scholarly articles and is featured across a range of media as an expert on popular culture, urban youth and politics. He is currently preparing his first academic book, Major Figures: Critical Essays on Hip Hop Music. len platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of such works as Joyce and the Anglo-Irish (1998), Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake (2007) and James Joyce: Texts and Contexts (2011). He edited Joyce, Ireland, Britain with Andrew Gibson (2006), the Cambridge University Press volume Modernism and Race (2010) and coedited with Sara Upstone the follow-up, Postmodern Literature and Race (2015). He is also the author of works on popular culture, such as Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 and co-editor of Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin 1890–1939, nominated by the American Musicological Society for the Ruth A. Solie Award. barry shank is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University where he teaches courses in American studies, popular music and interdisciplinary methods. He is the author of Dissonant Identities: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (1994), A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture (2004) and The Political Force of Musical Beauty (2014). david r. shumway is Professor of English, and Literary and Cultural Studies, and the founding director of the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a founder and the first President of the Cultural Studies Association. He is the author of Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (2014). He has also written Michel Foucault (1989), Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (1994), Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (2003) and John Sayles (2012).

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Contributors

xiii

randall stevenson is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature in the University of Edinburgh and General Editor of The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain. His books include Literature and the Great War (2013), Oxford English Literary History vol.12, The Last of England? (2004), which won a Saltire Prize, and, edited with Brian McHale, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006). His forthcoming book is Reading the Times: Studies in Twentieth-Century Narrative, History and Temporality (2017). takayuki tatsumi has taught American literature and critical theory at Keio University, Tokyo. He is President of the American Literature Society of Japan and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Transnational American Studies. His books include Cyberpunk America (1988), the winner of the JAPAN-US Friendship Commission’s American Studies Book Prize; New Americanist Poetics (1995), winner of the Yukichi Fukuzawa Award; and Full Metal Apache (2006), the winner of the 2010 IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award. A recent article entitled “Literary History on the Road” was published in PMLA (2004). wang ning is Changjiang Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Tsinghua University and Zhiyuan Chair Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Apart from his numerous books and articles in Chinese, he has published Globalization and Cultural Translation (2004) and Translated Modernities: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Globalization and China (2010) in English. He has also published various essays and articles in English and edited more than ten special issues for international journals such as European Review, Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Semiotica, Neohelicon, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, Amerasia Journal, ARIEL, Narrative and Telos. sara upstone is Director of Teaching and Learning for the School of Humanities and Associate Professor of English Literature at Kingston University, London. She is the author of Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel and British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices (2009). She is also editor of Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture, with Andrew Teverson (2011); Researching and Representing Mobilities, with Lesley Murray (2014);

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xiv

Contributors

and Postmodern Literature and Race, with Len Platt (2015). She is currently researching the utopian politics of race in contemporary British fiction. frazer ward is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Smith College. He is the author of No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (2012), and his work has appeared in books, catalogs and journals including Art + Text, Art Journal, Documents and October. robyn warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. Her most recent books are Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015), co-edited with Susan S. Lanser and Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (2015), co-written with Helena Michie. Previous books include Having a Good Cry (2003) and Gendered Interventions (1989).

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General introduction Brian McHale and Len Platt

History/postmodernism The concept of postmodernism is problematic enough in itself. There are the cliché confusions over terms (postmodernity/postmodernism) and old problems with definitions of a concept once used as everyday currency. It is not at all hard to understand why in an entry entitled “A Brief History of Postmodernism,” a website simulacrum of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Earth (hsg2) constructs a notion so hugely overused in “the last fifty years” that “it is now difficult to take . . . seriously as a sociological or philosophical concept.”1 But then, from this potential endgame, hsg2 effects something of a rescue through the difficult-toignore argument that the importance of the term postmodernism lies precisely in the one-time ubiquity of its usage. This was what made it so key, so defining of “an age,” if only in the sense that it once framed the way so many people formulated themselves in or perhaps against the world. That by itself guarantees return to the term in the future, a return inevitably made manifest as historiography, or at least made in relation to the historiographic – as, indeed, hsg2 illustrates. It is itself an example of historiographical return, a contemporary reconstruction, albeit a half-joke one. Written in the form of an imagined future and place, this interactive fanzine dedicated to and parodying Douglas Adams’s 1970s mock travel guide is distinct, but not entirely separate from, the “palpable” postmodern once embodied for Andreas Huyssen in quite different form – as art objects on display at Documenta 7 (1982).2 There are, of course, certain ironies to rethinking the postmodern in retrospect. Not least, the postmodern has had issues with historiography – these so fundamental that they were once central to the definition of postmodernism. Important interventions imagined the postmodern as being somehow “outside” history, famously positioned at the end of ideology. Just as modernist manifestos talked of a clean break, so postmodernism 1

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was often understood as being decisively torn away from its past. From a privileged point “beyond” history, versions of the postmodern made an assault on the very idea of historical narrative, reconfigured now as contaminated master narrative and reinserted as wild fabulation and myth of modernity. It may have been “safest,” as Jameson announced in the early 1990s, to imagine postmodernism as “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten to think historically in the first place,” but postmodern cultures were not greatly interested in safety. Jameson himself seemed ambivalent. At the very moment of appearing to seek refuge in historicism, he visualized the postmodern in more destabilizing, dazzling ways as “what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”3 Unsurprisingly such versions of the postmodern had a powerful impact on the discipline of history itself at the time, and the rumblings carried on well into the new millennium.4 Mainstream historians seemed willing to recognize that postmodernism had brought something significant to the practice of historical research, but only up to a certain point. An online website, Butterflies and Wheels, specifically set up to counter what it called “pseudo science and epistemic relativity (aka postmodernism)” carried an article in late 2002, well past the heyday of postmodern proper, which outlined the value-added of postmodernism – or at least of a soft, easily assimilated version of it. According to the author of “Postmodernism and History” – Sir Richard J. Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge – postmodernism had the beneficial effects of encouraging historians to take the irrational in the past more seriously, to pay more attention to ideas, beliefs and culture as influences in their own right, to devote more effort to framing our work in literary terms, to put individuals, often humble individuals, back into history, to emancipate ourselves from what became in the end a constricting straitjacket of social-science approaches, quantification and socio-economic determinism.

But things didn’t end there. Making a historian’s distinction between “moderate” and “radical,” the latter taking its cue from “poststructuralism,” the article continued on in rankled tones to worry away at what postmodernism in the extreme version might have done to historiography. Still mindful of postmodernism’s potentially “corrosive” effect, it looked back to earlier skirmishes when figures such as Keith Jenkins, historian of the French Revolution, Alan Munslow, and Hans Kellner had led the postmodern charge inside the domains of academic history writing. Under the influence of Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau, Robert Berkhofer,

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Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Ernesto Laclau, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, Hayden White, and so on, such historians, so the argument went, had deskilled the history project – or, rather, all possible history projects. Here history writing became reduced to “just ideology,” professional objectivity was rendered as farcical fantasy, historians wrote about “it” as though, paraphrasing Kellner, “it” were as real as the text which was “the object of their labors.” Whatever reconciliatory noises could be made in 2002, Evans’s article constructed a “radical” postmodernism that at its worst had threatened to condemn the past to the realms of the unknowable, with the result that all we would ever get to were “historians’ writings.” This was the vanishing point at which History disappeared, leaving us with nothing but “historiography as a species of literary endeavour.” Here postmodernism rendered any generalized version of the past both irretrievable and irredeemable as humanistic science.5 In fact, great swathes of postmodern critical culture once tackled such issues without ever giving up on poststructuralism or history, or necessarily losing out in terms of radical edge. For many conveners of the postmodern in the seventies, eighties, and beyond, the point was not to keel over from the initial onslaught of a conservative academy but rather to argue the case for a history, politics, and ethics already “embedded” in contemporary aesthetics. Linda Hutcheon’s influential formulation, for instance, famously responded to the charge that postmodern culture was both ahistorical and ethically withdrawn by constructing an ambivalent complexity obsessed with its own textuality at the same time as it reached out to a much wider politics of contemporary culture and society. Her term for this kind of high-status textuality – historiographic metafiction – seemed to confirm the fear that history was in danger of becoming nothing more than a species of “literary endeavour,” at the same time as it challenged the notion of postmodernism as decontextualized intellectual faddism.6 For all these problematics and qualifications, however, one knows full well what Evans was getting at in his broadside and how from some perspectives The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature will, even now, appear as a doubtful endeavor indeed, a text that claims to produce a cultural history using methods once unraveled by postmodern criticality – although the central focus of study here is postmodern cultural practices rather than postmodern critical theory. Preempting such criticisms, we would want to emphasize that now, in the early twenty-first century, things really have genuinely, rather than notionally, moved on – much further on than Evans thought in 2002.

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We are no longer locked in to the old arguments; nor were we by the onset of the new millennium. By most contemporary accounts, even then we had gotten well past, or perhaps over, postmodernism. Certainly nothing could be clearer than that we had left its peak years behind us, presumably somewhere in the seventies and eighties, and its onset (whenever that was) even farther back. Literary and wider intellectual cultures had already become positioned in different ways at the turn of the new century, outside or beyond postmodernity in cultures newly imagined through such concepts as Gilroy’s post-racial “planetary humanism” (2000), Baumann’s “soft” or “liquid” materiality (2000), Moraru’s “cosmodernism” and a host of other related formulations.7 From our perspective, these episodes leading up to the now makes histories of the postmodern entirely viable. Enough time has elapsed for us to be able to discern more of the internal articulation of the “postmodern era” – its successive moments or phases. Looking back on what now emerges into view as “the major phase” of postmodernism, it is easier to grasp what Fredric Jameson calls the “dialectic of the break and the period” in late-twentieth-century cultural historiography. There is, Jameson says, “a twofold movement in which the foregrounding of continuities, the insistent and unwavering focus on the seamless passage from past to present, slowly turns into a consciousness of a radical break; while at the same time the enforced attention to a break gradually turns the latter into a period in its own right.”8 Bring enough reflective pressure to bear on a period and it begins to look like a break; squint intently enough at a break, and it begins to look like a period. Squinting hard, then, at the postmodern break or moment, The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature asks what kind of internal temporality can now begin to come into focus and how we might begin to distinguish subperiods and locate internal thresholds, constituent moments within the postmodern moment.

A historiography of the postmodern – break, period, interregnum? How are historiographical problematics formulated in relation to postmodernism? As Jameson implies, however radical and subversive postmodernism may at one time have appeared, any serious historiography of its rise and fall would have to engage at some level with questions about continuity with what went before. This is the domain tackled in Part I of The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, entitled “Postmodernism before postmodernity?” What would such an engagement imply? What would it mean to seek an alignment for the postmodern world and its

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fictions with such figures as Rabelais, Sterne, and Cervantes and, from a much later period, Nietzsche, Joyce, and Beckett? Or to other forms outside the novel tradition, the tradition of shaped (concrete) poetry; the Romantic fragment poem and aesthetics of the fragment generally; Renaissance court masque and its successors, fantastic opera, for instance, and popular analogues such as pageant or pantomime; Las Meninas and selfreflective image-making, and so on? Would the seeking of such precedents for “postmodern” culture – a lineal descent from the raucous, rebellious, “dialogic” cultures of the past – constitute a genuine piece of cultural archaeology, or signify no more than the familiar process of assimilation and authorization where the once edgy, dangerous, and marginal comes to be appropriated by revisionist centers? Or is there a more complex paradox here, as Lyotard asserted to much ridicule, where “a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern,” and “postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent”?9 What would be the wider political and social contexts to such apparent continuities? What, for example, were the articulations made between postmodernist culture and the collapse of modernist progressivism marked by such events as the dismantling of mercantile national empires, the Holocaust, the spread of postcolonialism, and the Cold War? Subjecting postmodernism to such questioning would inevitably raise the issue of when the postmodern “age” properly began. However problematic such an idea seems, cultural historians have been drawn to it. Though earlier dates have sometimes been advanced, a broadly consensual view might be that postmodernism can be dated to the “long sixties,” spanning the years from the late fifties to the early seventies – Marianne DeKoven, for example, takes such a view.10 Particular years have been proposed, more or less seriously, in the spirit of Virginia Woolf ’s dating of modernism to “on or about December, 1910.”11 The year 1958, advanced by the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins as the onset of what he called “postcognitive” art, once seemed compelling but now seems too early, reflecting not postmodernism’s onset so much as the achievement of “critical mass” by a certain American postwar avant-garde (Black Mountain, the New American Poetry, Higgins’s own Fluxus circle, etc.).12 The year 1973, favored by Jameson and extensively documented by Andreas Killen, seems too late; it correlates more likely with the relaunch of postmodernism, its consolidation, and the onset of its peak period.13 Roughly splitting the difference, one might venture the dating of postmodernism’s onset to the year 1966. Other years (1967, 1968) no doubt have a stronger claim to attention in world-historical terms, but its relative lack of landmark events

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could actually strengthen 1966’s appeal, making it a test case for the hypothesis that movements in culture are not necessarily in synch with world-historical epochs – that asynchronicity, slippage, and semi-autonomy prevail across the different partial histories that make up capital-H History. However the case is made, it is clear that postmodernism has an intimate relation with sixties culture. If one were trying to make the case for 1966’s threshold status as a kind of Year Zero of cultural postmodernism, a place to begin might be architectural theory. Not one but two manifestos of what would come to be called postmodernism in architecture appeared in that year: Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, forerunner of his later polemics against modernist purism, and the Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City, which proposed a vision of architectural historicism and urban form at odds with orthodox modernism. Theory in general achieved breakthroughs on several fronts in 1966: in Paris, narratology was launched with the appearance of a special issue of the journal Communications, while poststructuralism arrived in the United States by way of a celebrated conference at Johns Hopkins University. Other European cultural imports of that year included art-house films such as Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine, and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which resonated with American “underground” cinema, such as Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. The reorientations of the year 1966 are symbolized by the reenvisioning of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books by Grace Slick in her song “White Rabbit” – the first of a series of postmodern Alices extending down to the present. A number of conspicuous art-world and rock-music careers hit speed bumps in 1966 and underwent more or less drastic reorientations. Warhol renounced painting in 1966 (not for the first time; he had already renounced it in favor of film a couple of years earlier). Pushing his art further toward the “dematerialization” that became typical of postmodernism, he produced art environments such as the shiny, bobbing, helium-filled pillows of Silver Clouds, and mixed-media performances of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable featuring the Velvet Underground. Both the Beatles and Bob Dylan had highly creative years and then stopped touring – the Beatles permanently, retreating from the road into the studio, Dylan only temporarily, after a motorcycle accident. The British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard completed a tetralogy of apocalyptic science fictions begun in 1962, then reoriented his fiction toward the technological fetishism of The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) and Crash (1973). His American counterpart, Philip K. Dick, published three of his weakest novels in 1966 but spent the year writing the texts on which his posthumous fame would later rest – the ones that would form

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the basis of the films Blade Runner (1982) and Total Recall (1990) – as well as his masterpiece of world-unmaking, Ubik (published 1969). Also in 1966 the Beat writer William S. Burroughs published a revised version of his 1961 text, The Soft Machine, the first of his full-length novels to employ cut-ups and fold-ins, while John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg both published long poems produced by collaging found materials. Truman Capote launched the hybrid fact/fiction novel (In Cold Blood), Jean Rhys inaugurated the practice of postmodern “rewriting” of canonical texts (Wide Sargasso Sea), and John Barth (Giles Goat-Boy) consolidated the encyclopedic “meganovel” genre that came to dominate American fiction in the postmodern era. Arguably the most important literary threshold of the year, however, was the one crossed by Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, by many accounts the text that marks the frontier between modernism and postmodernism. The postmodern emerges from this period and engages with it at fundamental levels, as the group of chapters in Part II of The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature – “The Long Sixties, 1954–1975” – amply shows. When did postmodernism reach its high-tide mark, its culmination? The appearance of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 coincides with other indicators of the launch of postmodernism’s major phase around the years 1972–74. One of the most telling signs of its onset was the gradual adoption of the term postmodernism itself, first in literary studies – by Fiedler in 1970, Hassan in 1971, and Spanos in 1972 – then around 1975 by architects who disseminated it to ever-wider circles of the culture. Having learned how to name itself, postmodernism could now emerge as a concept, which it did from the late seventies to the mid-eighties in the writings of Lyotard, Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, and others. Thus, if postmodernism does not actually begin in 1973, it at least brands itself in that year. The “grand narrative of 1973” which, according to Joshua Clover, has yet to be told, would have to include the kind of synchronicities that Andreas Killen abundantly documents: the Yom Kippur War and the start of the Arab oil embargo, the Paris Peace Accords and the repatriation of the American prisoners of war, the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency as details of the Watergate break-in emerged, and so on.14 Moreover, 1973 saw the founding of the first fully neoliberal regime anywhere, in Chile, following Augusto Pinochet’s bloody, CIA-backed coup. Neoliberal economics seeks to “liberat[e] individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” It requires

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“the construction of a . . . market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism.” More typically associated with changes inaugurated a little later and with less overt violence – during the years 1978–80 when Deng Xioping began the liberalization of the Chinese economy, and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were elected as (respectively) prime minister of Great Britain and president of the United States – neoliberalization nevertheless came first to Chile. “Not for the first time,” writes David Harvey, “a brutal experiment carried on in the periphery became a model for the formulation of policies in the centre.”15 In this perspective, postmodernism appears as something like the cultural expression of neoliberalism, or of what Jameson calls “late capitalism,” roughly the same thing. The market-based, populist, consumerist, libertarian neoliberal regimes “proved more than a little compatible with that cultural impulse called ‘post-modernism’ which had long been lurking in the wings but could now emerge full-blown as both a cultural and an intellectual dominant.” “Lurking in the wings” since at least the mid1960s, postmodernism seemed to step out into the spotlight around 1973.16 On the cultural front, 1973 was the year not only of postmodern architecture’s arrival on the scene, but also of the new, iconoclastic American “director’s cinema” (Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen). It was the year when reality TV (not yet called that) was invented in PBS’s An American Family; the year when the New York Dolls enjoyed their brief heyday, anticipating punk by several years; a year when Warhol was a ubiquitous figure in American culture, high and low. In other words, 1973 is a year when world-historical and cultural-historical thresholds do appear to synch up. Probably few would dissent from the proposition that the period between the early seventies and the late eighties represents the peak phase of postmodernist culture. This is the phase during which, in the wake of Gravity’s Rainbow, “megafictions” stalked the earth (John Barth, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, William Gaddis, Alasdair Gray, Joseph McElroy, Salman Rushdie, Gilbert Sorrentino, etc.). The American metafictionists and surfictionists of the Fiction Collective defected from the publishing industry, while their European counterparts, the intransigent experimentalists of OuLiPo, broke through to a wider public with Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual. High theory flourished. Language Poetry emerged; so did the punk and hip-hop subcultures, arguably reflecting the postmodern phases of their respective subcultural spheres. The magical

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realism of the Latin American literary “boom” of the sixties was internationalized. Cyberpunk was invented and along with it the blueprint for cyberspace, to be realized in the nineties. The hierarchical structures of culture that kept the “high” and the “low” apart in separate categories suffered erosion, as witness phenomena as diverse as postmodern architecture, minimalist music, and the spectacular popular success of Umberto Eco’s cerebral genre novel, The Name of the Rose. The fine arts, “dematerialized” in the late sixties and early seventies, were “rematerialized” again with the rediscovery of painting in the eighties (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Robert Yarber, the German and Italian neo-expressionists), driven by an overheated art market. This bare list subjects the era to drastic foreshortening, of course, but this material is substantively what we refer to when we talk about postmodernism. All of these developments are submitted to finer-grained analysis into successive mutations, constituent moments and sub-subperiods in Part III of A Cambridge History of Postmodernism, “The Major Phase: Peak Postmodernism, 1973–1991.” Inevitably, the next threshold in the history of postmodernism can only be 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Nineteen eighty-nine is manifestly another of those watersheds where cultural-historical and world-historical transitions coincide. But if 1989 is a threshold, the question is, the threshold of what? If it is a transition, a transition to what? David Harvey’s “new cosmopolitans” have been able to construct the transition in optimistic, if not euphoric, terms.17 Figures such as Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Beck, and Christian Moraru understand the nineties in terms of an overturning of imperialist subordination by planetary relationality, with Moraru coining the term cosmodernism to identify a cosmopolitanism stripped of that concept’s inevitable association with “First World” privilege.18 Francis Fukuyama notoriously associated the watershed events of 1989 with the Hegelian “end of history.”19 An alternative view might be Joshua Clover’s, that 1989 signals not the end of history but, following Jameson, the end of historical thinking – not at all the same thing – or, in other words, the final triumph of postmodernism. In or about 1989, the promise, or threat, of postmodernism is finally realized in full. To use Jameson’s formulation, “culture . . . become[s] the economic, and economics . . . become[s] cultural”; or, in Clover’s own terms, henceforth “history is now itself pop, and pop, history.”20 By one account, then, 1989 ushers in the next big thing, while by another it marks the apotheosis of the same old same old: so, either postpostmodernism, or more postmodernism.

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Philip Wegner adopts a third, more nuanced option where the “long nineties,” the phase after the symbolic turning point of 1989, represents a kind of interregnum, a term taken up in Part IV of A Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature. Here, the 1990s are the strange space between an ending (of the Cold War) and a beginning (of our post–September 11 world), one of those transitional phases that . . . following the leads of Lacan and Žižek, I call the “place between two deaths.” This place, located as it is between the Real Event and its symbolic repetition, is strictly speaking “non-historical,” and such an “empty place” is experienced in its lived reality, as Žižek suggests, in a Janus-faced fashion. On the one hand, it feels like a moment of “terrifying monsters,” of hauntings by a living dead past. Yet it is also experienced as a moment of “sublime beauty,” of openness and instability, of experimentation and opportunity, of conflict and insecurity – a place, in other words, wherein history might move.21

There is abundant evidence in the nineties of the “openness and instability,” the “experimentation and opportunity,” the “conflict and insecurity,” the potential multidirectionality of history of which Wegner speaks. During this “strange interlude” in global affairs, the dualistic or Manichaean worldview of the Cold War era was temporarily suspended, replaced by a vision of multipolarity, or even apolarity, that was at once baffling, risky, and rich with possibilities, with implications and knock-on consequences extending beyond geopolitics as far as epistemology and metaphysics. Madeline Albright, President Clinton’s secretary of state during this period, is quoted as saying, “It was like being set loose on the ocean and there wasn’t really any charted course.”22 This condition of “being set loose on the ocean” also expresses itself through the cultural production of the nineties, especially in the years immediately after the fall of the Wall. This was an episode of multipolarity not only in world affairs, but also in culture and the arts. The early nineties were the years of efflorescent multiculturalism and of the backlash against it in the so-called culture wars. It was the era of apartheid’s unraveling, reflected in William Kentridge’s “Drawings for Projection” (1989–2003), which captured the South African experience of living in an interregnum. Early-nineties culture was characterized by the proliferation and flowering of various subcultural and paracultural alternatives, including, as Clover reminds us, the brief heyday of grunge and the emergence of gangsta rap, as well as New Age spirituality and the shortlived utopian and communitarian phase of the Internet, before it was swept away in the frenzy of commodification and monetization that was

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the dot-com boom. As skeptical as Clover is about the utopian potentialities of this early-nineties episode, even he has to admit that “in such volatile moments, with one dominant toppling and another not yet consolidated, the field flies open, or at least so it feels.”23 This volatility, the feeling of fields flying open, or of what Clover elsewhere characterizes as a sensation of “boundlessness,” is aptly symbolized by the popular iconography of the angel that was a hallmark of the era.24 Angel iconography had already been revived in a secular context by a series of postmodernists since at least the late sixties – Donald Barthelme, Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Pynchon, James Merrill, Wim Wenders, Laurie Anderson – climaxing just as the nineties opened in Tony Kushner’s Brechtian drama of the AIDS epidemic, Angels in America. From here, angel iconography, largely dissociated from orthodox religious contexts, was disseminated throughout popular culture, appearing on television and at the movies, on greeting cards, calendars and T-shirts, on coffee mugs and in coffee-table books. Angels were the perfect icons of the era, airborne figures of what Milan Kundera, in the title of his 1984 novel, had mordantly called “the unbearable lightness of being,” and what Jameson once called “the antigravity of the postmodern.”25 Angels captured the experience of inbetweenness, volatility, multidirectionality, a bubble economy. The dark side of angel imagery is its capacity to reflect the experience of “ontological shock”: the shock of recognizing that there are other worlds besides this one, other orders of being beyond our own; that these other orders are at least potentially in communication with ours; that we live not in a single unitary world, but in a plurality of worlds.26 The term “ontological shock” was coined by the controversial Harvard psychologist John E. Mack in response to the testimony of supposed alien abductees, and the motif of alien abduction is another of the hallmarks of the in-between era of the nineties. The angels’ opposite number, their dysphoric counterpart, one might say, were the aliens of the science-fiction TV series The X-Files (1993–2002), whose nine seasons coincided almost perfectly with the interregnum. The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature Such then is the broad outline that circumscribes The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature – less of an outline, in fact, than an interrogative zone. To know that we can historicize postmodernism in such ways does not make the historiographic practice any less difficult, complex, or contentious. It is in the nature of the periodizing project that every gesture

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of temporal delimitation is a kind of experiment or enabling fiction, necessarily arbitrary, though not for that reason inconsequential. On the contrary, every such decision has knock-on consequences for the kind of period or subperiod one constructs and the kind of cultural-historical narrative one tells: choose a particular onset date or threshold moment, and particular continuities and discontinuities, causes and effects, themes and figures, leap into focus, while others recede into the background; choose a different date, and different continuities and discontinuities emerge. This collection of essays is a coming to grips with the problematics of imagining a historiography of postmodern literature. We emphasize that the contributors to this collection have not signed up to any explicit historiographical manifesto as such, except in the sense that they were asked to construct their chapters around the relationship between cultural practice and the broader politics of the period, which implies the existence of a cultural dynamic that penetrated, or was penetrated, deeply. We suggested a periodizing framework, divided in certain ways, and devised a range of topics as a starting point. These were presented as guidelines rather than as tablets of law. We kept things intentionally generalized in order to give our contributors as much opportunity as possible to develop their individual takes on things. At the same time we were drawn to certain themes and the kinds of issues that make any work of this kind challenging and exciting – cultural and political bias, the question of “objectivity,” the problem of presentism, and so on. In short, we began from the premise that any historiography of postmodernism worth a second glance would be controversial and contestable at virtually every point. From that position, we found a way of talking chronologically about this subject, in the full knowledge that this would constitute more of a point of departure than a final destination. Brian McHale Len Platt Notes Parts of this introduction and the introductions to Parts II, III, and IV of this volume have been adapted from Brian McHale, “Break, Period, Interregnum,” Twentieth-Century Literature 57/3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 2011), 328–40. 1 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition (http://h2g2.com/edited_en try/ A5140829, August 2014). 2 Documenta is a periodic exhibition held at Kassel, Germany. It documents the latest trends in contemporary art every four or five years. For an account of his

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visit to Documenta 7 see Andreas Huyssen, “Modernity and Postmodernity,” New German Critique (Autumn 1984), 5–51 [5–8]. 3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 1. 4 For a fuller account of this impact see Chapter 17 of this volume. 5 Richard J. Evans, “Postmodernism and History,” Butterflies and Wheels, 2002; www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2002/postmodernism-and-history (accessed August 2014). 6 See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 12, 28–9. 7 See Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Routledge, 2004); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 8 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 24. See also Phillip E. Wegner, Life Between Two Deaths, 1989–2000: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 20. 9 See Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question, What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 13. 10 Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 11 Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 4. 12 See Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes toward a Theory of the New Arts. (New York: Printed Editions, 1978). 13 See Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006). 14 See Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown. 15 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2, 7–8, 9, 42. 16 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 42. 17 David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 77–97. 18 See Moraru, Cosmodernism. 19 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 192). 20 See Clover, 1989, 115, 109. 21 Phillip E. Wegner, Life between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 24. 22 Quoted in Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America between the Wars, from 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years between the Fall of the Berlin Wall

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23 24 25 26

brian mchale and len platt and the Start of the War on Terror (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2008), 69–70. Clover, 1989, 41. See Clover, 1989, 120. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic Late Capitalism, 101 John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 26, 44.

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part i

Postmodernism before postmodernity?

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Introduction: postmodernism – rupture, tradition, historical reason? Len Platt

Time is a tyranny to be abolished.

Eugene Jolas. “Manifesto: The Revolution of the Word” (1929)

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

David Byrne, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980)

In its “classic” formulations – Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1905), for example, or Wyndham’s Lewis’s Blast (1914) – modernism was famously future-facing. By contrast, postmodern aesthetic practice plundered the past for all it was worth. But it did so without any attempt at authentic reconstitution. Remodeling itself out of bizarre conflations of historical styles, postmodernism, especially in the worlds of visual art, architecture, and design, mounted a radical version of montage that went well beyond pastiche. The Hans Hollein façade, for example, part of “The Presence of the Past” installation first displayed at the Vienna biennale in 1980, was a series of building fronts designed by contemporary architects, erected to form what became known as the Strada Novissima or “extremely new street.” Hollein’s contribution was comprised in part of a ruined column, invoking antiquity, two columns fortuitously already extant as part of the exhibition building and a further modern column in Art Deco style. The whole edifice was topped by a gaudy neon sign signifying the urban now. Alessandro Messini’s “Proust chair” (1978), to take another illustration, made under the Studio Alchymia collective, took its title from traditions of the modernist novel, constructed its form as a grotesque inflation of eighteenth-century baroque furniture and appropriated its decoration from a painting by the Pointillist painter, Paul Signac. Its referencing of the past was nothing short of obsessive. At the same time it appeared as indifferent to historiography as it was to matters of craft and tradition. The decoration was achieved by projecting an image of the Signac painting onto the chair and effectively matching the dots. Typically of the “classic” forms of “high” 17

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postmodernism, these illustrations were entirely easy about intertextuality. They were also worlds away from nostalgia.1 Expressed in the philosophical terms returned to repeatedly in this collection, postmodernism was constructed as the new-times culture par excellence. Outside of tradition, beyond historical narrative, it thus often seemed beyond antecedent. In Baudrillard’s Simulations (1963) postmodernism marked the revolutionary/counterrevolutionary moment where “simulation,” whose previous domain had been “specular and discursive,” took on a dramatically new constitutive dimension both “nuclear and genetic.”2 Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) formulated “incredulity” in the face of the foundational as a clean and decisive break, even if, as he implied, postmodernism was somehow rolling out within the framework of capitalism.3 Jameson’s Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) imagined “modernist history” to be “the first casualty and mysterious absence of the postmodern period,” contrasting modern intellectual interest in the genealogical with a postmodernist culture that looked for “breaks, for events rather than new worlds” and where time became represented by a series of perpetual presents. Positioned outside the chronological, postmodernism “clocked” variations but knew only too well that the contents of such shifts were just “more images.”4 Rorty’s vision of the postmodern self in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) was likewise thoroughly iconoclastic, involving the fragmentation of the familiar and the ironic/humanist pursuit of ever new “alternative narratives and alternative vocabularies.”5 And so on. It used to be said routinely that the mechanisms by which modernism was transformed into postmodernism were under-theorized, which was largely true, but this was less a failure of intellect than an exercise of will from an artistic and intellectual culture determined to break new ground – not least by withdrawing from negotiation with tradition and the past.6 There is, then, something counterintuitive about imagining postmodernism, especially “high” postmodernism, through a prehistory. That said, from the very beginning postmodern commentary has been centrally conducted around a temporal frame extending well beyond the 1970s and 1980s, for very good reasons. Postmodernism, as many commentators pointed out, was nothing if not an encounter with the modern, variously imagined as post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment, post-industrial, post fin de siècle. Early and incisive critics of postmodernism – Perry Anderson, David Frisby, and Alex Callinicos – countered the idea that we were living in a postmodern age with the argument that the assault on “metanarrative” and “foundationalism,” far from being the defining ethos of this particular

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period, was central to the very rise of modernism itself.7 At the same time, the sociologist Scott Lash, a broad believer in the dominance of postmodernism in 1970s and 1980s culture, was one of many who established the credentials of the new age in part by mapping out its “traces” avant la lettre. For Lash movements like surrealism and Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, and critical sensibilities represented by Susan Sontag’s advocacy of an “aesthetic of sensation,” were key in this respect.8 Some of these “reference points” were to become part of the everyday fabric of contemporary intellectual culture. Here postmodernism characteristically looked back to such figures as Martin Heidegger and, above all, Friedrich Nietzsche whose reinvention in Giles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) became central to the development of poststructuralist theory. In literature, if Samuel Beckett represented the tail end of an imploding modernism, James Joyce was typically seen as the postmodern progenitor, preempting in both Ulysses (1921) and Finnegans Wake (1939) virtually every aesthetic element ascribed to the postmodern text, from the predilection for “anti-form” over form, through the focus on process, textuality, and intertextuality, to the commitment to antinarrative, playfulness, and jouissance.9 In pictorial art, postmodernism was prefigured just about everywhere, from Max Ernst and the Dada Movement in the 1920s to Diego Velasquez and the later seventeenth century. This retrospective mapping became truly extensive in the 1970s and 1980s. It was at one level part of the very process by which postmodernism established its ascendancy, a process completely recognizable from familiar models of cultural assimilation and market capture. Writing in 1985, Umberto Eco observed such developments, lamenting the fact that postmodernism had become, a term bon á tout faire. I have the impression that it is applied today to anything the user happens to like. Further, there seems to be an attempt to make it increasingly retroactive: first it was apparently applied to certain artists or writers active in the last twenty years, then gradually it reached the beginning of the century, then further still back. And this reverse procedure continues; soon the postmodern category will include Homer.

At the same time, Eco was a strong advocate for what he saw as a more “classical” version of postmodernism, one which for all Eco’s concern about extending postmodernism retrospectively, itself looked back to the past, elevating a certain kind of contemporary culture to a position where the postmodern could be understood as an “ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen, a way of operating.”10 From here the postmodern spirit, or

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“manner,” for Eco, legitimately transcended the limitations of temporal confinement. Just as Richard Ellmann, the most eminent Joycean of the postwar period and Charles Feidelson, Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale, had once mapped out an eclectic temporal domain for literary modernism – it positioned Henry James, Ezra Pound, Joyce, and Woolf, alongside such figures as Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), William Blake (1757–1827), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), and Alain RobbeGrillett (1922–2008) – so with Eco.11 As Ellmann and Feidelson did with modernism, Eco went on to consider whether every age had its own version of postmodernism; whether all avant-gardes, responding to moments of crisis, were not somehow postmodern, settling their own “scores with the past” through the insistence on radical break.12 Some thirty years on and the complex question of how postmodernism might or might not be related to change and continuity is still being unraveled. This first section of The Cambridge History of Postmodernist Literature opens with Joe Bray returning to the much contested literary historiography which has attempted to construct a history of the novel as radical experiment by linking both cultural modernism and twentiethcentury postmodernism to the late eighteenth century. As in Virginia Woolf ’s 1928 fantasy Orlando, where the nineteenth century is marked by a general meteorological, intellectual, and spiritual “gloom” that descends on the world on January 1, 1800, here the “age of progress” and social realism becomes a historiographical interruption separating twentiethcentury joi de vivre and glamour from its apparent continuities with the equally rambunctious delights of the eighteenth century.13 Lawrence Sterne, whose The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy (1759–67) is often seen as the great eighteenth-century forerunner of twentieth-century literary experimentation, is a seminal figure in this debate. Bray takes a rather different approach though, designed not to add to the old discussion of what aesthetic elements constitute a postmodern text but, rather, to “draw attention to potential points of connection and intersection” between postmodern culture and society and the eighteenth century while at the same time recognizing the distinctiveness of each era. To achieve this ambitious aim, Bray investigates two lesser known texts – Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (1754) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796). Claiming neutrality on the vexed question of whether postmodernism is a recurring style or cultural dominant, his essay nevertheless implies how a sense of rupture may be shaped by continuities of difference and marginality operating across wildly distinct historical periods.

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Chapter 2 – “After the Holocaust” – looks back to a nearer time, to a period just preceding what Elazar Barkan has termed the post-war “retreat from scientific racism.”14 Here Robert Eaglestone continues the work of seeking articulations across the rupture of the postmodern world and the devastation of the “Final Solution,” a highly provocative move not least because, since the beginning, postmodernism has been criticized as a culture that elevates free play, problematizes ethics, and potentially renders politics impossible. At the same time, as Eaglestone points out at the start of his piece, “it’s clearly not the case that even a fraction of works described as ‘postmodern’ are ‘about’ the genocide of the European Jews and the associated genocides of other groups by the Third Reich.” On what basis, then, can the relationship between postmodernism and the Holocaust become anything more than “a post hoc ergo proper hoc claim?” Eaglestone responds with a reading of some of the classic texts of late twentiethcentury philosophy and postmodern critical culture – notably Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence (1981) and Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976). In these he unravels the signs of the Holocaust, the earlier, cataclysmic rupture that led directly “to the creation of new, self-reflective ways of seeing, creating and thinking” and “to the ethical concerns which underlie the postmodern.” For Theo D’Haen writing in this collection, addressing the postmodern antecedent implicates historical discourses that embed postmodernism very firmly in social, cultural, and political processes. Here the fundamental issue revolves around causation, which D’Haen tackles by setting the rise of new literary aesthetics (postmodernism, postcolonialism, and magical realism – all three problematized, all connected) in relation to the post-1945 collapse of the old European order, in particular the collapse of traditional empires. Focusing on what he sees as institutionalized critical culture, as opposed to the aesthetics of specific literary texts, he argues for a postmodernism strategically positioned in response to “the gap left by the collapse of European ‘high’ modernism.” From this perspective, postmodernism emerges as a specified project, an “ideology” dominated by America and ultimately concerned with inserting American culture into the spaces vacated by the end of the “age of empire.” For D’Haen then, postmodernism, far from being a new-times culture, is forever “haunted by the spectre of the vanished center.” In his account modern/postmodern are distinct as a matter of literary history but, as in earlier traditions, crucially contingent in other ways. Alan Nadel’s account in Chapter 4, “Cold War Culture at the Mid-Century,” is concerned less with an overarching historical narrative of causation than with the trace

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elements of postmodernism that he finds surfacing in 1950s America. As Nadel points out, the 1950s was a period with “sensibilities inimical to the postmodern” in many, perhaps most, ways. Nevertheless he finds in the “fabulated and fabulating” world of McCarthyism signs of the later postmodern moment. Likewise in novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), itself linked to 1950 American confessional poetry, and in the Living Theater Project (founded 1947) and television shows like The Burns and Allen Show (1950–8), Nadel detects characteristics symptomatic of postmodernism – notably “the ethos of identity as performance, which makes a confession the object of revelation rather than the means to it.” Notes 1 Both objects featured in the 2011 Victorian and Albert Museum’s retrospective on postmodernism, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990. 2 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foiss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext [e], 1983), 3. 3 The very idea of postmodernism, in all formulations, seems to be unthinkable except in terms of a relationship with a master narrative of some sort. See Douglas Kellner, “Postmodernism as Social Theory: Some Challenges and Problems,” Theory, Culture and Society 5 (1988), 239–69. 4 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, xi. 5 Richard Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” in J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan (eds.), Pragmatism’s Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 35. 6 See Mike Featherstone, “In Pursuit of the Postmodern: An Introduction,” Theory, Culture and Society 5 (1988), 195–215 [198]. 7 See Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review, 144 (1984), 96–113; David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1985); Alex Callinicos, “Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Postmarxism,” Theory, Culture and Society 2/3 (1985), 85–112. 8 See Scott Lash, “Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as a ‘Regime of Signification,’” Theory, Culture and Society 5 (1988), 311–36. 9 The terms used here are derived from Ibab Hassan’s well-known formulation published as “The Culture of Postmodernity” in Theory, Culture and Society, 2, 3 (1985), 123. For a full discussion of the immediate literary precedents of postmodernism, see Chapter 7 in this collection. 10 Umberto Eco, “Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable,” in Reflections on “The Name of the Rose,” trans. William Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985), 65–72. 11 See Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., (eds.), The Modern Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 12 Eco, “Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable.” Ellmann and Feidelson similarly see genuine modernism as, “committed to everything in human experience

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that militates against custom, abstract order, and even reason itself.” See The Modern Tradition, vi. 13 Chapter V of Orlando begins “The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed . . . ” See Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; London: Granada, 1984), 142. 14 See Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Postmodernism and its precursors Joe Bray

This chapter examines parallels between eighteenth-century literary practice and late twentieth-century aesthetic theory. Focusing on two particular case studies, Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), it argues that at two crucial moments of its early history the novel is preoccupied with formal and generic issues that were to recur two centuries later, in different forms, in the predominant mode of late twentieth-century art and culture. In doing so it is not attempting to suggest that postmodernism can be traced to these two texts, or to the eighteenth century more broadly, nor that there is any kind of continuous line of stylistic influence between the two periods. The aim instead is to draw attention to potential points of connection and intersection, in the belief that, in the words of Thomas Docherty, “it is increasingly apparent that many of the debates around the issue of the postmodern not only have their sources in eighteenth-century controversies, but also recapitulate those earlier debates and reconsider them: the late twentieth century is contaminated by the late eighteenth.”1 To investigate these earlier debates as they are represented in two eighteenth-century texts is not to award either the dubious honor of being “postmodern,” but rather to attempt to shed light on each work’s rich complexity and contested place within its own literary culture.2 One reason why the eighteenth-century novel in particular is often singled out by those seeking precursors of postmodernism is its selfconscious experimentation with the material form and layout of the page. This is one of the cornerstones of postmodern practice, but, as many critics have observed, early novels are no less ingenious in this respect. Pointing to the “extraordinary visual diversity” of the eighteenth-century novel, Janine Barchas, for example, claims that in the early decades of its formation the genre “plays its own games of havoc with the form and meaning of the printed word.”3 She claims that as a result of the opportunity afforded to 25

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this “new species of writing” to “redefine both audience expectation and print convention,” and aided by “the fluidity of publishing practices” at the time, “writers of prose fiction during roughly the first half of the eighteenth century experimented broadly (and, broadly speaking, every publication was an experiment) with the material presentation of the novel as well as its narrative content.” Highlighting a number of early eighteenth-century writers, publishers and printers who “emerge as particularly prone to graphic experimentality,” including Edmund Curll, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, Barchas urges renewed “consideration of the astounding graphic self-consciousness and experimentality that was common across much of the new species of writing, from ‘high’ to ‘low’ and peripheral to mainstream.”4 For Barchas, as for many others, “the apotheosis of this generic experimentation with form is, of course, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67).” Describing how Sterne “uses both graphic design and paratexts to test the boundaries of the emerging genre itself, rearranging the conventional ingredients of an eighteenth-century book to challenge readerly expectation,” Barchas, like others before her, sees Tristram Shandy as publicizing the early novel’s formal experimentation rather than inventing it: “In a sense, Sterne’s work records how far the novel has progressed by the late 1750s and early 1760s; the success of Tristram Shandy may, in part, be attributed to the preexistence of a novel readership that had been schooled to ‘read’ the visual components of the genre as part of its text.”5 It is not just in its graphic design and visual experimentation that Tristram Shandy is often seen as a precursor of the postmodern. The essays in the 1996 volume Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism, edited by David Pierce and Peter de Voogd, for example, propose a series of provocative connections between Sterne’s works and those of canonical postmodern writers, such as Rushdie and Milan Kundera, covering areas as varied as autobiography, psychoanalysis, and physics.6 An overriding theme is Sterne’s use of language; as Pierce puts it in the Introduction, “the postmodern interest in the free play of language, in the gaps and fissures in a text, in a concern with fragments, in what is involved in Derridean deferral or Sternean delay, in the impossibility of full presence, in the open work – all these have their place in the essays which follow.”7 Many of the contributors implicitly endorse Larry McCaffery’s claim that Tristram Shandy is “a thoroughly postmodern work in every respect but the period in which it is written.”8 Yet elsewhere other critics are more careful about making such an identification. A valuable note of caution is struck by Thomas Keymer,

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who complains that the “widespread contemporary sense of Tristram Shandy as the defining work of its immediate day, tied intimately into the writing of a culture it both reflects and influences, is rarely registered in modern criticism.”9 Keymer outlines two competing critical traditions, both of which “present the work as essentially an anachronism.” Whereas one emphasizes Sterne’s debt to a long and learned tradition of Renaissance satire, the other, emphasizing the “deconstructive sophistication” of his writing, regards him as “an honorary modern.” Keymer observes of this second approach that “by defining him instead as a writer of protomodernist or proto-postmodern fiction (the identikit yoking of ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodern’ endemic in this approach says much about its broadbrush manner), criticism can restore him to his proper place as our own contemporary.” Keymer is critical of both camps, arguing that “whether one finds in the text a disruptive sophistication that looks forward to postmodern fiction or a tissue of learned-wit recoveries that harks back to Renaissance satire, Tristram Shandy can all too easily seem to escape its time.” Paying attention to the work’s “contemporaneous literary hinterland,” which includes “a close engagement with the novel genre in the crucial period of its formation,” his aim is to “to reinsert Sterne’s writing into its rich and heterogenous cultural moment,” To do so is not, however, to dismiss the insights of either approach, as Keymer is at pains to stress: “Although I dispute identifications of Tristram Shandy as a solitary postmodern anticipation or a Renaissance Scriblerian throwback, I do indeed see it as heavily conditioned by satirical traditions that culminate with Swift, and I also see it as a self-conscious exercise in metafiction.”10 Keymer’s measured treatment of Sterne’s connection to the postmodern, and that of Tristram Shandy in particular, provides a useful model for the discussion of other potential precursors. While dismissing the commonly held view of the text as a “solitary postmodern anticipation,” he is nevertheless sensitive to the ways in which it includes, even embodies, techniques that are characteristic of postmodern writing, such as selfconscious experimentation with language. To investigate such techniques is not, however, to draw up a cursory list of postmodern features and tick them off as one reads the eighteenth-century counterpart. Rather, Keymer is concerned to stress the importance of considering Tristram Shandy on its own terms, and in its own “rich and heterogenous cultural moment.” The rest of this essay will attempt to proceed along similar lines, situating the texts discussed in their literary-historical moments while also being aware that the debates they raise are germane to other periods too.

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One crucial concern of the postmodern is with the ways in which the world we live in relates to the world(s) of the fictional text. McHale has observed that although “modernist fiction’s dominant was epistemological, knowledge-oriented; postmodernist fiction’s is ontological, beingoriented.”11 While modernist fiction was preoccupied with consciousness, this is relegated to the background, McHale claims, in postmodernist fiction, which “rather foregrounds the world itself as an object of reflection and contestation through the use of a range of devices and strategies. Postmodernism multiplies and juxtaposes worlds; it troubles and volatizes them.” Furthermore, according to McHale, whereas most fictional experiments generally vary individuals, while “leaving world-models intact,” postmodern fiction not only experiments with individuals and with world models, “but beyond that it experiments as well with the very process of world-modeling”; in other words, “postmodernist fiction also foregrounds the category of world by laying bare the operations by which narrative worlds are constructed.” This exposure can take a variety of forms, McHale claims, arguing that at its extreme “the ultimate gesture of exposing the nature and limits of a world involves drawing the veil of fiction aside to reveal the material basis of all world-building or rather its material bases, in the plural, for there is more than one way to think about the ultimate ontological grounding of a fictional world.”12 In Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (1754) it is the curtain of theatrical performance rather than the veil of fiction that is often drawn aside.13 The work is presented in the form of a play script, with characters including Portia, the heroine, Una, her wise mentor and spiritual guide, and the Cry, a group of skeptical, often rowdy observers, speaking to each other as if they were on stage. Discussing “the amateur theatrics” of the mid-eighteenth-century novel’s “graphic self-presentation,” Barchas notes that Fielding and Collier’s “experimental novel . . . most remarkably expresses the way that the eighteenth-century novel usurps the printed conventions of drama.”14 It is not just the work’s dramatic layout which leads to it frequently being described as “experimental.” In a critique of Northrop Frye’s universalizing critical methodology, and his reliance on myths and archetypes, John Paul Hunter, for example, describes how this rich and complex but highly unorthodox novel . . . moves easily among different modes of discourse and organizational strategies, sometimes affecting to be more of a closet drama than narrative and sometimes appearing to be an essay or argument now being hortatory, now meditative, now telling a broad cultural story of majority tastes and modes, now

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following a highly unconventional contemporary woman through her engaging but sad tribulations as a quietly rebellious liberated individual free of societal prejudice and restraint.15

Discussing how the text “resists allegorization, interpretation in terms of honored precedents, application, or ready moralizing,” Hunter decides that “like most novels of the early 1750s, The Cry is consciously experimental in the powerful definitional wake of Clarissa and Tom Jones.”16 Hunter’s mention of Clarissa and Tom Jones illustrates the common critical tendency to view The Cry through the lens of the rivalry between the two leading novelists of the mid-eighteenth century. In his discussion of Sarah Fielding’s role in the relationship between her brother Henry and her “principal literary advisor” Samuel Richardson from the late 1740s, Peter Sabor, for example, briefly mentions the latter’s assistance with The Cry, as part of his overall argument that “far from acting as a bridge between the rival novelists, as has often been suggested, Sarah Fielding served, unwittingly, to drive them ever further apart.”17 When Fielding’s own work is given attention, these two male novelists have continued to loom large, with critics frequently associating her style with one or the other, as Emily Friedman observes: because her opus does not quite fall into either the more satiric tradition of her brother Henry or the written-to-the-moment epistolary style of her friend Samuel Richardson, her work has suffered from misunderstanding and neglect. When it has not, her work is often discussed as moving between these two poles, combining qualities of both or leaning towards one man’s influence or the other’s.18

As Friedman rightly points out, “this placement is inaccurate given her experimental techniques the criticism, translation, didacticism, and genre-bending that cannot simply be understood as a conflation of Richardsonian and Henry Fieldingesque novelistic practices.”19 Another experimental technique found throughout The Cry, the “laying bare the operations by which narrative worlds are constructed,” which McHale identifies as key to postmodern experimentation, further establishes it as a significant mid-eighteenth-century text, deserving of critical attention on its own terms. The introduction to the work sets out to justify its use of the dramatic form. The first-person plural pronoun is used throughout, as, for example, when it is observed that “instead of the common divisions of books and chapters, we beg to be indulged in borrowing from the stage the name of scenes.”20 This authorial “we” defends “the method of making the

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principal character the speaker,” arguing that “it must be allow’d that characters should be animated to gain our attention,” and claiming that “the nearer things are brought to dramatic representation, the more you are acquainted with the personages, and interested in the event of the story” (The Cry, I, 17). While leaving it up to “future critics” to decide “whether this method be really the best or the worst,” the authorial voice declares that “we found it our easiest manner of conveying our thoughts and executing our purpose” (The Cry, I, 17). Yet at the same time this “we” indicates that it will remain as “an audience to hear the stories of those who shall be brought before them” (The Cry, I, 15), and so will be able to intervene in the on-stage action at strategic moments: Altho’ we have borrow’d from the stage the name of scenes, and generally its dialogue, yet have we kept the privilege of being our own chorus, in order not only to point out the behaviour of our actors, which for want of a real stage representation could sometimes not otherwise be understood; but to express or relate some things which are not proper to be spoken by our principal characters. (The Cry, I, 16)

While the use of “we” may partly reflect the probable joint authorship of The Cry, more important, then, is the collective persona that it constructs, able to comment on and assist the dramatic action at any stage. This choral voice is especially prominent in the Prologues to each of the work’s five Parts. The Prologue to the first Part announces, for example, that “our assembly being now form’d, not by ourselves, but by the good-will and spritely imagination of our readers, we have nothing to do but to draw up the curtain (our prologue being ended) and to discover our chief personage on the stage” (The Cry, I, 24–5), while the Prologue to the fourth Part introduces another important character: “Our assembly being again met, we implore as at first your assistance, gentle reader, that by your imagination you would add another personage to those with whom you are already brought acquainted. Her name Cylinda. Her character such as will appear by her discourse, and the relation of her past life” (The Cry, II, 249–50). The Prologue to the second Part illustrates the chorus’s role in revealing information that is “not proper to be spoken by our principal characters,” introducing the history of the family of Nicanor, with various members of which the heroine becomes intimately connected: “the matters of fact contained in the following history, our Portia could not with any propriety relate, had they been all within her knowledge: but concerning most of the circumstances she was perfectly ignorant” (The Cry, I, 201–2). At other points the chorus can present details that are known, but not

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spoken, by any of the characters, such as Portia’s “real thoughts” when a member of the Cry condemns female learning: “but these were only the thoughts which pass’d within Portia’s mind, for she deem’d their rude mirth not worthy an answer” (The Cry, III, 111). The result of such interventions is a sense of a guiding group presence hovering in the wings, ready to step in at any moment. The drama is further complicated by the need for the viewpoints of characters who cannot realistically be on stage at a particular point to be represented. This results in characters having on occasion to impersonate the voices of others. When Portia feels she has to present the feelings of Melantha, the young lady who first introduces her to Nicanor’s family, she turns to her spiritual advisor for guidance: “Shall I, O Una, relate only my own observations, or may I be permitted to suppose Melantha present, and speaking; by which means, in a more lively manner, I could paint all her sensations, and throw into action every motion of her heart?” (The Cry, II, 143–4). Una gives her blessing, declaring that “it is the subject matter itself I seek; and to cavil about the manner of conveying it, is trifling and unnecessary. Take therefore that method, Portia, by which, in the most lively and intelligible manner, you can paint the real history of Melantha’s mind” (The Cry, II, 144). Portia then proceeds “in the assumed character of Melantha,” revealing “the secret springs” that led her friend to believe herself in love with various members of the family, including finally Ferdinand, who Portia is in love with herself (The Cry, II, 144). Her portrayal (which is resumed several scenes later) is so convincing that the Cry become confused about who is actually speaking: The minds of the Cry now all sympathized so strongly with the raptures of Melantha for this compleat triumph over Portia, that they could admit no other image. They fairly forgot in whose person Portia had been speaking; they imagined Melantha present before their eyes. They declared that it was ever their opinion, that Portia would at last come to the highest disgrace. They pityed poor Melantha for entertaining such a treacherous guest, and abused Portia as if she was absent in the most virulent terms they could invent. (The Cry, II, 209–10)

Portia is taken aback by this, and has to have it explained by Una: Don’t you perceive, Portia, that the Cry have all drank of the Circean cup; they are intoxicated by the pleasure of supposing it possible for Melantha to have the power of treating you in such a manner. They are so drunk with their own inclinations, that they have literally lost their senses, and are metaphorically all standing upon their heads. (The Cry, II, 210)

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Perhaps intoxicated herself by the success of her acting skills, Portia later impersonates the Cry themselves (The Cry, III, 160–1) and gives Ferdinand’s account of his complicated deception of her to prove her love in his own words, having again sought permission from her mentor: “Una told Portia that she would on no occasion refuse her the liberty of taking her own method, provided she was but clear and intelligible in her narration” (The Cry, III, 250). The Cry thus evinces a pervasive concern with how its narrative is to be presented. Its characters debate the advantages and disadvantages of the dramatic form in which they find themselves, with Portia often turning to her spiritual mentor Una for guidance on whether her chosen method of telling her story is acceptable. Any attempt to delineate the various voices in the work is complicated by the individual voices that emerge within the Cry itself, as well as by the ability of characters on occasion to ventriloquize others. When read free from the Richardson–Fielding rivalry that continues to dominate much modern criticism, The Cry demonstrates the diversity and innovativeness of the novel in the early 1750s; its ability to incorporate a wide range of genres while reflecting skillfully and wittily on the process. Fielding and Collier’s “new dramatic fable” is self-consciously experimental throughout, especially in the sense proposed by McHale; constantly lifting the curtain on its own mechanics, and the “operations by which [its] narrative worlds are constructed.” The pervasive presence of the collective authorial voice in The Cry relates to another preoccupation of late twentieth-century postmodernism which is also the subject of much debate in the eighteenth century, particularly in the novel. Quoting Ronald Sukenick’s observation that “there’s a writer sitting there writing the page,” McHale comments that “the author, already a foregrounded presence in modernist Künstlerromane, intrudes even more aggressively in works of postmodernist metafiction (Beckett, Barth, Fowles, Brooke-Rose) and surfiction (Sukenick, Federman, Major), thrusting herself or himself onstage, visibly seizing control of the story and its world.”21 In the earliest stages of its formation, the novel is similarly dominated by the intrusive figure of the author, whether it be in the form of supposedly “editorial” prefaces, obsessive revisions, or firstperson metanarrative reflections. The remaining part of this essay will demonstrate how one particular late eighteenth-century text foregrounds the role of the author by presenting a number of author figures, each of whom, in different ways, is challenged and undermined. Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) purports to lay before the public the letters of the Rajah Zããrmilla, Chief of

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the Province of Kuttaher in Hindoostan. These were supposedly written in the 1770s and early 1780s, when much of Hindoostan was under British rule. Zããrmilla corresponds with a fellow Chief Mããndããra, who has been banished to a neighboring province. Zããrmilla comes into contact with an English officer named Captain Percy, and is impressed by his depiction of Christianity and English customs. His curiosity piqued by their discussions, he undertakes to travel to England. In the second volume his letters report on his voyage and the characters he meets when he arrives. Zããrmilla’s naïve impressions of English society allow for much satire against the fashionable manners of the day, though it is not always clear where exactly the target of the satire lies. Critics have agreed that due to its mixture of genres Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is a very difficult text to classify. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell note that “part anti-jacobin satire, like Modern Philosophers, part oriental fable, it is an ambitious piece of writing, one in which Hamilton engages directly with a range of the major issues of her day, from colonialism to the ‘new’ philosophy to the present state of literature to female education.”22 Discussing the text’s “multi-generic layers” Claire Grogan observes that it has been deemed “variously a eulogy, a religious satire, a political satire, an Oriental tale and most recently as a miscellany.”23 Grogan’s own view is that the work, with its “heightened, factual, scholarly cultural analysis of an Eastern culture or community’s behaviour, history, manners and customs,” should be regarded, at least in part, as an “Orientalist study,” the result of the author’s close relationship with and admiration for her brother Charles, a member of the East India Company and Oriental scholar and enthusiast, who had died in 1792 while on leave in England. For Grogan, his sister’s work “is a rethinking, a rewriting and reimagining of her brother Charles’s experience and learning.” As Grogan observes, the work’s factual credentials are enhanced by “various scholarly trappings,” including extensive footnotes, a fifty-two-page “Preliminary Dissertation,” and five-page “Glossary.”24 The categorization of Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah as an Oriental study thus raises questions about Elizabeth Hamilton’s authorship of the work, as well as broader issues concerning the outlook for the female writer in the 1790s. Her extensive demonstration of her scholarship, drawing not only on her brother’s work but on that of other members of the Royal Asiatic Society, and her deliberate blurring of the line between fact and fiction, carried political connotations in the contentious gender debates of the 1790s. Although most of the contemporary reviews broadly

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praised the book, the conservative Monthly Review took Hamilton to task on several factual matters, asserting for example that, in assigning the Barampooter as the eastern limit of Hindostan, she cuts off some of its richest provinces; in bestowing on its antient government a federative form, she has embraced too readily a most questionable hypothesis; and in exempting the Hindoos from all hatred or contempt of other nations, she has totally mistaken the genius and character of the sons of Bramha. (Hindoo, 314)

The reviewer concludes that “Miss H. is less happy in her descriptions of Hindoo manners, than in her delineations of scenes at home, where she is better acquainted” (Hindoo, 315). As Grogan notes, the insistence by Elizabeth Benger, Hamilton’s earliest biographer, that her subject wrote “without affecting to become a Persian scholar,” similarly “plays down Elizabeth’s competence or right to discuss Oriental matters.”25 Some contemporary critics have implicitly endorsed this view, emphasizing Charles’s role in the creation of the work at the expense of Elizabeth’s. Gary Kelly, for example, comments that “its material, viewpoint, and political purpose show the influence of her brother, as reflected in his published Orientalist work,” and refers to “Hamilton’s novelization of her brother’s Orientalist project.”26 Hamilton’s own ambivalence and anxiety at what Grogan describes as “entering this masculine sphere of writing” is strongly apparent in the “Preliminary Dissertation,” in which the author somewhat nervously defends her “short sketch, imperfect as it is” of the state of Hindoostan: “Adequate, however, to the purpose of elucidation, as it may be thought by some readers, it may be censured by others, as a presumptuous effort to wander out of that narrow and contracted path, which they have allotted to the female mind” (Hindoo, 72).27 Anticipating this objection on the grounds of her gender, she feels obliged to give “a succinct account of the motives which led her to the examination of a subject, at one time very universally talked of, but not often very thoroughly understood” (Hindoo, 72), and describes how she became familiar with “the names of the most celebrated of Orientalists” and “the productions of their writers” (Hindoo, 73). Without mentioning her brother and his death specifically, she laments that “had it not been for a fatal event, which transformed the cheerful haunt of domestic happiness into the gloomy abode of sorrow, and changed the energy of Hope into the listlessness of despondency, a competent knowledge of the language of the originals would likewise have been acquired” (Hindoo, 73). Renewed study eventually relieved her of her

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grief, as “the mind, by degrees, took pleasure in reverting to subjects which were interwoven with the ideas of past felicity” (Hindoo, 73). The result is the work to follow, the letters of the Rajah, which “are now presented to the world, whose decision upon their merit, is looked forward to with timid hope, and determined resignation” (Hindoo, 73). A counterpart of this suffering, timid yet determined author figure appears within Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah itself. Near the end of the second volume Zããrmilla finally has his long-awaited meeting with the sister of his late English friend, Captain Percy. Hearing that she is staying on a farm near to the home of his current hosts, the Denbeigh family, he discovers her poetry before he meets her, written on “some leaves of ivory, fastened by a silver clasp” (Hindoo, 300). Shortly after reading one of Charlotte’s melancholy poems, made partially illegible by tears, Zããrmilla encounters the poet herself, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree: “her countenance wore the traces of melancholy, but the manner in which she received the salutations of my friends, shewed that her heart was still capable of the most animated affection” (Hindoo, 301). She returns with him to the Denbeigh family home, where the grandfather of the family, Mr. Denbeigh, proceeds to give her advice on how to rouse herself from her grief and depression. His suggestion is that she seek to instruct and amuse others by seeking to publish the products of her cultivated mind, to which Charlotte replies, “Ah! Sir, . . . you know how female writers are looked down upon. The women fear, and hate; the men ridicule, and dislike them” (Hindoo, 303). Mr. Denbeigh’s response offers a somewhat qualified justification of the place of the female writer, admitting “this may be the case with the mere mob,” but insisting that “if the simplicity of your character remains unchanged if the virtues of your heart receive no alloy from the vanity of authorship; trust me, my dear Charlotte, you will not be less dear to any friend that is deserving of your love, for having employed your leisure hours in a way that is both innocent and rational” (Hindoo, 303). This is close to Hamilton’s cautious defense of her authorship in the “Preliminary Dissertation,” which similarly emphasizes how the exertion of her rational powers has helped her to overcome her grief, while maintaining her femininity. The connections between Charlotte and Elizabeth are indeed so strong that Benger describes the character as the author’s “prototype.”28 Yet Charlotte Percy is not the only female author figure within the text. Zããrmilla is nervous about being introduced in London to the well-known philosopher Miss Ardent, whom his friend Doctor Severan has attacked, criticizing her attempts to demonstrate her “masculine understanding,”

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and claiming that she “enforces her opinions in so dictatorial a manner, as renders her equally the object of dread and dislike to the generality of her acquaintance” (Hindoo, 220–1). When he does finally meet her, Zããrmilla is pleasantly surprised, finding this “learned Lady” “not quite so formidable as I had at first apprehended” (Hindoo, 226). He reports to Mããndããra that “you may believe it impressed me with a very high idea of the superior powers of Miss Ardent’s mind, when I found she had paid particular attention to every thing connected with the history or literature of India” (Hindoo, 227). This suggests that she could be another proxy for the author herself. However, Miss Ardent’s claims to learning are somewhat undermined by her association with the vacuous philosophers who gather at Ardent-Hall, and her particular fondness for the theories of Doctor Sceptic. She asks Zããrmilla, “What will your friends in India think, when you tell them, that sparrows may be changed into honey-bees?” declaring that “according to the arguments of the young philosopher, I see no reason, why, by a proper course of education, a monkey may not be a Minister of State, or a goose, Lord Chancellor, of England” (Hindoo, 266). The main author figure within the text is of course male, its chief letterwriter. After reporting Mr. Denbeigh’s encouragement of Charlotte, Zããrmilla reveals that this “venerable old man” has facilitated his efforts as an author too: “he has been particularly solicitous to know my opinions concerning all that I have seen in England; and expecting to reap advantage from his observations, I have put into his hands a copy of all my letters to you” (Hindoo, 303). According to Zããrmilla, “Mr Denbeigh was much entertained with my account of the philosophers, but said, ‘if it was known in England, people would think that I intended to turn philosophy itself into ridicule,’ which provokes him to exclaim that ‘thus it is that the designs of authors are mistaken! Perhaps this is not the only passage in my letters that might, to an English reader, appear to be absurd’” (Hindoo, 303). Zããrmilla decides that “happily they will never be exposed to any eye, save that of my friend,” declaring his “astonishment at the number of new books that are every year produced in England,” and his fear of the “formidable phalanx of Reviewers” (Hindoo, 304). Yet despite this apparent unwillingness to publish, later in the same letter he sums up the entirety of his account of his travels to Mããndããra, anticipating his response in a way that suggests he is also imagining the lessons that a wider, public readership should draw: “Thou wilt observe, that to extend our knowledge of the world, is but to become acquainted with new modes of pride, vanity, and folly. Thou wilt perceive that in Europe, as in Asia, an affected singularity often passes for superior wisdom; bold assertion for truth; and sickly fastidiousness for true delicacy of sentiment” (Hindoo, 306).

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Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is thus supposedly the result of Zããrmilla’s letters somehow finding their way into public notice after being placed in the hands of Mr. Denbeigh, and then being edited and appended with scholarly apparatus by a figure whose biography closely resembles that of Elizabeth Hamilton. Within the work, one author figure appears to express Hamilton’s own anxieties about female authorship, while another is used to suggest the potential dangers of female learning. This somewhat confusing picture expresses well the uncertain position of the woman writer in the fevered print culture debates of the 1790s. For a moderate such as Hamilton, keen to promote female education and learning, but skeptical of the excesses of the radical New Philosophy, as embodied by such controversial women as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, negotiating a path through this minefield is a delicate matter. The multiple figures of the author in her fiction are thus subtly hedged via layers of qualification and questioning. The years 1754 and 1796 mark two key moments of experimentation and tension in the novel’s early history. The Cry and Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah demonstrate the genre’s flexibility, as well as its ability to engage with crucial debates concerning form and politics. Viewing such complex eighteenth-century engagements through the lens of postmodernism, employing its insights and terminology as appropriate, is not to relegate any text to the status of “solitary postmodern anticipation,” which Keymer identifies in much criticism of Tristram Shandy. Instead it can serve to highlight with particular acuity those aspects of texts that were both original and controversial at the time. If deployed judiciously, and not (pre-)cursorily, postmodernist theory can bring out more fully the literary practice of earlier periods, especially that with which it is most deeply imbricated: the eighteenth century. Notes 1 Thomas Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 15. 2 As it is not attempting to identify any text as “postmodern,” the essay thus remains neutral on the vexed question of whether postmodernism is an aesthetic style which could be found in any historical period, or whether, in Jameson’s words, it is “essential to grasp ‘postmodernism’ not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant” (Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 55). 3 Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12. 4 Barchas, Graphic Design, 13, 15. See also Christopher Flint, The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8–9.

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5 Barchas, Graphic Design, 15–16. 6 See David Pierce and Peter de Voogd (eds.), Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 87–98; 147–56; 123–32; 179–96; 109–21. 7 Pierce and de Voogd (eds.), Laurence Sterne, 14. 8 Larry McCaffery, Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press), xv. 9 Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4. 10 Keymer, Sterne, 6, 12, 6–7. 11 McHale, “Postmodernism and Experiment,” 146. See also Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987) and Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992). 12 McHale, “Postmodernisms and Experiment,” 145–6, 147. 13 There is considerable debate over the authorship of The Cry, specifically the extent of Jane Collier’s involvement (see Carolyn Woodward, “Who Wrote The Cry?: A Fable for Our Times,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9/1 (1996), 91– 7). Here I follow most modern critics in attributing it equally to Fielding and Collier. 14 Barchas, Graphic Design, 190–1. 15 John Paul Hunter, “Novels and History and Northrop Frye,” EighteenthCentury Studies 24/2 (1990–1), 225–41 [234]. 16 Hunter, “Novels and History,” 234. 17 Peter Sabor, “Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Sarah Fielding,” in Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139–56 [150, 153]. 18 Emily C. Friedman, “Remarks on Richardson: Sarah Fielding and the Rational Reader,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22/2 (2009–10), 309–26 [310]. 19 Friedman, “Remarks on Richardson,” 310. 20 Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier, The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable, 3 vols. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1754), I, 15. Hereafter referred to in the text as The Cry. 21 McHale, “Postmodernisms and Experiment,” 147–8. 22 Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, eds. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (1796; Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 12. Hereafter referred to in the text as Hindoo. 23 Claire Grogan, Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 30. 24 Grogan, Politics and Genre, 36, 29, 37. See also Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 113. 25 Grogan, 40. 26 Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 129, 132. 27 Grogan, Politics and Genre, 44. 28 Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from Her Correspondence, and Other Unpublished Writings, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), I, 61.

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After the Holocaust Robert Eaglestone

When I looked at those photographs something broke. Some limit had been reached, and onto only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded; but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead, something is still crying. Susan Sontag, On Photography (2014)

This chapter suggests that the constellation of ideas, approaches, and aesthetic practices broadly described as “postmodern” have their origins in a response to the Holocaust. It only suggests this, rather than argues it, because the question of how one might actually argue such a claim is a hard one. Postmodernism, the leading intellectual and aesthetic movement of one era, is still contentious, as well as heterodox and internally divided: very different from, for example, those modernist movements with circles and manifestos. Further, much scholarly ink has been spent arguing that this or that thinker or writer or artist is, or is not, postmodern: no general agreement exists. More, it’s clearly not the case that even a fraction of works described as “postmodern” are “about” the genocide of the European Jews and the associated genocides of other groups by the Third Reich. What would make this anything other than a post hoc ergo proper hoc claim? And yet it seems obvious that, painted in broad strokes, “postmodernism” – with its sense of rupture, of human fragility, with its concern for “otherness,” with its complex attitudes to political and academic authority, with its strong anti-totalizing and anti-totalitarian impetus, and centrally and related to all these, because of its ethical concern (which I discuss later) – is a response to those terrible events. Derrida ends On Spirit, his essay on how Heidegger’s thought might be seen to lead to forms of Nazi ideologies, by discussing how we have been speaking of nothing but the “translation” of these thoughts and discourses into what are commonly called the “events” of “history” and of “politics” (I put quotation marks around all these obscure words) . . . 39

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robert eaglestone This “translation” appears to be both indispensable and for the moment impossible. It therefore calls for quite other protocols . . . What I am aiming at here is, obviously enough, anything but abstract. We are talking about past, present and future events, a composition of forces and discourses which seem to have been waging merciless war on each other (for example, from 1933 to our time).1

This chapter, then, reverses this “indispensable” and “impossible” translation: not from ideas to Holocaust, but from Holocaust to the ideas that come after it, although the “quite other protocols” of this translation are not exact, are variable and, in their nature, suggestive and indicative.2 Indeed, the first indicative suggestion explores the very nature of the problem of discussing these matters. Christopher Browning, a leading American historian of the Holocaust, wrote I believe that the Holocaust was a watershed event in human history – the most extreme case of genocide that has yet occurred. What distinguishes it from other genocide are two factors: first the totality and scope of intent – that is, the goal of killing every last Jew, man, woman and child, throughout the reach of the Nazi empire; and second, the means employed – namely, the harnessing of the administrative/bureaucratic and technological capacities of a modern nation state and western scientific culture.3

This statement draws on two different discourses. One the one hand, it relies on the generally positivist (and rarely postmodern) discourse of the discipline of history (scrutinizing and weighing up documents, accounts, and archives, comparing the Holocaust – “the most extreme case” – with other historical cases). These things, given the “language game” appropriate to history, might be provable. On the other, it begs the question: which archive or methodology proves the claim that the Holocaust is a “watershed,” a profound change in human history? This claim is so very much wider and all-pervasive: it suggests a profound sense of change in “who we are” and “how the world is for us.” Even in discussing the Holocaust’s significance, a paradigmatic postmodern issue – the limits and “realms” of discourse – has arisen. And this implies more: that the postmodern and the post-Holocaust are both experienced as a rupture. Many who lived through those years – survivors and others, as Susan Sontag, in the epigraph – voice similar ideas to Browning’s about rupture or breakage in a variety of different ways. The Nobel Laureate William Golding wrote that before the war he, like many others, believed in the “perfectibility of social man” but afterward he was “unable to” because he had “discovered what one man could do to another . . . the vileness

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beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states.” He continued: it is bad enough to say that so many Jews were exterminated, in this way and that, so many people liquidated – lovely, elegant word – but there were things done during that period which I still have to avert my mind less I should be physically sick. They were not done by the head hunters of New Guinea . . . They were done, skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilisation behind them, to beings of their own kind . . . I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.4

Hannah Arendt, whose whole intellectual post-war intellectual life is a response to the Holocaust, reflected that almost overnight, in the Reich, “morality collapsed . . . not with criminals but with ordinary people” (and that, almost ironically, “we must say we witnessed the total collapse of a moral order not once but twice” because with the Germans, “Hitler’s criminal morality was changed back again at a moment’s notice, at the moment ‘history’ had given notice of defeat.”)5 She wrote that the “real evil is what causes us speechless horror, when all we can say is: this should never have happened.”6 Adorno: “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed.”7 There are many, many similar comments bearing witness to the rupture caused by the events. This rupture, break or failure correlates, clearly, with many of the claims of postmodernism. The rupture does not insist upon, or even rely upon, the idea that the Holocaust was “unique.” As early as 1955 – well before the idea of “Holocaust uniqueness” was established, indeed before the name “the Holocaust” became attached to the events – Aimé Césaire argued that Europeans tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them . . . they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples . . . they . . . . cultivated that Nazism . . . they are responsible for it . . . before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.8

And even this is to pass over the genocides, well-known or obscure, which occurred both before and after 1939–1945. To understand the Holocaust in the context of other genocides does not reduce its impact as a rupture in Western civilization. Indeed, to understand this event and its aftermath in terms of its global history and antecedents only serves to

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stress how great a challenge to thought the Holocaust and genocide more generally is. For example, to uncover parallels in the colonial genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples in German South-West Africa (1904) or in British racial policy in nineteenth-century Australia is not to diminish the Holocaust but to set it and other horrors in a wider and profounder context. Indeed, it is another postmodern correlation that it is harder and harder to attempt to conceptualize the Holocaust, or use terms such as “ethnic cleansing,” outside of discussions of the colonial and postcolonial.9 Such a rupture, such a shock, does not easily disappear: as many postmodernists insist, it is impossible to escape from history. Some historians have suggested that there was a silence about the events after the War until the late 1950s, and they trace the beginnings of Holocaust discourse or “Holocaust Consciousness” to the global success of Anne Frank’s diary, and the play and film that stemmed from it, and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Yet it is clear that there was no such silence: not only were the survivors and Jewish communities discussing the events, but they were also appearing in strange, refracted versions in popular and high culture; for example in the UK, odd stories about death camps by C. S. Forester, Britain’s leading historical novelist, were published in the midfifties. Golding’s first success as a novelist, Lord of the Flies, clearly echoes the horrors of the camps. More than this, however, and like a peal of thunder rolling on, the events are powerful in the thoughts and sociocultural imagination of the West. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that National Socialism “never ceases to haunt modern consciousness as a sort of endlessly latent ‘potentiality,’” both “stored away and yet constantly at hand.”10 The recent and remarkable philosophical investigation-cum-memoir by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945, discusses centrally the latency of the Holocaust. A (perhaps ridiculous, but quite postmodern) instantiation of this “latency” is “Godwin’s Law,” admitted to the OED in 2012: “a facetious aphorism” the OED describes it as, named after Mike Godwin, the US lawyer and author who formulated it, “maintaining that as an online debate increases in length, it becomes inevitable that someone will eventually compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis.” A different form of instantiation comes from Lyotard’s detailed rebuttal to French Holocaust deniers, The Differend. In a much cited-passage he writes that the Holocaust is like an earthquake which “destroys not only lives, buildings, objects but also the instruments used to measure the earthquakes directly and indirectly. The impossibility of quantitatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the mind of the

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survivors the idea of a great seismic force.”11 Lyotard is thinking of the numerous difficulties in writing Holocaust history, difficulties many, including Raul Hilberg, have highlighted.12 But Geoffrey Hartman takes up his metaphor and suggests that the “aftershocks are measurable; we are deep into the process of creating new instruments to record and express what happened:” these instruments are “born of trauma.”13 These “new instruments,” born of and sensitive to trauma, are precisely what makes up postmodernism, with a crucial proviso. The historian Dan Stone writes that “Holocaust historians often begin by stating that the Holocaust signals the downfall of western civilisation and culture, and then go on to write about it with terms, methods, and implied beliefs unquestioningly inherited from that civilisation and culture.”14 Postmodernism precisely does not simply inherit these terms, methods, and beliefs: instead, in its self-reflective torsion it questions and explores the terms it uses, makes them suffer a sea change. Central to this sea change, and a response to the Holocaust, is the postmodern concern, implicitly or explicitly, with ethics. Yet postmodernism does not offer a new system of ethics or, obviously, endorse older ethical systems based on duty, virtue, or on use and ends. Rather, in prying through these explanatory systems, it can be seen as an attempt to respond to the “primordial ethical experience” that underlies “the construction of a system, or procedure, for formulating and testing the moral acceptability of certain maxims or judgements relation to social action and civic duty.”15 This is because postmodernism is, first, the disruption of the metaphysics of comprehension, which is the gesture that characterizes Western thought. This disruption stems from an encounter with otherness. (But, to disrupt a meeting, you have to attend it: the tools you use to break up a house are the same tools you use to build it. Postmodernism is not outside the metaphysics of comprehension the way that, perhaps, non-western modes of thinking are.) The metaphysics of comprehension is a way of describing how Western thought works. To comprehend means two things, to understand and to take hold and to do one involves, to a lesser or greater extent, the other: they are unavoidably intertwined. Levinas writes “that ‘I think’ comes down to ‘I can’ – to an appropriation of what is, to an exploitation of reality” and that, “Western Philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.”16 Truth and Universality become “impersonal” third terms (“and this is another inhumanity” (TI, 46)). This is the “mediation . . . characteristic of

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western philosophy” (TI, 44), which involves “somewhere a great ‘betrayal,’” of the other into the same. In terms of things, this betrayal is a “surrender” (TI, 44) into use by human beings (the rock becomes a useful site for extracting ore, the tree a source of timber, the animal, meat). In terms of people, this betrayal is “the terror that brings a free man under the domination of another” (TI , 44). This concern for ethics in this sense is most clearly explored from the work of two philosophers who are central to postmodern thought – despite debates over whether they are or are not postmodern – Levinas and Derrida. As debates about the roles of ethics and politics in postmodernism developed over the 1980s and 1990s, it became clear that the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas – not without its problems, especially around issues of gender and race – had been, and continues to be, both an influence to major postmodern thinkers and, importantly, something like an explanatory frame for the ethics of much postmodern work. Indeed, a leading commentator suggests that “it now looks as if Levinas were the hidden king of twentieth century French philosophy.”17 Levinas’s work is an influence on Derrida, Lyotard, Luce Irigaray, and many others, even those whose thought did not have the same phenomenological point of origin – thinkers like Deleuze and Alain Badiou: this latter, for example, writes that it is to Levinas that “we owe, long before current fashions, a kind of ethical radicalism.”18 Levinas’s thought is marked by the Holocaust: he wrote that his life was “dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.” As a French soldier, he was held in a camp for Jewish POWs which followed – just – the letter of the law (Jewish POWs were not murdered because the Nazis feared Allied reprisals); his wife and daughter were hidden during the occupation, but all the rest of their families were murdered in Lithuania. In one of his Talmudic readings Levinas writes of the “ultimate source” of war, “which is Auschwitz”19 and he finds “Auschwitz” as the “paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, where evil appears in its diabolical horror.”20 The Holocaust, to use Maurice Blanchot’s phrase, “traverses . . . the whole of Levinas’ philosophy.”21 It traverses his work in phrases that occur throughout. When Levinas writes we “live from ‘good soup”’ (TI, 110), the inverted commas are significant: “good soup” is the camp staple and its “goodness” is important – it’s not simply a philosophical example in a dispute with Heidegger. It underlies the “philosophical narrative” of his first major work, Totality and Infinity. (Nietzsche, after all, writes that “every great philosophy has been . . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary

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and unconscious memoir.”)22 The book begins with a meditation on war and morality, and – like many Holocaust testimonies – makes a journey through separation, isolation from society and “the human,” a rediscovery and reevaluation of these, and finally an evocation of the “marvel of the family” and peace, echoing his own wartime experiences as a prisoner. Most movingly, it occurs in the epigraph to Otherwise than Being, which he dedicated to “the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions and millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other, the same anti-Semitism.” In a typical Levinasian move, he finds the structure of anti-Semitism a version of a larger structure, simply: the hatred of the other. Most importantly, the Holocaust appears in the aims of his work. While these are too large to do proper justice to here, I will highlight some aspects of this, focusing on the questions asked at the beginning of his two major works. Totality and Infinity begins in thinking about war, in which morality seems to disappear, and asks, then, if we are simply duped by morality. The book circles around this question and answers it over the length of its analyses. Perhaps, however, the keenest point of this analysis is the question of murder. For Levinas, murder is not like other forms of destruction (which aim only at things): murder is an act of “total negation” (TI, 198). “To kill is not to dominate but to annihilate” (TI, 198). But he points out that the “Other is the sole being I can wish to kill” (TI, 198): it seems to make no real sense to speak of “murdering” rocks or trees, for example.23 That is, unless the other was being recognized as other, there would be no desire to murder that other: murder, and so war, “presupposes peace, the antecedent and non-allergic presence of the Other” (TI, 199). That moment of recognition of the other is the source of the ethical: the name Levinas gives that moment (in that book) is “the face,” or seeing the face of the other. (This sort of thinking in Levinas leads to a common misunderstanding of Levinas’s work: in his philosophical work he is not, as it were, offering an ethical code, or a way of living. Instead, as a phenomenologist, he is analyzing how it might be that any ethical code or series of moral values might come to be. One might have values, but not know how or why: Levinas’s task is to explain how values themselves – whether we live up to them or not – come to be. Paradoxically, then, the experience of murder reveals the possibility of ethics). Throughout his work, but here especially, in Levinas’s thought of murder, clearly inspired by a reflection of the Holocaust, is the sense of “otherness” to which so much postmodern art and thought responds.

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The core of his second major work, Otherwise than Being, is a modification of this: responding to a very long critique by Derrida (“Violence and Metaphysics”), Levinas shifts his position and finds not “the face” of the other as that which reveals the possibility of ethics, but instead finds this possibility in the phenomenon of language. Levinas argues that language works in a way that is both complex and very simple. He finds that while the very phenomenon of language reveals the other (the “saying” of language, in his terms), language also thematises and “pins down,” makes concrete this saying in a fixed “said.” (e.g., underlying the phrase “Good morning” is this ethical saying for Levinas, but it carries with it all sorts of determined meaning – through being in English, through its register, and so on). Thus, for Levinas, all language is a weaving of “saying” and “said.” More, it is not enough simply to contest one “said” with another: this simply means that war perpetuates war. Instead, there must be an attempt constantly to uncover the saying in the said. This has (at least!) three consequences. The first is in Levinas’s own writing: it is characterized by a constant substation of terms for Levinas (another reason he is hard to read). He offers not a fixed lexis of philosophical terms but rather a shifting set of almost-synonyms in order to attempt to disrupt the processes by which the “saying” becomes “said.” Second, it is rare for him to come to a polemical conclusion. He believes that “philosophical research . . . does not answer questions like an interview, oracle or wisdom” (TI, 29) and instead performs a work of constant interruption. And third, this means that Levinas is very resistant to attempts to offer overarching, abstract, and totalizing narratives. Levinas describes philosophy as a failure, “betrayed in the said that dominates the saying which states it” (OBBE, 7).24 The “exceptional words . . . One, God – become terms, re-enter the vocabulary and are put at the disposition of philologists, instead of confounding philosophical language” (OBBE, 169). The task of philosophy is to be an “an endless critique, or scepticism . . . destroying the conjunction into which its saying and said continually enter” (OBBE, 44). No philosophy can offer a final answer. These three, in, as it were, a fractal sequence (from the level of his prose to the level of his thought to the level of abstraction and ordering in general) mean that he is roughly “incredulous about metanarratives” – how, precisely, Lyotard defined postmodernism. Again, it is the postmodern refusal of closure, apparent from thought about the Holocaust. It is this ethical thought that seems to underlie much postmodern work, which is echoed, too, in the Levinasian tone of Derrida’s later writing. For him too, the Holocaust is a central event: the

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thought of the incineration of the holocaust, of cinders, runs through all my texts . . . What is the thought of the trace, in fact, without which there would be no deconstruction? . . . The thought of the trace . . . is a thought about cinders and the advent of an event, a date, a memory. But I have no wish to demonstrate this here, the more so, since, in effect, “Auschwitz” has obsessed everything that I have ever been able to think, a fact that is not especially original.25

This obsession is clearer if we turn to recurring and influential themes in Derrida’s work: the idea of the “exorbitant,” from the Latin root “exitorbitare . . . to go out of the wheel track” (as wagons bounced from the ruts – which serves as inverted rails – in the roads of classical Rome). The exorbitant is a point of “exteriority to the totality of the age of logocentrism” and it is precisely starting “from this point of exteriority” that “a certain deconstruction of that totality which is also a traced path . . . might be broached.”26 The exorbitant is that which is outside the orbit, the orb (eye), or more prosaically, outside the wheel rut of Western philosophy. To open a work to the “exorbitant” is to see it in a way that questions or reframes the framework in which the work appears: the act of deconstruction itself. The question then, is why one might want to do this. Derrida’s answer, in different ways, in different phases of his work, is that there is an ethical motivation: for example, in “Force of Law” Derrida argues that “Deconstruction is justice.”27 It is in this coming to understand deconstruction as an ethical process that the “trace” developed from Levinas’s thought, becomes so important. For Levinas, the trace is a way of describing how the ethical is made manifest. As I suggested earlier, in Totality and Infinity from 1961 the ethical appears in the actual, really present face-to-face relation of one to another. The face is thought of not as a metaphor or a representation: it is “nudity,” its “very straightforwardness,” “appealing to me in destitution” (TI, 200), and so on. Even language for Levinas (in this work) is only truly language if it is guaranteed by presence: the speaker and “must present himself before every sign – present a face” (TI, 182). However, this causes a problem for his ethics: if the ethical moment is only the moment of facing, with the face actually present, then how are we responsible for those who are absent, who have no faces? How does the ethical relation appear in an absence, the absence of the past, for example? (This question, too, with the sense of absence, clearly bears a trace of the Holocaust.) The answer to this problem, a major turning point in his thought and the clue that opens to the ethical discussion of language in Otherwise than Being, occurs in Levinas’s discussion of the

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trace. The trace is precisely the sign of the presence of the other in or as a sign: It is in “the trace of the other that a face shines.”28 The trace, beyond its material, inaugurates the same ethical relation to the other in the past as the face does to the actually present other. What a particular trace signifies is not central: that it signifies and what this implies is: the same structure as the saying and the said, earlier. Derrida writes that he relates his “concept of trace to what is at the centre of the latest work of Levinas and his critique of ontology” (OG, 70). He is keen not to give a particular name to “the exorbitant” as that would both place it into a system and invoke a specific point or referent which would anchor the text being read. So, where, for Levinas, the trace is the trace of the other (the other absent and present, disrupting presence), for Derrida, the trace “signifies . . . the undermining of an ontology which, in its innermost course, has determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of language as the full continuity of speech” (OG, 70). The trace is, then, the moment of disruption in thought, it is what exceeds philosophy. Like the ghost, the trace is both there and not there, inside and outside a system of thinking. Derrida says that to deconstruct “philosophy . . . would be to think . . . the structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the same time to determine – from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy – what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid.”29 The trace is the appearance of the exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy, not describable by metaphysics, the infinite responsibility that arises from the other appearing before (and so outside) reasoned thinking. Derrida’s obsession with specters and “hauntology” in Spectres of Marx and with ghosts, ashes, spirits and spirit in Of Spirit again show the importance of the trace: ghosts are both present and absent, a presence that marks an absence. This is not to say that the trace is a new philosophy: Derrida argues that “the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy . . . but in continuing to read philosophy in a certain way.”30 Derrida, like Levinas, constantly renames his terms to avoid them becoming systematic and in order to fix them in definite responses to certain texts: a reading not a methodology. As is well known, Derrida’s readings are supposed to follow no method, but to be attentive to the text: however, it seems clear that the Derridian terms that emerge from very specific readings – “shibboleth” from reading Paul Celan, “hymen” in “The Double Session,” “pharmakon” from Plato, and so on – can all be seen as specific, located versions of reading under the pressure of the trace. Derrida writes that “[O]f course, the word trace doesn’t mean anything by

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itself. . . . I would prefer something which is neither present nor absent: I would prefer ashes as the better paradigm for what I call trace: something which erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself.”31 The word “trace” does not mean anything: like “hymen” or “pharmakon” it is one word taken from a certain context to describe what “no concept of metaphysics can describe.” Even the idea of trace as “imprinting” is to force it too much into a conceptual framework: it appears each time in each context as different. But the “thought of the trace, without which there is no deconstruction, is a thought about cinders and the advent of an event, a date, a memory.”32 The trace is conceptually tied to the Holocaust. And this, too, underlies some of the core concepts of the postmodern: not just, as it were, its reuse of the past, but the reasons for that reuse.

Conclusion This complex translation of the Holocaust, I have suggested, contorts standard academic language in, not least, mixing different sorts of claims; responds to the sense of rupture, which emerges in nuanced and coded ways as well as in a direct engagement; stays, latent or manifest, in the cultural imaginary of the West. More, this tremendous shock leads to the creation of new, self-reflective ways of seeing, creating and thinking. Centrally, I suggested by looking in detail at two very significant thinkers, it leads to the ethical concerns which underlie the postmodern. This concern can be seen as the disruption or rejection of the “metaphysics of comprehension,” the omnivorous core of Western thought, “mind turned belly” as Adorno called it. The Holocaust is how this concern has appeared: I looked, for example, at one instance in Levinas where the phenomenon of murder revealed the role of otherness in ethical thought. It also underlies the rejection of closure so central to postmodernism in the arts and in philosophy. More, the Holocaust plays a role in the thinking of the “trace” in both Levinas and Derrida: this vital concept underlies much in their thought and in postmodernism generally. Among other things, the “trace” suggests not only the untimely interruption of the other, but also the sense that newness emerges from what already is, not, as it were, against it. This awareness of the other and of the metaphysics that seem to deny or “concrete over” otherness has been taken by some thinkers to suggest the grounding of a form of new form of hope and humanism, a humanism beyond humanism, based on a sense of the “fundamentally fragile, corporeal existence” and on an awareness of “the trace,” of that otherness which escapes the limits of systems of thought and language but

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is made manifest in them. It is in these ways, perhaps most importantly, that postmodernism comes “after the Holocaust.” Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 109. 2 I discuss these matters at greater length in Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004) and, focusing on the ethics of postmodernism, in “Against the Metaphysics of Comprehension,” in Steven Connor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 182–95. 3 Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32. 4 William Golding, The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces (London: Harvest/HBJ, 1965), 86–7. 5 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 54. 6 Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 75. 7 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 366. 8 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1955; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 14. 9 On the relationship between the Holocaust and the postcolonial, see recent work by Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation (Stanford University Press, 2009); Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (London: Yale University Press, 2013); Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (London: Palgrave, 2013); Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (London: Berghahn, 2013); Gilroy, Between Camps. 10 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 77. 11 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester University Press, 1988), 56. 12 See Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). 13 Geoffrey Hartmann, The Longest Shadow (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1. 14 Dan Stone, “Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White and Holocaust Historiography,” in Jorn Stuckrath and Zurg Zbinden (eds.), Metageschichte: Hayden White und Paul Ricoeur (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997), 254–74 [270]. 15 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 3.

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16 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 46, 43. Hereafter referred to in the text as TI. 17 Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1, 5. 18 Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 18. 19 Emmanuel Levinas, “Damages Due to Fire” in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. with an introduction by Annette Aronwicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 182. 20 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering” in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds.), The Provocation of Levinas (London: Routledge, 1988) 156–165 [162]. 21 Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion,” in Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 41–50 [50]. 22 Fredrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973), 37. John Llewelyn, The HypoCritical Imagination (London: Routledge, 2000), 200. 23 However, on the continuation of this point, see Roger Gottlieb, “Levinas, Feminism, Holocaust, Ecocide,” in C. C. Gould and R. S. Cohen (eds.), Artefacts, Representations and Social Practice (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 365–76; and David Clark, “On Being the Last Kantian in Germany,” in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (eds.), Animal Acts (London: Routledge, 1997), 165–98. 24 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). Hereafter referred to in the text as OBBE. 25 “Canons and Metonymies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Richard Rand (ed.), Logomachia: The Contest of the Faculties (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 195–218 [211–12]. 26 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 159. Hereafter referred to in the text as OG. 27 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, 3–67 [15]. Hereafter referred to in the text as FL. 28 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,”106. 29 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 6. 30 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 288. 31 Jacques Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium,” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987) 171–85 [177]. 32 Rand, Logomachia, “Canons and Metonymies,” 211.

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3

Empire’s ebb Theo D’haen

Eric Hobsbawm famously defined the period 1789 to 1914 as the “long” nineteenth century and 1914 to 1991 as the “short” twentieth century. From a purely European point of view this makes sense, with 1914 and the beginning of World War I marking the end of a bourgeois or middleclass Europe ushered in by the French Revolution, as well as the culmination and the ruin of the balance of power politics that had followed the Napoleonic era. That war also saw the rise of the first totalitarian regime in Europe with the communist takeover of Russia in 1917, while 1991 marks the end of that same regime and its grip on much of Central and Eastern Europe via satellite regimes, with various fascist regimes ruling significant portions of Europe for shorter periods in between – Italy, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and again parts of Central and Eastern Europe. When we venture to look beyond Europe though, it makes sense to argue for a “very long nineteenth century” stretching from 1776, with Britain after the loss of its “First Empire” following the American Declaration of Independence turning to the East and particularly the Indian subcontinent, thus ushering in the age of imperialism, until the end of World War II and its aftermath of decolonization and Cold War. Beyond doubt, the carnage of World War I in many ways ended the absolute supremacy of the European powers and brought about a major shift from Europe to the United States in financial and economic power, and what would soon become the Soviet Union in military power. For the world beyond Europe, though, nothing very much changed in that also after 1918 the European colonial powers continued to rule most of the world beyond Europe itself and the Americas. In terms of culture, too, Europe continued to set the tone and the pace. True, Vienna no longer shone quite as brightly as it had at the fin-de-siècle, but London, Paris, and Berlin continued to draw writers, artists, and intellectuals from all over Europe and the Americas, as well as from the colonies. Modernism and the successive avant-garde movements all found their origins or inspiration in Europe even if they partially played out 52

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elsewhere. And Great Britain and France, followed in the 1920s by Italy and in the early 1930s by Germany, continued to be dominant actors in world affairs, especially militarily, not least because the United States after World War I had retreated into isolationism. It was World War II that definitively put an end to European hegemony, militarily, and later politically and economically. In the world of politics and diplomacy, Mark Mazower notes, “the Second World War marked the end of a long period of European ascendency,” which he dates specifically from around 1800, and which he labels “the age of Eurocentrism.”1 Cornel West likewise speaks of “the end of the European Age (1492–1945).”2 The prewar European colonial empires quickly disintegrated after 1945. India, the jewel in the crown of the largest-ever colonial Empire, gained independence in 1947. Indonesia, formerly known as the Dutch East Indies, officially became independent in 1949, but in practice (and retrospectively now also recognized as such by The Netherlands) had been so since the departure of the Japanese occupying forces in 1945. Most other European colonies followed suit during the 1950s and early 1960s, with most of Africa and South and Southeast Asia being independent by the mid-1960s. In many instances this did not happen without prolonged and bloody struggle against the metropolitan colonizer, but often also between different factions in the newly independent, or soon to be, countries. The first was the case in Indonesia, and in what was then still known as French Indochina and the equally French Maghreb, and especially Algeria, and in parts of British Eastern Africa, with the rising of the Mau Mau and other black resistance movements. The latter was the case in the Indian subcontinent prior to and upon its splitting into various “new” entities, and in the former Belgian Congo, which became independent in 1960. In the same year France granted independence to fifteen of its African colonies. While before 1945 only four African countries enjoyed independence, after 1965 only Portugal retained substantial African mainland colonies with Angola and Mozambique, both of which by then had entered upon a period of vicious guerilla wars, with Britain, France, and Spain holding onto some smaller possessions. The Caribbean was slower to follow suit. Spain’s former colonies Cuba, San Domingo, and Puerto Rico had already become independent in 1898 after the Spanish-American war, although Puerto Rico remained in the hands of the US. The majority of the British island possessions in the Caribbean, however, were granted independence only in the 1970s and 1980s, the exceptions being Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, which gained independence in 1962. British Guyana followed in 1966. Some islands remain British, as the French

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Antilles remain French, and, albeit in a different constellation, (most of ) the Dutch Antilles remain Dutch. The immediate postwar period until the middle 1960s saw the first relatively massive waves of immigrants from the former colonies to the former European metropolises. In Great Britain this mainly concerned black male immigrants from the West Indies as of June 22, 1948, the arrival date in London of the Empire Windrush from Jamaica, later followed by entire families migrating to (primarily) England. In The Netherlands it was initially mainly Indonesians of mixed blood, so-called indos, but also Moluccans, who had been heavily compromised with the Dutch colonial regime as soldiers, that in large numbers immigrated, but increasingly they were also followed by West Indians from the Dutch Caribbean looking for a better life in the mother country. France, as a result of the increasingly bloody Algerian struggle for independence, saw the influx of nearly a million of so-called pieds-noirs, descendants of French colonists in Algeria. The riots, uprisings, and internal struggles following the abrupt independence of the until-then Belgian Congo in 1960 led to tens of thousands of Europeans, mainly Belgians, fleeing the country, many of them returning to Belgium. The United States and the Soviet Union, the ultimate victors of World War II, emerged as the uncontested superpowers of the new “nuclear age.” The rivalry between the two former allies quickly led to the so-called Cold War, effectively dividing the world into two political and military camps. Independence struggles in many European colonies between 1945 and the mid-1960s were sometimes fueled by this rivalry, with each of the superpowers and their allies supporting rivaling parties, whether these were the former European colonial powers wanting to hold on, insurgents, revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries, or different factions within each of these. But the superpowers also intervened elsewhere, notably in Latin America, which since the 1823 Monroe doctrine the US had considered its legitimate backyard, but where the Soviets now started backing movements sympathetic to their own ideology, or simply opposing US hegemony. The desire of many newly independent states to get out from under this binary system pitting a US-led so-called Free or First World against a Soviet-led Communist one occasioned the Bandung Conference of 1955, organized by Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and gathering together twenty-five Asian and African countries. Eventually this led to the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement, comprised of mostly what now were called “Third World” countries, in a follow-up meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), in 1961.

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Finally, although perhaps less immediately noticed, at least in the so-called Free World, the lead in cultural matters too largely passed to the United States. To be sure, European philosophers from Jean Paul Sartre and Heidegger to Louis Athusser, Jacques Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, and Lévinas, continued to generate the ideas and theories that fueled reflection and discussion in much of the rest of the world, but increasingly their success depended upon mediation through English-language translation and wholesale adoption and dissemination in the United States, and especially in the American academy. For the arts the change was more immediately evident. After World War II New York became the primary art market where many, if not most, new art movements originated or at least were consecrated. In the period since World War II Europe has not generated a single -ism, in the arts or in literature, that in any significant sense has transcended national or linguistic borders. Instead, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and magical realism, the three “global” literary -isms that have marked the second half of the twentieth century, all originated outside of Europe. While proof, then, of what Cornel West has called the “decentering,” and Dipesh Chakrabarty the “provincializing” of Europe, these “post-European” -isms are also haunted by the specter of the vanished center, as signaled by the necessary addition of a prefix, or in the case of “magical realism” of a distinctive ending to what in the European context needs no further qualification.3 This spectral haunting takes various forms at various stages of each of the -isms concerned, with a significant break for all three occurring in the mid-1960s. In what follows I concentrate on the period 1945 to the mid-1960s, although it will also be necessary to briefly signal further developments to show how they lead to the situation that for us now is the more familiar one.

Postmodernism – enter the new American empire The rise of the term postmodern or postmodernism, at least in English and in the literary sphere, is closely linked to American critics, that is to say critics from the United States, trying to account for the gap left by the collapse of European “high” modernism, and particularly concerned with positioning American literature in relation to that collapse. We should mention here that in Spanish the term posmodernismo already existed in the early part of the twentieth century, referring to a transitional generation of Latin American poets entering the literary scene between 1905 and 1920, between the waning of Latin American modernismo (more contemporary with and related to European Symbolism than to the “modernism” of a more

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general Euramerican context – the main “modernista” is Rubén Darío), and the rise of Latin American avant-gardism with movements such as Ultraísmo. But the very first mention in English of anything postmodern European has nothing to do with the United States or with American literature either. D. C. Somervell, in his 1947 one-volume abridgement of the first six volumes (1934–1939) of the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee’s Study of History, has Toynbee date what he calls “the post Modern Age” as of 1875 and reaching to Toynbee’s present.4 In Toynbee’s view this age is marked by the decline of the middle classes and the transition to a mass society, both of which Toynbee sees as harmful. Such views were not uncommon in the interbellum, whether applied wholesale to Western, and particularly European civilization, as in Oswald Spengler’s The Waning of the West (1919), or in more nuanced versions as in some of the later works of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. The Frankfurt School social philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno famously expressed similar views in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. This book was published in German (in Amsterdam) in 1947, with an English translation following only in 1972, but it had been written during the war years in the US, where Adorno and Horkheimer had sought refuge from the Nazi regime. The mass society that the Dialectic of Enlightenment revolted against, then, was directed fully as much against the American society Adorno and Horkheimer feared would be the norm for the future as it was a lament for what they perceived had been lost in Europe. Dialectic of Enlightenment does not make any mention of postmodernism, but the earliest American uses of the term reflect a similar mixture of revulsion at American reality and European loss. The American literary and social critic Irving Howe in his 1959 “Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction” sees the post–World War II fiction of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and the Beats as symptomatic of the chaotic shapelessness of mass consumer society. In “What Was Modernism?” (1960), Harry Levin, making an explicit reference to Toynbee, labeled his own then present “the Post-Modern Period.” “Looking back to the Moderns,” he said, “we may feel as Dryden did when he looked back from the Restoration to the Elizabethans, contrasting earlier strength with later refinement. ‘Theirs was the giant race before the Flood . . .’” For Levin’s own age “The Second World War was the Flood.” As a notable example he pointed to Beckett, whom he called Joyce’s “disheveled disciple.” In the 1966 introduction to the reprint of his essay in Refractions, Levin underscored the point, claiming that “Beckett, after Joyce, seems thin and strident and monotonous” just as “[Henry] Miller

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looks like an amusing but crude burlesque of [D. H.] Lawrence.” In short, Levin lamented, “we have fallen among epigones.” Other writers whose work he sees as falling short of the achievement of the “Moderns” include Jean Genet, the French practitioners of the nouveau roman, the German Gruppe ’47, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (1958, The Leopard), Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957), and the Americans Edward Albee, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, John Updike, and William Burroughs, whose “notion of writing books by cutting out or ‘folding in’ random snippets from other books sets a more demoralizing example for would-be writers than his fantasies of drug addiction.”5 Howe and Levin in their versions of postmodernism in essence reiterated the continuing centrality of Europe also for immediate postwar American culture and literature. Their postmodernism not only comes after modernism but basically defines itself negatively as what is no longer quite modernist. In fact, with the exception of Burroughs, most of the writers Howe and Levin branded as postmodern would later be relabeled as “late-modernists” by Alan Wilde in Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination (1981), and by McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), as “limit-modernis[ts].”6 We first encounter the term post-Modernist literature linked to what from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century we may think of as an at least partially more “typical” list of authors, and a much more positive evaluation of what these may be up to, in Leslie Fiedler’s 1965 “The New Mutants.” Fiedler claims to have noted a tendency in a number of then contemporary “serious writers” – Golding, Anthony Burgess, Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Harry Matthews, and Barth – to emulate the modes of science fiction. However, Fiedler is not so much interested in “analyzing the diction and imagery which have passed from science fiction into postmodernist literature, but rather in coming to terms with the prophetic content common to both: with the myth rather than the modes of science fiction.” That myth, he contends, “is quite simply the myth of the end of man, of the transcendence or transformation . . . (under the impact of advanced technology and the transfer of traditional human functions to machines) of homo sapiens into something else: the emergence – to use the language of Science Fiction itself – of ‘mutants’ among us.” It is the students populating the university class rooms of the 1960s, Fiedler argues, that are the new mutants, and their future world is “post-humanist, postmale, post-white, post-heroic.”7 Their chief prophet is Burroughs. In a slightly later article, “Cross the Border – Close that Gap” (1969), Fiedler claims the advent, since 1955, of a postmodernism the essence of which

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consists in erasing the distinction between elite and mass culture, arguing that truly new art, postmodern art, is “at the furthest possible remove from art and avant-garde, the greatest distance from inwardness, analysis, and pretension” and prefers “genre[s] most associated with exploitation by the mass media: notably, the Western, Science Fiction, and Pornography.”8 In fact, of course, Fiedler is pretty much saying the same thing as Howe and Levin with regard to post-1945 literature and society, but whereas the latter look back toward European humanist culture as normative and lament what is lost, Fiedler is joyfully looking forward to and celebrating what he sees as a new and especially American future culture and literature. In this, of course, Fiedler is following a typically American pattern of endlessly positing the United States as a place of new beginnings. It is with Ihab Hassan that the classical canon of early postmodernism gains a firm footing. In his earliest book-length publication, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971), after focusing on avant-gardes from the first third of the twentieth century, in the final chapter Hassan attempts to “survey the postmodern scene.” The names he cites range from Artaud to Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter to Edward Albee, Peter Weiss to Thomas Bernhardt, the late Joyce, Philip Sollers and Claude Ollier, Salinger, the Beats, and Norman Mailer, along with those of Burroughs and Barth – the only two names that we would now readily recognize as postmodernists. When Hassan briefly turns to an enumeration of what in “recent American fiction” he calls “votaries” of “the art of the absurd,” which he sees as “a further stage in the literature of silence extending from Sade to Beckett,” we encounter the names of “Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, James Purdy, J. P. Donleavy, Terry Southern, Thomas Berger, Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Richard Brautigan, and Raymond Federman, among others.”9 These “others” might then presumably comprise the likes of Coover, DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Gaddis, William Gass, John Hawkes, Thomas McGuane, Richard Sukenick, and Vonnegut, along with Abish, whom Hassan himself mentions in “Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” a piece he wrote for the second edition of The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Hassan’s writings provided part of the inspiration for Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne, a 1979 report on knowledge commissioned by the government of the Canadian province of Québec that gained great currency in its 1984 English translation for an American university press, with a foreword by Jameson, and that defined postmodernism as marked by “incredulity toward metanarratives,” meaning foundational narratives that made holistic sense of the world, or perhaps more modestly of society, and

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as a constellation of rivaling language games. The two works that during the 1980s quickly became the leading introductory volumes to literary postmodernism – McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), in practice see Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” literarily embodied in a number of technical features borrowed from Hassan and Fiedler, as well as a number of other more recent commentators: self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the erasure of boundaries, the destabilization of the reader, and a stance toward indeterminacy and immanence, or what Hassan had neologized as “indeterminance.” The same year he provided the preface to the English translation of Lyotard’s book Jameson published “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” an article that also served as the title essay for a 1991 book, and which came to stand as the definitive leftist, or neoMarxist, and overall negative position on postmodernism. Jameson in his foreword to The Postmodern Condition (1979) sees Lyotard’s analysis of post-1945 society as confirming Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s views of the dangers of mass society characterized by commodity fetishism, and sides with another and later Frankfurt School member, Habermas, who in his 1980 Frankfurt lecture “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” published as “Modernity – An Incomplete Project” in 1981, had reiterated his belief in the continuing validity of those metanarratives Lyotard disparages as obsolete, and which Habermas identifies as embodying the Enlightenment project of modernity, while he sees postmodernism as undermining this project. These later critiques of postmodernism, of Habermas in Europe and Jameson in the United States, thus can be seen to continue in the line of Howe and Levin, and explicitly or implicitly target the “classical” postmodernist canon first outlined by Hassan in the early 1970s and later consolidated by McHale and Hutcheon. Fiedler’s celebratory postmodernism, on the other hand, as of the 1980s would at least partially mutate into what we have come to know as multiculturalism in American literature and postcolonialism elsewhere.

Postcolonialism – enter an-“other” world The emergence of postcolonialism is directly linked to the waning of Europe as the center of colonial power, although here too we have to be aware that what this term covers changes over time. Like the term

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postmodern so also the term post-colonial originates in the period 1945 to 1965, its first appearance recorded in 1959 with reference to India.10 Like postmodernism, it is an English coinage and at first was used in a purely historical context. The term came to be applied widely to literature only after the publication of Edward Said’s extremely influential Orientalism (1978), and was further theorized in the 1980s by Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and popularized especially after the 1989 appearance of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. From then on, initially in hyphenated form, post-dating independence, but eventually, now mostly unhyphenated, it covered both a way of reading European classics, with an eye to unveiling their colonial bias, as well as works written by authors from former colonies – all works by such authors revealing an oppositional stance to the (ex)colonial center. As such, it was used to retrospectively reinterpret as postcolonial a number of authors and works predating the coinage of the very term post-colonial, including authors between 1945 and the early 1960s that had previously been subsumed under the label “Commonwealth literature.” The latter label suggests the will to both differentiate this literature from “English” or “British” literature, yet at the same time maintain the link suggested by the term also in the political realm. Commonwealth Literature was also the title of one of the first surveys of English-language literature “outside the traditions of Britain and the United States,” and discussing African authors such as Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, Wole Soyinka from Ghana, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya, next to Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and West Indian writers.11 Along with the waves of Caribbean laborer immigrants of the late 1940s and 1950s also came a number of writers, among them Sam Selvon, George Lamming, (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, and V. S. Naipaul. Ian Baucom in Out of Place discusses Naipaul’s 1988 autofictional The Enigma of Arrival as retrospectively registering Naipaul’s early 1950s arrival in England, coming from then still colonial Trinidad, as coinciding with “the death of that England in which, as a child, he had been taught to believe . . . [i]ts death is, indeed, announced by the fact of his coming.”12 In one sense, then, The Enigma of Arrival signals another “end of Eurocentrism.” At the same time, Naipaul in this novel as in most of his work, and in a move parallel to what we saw with at least the early uses of postmodernism, reinscribes Europe, in casu Britain and the British Empire, as a horizon of lost, even if only imagined, wholeness, especially so at the moment of migration. In an instance of the cultural belatedness of the

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colonized, this reinscription also encompasses the desire to emulate the literary achievements expressive of this horizon, that is, modernism from its earliest glimmers in Joseph Conrad to the late Joyce. At the same time the new post-1945 “native” English writers, in response to the ongoing loss of Empire, were themselves turning to “kitchensink realism” and the “LittleEnglandism” of the Angry Young Men and their fellow travelers. Little wonder, then, that, as Peter Kalliney (2007) argues, Caribbean writers in England during the immediate post-1945 period until the mid-1960s, and regardless of the fact that they were often describing the less pleasant aspects of immigrant life in England, or of life in the colonies, that is to say the very elements for which later on they would be recuperated as postcolonial, were considered by the British literary establishment, including major presses and the BBC Third Programme, not so much as opposing English literary culture as continuing and even upholding it.13 The same applied to All About H. Hatterr (1948), a novel published in London by the Indian (although Kenyan-born) G. V. Desani and often compared to Joyce’s Ulysses. As of the early 1960s things changed. As Kalliney notes, most Caribbean authors left Britain, a fair number of them taking up university appointments in the US, Canada, or the West Indies itself. But the social and political atmosphere in Britain had also become less hospitable. As of 1962 economic conditions worsened in the UK while immigration accelerated, now no longer from the Caribbean only but also starting up in earnest from other recently independent former colonies. The same year saw the passing of the Commonwealth Migration Act which made a distinction between British passport holders born in the UK itself and in other parts of the Commonwealth. All of this led to a hardening of the color line, and a criminalization of blacks by British conservatives eventually culminating in Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech of 1968. The term postcolonial, in its various local variants, enters other languages modeled after English-language usage, and only after 1980. In French it seems to have first been used, as in English, in the chronological sense of referring to a literary period coming after colonialism, in 1984 by Bernard Mouralis in Littérature et développement.14 More recently it has assumed what Moura calls the “valeur adversative et critique” we also associate with more contemporary Anglophone usages. In 2001 Bessière and Moura, in their introduction to Littératures postcoloniales et francophonie, still felt compelled to note that “l’usage du terme postcolonialisme à propos des littératures francophones contemporaines est peu fréquent tant chez les écrivains francophones que chez les critiques francophones” (“the use of the term

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postcolonialisme with respect to contemporary francophone literatures is rare with both francophone writers and critics”).15 The term was seen as to a large extent covering the same range of literary products traditionally already subsumed under the label “littératures francophones,” even though the latter also refers to a number of non-French but also decidedly non-postcolonial literatures such as Belgian and Swiss literature in French. The case of Québequois literature is more tenuous, as Québec might be seen as itself colonial/postcolonial within Canada, and Canada as postcolonial with respect to Great Britain. The same thing holds for the literature(s) of Australia and New Zealand, and in a different way South Africa. In this respect we should always keep in mind Stuart Hall’s injunction in “When was the Postcolonial?” (1996) that postcolonial does not apply everywhere in the same way, and that there is a difference between white settler colonies and what Anne McClintock (1992) has called deep-settler colonies.16 This is not to say, of course, that there was no such thing as what we now call postcolonial literature in French, also during the immediate post1945 period up until the mid-1960s. In fact, we might well say that there is more of it in French than in English, certainly when it comes to what retrospectively has been claimed as postcolonial theory avant-la-lettre, particularly the work of the Martinican-Algerian Frantz Fanon with Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and that of the Tunisian Albert Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized (1957), works that have played an important role in later formulations of postcolonialism by Homi Bhabha and also Robert Young. But also French-language literature properly speaking of the same period is often more militantly anticolonial than its English-language counterpart. Suffice it to think of the “négritude” movement as of the 1930s, the roles of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas in this, the foundation of the journal Présence Africaine in 1948, and the early work of Algerians Mohamed Dib, Kateb Yacine, and Assia Djebar published during the Algerian war for independence from France. But we could add Driss Chraïbi for Morocco, Sembène Ousmane for Senegal, Ferdinand Léopold Oyono and Mongo Beti for Cameroon, Bernard Dadié and Ahmadou Kourouma for Côte d’Ivoire, Camara Laye for Guinea, Seydou Badian Kouyaté for Mali, and the early Edouard Glissant for the Caribbean.

Magical realism – de/re-centering literature Like postmodernism and postcolonialism magical realism as we now know it originates in the immediate post-1945 period. To be precise, it does so in

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1949 with Alejo Carpentier’s preface to his novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World), later published in an expanded version as “De lo real maravilloso americano” in Carpentier’s volume of essays Tientos y diferencias (1967). In fact, the term magic realism had already been coined in the 1920s by the German art critic Franz Roh with reference to a strain in the visual and verbal arts closely related to surrealism. In 1927 Roh’s article had been translated into Spanish, in Revista de Occidente in Madrid, and as such the term realismo mágico had circulated widely also in Spanishlanguage Latin America. Carpentier also refers to Roh’s term, but finds it unfit for his purpose. As American reality is different from that of Europe, Carpentier argues, it cannot logically be described in a European language geared to European reality. Latin America’s “Other” reality for its expression calls for the language of European “un-reason”: faith or magic. The term magic realism in its then familiar European Surrealism-related use, however, referred to an-other reality “beyond” customary reality, a world of the mind, of the psyche, of the ideal perhaps, while Carpentier’s Latin America was very real to him, very much “there.” Thus the neologism “lo real maravilloso” and the insistence on the “americano.” The “marvelous real,” then, in combination with any non-European (and by extension Western) geographical particularization, immediately opens up the possibility of a critique of Eurocentrism. It is this aspect of what in the meantime had been rebaptized “magical realism” in English by the Puerto Rican critic Angel Flores, professor at Queens College, New York, in a talk at the 1954 MLA, and published as “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction” (1955), that would make it an extremely popular mode also for the later practitioners of postcolonialism around the world, and of multiculturalism, first in Canada and then the United States, and later also in Europe, with in many cases the borderlines between the various labels and movements hard to trace. Flores’s “magical realism” covered a much wider chronology or geography than either the original “magic realism” or Carpentier’s “real maravilloso,” stretching from Miguel de Cervantes over Franz Kafka to Jorge Luis Borges and beyond, and thus allowed for the worldwide adoption of a very broad technical definition of the term. Such adoption was fueled as of the mid-1960s by the tremendous success of the Latin American “boom” and in first instance Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) (1967), a novel that since then has come to stand as the very incarnation of magical realism. The mode’s popularity outside or beyond the Latin American domain was enhanced by the almost equally stunning success of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), a novel that in turn came

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to stand as the very embodiment of postcolonialism. It was also this broad magical realism that was woven into postmodernism as of the late 1960s through Barth’s well-known essays “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) and “The Literature of Replenishment” (1980). Latin American magical realists feature prominently in McHale’s and Hutcheon’s late 1980s systematizations of postmodernism.

After 1965 The mid- to late 1960s, in fact, as we have seen, mark at the same time a reconceptualization of the three -isms under consideration as well as their intensive cross-pollination, at least as far as narrative techniques are concerned. If the latter has been rather generally recognized, the theoreticians of the postcolonial in particular have always insisted on keeping apart the worldviews, or perhaps we should call them the ideologies, of the various currents or approaches. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1991), when posing the question “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” answered in the negative. Helen Tiffin noted that “there is a good deal of formal and tropological overlap between ‘primary’ texts variously categorised as ‘post-modern’ or ‘post-colonial.’” But, she insisted, “if there is overlap between the two discourses in terms of ‘primary’ texts . . . there is considerably less in the ‘secondary’ category. It is thus in the selection and reading of such ‘primary’ texts, and in the contexts of discussion in which they are placed, that significant divergences between post-colonialism and post-modernism are most often isolated.”17 And Stephen Slemon argues that “whereas a post-modernist criticism would want to argue . . . the constructedness of all textuality . . . an interested postcolonial critical practice would want to allow for the positive production of oppositional truthclaims in these texts.”18 Others, on the contrary, have allowed for a complementary relationship grounded in the concrete historical circumstances shared by both currents. In Local Histories/Global Designs, Walter Mignolo, for instance, argues that If modernity consists of both the consolidation of European history (global design) and the silenced critical voices of peripheral colonies (local histories), postmodernism and post/Occidentalism/colonialism are alternate processes of countering modernity from different colonial legacies and in different national or neocolonial situations: (1) legacies from/at the center of colonial empires (e.g. Lyotard); (2) colonial legacies in settler colonies (e.g. Jameson in the United States); and (3) colonial legacies in deep-settler colonies (e.g. Said, Cusicanqui, Spivak, Glissant, Albó, Bhabha, Quijano).

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In other words, postmodernity and post/Occidentalism/colonialism are both parts of subaltern reason and an extended critique of subalternity.19

Mignolo’s view can conveniently serve as shorthand for what since the late 1960s have become the “standard” views of, particularly, postmodernism and postcolonialism. Looking to periodize the second half of the twentieth century, Ann Douglass sees “postcoloniality and postmodernity [as having] originated in a common site, in the events and developments of World War II and of the cold war.” Distinguishing between the period 1945 to the early 1960s and that from the mid-1960s to her own present, she finds that “the first generation of post–World War II artists in both the First and the Third Worlds, faced with the psychotic behavior and elaborately systematic deceit of the cold war era, were nerved to fresh acts of resistance and self-expression,” that “these desperately creative acts of heroic subjectivity were attempts at what Jack Kerouac called ‘100 percent personal honesty,’ a romantic reinvention of charisma designed to declassify every kind of information for revolutionary political and artistic ends” and that at the time “[t]here is an outside to the system, a place where protest is meaningful and consequential.”20 As of the mid-1960s this “outside” disappears. In American literature the “honesty” of a Kerouac is replaced by the selfreflexivity and metafiction, the “linguisticity” of “classical” postmodernism, colonialism turns into economically steered neocolonialism, with the United States now at the center of the “world system,” and the anticolonialism of a Frantz Fanon, concerned with actual resistance, turns into postcolonialism concerned with issues of representation. It is the latter postcolonialism that has retrospectively gathered early post–World War II writers from Britain’s colonies under its banner, just as it has come to condone the use of postmodern techniques, even though reading them “adversively,” and to see magical realism as one of its favored categories. Notes 1 Mark Mazower, “The End of Eurocentrism,” in Critical Inquiry 40, (Summer 2014), 298–313 [298–9]. 2 Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 9. 3 West, Keeping Faith, 9. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Rey Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective,” in ELH, 71/2 (Summer 2004), 289–311.

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4 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. Abridgement of Volumes I–VI by D. C. Somervell. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 323. 5 Harry Levin (1960), “What Was Modernism?” reprinted in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 271–95 [277–8, 272–3]. 6 Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 106ff; McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 13. 7 Leslie Fiedler, “The New Mutants,” reprinted in A Fiedler Reader (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 189–210 [192, 202]. 8 Leslie Fiedler, “Cross the Border – Close that Gap,” reprinted in A Fiedler Reader, 270–94 [280]. 9 Ibab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971; Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 254. 10 See Dennis Walder, Post-Colonial Literatures in English: History Language Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3. 11 William Walsh, Commonwealth Literature (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), v. 12 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity, (Princeton University Press, 1999), 183–4. 13 See Peter Kalliney, “Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature,” PMLA, 122/1, (2007), 89–104. 14 See Jean-Marc Moura “Sur quelques apports et apories de la théorie postcoloniale pour le domaine francophone,” in Jean Bessière and Jean-Marc Moura (eds.), Littératures postcoloniales et francophonie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 149–67 [150]. 15 Bessière and Moura (eds.), Littératures postcoloniales et francophonie, 7. 16 See Stuart Hall, “When Was the Post-Colonial? Thinking at the Limit,” in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds.), The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York: Routledge, 1966), 242–60 and Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonial,’” Social Text, 31/32, (1992), 84–98. 17 Helen Tiffin “Introduction” in Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (London: Harvester/ Wheatsheaf, 1991), vii–xvi [vii]. 18 Stephen Slemon, “Modernism’s Last Post,” in Adam and Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post, 1–11 [5]. 19 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 107. 20 Ann Douglas, “Periodizing the American Century: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism in the Cold War Context,” Modernism/Modernity, 5/3, (1998), 71–98 [83].

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4

Cold War culture at the mid-century Alan Nadel

In the Epilogue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s anonymous narrator writes, “When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending on who happens to be looking through him at the time.” In this proto-postmodern moment, the narrator ponders the implications of “invisibility” as a way of summing up how the novel’s narrative has modified and extended its unifying trope, such that the narrator acquires identity (or an infinite panoply of identities) because of his invisibility rather than in spite of it: the act of looking through him delimits the parameters of an amorphous self, and thus not-being-seen creates his identity in the moral anti-matter of performativity. This understanding of identity as socially constructed differs subtly but radically from the way the narrator describes his invisibility at the outset of the novel, when he states, “I am invisible simply because people refuse to see me.” In that construction of identity, consistent with the realist and modernist traditions, the narrator has a true self that lacks recognition. Because the act of telling his story is the only event that separates temporally the novel’s Prologue from its Epilogue, in that all the other events precede the Prologue in the time frame of the narrator’s life, his recounting of his story leads him to reconfigure his subject position. Crucial to that reconfiguration is the character P. B. Rinehart, the consummate manipulator of African-American identity (“Still, could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?”), for, as I have noted elsewhere, in the narrator’s rejection of Rinehartism, he demonstrates that he has more potential than Rinehart because he has one more option than Rinehart, that of not-being Rinehart.1 So constructed, the narrator anticipates the postmodern subject freed from the perspectives and hierarchies mandated by metanarratives. This postmodern moment near the conclusion of one of the major American modernist novels, I am suggesting, reflects the historically specific dilemma 67

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of a narrator in the age of McCarthyism, when satisfying one’s audience was crucial, especially in attempting to testify (or confess) about one’s past.2

The postwar moment and the man of the hour If American postmodernism represents a breakdown in a rigidly normative notion of identity, framed by the equally rigid set of ideological binaries that characterized Cold War America, then in many ways, the 1950s was a period with sensibilities inimical to the postmodern. Characterized by an intense emphasis on conformity that inflected the spectrum of cultural and social production, 1950s American culture was assumed to disdain and even fear the premises that the rubric “postmodern” would later consolidate. Consider, for example, how much the critique of master narratives foundational to the postmodern condition was antithetical to the public endorsement of organized religion and to the pervasive normality implicit in the containment narratives that informed American Cold War culture. And yet, hiding in plain sight of the public and political spotlight – so much so that his name became virtually synonymous with the early 1950s – we find the prototypical postmodern persona, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a trickster who demonstrated, it is now clear, that identity was absolutely performative. McCarthy’s early forays into Wisconsin electoral politics, for example, were fueled by a wartime citation signed by Admiral Nimitz. Although the signature was genuine, the events it cited were not. McCarthy, according to biographer David Oshinsky, “wrote the recommendation himself, forged his commanding officer’s signature, and sent it on to Nimitz, who signed thousands of such documents during the war.”3 False documents, in other words, were as foundational to McCarthy’s career as was E. L. Doctorow’s essay “False Documents” to the description of postmodern fiction. “[T]here is no fiction or non fiction as we commonly understand the distinction,” Doctorow states, “there is only narrative,” an assertion that encapsulates McCarthy’s political life (which, in all its infamy, lasted just barely more than a decade).4 In 1950, after the furor created by his claim that there were numerous Communists in the State Department (208, over 200, 57, depending on the specific speech), McCarthy presented before a Senate Committee a slew of documents allegedly supporting his accusations. However, instead of handing in these documents (which were actually from a three-year-old House investigation), he demonstrated all too literally that “there is only

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narrative” by paraphrasing them verbally for hours, orally editing and revising radically each document as suited his purpose. Thus McCarthy began a process of yoking fictional subversives to the actual security state, the fictionality of his accusations reflected by the fact that all his charges and supporting “evidence” resulted in not one prosecution of the “subversives” he claimed to have “uncovered.” McCarthy was not only a “fabulator” (Robert Scholes’s term for an array of postmodern fiction writers) but, moreover, the leading propagator of rampant fabulation, turning confessed traitors into pinnacles of credibility.5 Admitted traitors, such as Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, or Louis Budenz, became stars by performing acts of ritual purification before the deified state. For Budenz, in fact, it was an explicitly spiritual journey, his “strange personal odyssey” that had “taken him from Catholicism to Marxism and back;” his 1945 reconversion was initiated by a conversation with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who said “Let’s talk about the blessed Virgin.”6 The fact that the corral of star witnesses had, like Budenz, deceived their country in the past, made being a scoundrel more credible and more “patriotic” in the fabulated and fabulating world of McCarthyism than those who had nothing to hide and hence nothing to confess. In March 1950, to support a dramatic series of accusations, McCarthy singled out Owen Lattimore, a prestigious academic with expertise on China, who had been appointed by President Roosevelt in 1941 to be Chiang Kai-shek’s political advisor. McCarthy supported his flimsy claim that Lattimore was a top Soviet spy by exhorting coached and recoached testimony from Budenz, which lacked internal consistency and substituted inference for fact, in order to recontextualize Lattimore’s opinions – which were a matter of public record and well within the range of acceptable public debate – as signs of espionage that contributed to the United States “losing” China. (The idea that China could be “lost,” of course, resembles the informing notion of a Borges story more than a cogent political issue signaling acts of perfidy and necessitating investigation.) Relying on false documents to interrogate actual witnesses and conflating spiritual and forensic testimony, McCarthy embodied the ontological status of a subject in a world where authors “realize they have complete control over history and no control whatsoever over events.”7

History, event, and metafictional confession The debate over the relationship between history and event informs one of the earliest postmodern novels of the 1950s, John Barth’s The Floating

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Opera (1956). That work is framed as a confession from Todd Andrews, who, like McCarthy’s star witnesses, lodges his credibility in the fact that he changed his mind after undergoing a radical reversal of “principles.” That reversal – the movement from the decision to kill himself to the decision not to kill himself – took place in 1937, coinciding, perhaps coincidentally, with the Moscow Trials at the height of the Stalinist purges, which initiated or retrospectively motivated much defection from the Communist Party in America (defection that accelerated greatly after 1939, when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler). Todd opens the novel by self-consciously acknowledging that he is plunging into a new genre, one which poses for him two problems: “to stick to the story, and finally to shut myself up.”8 Instead of confronting the demands of genre, however, the novel exposes the speaker’s inability to meet them, as he intermingles bits of narrative with the rhetorical structure of a philosophical discourse requiring the establishment of premises. But The Floating Opera’s structure, it could be argued, is built upon the irreconcilability of these two discourses, for the premises constantly devolve into negative propositions: nothing has intrinsic value; values are ultimately irrational; there is no reason for valuing anything; living is an action and there is no reason for an action – ergo, there is no reason for living. In a perfect loop, the narrator, who is ostensibly alive, relates the story of the events that make that fact true, as though he were building a philosophical argument, even though the fact that he is alive is the one thing that need not be proven within the diegesis and cannot be proven external to it. The story’s a priori conclusion thus explains an argument that demonstrates there is no reason for it to be true. The tension between two discourses, on which the novel exhausts itself, finds expression in a metafictional selfconsciousness, wherein Todd comments not just on genre and argument but also on the meaning of words and the structure of sentences, never allowing the reader to forget that this “confession” or “argument” or “narrative” is a linguistic construction. Its privileging the performative over the essential and its self-consciousness are the novel’s most prominent postmodern traits, especially as the novel attends to the way writing trumps history. And The Floating Opera’s recognition that its foregone conclusion is based on irrational premises makes it McCarthyist as well as postmodern.

Testifying Humbert-style If Todd Andrews resembles the witnesses of the age of McCarthyism, the fictional kindred spirit of McCarthy himself was Humbert, the pederast

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narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita (1958), a major postmodern American novel, one which plays with the tenuousness of authorial authority.9 From its opening “Forward,” by a fictitious editor who presents the confession of a character, now deceased, whose “bizarre cognomen is his own invention” (as are the pseudonyms that the self-invented narrator ascribes to the other characters), Lolita’s mise-en-abimes locates the basis for all identity in fiction.10 Humbert is a parody of a literary sensibility, a preposterous figure who takes Poe’s poem, “Annabelle Lee” literally, so much so that it constitutes his paradigmatic understanding of love. In the miasma of his bathetic pederast-as-romantic performance, Humbert produces a true confession to events that were not just the product of Nabokov’s imagination but also, in many cases, of Humbert’s. (That we cannot know how many cases is the novel’s prevailing joke.) In the end, the confessional act itself becomes the only reality, rather than the deeds that have been confessed. In this way, Humbert channels the ethos of McCarthyism with its hearings staged for the sake of evincing confession rather than producing verifiable information. All experience is grist for Humbert’s world of illusion and delusion, where the text comprises an array of anagrams, word games, and echoes, such that our investment in the novel Lolita differs little from Humbert’s investment in the character Lolita: both are illusions produced by words. In this awareness of conventions and the games they all allow, Nabokov is no less blatant, albeit perhaps more polished, than McCarthy, whose bulging briefcase of false documents resembled the hat of a hack magician, less noteworthy for the originality of his tricks than for the conviction of his performance. Humbert recounts, for example, the moment when his first wife, for whom he had total contempt, announces her love for another man: A mounting fury was suffocating me – not because I had any particular fondness for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide and here she was, Valeria, the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort and fate.

Valeria, in other words, has defied Humbert’s understanding of genre, a cardinal sin to a man whose comprehension of reality is fatally generic: he falls in love with Lolita because he recognizes instantaneously, with exactly the same acuity McCarthy used to spot a Commie, that “Delores Haze” was generically Annabelle Lee. In the same way, Humbert deprecates himself, by comparing his relationship with Lolita to the family life of her friends: “it had become clear to my conventional Lolita . . . that even

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the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.”11 Using the word conventional to describe simultaneously Lolita’s worldview and the status of that perspective as a literary condition, Humbert foregrounds the parodic relationship of his confession to the genuine article, making the real thing, in its nonparodic form, incest, for which, he confesses, pederasty is a poor imitation.

Confessing away modernist poetry In his confessionalism, Humbert also mimes confessional poets of the 1950s, such as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell, who at the height of the Cold War rejected the alleged anonymity of modernist poetry. In this regard, it is important to note that while postmodern American fiction consolidated a set of characteristics and literary conventions, American poetry was more generally “postmodern” on the basis of its differences from the core poetic principles of modernism, as articulated most prominently by the poets Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and by the New Critics. In that regard, although Lowell’s poetry differed from Ginsberg’s in many formal ways, both poets shared a rejection of anonymity, especially as that anonymity was conjoined with the privileging of mythic time over historically specificity. Lowell’s “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” for example, exploits the formal technique of juxtaposition to construct the speaker as an explicitly autobiographical subject, produced by history and cowered by its implications. He makes clear how much the “lost connections” of the poem’s final line falsify the speaker, in that the connections are actually not lost, but they are potentially lethal, like the electric chair, an apparatus that in the poem awaits Lepke, and by the time of the poem’s composition had claimed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Besieged by connections he can neither make nor ignore, Lowell merges his identity with a poetic performance that struggles, as did those whom McCarthy interrogated (and later McCarthy himself ), to speak without incriminating himself or others. And yet “Memories of West Street and Lepke” is rich with self-incrimination: “I hog a whole house,” “I have a nine months daughter,/young enough to be my granddaughter,” “Ought I to regret my seedtime?” “I was so out of things.” In “Skunk Hour” Lowell states, “My mind’s not right,” “I myself am hell;/nobody’s here–” (ll. 35–6), such that confessing to being an unreliable narrator authenticates rather than undermines his assertions, in the same way that it did for Chambers, Budenz, and Bently.12

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Similarly, Allen Ginsberg, in his poem “America,” written three years before “Skunk Hour,” confesses, “I can’t stand my own mind,” and in an oxymoronic contradiction that echoes Humbert, “I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.”13 At first alternating between interrogating America’s failings and admitting his own, Ginsberg searches in the poem for a path to citizenship, which he finds, ultimately, through Time, a magazine that in effect couches his confessional performance in Cold War paranoia, until the nation’s paranoid delusions become as real to his perception as does the pervasive pederasty that Humbert discovers in the postwar American sensibility. In this way, Ginsberg blends high and low culture and reduces American history to the captions that gloss it in the popular imaginary. These become the mediations between the confessional subject, who is not in his right mind, and the equally paranoid pastiche of history that reduces time and cause to snapshots and slogans, to a compilation of lost experiences that do not add up, in much the same way that Humbert’s “extensive travels all over the states” with Lolita leave him with the impression that We had been everywhere. We had seen really nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, and tires.14

The crucial difference between Ginsberg and Humbert is that Humbert, desiring to remain in the closet, writes his memoir for a posthumous audience, while Ginsberg, wanting to come out, concludes his poem with a personal version of the loyalty oaths mandated so pervasively in the age of McCarthyism: “America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” Seamlessly combining ludic and autobiographical Ginsbergs, this line announces the postmodern subject position that Humbert, like McCarthy, tried to conceal, in the same way that Lowell worked to suppress the lethal connections between himself and his past, between patriarchy and patriotism, between war and Murder Incorporated, between incrimination and electrocution. In all of these works, the autobiographical speaker creates a postmodern subject position forged out of, and overtly displaying, the breakdown in normativity. The ethos of identity as performance, which makes a confession the object of revelation rather than the means to it, can also be found in Frank O’Hara’s poetry, which similarly transforms the meaning of performance

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from rendition to substance. But it does so in a celebratory fashion, as O’Hara proclaims the “personism” of his poetry in a “manifesto” which he writes “at the risk of sounding like a poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg.” “It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person . . . The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”15 O’Hara is thus subordinating the words with which an utterance is transcribed to the ephemeral performance of that utterance. The privileging of the ephemeral in O’Hara’s poetry, as in that of John Ashbury, undermines the surface/depth model foundational to realist and modern art. It is not just that the genre of the confession provides the donnée for O’Hara’s poetry, but that its substance is the surface of O’Hara’s experience, rather than some repressed depth of his psyche. In “Having a Coke with You,” O’Hara, whose “day job” was curator at the Museum of Modern Art, writes, “[T]he portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint.”16 High culture and low, classical and modern art, nature and artifice all exist on the same (superficial) plane of experience, rather than being organized according to social, aesthetic, political, or psychological hierarchies. “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass,” O’Hara writes in “Meditations on an Emergency,” “unless I know that there is a subway handy or a record store or some other sign that people do not regret life.”17 O’Hara’s poetry also dismantles the distinction between performer and performance by making the performance itself the site of the “confessed” experience or emotion. Thus, in “Having a Coke with You,” after surveying a spectrum of art that he admires, he concludes about the artists, it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it. [emphasis added]

In this metafictional moment, self-expression dissolves hierarchy, along with the boundaries between public and private or between experience and performance, in the same way that it did for witnesses called before McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee or before HUAC to address for public consumption (and satisfaction) whether they were now or ever had been card-carrying Communists. Forced to respond to unidentified accusers, relating to unspecified actions and unverified documents, while attempting to incriminate neither themselves nor others, their performances, like that of McCarthy himself, determined their identity, rather than followed from it (a trait that would retrospectively come to be called, after another protopostmodern 1950s personality, “Nixonian”).

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Television knows best If McCarthy is the quintessential postmodern subject of the 1950s, television (the 1948 advent of which as a popular medium coincides almost exactly with McCarthy’s rise to prominence) provides the surest template for the conventions with which postmodernism would be most typically associated. In the 1950s, in the midst of the baby boom and the idealization of the “normal” American family, the parodic qualities of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita went as unperceived as did the parodies of the family that proliferated on television at the time. Lolita, after all, could easily have been retitled Father Knows Best, after a hit television show that premiered in 1954. The 1950s has been called “The Golden Age of Television” chiefly because of the abundance of high-quality, often original, dramas broadcast on a weekly basis. Live comedy and variety shows also proliferated, as did hour-long, prime-time news features. If, after a dozen years as a full-time broadcast medium, the programming had deteriorated such that in 1961, newly appointed Federal Communications Commissioner Newton Minow famously declared that it had become a “vast wasteland,” television’s qualities qua medium had just begun to peak.18 Between 1948 and 1961 television ownership grew from under ten percent of American households to over ninety percent. This means that, regardless of specific content, this form of communication and entertainment had become a sui generus national pastime with tropes and conventions that challenged temporal and spatial linearities and that reconfigured the relationship between the spectator and the scene. These qualities of televisuality, we can see retrospectively, were largely analogous to those characterizing what would be called postmodernism, despite television’s ostensibly conservative programming. For example, television foregrounded an awareness of the frame, which classical Hollywood-style cinema suppressed. Diverting attention away from the cinematic apparatus, Hollywood wanted the viewer to invest in an illusionbased narrative just as realist literature encouraged the reader to forget that the only “reality” that reading a novel involved was the act of reading a novel. Thus the realist tradition foregrounded the authority of its omnipotent narrator and the illusion of intimacy that accrued to free indirect discourse; the fact that one’s lap held drippings of ink smeared over the detritus of dead trees was meant to be obscured by the shadows of Bleak House or the gardens of Pemberley. The reader was supposed to imagine

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the forest through the remnants of its trees and construct the story of The Scarlet Letter out of the thousands of black letters that signified that story. Just as the devices of metafiction would call the reader back to the process of constructing narratives, so too would the television frame signify, definitively so, the artifice of that narrative medium. The small frame, moreover, enclosed scenes that were much larger than the room in which they were seen. The Olympics or a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral could take place, “live,” in one’s tiny living room, which might be in a different time zone from the event the living room now contained. Regularly, television normalized two different times in the same place and, with the same facility, two different places at the same time: A television set in Chicago could show a newscaster in New York talking to a reporter on the scene in Los Angeles, while this projection was regularly announcing that it was “live,” albeit obviously on a different ontological plane than the life occurring in the living room which framed the mechanical representation of the live presentation, taking place elsewhere. Nor did television adhere to the conventions of surface and depth. Twodimensional and three-dimension representations replaced one another with dizzying speed, as did the discursive registers that contextualized those spaces: high, low, and middle brows bounced with equal ease over the ever-watchful eye of the TV screen, an eye that was thematized in the logos of the two major networks, CBS’s immense single eye and the multiple eyes in the tail of the NBC peacock. Even more disconcerting, human eyes looked directly at the viewer and at his or her living space. Filmmakers generally avoid having actors looking directly into the camera, for fear that such a gaze would disrupt the spectator’s sense of (limited) omniscience upon which the construction of cinematic space and time depend. Like realist and modernist fiction and drama, Hollywood style presumed that making the audience aware of its own presence interfered with the willing suspension of disbelief. Watching television, in contrast, made such self-awareness endemic. Announcers, MCs, newscasters, and salespeople not only looked into the eyes of the viewer, but also constantly alluded to the viewer’s attitudes, environs, even bodily functions, as if television enabled the speaker to see what he was looking at. In addition to flashing its logo self-consciously, promoting its shows, and naming their sponsors, television also regularly reminded the viewer, through direct address, that while watching television he or she was being watched by it. Or at least television created a viewer self-consciously uncomfortable about that possibility. Television, in

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other words, normalized at the most quotidian level the surveillance state associated with the Cold War and writ large by the figure of McCarthy. The television set, the appliance, the inanimate object – yet often the most animated agent in the living room – which created this self-consciousness also periodically insisted it was “live.” The inertia of the viewer was thus animated by an agency external to itself: a performer, a program, a network. TV Guide, by the end of the 1950s the best-selling subscription magazine in America, became the means for navigating a world of animating narratives. In one of the earliest theoretical works about television, Raymond Williams pondered the effects on culture – on civilization itself –of facilitating the ability for a mass population to identify for several hours a day with dramatic situations and personae, when heretofore such imaginary displacement had been possible only a few hours per week and, in earlier centuries, often less than once a year or in some cases once a lifetime. Williams further coupled his keen sense of the fluidity of identities that television would make available with his assertion that the definitive trait of the medium was its flow. Bits of different lengths, in different registers and formats, intended to sell, to inform, to entertain, to educate, to amuse, or to promote followed upon one another almost haphazardly, regularly punctuated by the gaze of someone looking directly at the viewer, such that juxtaposition no longer implied commentary, as it had in modernist and realist modes. Television, indeed, was all pastiche. It replaced the time-honored respect for a Renaissance perspective with one that revealed the instability of such notions as foreground and background. The home television became the background for the television studio that in turn served as background for the world. The financing model for American television, moreover, inverted the traditional relationship between consumer and consumed, wherein a producer sold to a buyer. Broadcasters, in exchange for the licenses that gave them access to the airwaves, provided free programming to the general public so that the viewers attracted by that programming could then be sold to commercial interests. Instead of selling beer to people, television sold people to beer. All of this means that the basic configuration of television, as a medium and as an industry, was postmodern, despite the fact that most of its programs employed realist or romantic narrative conventions. Even the most thematically traditional programming, moreover, reflected a postmodern sense of history. Weekly situation comedies and dramas portrayed characters moving from episode to episode with little sense of past or future. Rather, they remained fixed in time, altering events inside the hermetic time-space of an individual episode without changing the conditions of

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their world and without being changed by them. The heroes of westerns, detective shows, and sitcoms rarely acknowledged that the chain of episodes comprised their personal history or that they were subjects of their national or world history. No news was not good news; no news was the only news in a world where father always knew best, no one ever recognized who that masked man was until the last seconds of the episode, Marshall Dillon always courted Kitty, and my little Margie never got laid. Nor rarely, if ever, did Ben Cartwright and his three sons on the Ponderosa ranch where Bonanza was set. Over its fifteen years, Bonanza did allude to historical events and characters, but in such a way as to indicate that its 440 episodes were not unfolding in a chronological order or could be coherently correlated to the time frames of American history. Rather, the accumulation of discrete episodes revealed that any relationship to the extra-textual world upon which the show relied – American history, the settling of the West – was impossible. The traditionally seamless, linear temporality of each episode of the most popular series of the 1950s and 1960s, when juxtaposed with the a-temporality of the series as a whole, may therefore have been one of television’s most postmodern traits. Although we cannot know how Francis Fukuyama came to that postmodern fabulation he called “the end of history,” surely a foundation could be found in the television shows he grew up watching in the 1950s. Television, however, rarely foregrounded its postmodernism by calling attention to the medium’s odd conventions, its pastiche-style programming, or its undermining of stable framing and perspective. One striking exception was The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, a weekly half-hour comedy that ran from 1950 to 1958, the central years of the medium’s development as an entertainment form and a national pastime. A show about its own production, it was steeped in meta-discourse. Burns, who was constantly worried about having enough material to fill the show we were watching, encouraged, supported, or complicated his wife, Gracie Allen’s misconceptions and ill-conceived schemes. Addressing the audience directly about these concerns and commenting on the behavior of the other characters, Burns regularly broke the fourth wall (a practice, as I have noted, more conventional on television than in film or drama). The person addressing the audience, moreover, was George Burns, speaking simultaneously in character and out of character, as did Humbert (and also, arguably, as did Joseph McCarthy). The show was set in Burns’s own home, which was a set, set up to resemble his actual home. Thus the home was a set for the setting of a parody of family life, intermingling Gracie and George’s real son, Ronnie Burns, and the show’s real announcer, Harry

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Von Zell (both “playing themselves”) with fictional characters, including the neighbors, Blanche and Harry Morton, with Harry played by five different actors.19 Like all metafiction, the show thematized the truth that the actual reason for the characters’ behavior was to make a show. In this regard, the Burns and Allen Show did more blatantly what Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62) did in a coy and parenthetical manner when Hitchcock directly addressed the audience about their response to the drama they would be watching and the actual motivation of the characters, which, ultimately, was to please his sponsors. In its last season, the Burns and Allen Show became even more radically postmodern by using television’s role as a broadcast medium and as a surveillance device as elements of the diegesis. The season starts with Burns explaining to the audience his plans to convert the show into a western, in response to the exploding popularity of the genre on prime-time television.20 He interrupts this discussion with the statement, “better turn on my set and see what Gracie’s doing,” at which point he joins the viewer in watching the show he is discussing. Because Gracie is one of the stars of the show, he can watch her from a perspective simultaneously interior to and external to the diegesis. Those two perspectives conflate, however, when watching the show enables him to affect its plot, something he does based on the assumption that unless he does so, there will not be a show for us (or him) to watch. Throughout that last season, therefore, the television set served not just as a surveillance mechanism but also as a secret agent, an instrument of espionage, with the target for its subterfuges being the family life of the principals, a life that, because of the agency of television, had become a performance, one implicitly alternative to the parody of incest that Humbert offered but nevertheless not a far cry from the security state McCarthy implicitly imagined. Burns makes this explicit: Now I know why Gracie took my breakfast away from me, thanks to my 21-inch private eye – a great invention. You know with that little television set I’m the Mata Hari of Beverly Hills. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone had a television set like mine? We’d just sit around and . . . No. Come to think of it, that would be pretty boring. Every time you tuned in you would see somebody else sitting in front of his television set watching you watching him.

Real life, Burns is implying, is what we can see on television, in part because it exists outside our living room and always because it resides within it. This condition made television the apotheosis of the surveillance state, to the extent that it transformed the fourth wall into the walls of the living room.

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(The) Living Theater It was thus realizing, much more subtly and far more pervasively, the blatant goal of The Living Theater. Judith Molina and Julian Beck, who founded The Living Theater in 1947, were committed to dissolving the division between theater and life or, a la Joseph McCarthy, between politics and performance. The fourth wall, in other words, was not just a theatrical convention but a political instantiation of hegemonic values; if a frame was the necessary condition for surveillance – consider Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) – and the fourth wall created hierarchical relations grounded in the nonreciprocity of the gaze, Molina and Beck sought to undermine the authority of traditional theatrics not just in the physical staging of the actors but in the inherent relationship between actor and action, between scene and seen. They believed that a central problem of contemporary theater was, as John Tytell put it, “the pretense that the audience did not exist and could be safely ignored.”21 Their staging of Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959) exemplifies their radical approach to theater. A play about heroin addiction, which finally put The Living Theater on the New York theater map, it presented a group of addicts in a room waiting for a middleman – their “connection” – to bring them a fix. At the same time, these addicts were the subjects of a fictitious documentary, with the substance of the first act being their aggressive rejection of their roles in the documentary. The effect in the free form of the production was that they were rejecting, equally their roles in the play that situated them as addicts and/or as documentary subjects. This enabled them to break out of their characters to and reveal themselves as actual addicts. As the painter Larry Rivers pointed out, “there was real heroin in the capsules handed out to the anxious actors waiting onstage, some of whom shot up in front of the audience.” A jazz quartet, off to the side, would periodically jam to accompany the addicts’ moans, just as some of the musicians complemented the action of the play in that they were, themselves, suffering from heroin problems: “Sometimes, a musician passed out during performance or disappeared during rehearsals because of drugs.”22

Portents of postmodernism Television, the living-room theater, may well have prepared audiences for The Living Theater, which was the mirror image of live television, that is, its same in reverse. Or both cultural phenomena may have been symptoms

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of the need for a form of public space and a set of artistic premises articulating the angst surrounding the political and personal containment of the 1950s. If American postmodernism was a manifestation of the dichotomies that “normal” American life was ultimately unable to contain, then it is not surprising that the most radical theater of the postwar period and the most powerful, most allegedly conservative mainstream medium were as much united by some of their conventions as they were divided by the 1950s’ patina of norms and decorum. Similarly, it is not surprising that the figure uniting the demand for conformity with conformity’s most indecorous enforcement was Joseph McCarthy. When McCarthy’s disastrous (televised) performance in the 1954 ArmyMcCarthy hearings finally betrayed him and his cohorts, it revealed McCarthyism not as a unidirectional exertion of power but as a set of historically specific conditions, from which the power/knowledge system exempted no one, such that McCarthy’s false documents, connected to his subsequent censure, also became his death sentence; expiring before his term of office did, he drank himself to death at the age of 48, when, in 1957, the performativity of his identity became coterminous with the performance of his liver. Although by this point in the history of American postmodernism live television was becoming extinct, the radical changes in artistic conventions and cultural sensibilities that television, The Living Theater, confessional poetry, and metafiction portended were immanent. Notes 1 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (1952; New York: Random House, 1982), 432, 3, 376. See Alan Nadel, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 21. 2 Barbara Foley, working with Ellison’s papers, his early writing and early drafts of Invisible Man, shows in meticulous detail Ellison’s movement away from his earlier left-wing attitudes and beliefs. See Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 3 David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. (New York, Free Press, 1983; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 33. 4 E. L. Doctorow, “False Documents,” in E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, ed. Richard Trenne (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983), 26. 5 See Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 6 Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 149. 7 Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 39. 8 John Barth, The Floating Opera (New York: Avon Books, 1956), 7.

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The book was first published in France in 1955. Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1991), 3. Nabokov, Lolita, 287. See Lowell, Robert. “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” at www .poetryfoundation.org/poem/177955 and “Skunk Hour,” at http://people.vir ginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/2004/lowell.html. 13 See Allen Ginsberg, “America,” at www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ ginsberg/onlinepoems.htm. 14 Nabokov, Lolita, 145, 176. 15 See Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” at www.poetspath.com/trans missions/messages/ohara.html. 16 See Frank O’ Hara, “Having a Coke with You,” at http://mappingthemarvel lous.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/having-a-coke-with-you/ 17 See Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency,” at www.poetryfounda tion.org/poetrymagazine/poem/15741. 18 Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 300. 19 The second, John Brown, was blacklisted in 1951; he was preceded by Hal March and succeeded by Bob Sweeny, Fred Clark, and Larry Keating. 20 The following season (1959–60) the adult western craze peaked with the three networks carrying a total of thirty separate westerns in prime time; in some months, eight of the top ten shows that season were westerns. 21 John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 83. 22 Tytell, The Living Theatre, 157.

9 10 11 12

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part ii

The long sixties, 1954–1975

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Introduction: on or about the year 1966 Brian McHale

“On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1924, “human character changed.”1 The nineteenth-century view of human character as a stable given – rich and complex, subject to development over time, but in principle knowable and representable – had underwritten the Victorian novel, but it had been under pressure for some time, and on or about December 1910 it gave way to the forces of modernity. Woolf is talking about the onset of modernism, which was surely, as she knew perfectly well, a process spanning decades, not an event. Why identify it, then, with a particular month? Scholars have puzzled about this. Was Woolf thinking about the exhibition of post-impressionist artists that opened in December 1910, curated by the art critic Roger Fry, a member of her circle, which introduced the English public to advanced French painting? Was she thinking about the death of King Edward VII, ending the brief Edwardian period, or about the governing Liberal Party’s threat to abolish the House of Lords? Was she thinking about the bizarre hoax that she and her friends perpetrated on the Royal Navy that month, blacking up and disguising themselves as a delegation of Abyssinians and getting a guided tour of a battleship? Was she perhaps thinking of the nervous breakdown she suffered, the first of several?2 Woolf couldn’t have expected to be taken seriously. She only wanted to capture, in an appropriately arbitrary and tongue-in-cheek way, some sense of the abruptness of change that her generation experienced in the years of cultural modernization between, roughly, the turn of the nineteenth century and the Great War of 1914–18. For Woolf and her contemporaries, it felt as if everything changed in the space of a month or so, and that is what dating the onset of modernism to a particular month and year – on or about December 1910 – expresses. It is also, surely, a cultural-historical thought experiment: if we date the onset of modernism to December 1910, then what does that version of modernism look like? It looks, unsurprisingly, like 85

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the modernism that Woolf herself was in the thick of around the year 1924, when she paused to reflect on where, how, and when this modernism had emerged. Cultural producers and consumers in the Western industrialized societies found themselves in parallel position during the 1970s and 80s. They had undergone an experience that felt abrupt and total, and they might have undertaken a parallel thought experiment: when, where, and how had everything changed? When had modernism given way to postmodernism? Let’s try updating Woolf ’s thought-experiment: on or about October 1966, modernism became postmodernism. Why October 1966? For one thing, it could serve as the symbolic date of origin for postmodernist fiction, or at least for a certain strain of postmodernism in fiction. As he tells it, Raymond Federman, a French-born American scholar of Samuel Beckett, sat down to begin composing his first novel, Double or Nothing (published 1971), on October 1, 1966, in Paris.3 Unflaggingly self-reflective and experimental, Double or Nothing is a model of the American brand of postmodernism that Federman himself preferred to call surfiction, but that others (following William Gass) called metafiction, and that would in due course be assimilated to the broader category of postmodernism. Other postmodern novels of the year 1966 – or at any rate, novels on their way to a postmodernism still in the making – included Barth’s Giles Goat-boy, Christine BrookeRose’s Such, Burroughs’s The Soft Machine (a 1961 novel reissued in a new version in 1966), Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists, William H. Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck, B. S. Johnson’s Trawl, McElroy’s A Smuggler’s Bible, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Sorrentino’s The Sky Changes, and Charles Wright’s The Wig. The occasion could not be more perfectly symbolic: Federman, in Paris to research Beckett, exemplary late-modernist and one-time secretary to James Joyce, begins his own novel and helps launch postmodernism. Too perfectly symbolic, in fact: Federman was a notorious self-mythographer, and his story is as untrustworthy as any of his novels, a fiction of origins rather than a sober matter of fact. Altogether more serious-minded were the events later that same month of October 1966 at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, when at a conference called “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” French poststructuralism was introduced to the United States, essentially for the first time. Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan were both there. Derrida delivered a seminal lecture entitled, “Structural, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Of all the poststructuralists who

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would figure so crucially in the development of what, in the Anglophone world, would come to be called “theory,” only Foucault was missing. “Theory,” in the sense of philosophical speculation, had of course existed for millennia, since the Greek forerunners of Plato, but “theory” in the peculiarly postmodern Anglophone sense – not theory of this or that, but theory as the “critique of whatever is taken as natural” – dates, at least symbolically, from this occasion.4 It would arrive in waves – a first wave of the thinkers who were (or should have been) at Johns Hopkins in 1966, and then a later wave of Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, and the feminist theorists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva – and it would transform academic discourse in the United States and Britain, and even penetrate as far as popular culture. Theory, however, should not be mistaken for something like the cause of postmodernism; that is, poststructuralism does not constitute the blueprint for the production of postmodernist artworks or other forms of cultural expression, as some people have rashly concluded. Poststructuralism is not the theory of which postmodernism is the practice. Rather, theory, the subject of Thomas Doherty’s chapter in this section, is itself one of the symptoms of postmodernism, on a par with postmodernist novels, poems, films, buildings, cities, and so on. The origin myth of postmodernist fiction and that of poststructuralist theory converge in October 1966. It makes for a compelling synchronicity, but hardly the only one we can observe in the year 1966. For instance: On or about January 1966 the leading Pop artist, Andy Warhol, having renounced painting and reoriented his art practice toward film, installation, and performance, began staging mixed-media shows under the title of “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” featuring a short-lived rock band that would have an enormous impact in the long run – The Velvet Underground. Warhol’s collaboration with The Velvet Underground crossed the divide between high and low culture that had been carefully policed in the modernist era, and signaled the onset of a new era when avant-garde tendencies converged and cross-pollinated with developments in popular culture, to explosive effect. On or about April 1966 the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, published his second and last novel, the difficult, controversial, and frankly pornographic Beautiful Losers, and in the aftermath, like Warhol, reoriented his career, renouncing literature for the life of a singer-songwriter. Beautiful Losers is arguably one of the most fully, unreservedly postmodern novels to appear in 1966. In it, the fantastic and the everyday, the historical and the hallucinated, mix and mingle. By the end, one of Cohen’s protagonists has

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literally, physically disintegrated, as Pynchon’s protagonist Tyrone Slothrop later would in Gravity’s Rainbow, but then reassembles himself as, of all things, a movie of the R ‘n’ B singer Ray Charles projected onto the sky. Where Oedipa Mass, the heroine of Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, asks herself “Shall I project a world?” but then stops short of doing so, Cohen embraces the alternative-reality mode and morphs his character into a literal, fantastic projection. On or about July 1966 Bob Dylan, having returned home to Woodstock, New York, after a series of grueling and confrontational concerts in support of his latest recording, the double LP Blonde and Blonde, showcasing his new electric sound, was involved in some sort of motorcycle accident – how serious remains unclear.5 Dylan, then at the very height of his powers as a visionary poet of rock, had seemingly achieved what other rock musicians around 1966 – especially the Beatles, but also Warhol’s “house band,” The Velvet Underground – were also seeking: recognition as a serious artist, not just a commercial entertainer for the teenage market. Whether forced by his injuries to abandon touring for the time being, or merely using the accident as a pretext for doing so, Dylan literally went underground, down into the basement studio of his band’s house near Woodstock, to reacquaint himself with the raw materials of his own musical tradition, emerging a year later having reinvented himself as a much sparer, more severe songwriter on the album John Wesley Harding. Like Dylan, the Beatles, too, stopped touring in 1966, after an unsatisfactory tour in North America and Asia; also like Dylan, they disappeared into the recording studio, reinventing themselves continually over the next several years, first of all as Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Unlike Dylan, however, the Beatles never reemerged from the studio to perform together as a touring band. On or about August 1966 the Beatles themselves released their most aesthetically ambitious recording to date, Revolver, the album that marks the emergence of the rock album as a unified artwork. Arguably the first rock album designed to be experienced as an integrated whole, Revolver is crisscrossed with motifs, both musical and verbal, that echo across the album from cut to cut.6 Even as it aspires to a higher degree of integration than any rock album to date, however, Revolver also seems more eclectic and heterogeneous than almost any rock album to date, each of its songs seeming to belong to a different sound world from all the others.7 On the one hand, then, Revolver anticipates highly integrated albums including the Beatles’ own Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or later “concept” albums by The Who, Marvin Gaye, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and

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others. On the other hand, Revolver also anticipates the radical stylistic and thematic eclecticism of the Beatles’ White Album (1968). Balancing its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, Revolver stands poised between integration and disintegration, unity and diversity, concentration and dispersion – between, some might say, modernism and postmodernism. On or about December 1966 the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language film, Blow-Up, opened in the United States (it would not open in the United Kingdom until August of the next year). Blow-Up in itself is a dense knot of convergences and synchronicities. Its ostensible literary source is a short story entitled “Las babas del diablo” (1959) by Julio Cortázar, a major figure of the Latin American literary Boom – the subject of Wendy Faris’s account in Chapter 8 of this volume – who, together with another postmodernist forerunner, Jorge Luis Borges, was already widely read and admired on the Continent, and soon would be in the Englishspeaking world as well. (The English translation of his 1963 novel Hopscotch [Rayuela] was published in 1966.) Blow-Up addresses, with a mixture of anthropological curiosity and existentialist angst, the very milieu in which boundary-breaking rockers such as the Beatles and Dylan (on his 1966 tour) flourished, namely “Swinging London” of the mid-1960s. Of the two major European art films of 1966 that tried, with only partial success, to come to terms with global youth culture – Godard’s Masculine Feminine being the other one – Blow-Up is the more prescient, featuring as it does an explosive scene of the British blues band the Yardbirds performing in a London club; the budding pop star or yé-yé girl of Masculine Feminine pales by comparison. (A few years later Godard would engage more robustly with rock music than he was able to do in 1966, incorporating documentary footage of the Rolling Stones recording “Sympathy for the Devil” in One Plus One [1968]). Antonioni establishes the tone of alienation and absurdity in the world of his film by setting its opening scene amid the severe, stripped-down architecture of the Economist complex, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, which provides a suitably hostile, regimented backdrop for the anarchic antics of a mime troupe. The architecture critic Rayner Banham, in a book that appeared in 1966, gave this architectural style a name, calling it the New Brutalism – a term of approval for Banham, referring to the use of exposed, undecorated materials such as béton brut, raw concrete, which in his view was a sign of this style’s aesthetic honesty and integrity: what you see is what you get. It was a sign, in other words, of New Brutalism’s adherence to the aesthetic standards of architectural modernism: integrity, functionality, expression of the materials, renunciation of decoration.

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Antonioni’s use of this style to connote alienation anticipates the sorts of critiques of high-modernist architecture that would eventually provoke the search for some alternative to modernism – the search for a postmodern architecture. Antonioni’s cinematic critique of modernist architecture coincides with the appearance of two books that would lay the groundwork for the emergence of architectural postmodernism in the 1970s. The first of these is Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, by the American architect Robert Venturi. Here Venturi argues for an alternative set of values to those of modernism: not unity and simplicity but complexity and contradiction; not clarity and the expression of materials but ambiguity and the principle of “both-and”; not “less is more,” Mies van der Rohe’s modernist slogan, but “Main Street is almost all right.” By “Main Street” Venturi means the pop-cultural and commercial elements of the urban and ex-urban landscape – its signage, iconic forms, and visual busyness and clutter, its bad taste. It is Venturi’s embrace of the complexities and contradictions of Main Street that would over the next few years evolve into the postmodernist appreciation of the Las Vegas Strip in Learning from Las Vegas, his 1972 collaboration with Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour. The other foundational book of 1966 is Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City [L’architettura della cittá], which proposes a vision of architectural historicism and urban form at odds with orthodox modernism. Resisting the modernist tendency to view the city in exclusively functionalist terms, Rossi argues that, apart from its economic, administrative, circulatory, and other functions, a city is also a repository of history and memory. Reluctant to apply too dogmatically the modernist dictum that “form follows function,” he entertains the possibility that in cities, especially in older cities, function can sometimes follow form, in the sense that inherited urban elements – monuments, ancient buildings, squares and plazas, entire quarters (his example is the Roman Forum) – can continue to shape the city even after their function changes or disappears altogether. Rossi’s approach clearly has something in common with Kevin Lynch’s earlier insights (in The Image of the City [1960]) into the role of urban landmarks in making cities navigable and livable – insights that would later inform Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernism. Rossi also evidently shares something with the American urbanist Jane Jacobs, whose defense of urban complexity (in The Death and Life of Great American Cities [1961]) in turn influenced Venturi’s postmodernism. We could continue accumulating details of cultural history that, item by item, substantiate one’s sense of 1966 as a threshold year for postmodernism,

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the year when postmodernism achieved critical mass or escape velocity. On or about the year 1966, modernism became postmodernism. But why identify an onset “moment” at all, whether that moment is a month long or a year long? Just as in the case of modernism in Virginia Woolf ’s thought experiment, the onset of postmodernism, too, is really a process, not a discrete event – a more or less long duration, not a “moment.” The consensus view seems to be that postmodernism emerged over the course of the “long sixties,” the span of years from the mid-fifties to the early seventies.8 This is a reasonable and defensible position, for even if elements of what would later be called postmodernism can be traced back to the early fifties, or even as far back the late thirties or earlier – maybe much earlier – these elements converge only in the sixties to form something like a period style. Granted the reasonableness of the consensus view, there is still something to be gained by entertaining more narrowly focused onset dates. As with Virginia Woolf ’s 1910, each date implies a working hypothesis about the nature of the postmodernism that could be said to emerge around that time. Each is a thought experiment: if we date the onset of postmodernism to the mid-sixties – 1966, let’s say – then what does that version of postmodernism look like? Other dates have been proposed, it goes without saying, and each proposal implies a somewhat different construction of postmodernism. Thus, for example, the avant-garde Fluxus artist Dick Higgins once identified 1958 as the onset year of what he called “post-cognitive” art, while Sally Banes nominated a somewhat later date, 1963, associated with the onset of a countercultural artistic practice that sprang up initially in New York’s Greenwich Village among overlapping circles of Pop artists, dancers, performance artists, and underground filmmakers.9 The postmodernisms that Higgins and Banes construct, though somewhat different in their emphases, are nevertheless both oriented toward the avant-garde component of postmodernism – postmodernism as the continuation of the modernist-era avant-garde impulse down to the postwar period and beyond. While the avant-garde impulse is surely one component of postmodernism, their constructions exclude the popular-culture component that emerges so clearly when one focuses on 1966, the year of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, of Revolver, of Blow-Up. Alternatively, one could nominate a year like 1968 as postmodernism’s onset – surely a more compelling candidate than 1966, from many points of view. To identify 1968 as postmodernism’s threshold year inevitably entails privileging the historical determinants of cultural change – historical in the

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capital H sense of world-historical developments such as the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the antiwar movement on the home front, the May Events in Paris, the Prague Spring, the political assassinations of that year, and so on.10 A postmodernism keyed to the onset year 1968 will inevitably emphasize the legacy of liberationist politics and mass movements, which certainly deserve to be taken into account, but it also risks obscuring or muting the semi-autonomy of culture. Culture develops not only in response to the unfolding of capital H History, but also as a consequence of its own internal dynamics, which is not entirely determined by historical conditions. Culture unfolds not in lock-step with History, but in counterpoint with it; the rhythm of its unfolding is syncopated. This syncopation is easier to discern if we privilege a year less freighted with world-historical events than 1968. Which is not to say that 1966 is bereft of world-shaping events. Arguably, many of the world-historical transformations that emerge so spectacularly in 1968 actually have their roots in developments dating to 1966. The anti-Vietnam War movement is already mobilized in 1966, as reflected, for instance, in Allen Ginsberg’s monumental antiwar poem of that year, Witchita Vortex Sutra, composed orally during a bus and car trip through the Midwest and recorded on a portable tape recorder bought with money donated expressly for that purpose by none other than Bob Dylan.11 The second wave of feminism crosses an institutional threshold in 1966 with the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to agitate for justice for women in the workplace, the home, and the public sphere. The black-separatist Black Panther Party is also founded in 1966, amplifying fears of violent rebellion, while on the other side of the world Mao Zedong launches the Cultural Revolution in China, throwing his country into turmoil and incidentally creating a model for revolutionary utopianism in the West. Finally, if we do carry out our thought experiment and accept the working hypothesis that on or about the year 1966 postmodernism began, then what does that version of postmodernism look like? It looks more or less like the chapters that follow. As John Johnstone shows in Chapter 5, ‘’Mass Mediation,” the postmodernism that emerges in the mid-sixties is, first of all, profoundly shaped by the ubiquity of the mass media, theorized by Marshall McLuhan, whose vision of a mass-mediated “global village” would be nightmarishly realized in the televisualization of the Vietnam War. As David Shumway’s chapter shows, that version of postmodernism is also characterized by the emergence of countercultures intimately affiliated with the political movements of the era, including black nationalism and the antiwar movement. The countercultural arts of the sixties are the

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contact zone where popular culture mingles and cross-breeds with the avant-garde, as in Warhol’s Factory and other sites of high/low contact and cultural exchange. Randall Stevenson illustrates how anxious reports of the death of the novel, echoing throughout the long sixties, are belied by the vigor of innovation in long-form fiction, beginning with the French nouveau roman of the fifties and continuing through the emergence of black humor, metafiction, and other experimental and adventurous forms. Though the term itself was not yet current, many of these developments would later by subsumed under postmodernism, as would, perhaps with less justification, the Latin American Boom writers, whose emergence predates postmodernism by decades and whose legacy, especially among postcolonial and diasporic writers worldwide, is arguably broader and longer-lasting than postmodernism’s – this is the subject of Faris’s chapter. Finally, the postmodern era also coincides with the era of “theory,” a conjuncture treated by Thomas Doherty in Chapter 9. Not only is theory’s onset on or about the year 1966 coincidental with postmodernism’s, but theory and postmodernism develop in tandem, with many reciprocal influences. Notes 1 Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 4. 2 See Peter Stansky, On or about 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1996. For a different version of 1910, emphasizing Kandinsky’s breakthrough to abstraction and Schoenberg’s to dissonance in that year, see Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 3 See Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) 113–14. 4 Jonathan Culler, “Literary Theory,” in Joseph Gibaldi (ed.), Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, 2nd edn. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 208. 5 See David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 292–5. 6 Russell Reising, Every Sound There Is: The Beatles’ “Revolver” and the Transformation of Rock and Roll (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 251–2. 7 Reising, Every Sound There Is, 236. 8 See Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties,” in The Syntax of History. The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 178–208; DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 2004.

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9 See Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes toward a Theory of the New Arts (New York: Printed Editions, 1978), 101; Sally Banes, Greenwich Village, 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1993). 10 See Mark Kurlansky, 1968, The Year That Rocked the World (London: Vintage, 2005). 11 See Mike Marqusee, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (New York Press, 2003), 190–2

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5

Mass mediation John Johnston

I By midpoint in the twentieth century, in what would later be called the “developed” or “first” world, new technical media were operating on such a large scale that their collective presence and shaping power constituted a new and defining feature of social life. In effect, the era of “mass media” had begun. To be sure, modern media affecting masses of people – widespread print publications, movies, radio broadcasts, the widespread use of electricity and travel by trains, motorcars, and airplanes – had directly shaped earlier twentieth-century culture. But with the advent of television and the increasing saturation of the social space with a range of electronic media in the 1960s, a new threshold of pervasiveness and speed seems to have been crossed. It was not simply that the experiences of many more people were directed and transformed by a pervasive mass media, but that new consequences and effects were making themselves felt that could no longer be identified with the conveniences, alienations, and exhilarations of the technologically modern. The nature of the human environment itself had changed and in ways that modern thinkers had never imagined or theorized before. An early sign of what would later evolve into a “postmodern” disenchantment toward the new mass media appeared with Daniel Boorstin’s book, The Image, published in 1962. Boorstin argued that we had become a “culture of the image,” mesmerized by advertisements for new consumer products and “pseudo-events” staged for the very purpose of their being reported in the media. He cites the example of a hotel’s thirty-year anniversary celebration, contrived explicitly to create publicity and increase its business. “[P]seudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in geometric progression,” he observes, intuiting the logic of self-perpetuation that Niklas Luhmann will later argue is essential to “the reality of the mass media.”1 But Boorstin is pointing to an historical shift that Luhmann simply takes as a 95

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given. Events that occur in the world are usually reported according to what newspaper editors deem to be their “newsworthiness”; thus deaths, disasters, and events affecting the lives of many people are reported accordingly. A pseudo-event, in contrast, has an ambiguous status, because it is not spontaneous but planned in advance and staged, usually for the express purpose of being reported. Often it functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy: by announcing that the hotel being celebrated is distinguished, it becomes distinguished. Thus the pseudo-event also functions as a “performative”: it “performs” as an instance of what its reporting claims it to be. The creation of a celebrity, which Boorstin defines as “a person known for his [or her] well-knownness,” provides another example of a pseudoevent. Indeed, the celebrity is “the human pseudo-event,” as if pseudoevents are also instantiated in human form.2 Again, in contemporary terms, the celebrity is one who performs the role of being a celebrity. Whereas a hero achieves fame and renown for accomplishing deeds beyond the capacities of most people, the celebrity is precisely a fabrication of the mass-produced image. The halo of celebrity surrounding movie stars, sports heroes, and the extremely wealthy feeds on itself like the news – indeed, it becomes part of the news – creating a further demand for more information about the pseudo-events in their lives. In Boorstin’s view, news about celebrities and a whole range of pseudo-events now constitute most of the content of the mass media, as reporting the news increasingly gave way to “making the news.” The historical shift from reporting significant events to creating and sustaining interest in pseudo-events can be traced back to the creation of a supply and demand for news by newspapers in the nineteenth century, which rapidly acquired the power “to disseminate up-to-date reports of matters of interest written by eyewitnesses or professional reporters near the scene.” This capacity, in turn, created an ever-increasing demand, leading to what Boorstin calls “a little-noticed . . . Graphic Revolution.” As a result, “Man’s ability to make, preserve, transmit, and disseminate precise images – images of print, of men and landscapes and events, of the voices of men and mobs – now grew at a fantastic pace.” As new technologies for making and disseminating “direct images of nature” were rapidly developed, the speed of the production and consumption of printed materials also increased. From photography to the telephone and motion pictures and television, it took less than a century to form a new mass media whose audience would cut across social and class differences and eventually redefine the public itself as “a mass” that Boorstin doesn’t yet recognize.3

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Bemoaning the “lost art of travel,” Boorstin shows how the mass-media image has also converted the traveler into the modern “tourist.” The modern American tourist in particular “fills his experience with pseudoevents” and fully expects that “the exotic and the familiar can be made to order.” In fact, the tourist and celebrity are the human figures par excellence of a new form of society defined by the image. Americans in particular are beguiled by images, starting from the American dream. Boorstin senses that the new age of television news, glossy magazine images of glamorous celebrities, and new tourist attractions may even be changing the reality beyond what these images evoke. But lacking a theoretical frame that might enable him to analyze this society of the image more deeply, he falls back on a moral perspective. In the “Foreword” he states that The Image is “about our arts of self-deception, how we hide reality from ourselves.” But he admits that he “cannot describe ‘reality.’” The “task of disenchantment,” he suggests, “is finally not the writer’s but the reader’s.”4 While this critical view accords with Boorstin’s belief that each individual must assume responsibility for him or herself, by the book’s conclusion he has come to believe that for Americans, “illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventures, our forms of art, our very experience.” Indeed, on the evidence of The Image, everything that once seemed natural, authentic, and spontaneous has been replaced by the fabricated, the stage-managed, and the promoted. Image is now everything, and celebrities “the receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.” In response, Boorstin exhorts each of us to “penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin.”5 Yet this act of individual disillusionment is inherently limited. In suggesting that the reality occluded by these images is only accessible individually, Boorstin fails to grasp their shaping power as technological mediations. Unlike the “contents” of high art, the contents of mass-media images, following their specific form of technical production and transmission, are not intended for individual reception but are made to appeal to and even produce a new form of “mass subjectivity.” Boorstin thus appears to be caught in a contradiction between the culture of modern individualism and the new technically mediated forms of collective communications that tend precisely to transform the modern public into “the masses.” Just as mechanical reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin had argued, would change the very function and nature of art, so the large-scale mass media transmission

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and reception of images would produce changes in the “mass subjects” who perceive them.6 In The Society of the Spectacle, published five years later in 1967, Guy Debord describes how we are held in thrall by a baleful enchantment similar to that of the mass images and pseudo-events Boorstin describes. But for Debord, it has a specific logic and a name: all that we perceive and experience now operates under the maleficent spell of “commodity capitalism.”7 Occupying the visible face of the Western world, image and pseudo-event function as part of the spectacle of endless proliferation and consumption of ever new commodities and forms of commodification. According to Debord, the dominant visibility of image and pseudoevent results from the fact that material production and social practice are no longer allowed to appear as such. They have been displaced by gleaming images of power and wealth that bewitch and separate us from the new reality defined by global capitalism, which develops the economic realm for itself, as both the “outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production,” and subsumes all other systems in a voracious logic of profit and commodification. Boorstin’s moral and psychological critique of the image and pseudo-event is deemed a “sociology that believes it possible to isolate an industrial rationality, functioning on its own, from social life as a whole”; it tends, therefore, “to view the technology of reproduction and communication as independent of overall industrial development.” Contrarily, Debord argues, because “individuals do not experience events,” history itself has become spectral, and “pseudo-history has to be fabricated at every level of the consumption of life.”8

II Whereas Boorstin’s analysis of the culture of the image and Debord’s critique of commodity capitalism can both be read as “late modern,” inasmuch as they are fundamentally concerned with modern forms of alienation and mystification, McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man initiates a novel, technologically optimistic approach, in a tone that might be described as affable or bemused detachment. McLuhan considers not how media supposedly distort or otherwise de-naturalize perception and communication, but rather how media dynamically reshape the environment and alter the human “sensory ratios” in and by which perception and communication take place. Understanding Media, in fact, proposes the first fully developed theory of “media” understood as technological extensions of human organs and capacities. In Part I,

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McLuhan explains how any technological extension of the human body “demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body,” and how any such extension (according to Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas) necessarily produces an irritant that must be countered by an “autoamputation” or numbing. To illustrate, McLuhan invokes Narcissus, who in Greek myth mistakes his own reflection in the water (i.e., his “extension”) for the image of another, and consequently becomes numb to Echo’s plaints. In a further complication, the “content of any medium is always another medium” – thus the content of writing is speech, and that of speech “an actual [nonverbal] process of thought.” However, the content of electric light is “pure information,” making it a “medium without a message.”9 In Part II, McLuhan examines the operational effects of specific media, including roads and paper routes, clothing and housing, money, clocks, comics, the photograph, ads, the telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, movies, the radio, and television. Telescopes and microscopes, for example, extend the human eye’s perceptual capacity. But McLuhan is making a stronger claim about how the human environment itself is reshaped by new media. By extending the realm of the visible to the far away and the very tiny, these instruments further reinforce the new visual orientation in Western culture brought about by the printing press. As a new technology, the printing press not only mechanizes the process of copying by hand but also introduces a new set of principles – “the typographic principles of continuity, uniformity, and repeatability” – that transform medieval oral culture as a whole into modern print culture (UM, 300). Gutenberg’s use of moveable type and application of homogeneous and repeatable segmentation result in the book as a new technological object. Its rapid, widespread propagation creates a new reading “public” and reorganizes the “sensory ratios” of an increasingly literate society. In this “exchange of an ear for an eye,” the book becomes the model and template of a new cultural environment in which a visual and more abstract organization of space and time replace one in which oral and tactile sensory values predominate. Through a standardization and regulation of language, print technology further enables the formation of national languages, nations, and nationalisms, as well as a cognitive orientation toward mechanical and linear models. Based on a “model” product, assembly-line industrial production follows and extends the linear technology of the book. In the twentieth century, the invention and widespread use of electronic technologies in turn lead to an environment in which oral and tactile values are reactivated in a new sensory reordering. Glossing over the

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development of cybernetics in the 1950s and the new types of machines it made possible, McLuhan underscores the importance of “feedback” in the concluding chapter on automation: “feedback . . . means introducing an information loop or circuit, where before there had been merely a one-way flow or mechanical sequence.” Feedback thus spells “the end of the linearity that came into the Western world with the alphabet and the continuous forms of Euclidean space” (UM, 354). However, it is the technology of television that plays the key role in the latest transformation of the human environment. With the advent of television, McLuhan argues, the effects of reading printed material are counteracted, since sustained contact with the TV’s mosaic mesh of visual-acoustic images erodes the lineality and perspectivism fostered by the print medium. In contrast to the movies, where the cinematic apparatus projects images away from the viewer onto a large screen, “[w]ith TV, the viewer is the screen” and is “bombarded with light impulses.” Consequently, the TV image is not constituted of “still shots” whose movement creates the illusion of motion; in fact, it is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture. The TV image offers some three million dots per second to the receiver. From these he accepts only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image. (UM, 313)

The TV image is thus constructed by the brain out of a constantly collapsing and reforming pattern of illuminated and darkened dots. Consequently, the images of early black and white television provide an essentially low-definition image that increases the viewer’s involvement and participation on multiple levels. For this very reason, McLuhan considers television to be a “cool medium.” Having introduced the binary distinction between “hot” and “cool” media earlier, he returns to it here. What characterizes “hot media” such as print, radio, and cinema is their high definition and thus high information content, which appeals to a single or dominant sense. Cool media such as jazz and television, on the other hand, appeal to several senses at once and thereby invite a greater degree of participation. Later, the arrival of “high-def ” color television initiates a change completed only when the cathode ray tube and electron gun combination are replaced by the fully digital LED (light-emitting display) of “flat-screen” technology. In McLuhan’s terms, this newer technology has transformed what was a

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“cool” medium into a “hot” one. Though the distinction perplexes even sympathetic readers, it enables McLuhan to account for how the same media in different environments can produce contradictory effects. He mentions radio as a hot medium, for example, but also discusses its power to “retribalize” Europeans, that is, to break down the distance and detachment conveyed by print culture. He also notes that “one of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system” (UM, 298). In this sense, McLuhan’s “environment” could be said to anticipate the notion of “media ecology.” No doubt McLuhan’s writing often tends toward formulaic expression and whimsical “pop psychology,” as when he suggests that the masses represent archetypal man. In the televised harsh light of war in Viet Nam, moreover, his claim that we inhabit a “global village” appeared specious and naïve. Nevertheless, the utopian visions of the early Internet and the excitement of personal computers and the promise of global information technology have revived aspects of his technological optimism. Indeed, the opening pages of Understanding Media seem to herald the coming of the Internet: “Today, after a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as the planet is concerned” (UM, 3). But despite the simplifications, McLuhan’s analysis of media as dynamic transformers of the human sensorium and of the specific media that wrought changes of perception in mass-mediated environments undeniably sparked new ways of thinking about the media’s central importance.

III One detractor who clearly saw the value of McLuhan’s media theory was Jean Baudrillard, who reviewed Understanding Media in 1967.10 Sharply critical of McLuhan’s “lack of understanding of history and . . . the social history of media,” Baudrillard observes that the technological idealism on which McLuhan’s education is based “makes him ignore as anachronistic, behind the ‘infrastructural’ revolutions of the media, all the historical convulsions, the ideologies, the remarkable persistence, and even the upsurge of political imperialisms, nationalisms, bureaucratic feudalisms, etc.” On the other hand, Baudrillard acknowledges the importance of McLuhan’s analysis of the effects of a new medium, whether book or television, and apart from any particular messages it might convey. He also takes up McLuhan’s theme of implosion, which refers to the “all-at-once”

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effect produced by the new electronic technologies and the return of a more tribalized, oral, and tactile culture. But whereas McLuhan sees the new electronic media as restructuring our sensory ratios in a preferable balance, Baudrillard thinks the new mass media actually bring about “the implosion of the social in the masses.” This collapse of the social into the “a-semiotic” masses sustains neither an optimistic nor a pessimistic outlook, but one that is at once “ironic and antagonistic.” Trained as a sociologist and assuming a readership newly familiar with French structuralism and semiotics, Baudrillard breaks new ground in his brilliant analyses of consumer society’s object systems and décor environments.11 With Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), however, he produces a major document of postmodern thought. There he undertakes a semiotichistorical analysis of the three orders of simulacra that correspond “to the successive mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance”: the counterfeit in the Renaissance, production in the industrial era, and simulation in our “current code-governed phase.”12 Whereas the earlier books analyze the shift from the production of goods to their consumption and the concomitant importance of advertising and pseudo-events in a new mass-media culture, Symbolic Exchange and Death jumps into a new realm of discourse, which will become known as “high theory.” An unusual, even uncanny idea lies at the heart of the book: that capitalism, having passed from a mode of production to reproduction and now to simulation, is haunted by its own death and destruction. This “haunting” originates in capitalism’s recognition of only the law of value and generalized equivalence, that is, in its having done away with the type of symbolic gift exchange characteristic of primitive and traditional societies studied by anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss and radicalized in the modernist writings of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille. Specifically, this haunting assumes the forms of Freud’s death drive and the escalations [surenchères] of the gift in the counter-gift and the reversibility of exchange in sacrificial death. From this reverted perspective, Baudrillard argues that the modern worker is one whose death has been deferred by the capitalist master: Whoever works has not been put to death, he is refused this honour. And labour is first of all the sign of being judged worthy only of life. Does capital exploit the workers to death? Paradoxically, the worst it inflicts on them is refusing them death. It is by deferring their death that they are made into slaves and condemned to the indefinite abjection of a life of labour.13

Not only is the hidden violence of capitalism revealed, but also the historical justification of the workers’ strike “as organized violence for

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purposes of snatching a fraction of surplus value, or else power, from the opposing violence of capital.”14 With the “end of production,” however, strikes cease to be effective, for “contemporary capital easily redistributes itself,” only caring about the “reproduction of the form of social relations,” that is, the code by which it operates. The new order of reproduction and the advent of simulation as “the dominant schema in the current codegoverned phase” is encapsulated in this often-quoted summary: After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after energy and determinacy, the metaphysics of indeterminacy and the code. Cybernetic control, generation through models, differential modulation, feedback, question/ answer, etc.: this is the new operational configuration . . . Digitality is its metaphysical principle (Leibniz’s God), and DNA is its prophet. In fact, it is in the genetic code that the “genesis of simulacra” today finds its completed form.15

Although Symbolic Exchange and Death is a singular turning point, the implosive effects of the new mass media that become dominant in the late 1970s and 1980s are Baudrillard’s true subject. Simulacra and Simulation (1981) gathers his initial mappings and anticipates the delirious “fatal” strategies, viral escalations, and the ne plus ultra “volatilization of the real” that characterize his later writings.16 Specifically, in his analysis of the architecture of the Beaubourg art museum in central Paris the “masses” first appear in their strange combination of avidity and apathetic indifference. Neither the contemporary public, workers, consumers, tourists, nor the anonymous crowds, the masses are a new conglomerate entity containing elements of all these social groups. They come into existence exactly at the point of implosion, here understood as the collapse of subject and object poles. This collapse or implosion is made visible by Beaubourg itself, at once a site constructed for the masses’ circulation and a scene of their “implosion and deterrence.” Baudrillard describes this ultra-modern building as a carcass, since everything that normally would be hidden in a building’s interior – the escalator, network of ventilation tubes and vents, air-conditioners, and filters – is here directly exposed on its exterior, outer surfaces. The building’s weakness, however, is that instead of being empty and void within, and thus fully commensurate with the pure visibility of circulation and flow, of input and output, such that the masses would circulate through it like the “traditional” fluids of ventilation, cooling, and electrical networks, it retains an interior exhibition space for works of art and culture. Thus, instead of offering only an empty, voided space signifying

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“the disappearance of any culture of meaning and aesthetic sentiment,” Beaubourg “illustrates very well that an order of simulacra only establishes itself on the alibi of the previous order.” Yet Baudrillard acknowledges that a voided interior would still be “too romantic and destructive [and that] this void would still have had value as a masterpiece of anticulture.” Beaubourg, therefore, “should have been a labyrinth, a combinatory, infinite library, an aleatory redistribution of destinies through games and lotteries . . . [or an] experimentation with all the different processes of representation, detraction, implosion, slow motion, aleatory linkage and decoupling.” In short, it should be evidence of neither a culture of “production and meaning” nor of “a miserable anticulture.” This is simply because “the only real cultural practice, that of the masses, ours (there is no longer a difference) is a manipulative, aleatory practice, a labyrinthine practice of signs, and one that no longer has any meaning.”17 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or the End of the Social, published a year later, offers some clarification of the masses’ “cultural practice.” Neither subject nor object, the masses constitute a “spongy referent” around which “the whole confused accumulation [amas] of the social turns.” That is to say, the masses are both the unsuccessful object of all current attempts at socialization directed at them/us, and a silent, indifferent refusal of all subjective response(s). As poor “conductors” of the social, the political, and of meaning in general, the masses absorb and diffract all social energy and information: “everything flows through them, everything magnetizes them, but diffuses throughout them without leaving a trace . . . They do not radiate; on the contrary, they absorb all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning. They are inertia, the strength of inertia.” A “highly implosive phenomena,” the masses are both produced by and exist as an abreaction or hyperallergic response to the mass media’s ceaseless inundations of information.18 Yet this is entirely appropriate, inasmuch as the media tests, polls, questionnaires, interviews, and discussions are so many attempts to pump meaning into and thereby make meaningful exactly what the media itself has destroyed the very possibility of through its saturation of the social space with information.19 Baudrillard understands the “silence” of the majority and the “hyperconformity” of the masses to be a new form of resistance to power. He focuses on the example of Klaus Croissant, a German activist lawyer who had fled Germany because of his associations with the terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. Seeking political asylum in France and supported by leading French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, Croissant was nevertheless arrested by the French authorities and

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held in La Santé Prison. On the night of his extradition, while lawyers and political leaders scurried frantically to and fro, seeking last-minute stratagems to plead his case, some twenty million French spectators were “glued to the [TV] screen,” mesmerized by France’s qualifying match in the world soccer cup championship. But far from being “prostrate in an unintelligible coma,” manipulated by an omnipotent ruling power, the masses were neither “misled nor mystified.” The simple fact, Baudrillard argues, is that “the masses scandalously resist the imperative of rational communication. They are given meaning: they want spectacle.” This has been and remains especially true of religion: “For the masses, the Kingdom of God has always been already here on earth, in the pagan immanence of images, in the spectacle of it presented by the Church. Fantastic distortion of the religious principle. The masses have absorbed religion by their sorcerous and spectacular manner of practicing it.”20 In this vein, Baudrillard suggests, we are witnessing the continuation of a pattern: “So it was with Historical Reason, Political Reason, Cultural Reason, Revolutionary Reason – so even with the very Reason of the Social, the most interesting since this seems inherent to the masses, and appears to have produced them throughout its evolution.” These different orders of Reason, however, emerged in the era of production and are fully dependent upon representation. In the current regime of simulation and implosion, the only referent which still functions is that of the silent majority. All others, he writes, “are short-circuited by the confusing of poles, in a total circularity of signaling (exactly as is the case with molecular communication and with the substance it informs in DNA and the genetic code). This is the ideal form of simulation: collapse of poles, orbital circulation of models (this is the matrix of every implosive process).”21 And yet, as Baudrillard describes this implosion, this collapse of meaning in information and the formation of the masses, there is neither nostalgia for an earlier period nor a celebration of the present order. In later writings, particularly where he discusses 9/11 as the “return of the event,” terrorism as an “impossible exchange” and our complicity in the new global hegemony, it remains clear that he finds in the masses the perfect embodiment of his own ironic and antagonistic response to the information deluge of contemporary media.

IV Baudrillard’s hyperbolic theoretical challenge can be usefully contrasted with Niklas Luhmann’s analysis in his book The Reality of the Mass Media

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(1996), which offers a seemingly “objective” alternative. In the 1980s, Luhmann achieved notoriety for contesting Jürgen Habermas’s argument for open communication and consensus (versus justice) as a selflegitimizing basis for modern society, proposing instead the “performativity” of society as a self-regulating machine. In The Postmodern Condition (1984) Jean-François Lyotard discusses the debate, siding with neither Habermas’s consensus approach nor Luhmann’s technocratic one. Luhmann himself later clarifies his differences with Habermas in his essay, “Why Does Society Describe Itself as Postmodern?”22 While readers may not garner from it any certainty over Luhmann’s own status – modern or postmodern? – his analysis of society will probably incline them to the latter, for it begins with the claim that society does not consist of human beings, but only of communications. For Luhmann, what we call modern society is constituted of many distinct functional social systems – the economy, law, politics, science, religion, and the mass media, each of which differentiates itself from all the others in “the environment” according to a set of operations and unique code that together guarantee the system’s “autopoiesis” or selfreproduction. Though the systems operate by means of human activity, humans themselves are “outside” them. The different social systems, however, are not isolated from one another, but form “structural couplings” that enable them to increase their own functional complexity and further differentiation. For example, human consciousness (the “psychic system”) is structurally coupled with communication systems such as the mass media through language. Thus, with one fell swoop, Luhmann does away with any totality or unified whole, as well as with subject and world. These “old European notions,” as he calls them, are no longer useful social constructions. In The Reality of the Mass Media Luhmann undertakes a systems analysis of modern mass media, defined as “all those institutions of society which make use of copying technologies to disseminate communication.”23 That a technology is interposed between sender and receiver is essential, for it ensures that no interaction can take place between them. Whereas for Baudrillard it means that no meaningful response is possible to the mass media except challenge, for Luhmann the technological separation maintains the identity of the mass-media system and its operational closure.24 Like the functional social systems noted earlier, the mass media brackets out all other systems as “the environment” through a binary-coded operation of differentiation. In this case, it is information/noninformation; for the system of law, it is legal/illegal; for science, true/false; for the economy,

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payment/nonpayment; for religion, immanence/transcendence; and for the system of politics, government/opposition. Each of these systems also possesses its unique “medium”: jurisdiction for law, truth for science, money for the economy, faith for religion, and power for politics.25 For the mass media, the technology of dissemination itself defines the “medium.” Hence the surprising fact that the actual differences in the technologies of transmission – between, say, newspapers produced by printing presses and electronic broadcasts by TV stations – have no significance in Luhmann’s analysis. One virtue of Luhmann’s theory is that it demonstrates how a systems approach to mass media must pursue a double path: it must analyze both the cognitive systems by which the mass media construct their version of “reality,” and the mechanism by which the mass media perpetuate themselves. The key lies in what Luhmann describes as the “recursive public discussion of the topic,” which has the double requirement that we already know about it and that we want more information. Accordingly, the mass media’s operational code – the distinction between information and noninformation – functions temporally: “Information cannot be repeated; as soon as it becomes an event [i.e., is published or transmitted], it becomes non-information.” And what defines information? It is simply “what everybody knows,” or what everybody assumes to be known and would lose face in not knowing. Paradoxically, the mass media system itself both declares what is information and in that very operation renders it obsolete. Luhmann explains: “The system is constantly feeding its own output, that is, knowledge of certain facts, back into the system on the negative side of the code, as noninformation; and in doing so it forces itself constantly to provide new information.” The necessity of the system’s continued autopoiesis is thus assured. In this constant turnover of feedback and replenishment, information functions like money; indeed, for Luhmann “fresh money and new information are two central motives of modern social dynamics.”26 The mass-media system further differentiates itself into “news,” “advertising,” and “entertainment,” with numerous structural couplings among them. A flashy new car in a popular movie also functions as an “ad” for the car, to cite an obvious example. After demonstrating how the mass media works as a system, Luhmann addresses its “reality.” Our general attitude to the information conveyed by the mass media is best reflected, he suggests, by Horatio’s quip in Hamlet: “So I have heard, and do in part believe it.” Yet our lack of full belief in the mass media comes not from a sense that it reports only an incomplete or rough version of events, but from our

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suspicion that “there is manipulation at work.”27 That is, we naturally suspect that forces external to the media shape and control the information it disseminates, for economic, political, or religious reasons. In fact, such manipulations have been widely demonstrated. In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky document how U.S. government officials and corporate leaders took measures to ensure that their actions in the war in Cambodia and the NAFTA trade agreement were presented positively in the media. A second type of suspicion falls on the media itself as a non-neutral agency that has acquired so much power and influence that politicians and corporate leaders must curry favor and always present themselves in a media-favorable light. Against these types of suspicions, Luhmann argues that the very operations that define the mass media as a quasi-autonomous recursive machine prohibits such external influences. The fact that the information it presents is constantly refreshed and revised from a multiplicity of sources works against its domination or subversion by other systems. Always under construction and in a process of revision, the “reality” of the mass media, he concludes, can’t be controlled by external forces; its only power is its continuing autopoeisis. Though Luhmann never discusses Baudrillard’s radical assessment of the media, he cites it as an example of the view that “[c]omplex entanglements of real reality and fictional reality occur.”28 Yet from a Baudrillardian perspective, Luhmann’s theory itself would seem to constitute a detailed, perfectly realized simulation, orbiting around the systems model that generates it. From this perspective, the mass media’s dissemination of information (what is known to be known) is reduced to an absolute banality, and the implosive effects of the mass media completely vanish, visible only in the pages of Baudrillard’s book. “Outside” the media as an observing system, the masses are, by definition, “invisible.” Thus, Luhmann’s second-order observing system, systematically observing the operations of a first-order system – in this case, the mass media – excludes the very thing that makes the latter meaningful: the effects produced on human subjects by its reproductions and transmissions. Luhmann’s expulsion of human agency from his analysis of the mass media and other social systems inevitably associates him with his fellow German, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who joked that his ambition was to rid the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) of mind or spirit (Geist). For Kittler, the very terms in which we conceive of “so-called man” (der sogenannte Mensch) are dependent variables of earlier discourse formations that will not last beyond the operations of technical media that now

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function as information systems. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, he explains that “[t]he term discourse network . . . can also designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.”29 In other words, culture functions as a vast information-processing machine. What counts as subject, mode of exchange, and address are formed in a network of historical and technological delimitations. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), Kittler examines how analog devices become modernism’s first technical media that inscribe and store data flows. The typewriter, however, is less important as a mechanization of writing than as a transition to Alan Turing’s computing machine. A read–write device capable of “conditional jumps” (If-Then commands), it computes data, thus initiating the age in which “computers become subjects” (“machine-subjects”), and bringing an end to not only the monopoly of writing and discourse but the era of Man as subject. Kittler’s “Introduction” to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is Janus-faced, positioned at the moment of historical transition from separate, unconnected analog media to the advent of digital and networked computational machines. Essentially this transition marks the end of unstorable data flows and leads to a fundamentally different form of mass mediation: access to a virtually infinite amount of data on the Internet, processed by new forms of human/machinery. Whereas Boorstin, Debord, McLuhan, and Baudrillard have demonstrated how the mass media have shaped and directed human behavior in unsuspected ways, Kittler believes that in its last stage, that of n + 1 computers networked through fiber-optic cable, people finally become extensions of the computational medium itself, exquisite processors in their own way but nonetheless information machines endlessly coiled in its circuits. Yet in real time we move beyond Kittler and accept that we are modeled by our media. At last (or at least), Baudrillard’s imploded masses have been resubjectified in the endless flow of Facebook pages and tweets. In the transition, the Internet guaranteed our anonymity and the respite of privacy (in that sense, it was a mass medium). However, the new millennium brings a reversal: a name, a face, a set of statements and network links now signify a subject in (or of ) what Henry Jenkins calls “the culture of participation.”30 Does the advent of social media (many to many) finally signal the end of mass media (one to many)? The question remains open and not simply dependent on how we value individual user-generated content. In the shadow of the new total surveillance state, the exuberance of participation in social media has been short-lived, and critically

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qualified.31 The collection of all personal data by corporate and state bureaucracies both redefines and maintains the old dissymmetry of the mass media, creating new boundary conditions for vital social connection and interaction. Notes 1 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962; Harmondsworth: Vintage Books, 1992), 33. See the discussion of Luhmann’s The Reality of Mass Media. 2 Boorstin, The Image, 57. 3 Boorstin, The Image, 12, 13. 4 Boorstin, The Image, ix. 5 Boorstin, The Image, 261. 6 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” www.berk-edu.com/VisualStudies/readingList/06b_benjaminwork%20of%20art%20in%20the%20age%20of%20mechanical%20reproducti on.pdf. 7 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). 8 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 13, 141. 9 Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 5, 8. Hereafter referred to in the text as UM. 10 Published in L’Homme et la Société, it appears in English in Gary Genosko (ed.), The Uncollected Baudrillard, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001). 11 See, specifically, The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970). 12 For analysis of how the three orders of simulacra are governed by the counterfeit, production, and simulation respectively, see John Johnston, “Theoretical Invention and the Contingency of Critique: The Example of Postmodern Semiotics,” in Stephen Barker (ed.), Signs of Change: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 49–73. 13 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1993), 38–9. 14 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23. 15 Symbolic Exchange and Death, 50, 57. 16 Simulacra and Simulation includes several key theoretical texts as well as essays on influential movies and television productions such as Holocaust, China Syndrome, and Apocalypse Now. 17 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faris Glass (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 64, 65. 18 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or the End of the Social (New York: Semietext[e], 1983), 2. 19 See “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media” in Simulacra and Simulation.

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20 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 10, 8. 21 Simulacra and Simulation, 8–9, 19, 21. 22 Niklas Luhmann, “Why Does Society Describe Itself as Postmodern?” Cultural Critique, Spring (1995). 23 Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford University Press, 1996), 2. 24 For Baudrillard, the term response carries with it “a meaning at once strong, symbolic, and primitive: power belongs to him who gives and to whom no return can be made.” See “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,” New Literary History, Spring (1985), 578. 25 In Luhmann Explained (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2006), Hans-Georg Moeller provides a useful chart of these basic differences (29). 26 Luhmann, The Reality of Mass Media, 19, 20–21. 27 Luhmann, The Reality of Mass Media, 1. 28 Luhmann, The Reality of Mass Media, 82. Luhmann refers to a German translation of essays selected from Simulacra and Simulation (1981). 29 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford University Press, 1990), 370. 30 See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2008). Contrastingly, Gilles Deleuze, in “Postscript on Control Societies,” designates such precipitates of subjectivity in the era of the database as “dividuals.” 31 Reassurances such as “we’re only collecting your metadata” have been systematically demonstrated to be false. See Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015).

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6

Countercultures David R. Shumway

Countercultural expression in the 1960s, so characteristic of the decade, was a seedbed of later postmodernist aesthetics and the source of important contemporary works. As Marianne DeKoven has argued, one cannot assert a simple identity between the counterculture and the postmodern. Rather there are, as she puts it, continuities between the two phenomena.1 But what exactly are the phenomena in question? The countercultures of the 1960s, as I am using the term here, refers to 1960s youth culture in general, but especially to the less traditionally political and more cultural groups, practices, and events of the era. Radical political groups such as Students for Democratic Society and the Black Panthers do have countercultural aspects, so they are not entirely excluded. Sixties counterculture was connected to political movements including Civil Rights and black nationalism, the antiwar movement, the New Left, and the nascent women’s and gay liberation movement, but it cannot be identified with them. While the more traditionally leftist organizations, such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were often at odds with the more culturally centered ones such as San Francisco’s Diggers, the two sides had more in common than they admitted. The “Port Huron Statement” (1962), the founding document of SDS, contains much that is broadly philosophical and cultural. But countercultural activities were not primarily oriented toward changing existing institutions and practices through ballots, protests, or violent confrontation. Rather, members of the counterculture invented alternative institutions and practices or simply opted out of many hitherto existing ones. For example, the Diggers, named after the seventeenthcentury radical Protestant sect, was known for giving away food and its “Free Store,” where clothing was given to anyone who asked. Tie-dying was invented at the Free Store as a way to make surplus white shirts attractive to freaks. Though the Diggers rejected the politics of protest, they were nevertheless at least as anticapitalist as their more traditionally leftist counterparts. The Diggers created alternative institutions, but they 112

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were never intended to last. The group emerged out of the San Francisco Mime Troup, a street theater collective, and one could understand all of the Diggers activities as performance. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and his friends, who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, were among those who sought to dissolve the distinction between life and art entirely. The clearest expression of this lay in the Acid Tests, the large public parties featuring vats of Kool-Aid spiked with then (1965) legal LSD. The Acid Tests launched the career of the Grateful Dead, and band member Jerry Garcia described them as “one of the truly democratic art forms to appear in this century. The audience didn’t come to see us. They came to experience something altogether different. So we could play or not. So we had the luxury of being able to experiment freely in a situation which didn’t require anything of us.”2

The making of countercultures It is rather easier to specify what the countercultures were than to state a definition of postmodernism everyone will agree on. Because the debate about what postmodernism is can’t be settled here, I will simply stipulate the term’s meaning in this chapter, which is as an idea or complex of related ideas. The title of this chapter is “Countercultures,” and that, too, requires some further explanation. Like many observers since Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (1968) popularized the term, I hold that there emerged in the 1960s a new phenomenon, a counterculture comprised mainly of white, middle-class youth. Although it included political radicals, most members defined themselves by the alternative practices in which they engaged – matters of dress, hairstyle, musical and other aesthetic preferences, the use of illegal drugs – rather than a program for social change. People who identified with this counterculture actively rejected many of political certainties accepted by what they called the “straight” culture, but they did not agree on an alternative belief system. The counterculture included Marxists, anarchists, socialists, and others who held some more or less traditional political position, but the majority held views cobbled together from all manner of heterogeneous sources. Alongside this newly emerged “majority” counterculture, there were already-existing countercultures that contributed to it but which remained distinct. Roszak himself thought that African American youth culture needed to be considered as separate.3 Civil rights organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

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Committee, and later black power groups such as the Black Panthers were significant influences on the larger counterculture, but they remained distinct both culturally and politically. Segregation had resulted in most African Americans living in a separate culture, which in the 1960s produced its own counterculture in explicit opposition to the dominant white one. But there were other countercultures prior to the 1960s, though they would have been termed “subcultures.” The most significant of these would have included gay, drug, and beat cultures, the latter drawing on the former two. All of these countercultures bear some relation to the various conceptions of postmodernism. The counterculture of the 1960s was especially the offspring of the Beat movement that had produced the Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore and press in San Francisco. City Lights published Alan Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956), and Ferlinghetti and the bookstore’s manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested and charged with disseminating obscene literature because of the depiction of homosexual and heterosexual acts. A judge ruled that the book was not obscene. Ginsberg and another poet, Gary Snyder, read at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967, which has been called “the hippies’ coming out party.”4 In 1964 Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarity, the hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, drove the Merry Prankster’s bus, “Further,” on a cross-country trip to meet Kerouac and LSD advocate Timothy Leary.5 Cassidy/Moriarity became a model of countercultural masculinity. While neither Beat poetry nor Kerouac’s fiction is normally considered postmodern, beat novelist William Burroughs is. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), often treated as exhibit A of postmodernist fiction, offers many clues to the relationship of the counterculture to postmodernism. Pynchon’s tale of intrigue, subversion, and paranoia is studded with allusions to popular culture and to countercultural habits such as the use of marijuana and LSD, the omnipresence of rock music, and various practices of sex outside of heterosexual marriage. Moreover, the novel’s themetizing of epistemological and hermeneutic uncertainty anticipates the attitudes toward knowledge that grew out of the era’s politics. The novel was published before the San Francisco counterculture became national news, but some countercultural activities were already in progress. The first Acid Test was held in November 1965. The San Francisco Mime Troupe was founded in 1959, and by the mid1960s had become increasingly political and confrontational. Former Mime Troupe members would become key participants in the Diggers beginning in 1966, and concert promoter Bill Graham, whose Fillmore

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Auditorium in San Francisco and Fillmore East in New York were major rock performance venues, got his start there. The Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley, developed during the 1964–5 academic year and made national headlines. Pynchon has his heroine, Oedipa Mas, observe the change this movement represented on American college campuses: It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She came downslope from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs, blonde hair, hornrims, bicycle spokes in the sun, bookbags, swaying card tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for decipherable FSM’s, YAF’s, VDC’s, suds in the fountain, students in noseto-nose dialogue. She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take. For she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of them, this having been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places only death had the power to cure, and this Berkeley was like not somnolent Siwash out of her own past at all, but more akin to those Far Eastern or Latin American universities your read about, those autonomous culture media where the most beloved of folklores may be brought into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal commitments chosen – the sort that bring governments down.6

The passage describes the Berkeley campus not only as a countercultural space, but the site of “alternative universes,” and this is what the counterculture promised and postmodernist fiction delivered. There would be nothing particularly postmodern about a novel that presented us with a realist description of the counterculture. Pynchon does not do that, but rather uses it as the context or occasion for an alternative universe of his own invention. While McHale believes that The Crying of Lot 49 is a modernist text because of its epistemological concerns, I would argue that the novel insists on the ontological question in part by dismissing any possible solution to the epistemological one. As Stefan Mattessich puts it, alluding to Jacques Derrida, “There is nothing outside the text in The Crying of Lot 49, and no place from which to guarantee an immunity from its meditations or its fantasms.”7 Or to put it another way, one cannot read this novel as Erich Auerbach read James Joyce or Virginia Woolf as pursuing realism by other means.8 The world of The Crying of Lot 49 is obviously unreal. It is not an attempt to render the subjective reality of someone, but the projection of a patently fictional world, a cartoon where

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characters have impossible names and their behavior is silly. Oedipa asks, “[S]hall I project a world?” but Pynchon has already done so.

Psychedelia The idea of their being a perhaps infinite number of alternative worlds is strongly connected to the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. According to Nick Bromell: psychedelic experience is not so much an object of knowledge as an alternative form of consciousness that is entirely different from that rational mode through which we customarily believe we know the things we know. . . . The psychedelic experience, itself a way of knowing, rises up as an alternative to, not as an object within the purview of, our usual ways of knowing.9

Bromell uses William James’s notion of the world’s “radical pluralism” to help describe the intellectual implications of psychedelics. “The experience of stepping into a new framework of vision, into an alternative way of being in the world, is an unimaginably powerful confirmation of the view that ‘stability is not natural.’”10 Psychedelics gave the counterculture the sense that there was no single, fixed reality, no stable world that needed to be known or represented in itself. Rather, the counterculture imagined there were as many possible worlds as there were trips to take or novels to read. One could argue that postmodernist fiction of the 1960s and 1970s is often characterized by this irrealism, a movement away from the modernist attempt to capture subjective experience in its diversity and idiosyncrasy, to project unfamiliar worlds, alternative universes that by their distance from our assumptions about reality make us ask “what world is this?”11 There are, of course, innumerable ways to create an alternative world. Traditional science fiction preceded postmodernism in this endeavor, but with the difference that the alternative world was supposed to be understood as a possible future, a continuation of the present reality under specifically altered circumstances. Postmodernist fiction gives us alternatives that, whether they are supposed to be in the future or not, could not be understood as either progress or decline from the present world. The fiction of Donald Barthelme, Rushdie, William Gibson, John Barth, and many others can be seen in this light. Even, perhaps especially, the postmodern historicism of such novels Doctorow’s Ragtime or Eco’s The Name of the Rose can be seen to project alternative worlds that are precisely impossible in historical terms.12

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It is important to understand that postmodern novels were themselves countercultural even when they did not draw on countercultural activities or styles. Indeed, many of the novels most closely associated with countercultural behaviors – those of Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion) and Richard Fariña (Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me [1966]), for example – were formally quite traditional. William Burroughs’s novels – Naked Lunch (1959), Nova Express (1964) – however, are almost always cited as part of the postmodern canon, and they gave expression to gay and drug subcultures beginning before most Americans were aware there were such subcultures. These isolated worlds provide some of the grounds for the ontological question raised by Burroughs’s fiction, but so do their hallucinogenic qualities, which give them something in common with psychedelic music and art. But postmodern novels such as Barthelme’s Snow White (1967) or Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967) were understood to be countercultural in a different sense. Because they did not depict the world in realist terms, this fiction seemed of piece with other activities that rejected the straight world.

Countercultural institutions While we correctly identify the counterculture most strongly with the alternative institutions and practices such as the Diggers’s free stores or the use of psychedelic drugs, the counterculture had more traditionally cultural dimensions as well. As Loren Glass has shown in Counterculture Colophon, Grove Press was a major purveyor of countercultural writing, and one might add, of postmodernist culture as well. According to Glass, “a crucial component . . . in the emergence of the counterculture . . . was what one might call the ‘repoliticication’ of the avant-garde and the increasing engagement of radical artists with radical politics over the course of the 1960s. Grove Press was central to this effort to rearticulate the political to the aesthetic meanings of the avant-garde.”13 Beginning in the 1950s, Grove and its literary magazine, the Evergreen Review, were instrumental in bringing foreign avant-garde writers into America. Samuel Beckett was “virtually unknown” here until Grove began to publish him.14 Grove’s drama list was central to postmodern theater, including, in addition to Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter among others. Its contributions to postmodern fiction included Beckett as well as Burroughs and Alain Robbe-Grillet. But in addition to these artists, the press also published Régis Debray and Frantz

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Fanon, major contributors to political thought of the 1960s. Finally, Grove’s publication of sexuality explicit material, from Victorian pornography, to Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence, to the film I Am Curious (Yellow) and its illustrated scenario, and its winning court cases against the censorship of these works were part of the counterculture’s remaking of American sexual habits and mores.15 Grove embodied a postmodern mix of heterogeneous political radicalism, avant-garde aesthetics, and explicit and “deviant” sexuality that defined both the counterculture and the postmodern.16 Grove, like many publishing houses, started as the project of an individual, Barney Rosset, and according to Glass, its direction was very much at the mercy of Rosset’s whims.17 But Grove was also very much a part of a cultural scene, and such scenes nurtured both the counterculture and postmodernism. These scenes were defined by their eclecticism rather than by rigid adherence to one medium or a single program. Pynchon makes reference in The Crying of Lot 49 to the important scene in San Francisco and its environs, which included the University of California in Berkeley, the bookstores, and other gathering spots on Telegraph Avenue there, and the Beat community attached to City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. Grove and many of its authors were part of a burgeoning scene in Greenwich Village, which included coffeehouses and bars such as Café Figaro and the White Horse Tavern, performance spaces including the Village Vanguard and the Fillmore East, cultural institutions such as the Living Theater (which from an early date staged plays by European playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, and Luigi Pirandello), and bookstores such as the Strand. Bob Dylan experienced this scene that included folk music and avant-garde art, and enabled him to acquire both some of the liberal education he ignored while briefly enrolled at the University of Minnesota, and an education that would have been hard to obtain anywhere else but in New York. In his Chronicles: Volume 1, Dylan reveals that he apparently took great advantage of New York’s cultural resources.18 He credits hearing a performance of Brecht-Weil songs, especially “Pirate Jenny,” for giving him the inspiration to write complex songs such as “A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall” (1963), “It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (1965), and “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1964).19 In characteristically countercultural way, Dylan says he both recognized and kept at arm’s length the Marxism expressed in Brecht’s songs. He participated in other avant-garde activities as well, attending plays by radical African American playwright LeRoi Jones (who later renamed himself Amiri Baraka) and the Living Theater, and seeing films by Fellini and other European directors. Among visual artists,

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he singles out Red Grooms as his favorite.20 Grooms was part of the emerging Pop Art movement, of which Andy Warhol would soon become the undisputed leader, but Grooms’s site-specific and installation art anticipated a broader shift in high art practice. Pop Art broke down the divide between high and low by making bits of mass culture and everyday consumer products into paintings that hung in elite galleries and, soon, museums. Dylan would attack the divide from the other side, making rock and roll that had the seriousness and complexity of high modernism.21 This blurring of the boundary between high and low is another feature often said to be definitive of the postmodern.

High/low The counterculture contributed significantly to the tendency of dispensing with traditional cultural hierarchies. According to a common narrative, modernism was defined by its resistance to popular culture and consumer society, but in postmodernism high art embraces both of these.22 While the locus classicus of the mixing of high and low is postmodern architecture, one could argue that what really happens here was the borrowing of elements of the low by a practice that of necessity will always be high.23 The counterculture was, on the contrary, a site where the low and the high were repackaged into something new. Forms of mass culture including rock and roll began to be taken seriously as art but without losing their popular appeal as a result. The counterculture certainly made aesthetic judgments, but they dispensed with the old opposition of high and low. Zap comics and Herman Hesse, Rick Griffin and Andy Warhol, the Grateful Dead and Beethoven’s Ninth might all be enjoyed and regarded as more or less of equal value. Pynchon gives us a glimpse of this by having Oedipa enjoy the painter Remedios Varo, the trashy old movie Cashiered, and the seventeenth-century revenge drama The Courier’s Tragedy.24 The Crying of Lot 49 itself is suffused with mass culture, Oedipa’s husband being a disk jockey and much of her time being spent with a rock band, the Paranoids, while Pynchon throws in innumerable allusions to actual mass culture. The novel itself illustrates by its embrace of mass culture the rejection of modernist cultural hierarchies. These instances of cultural destabilization were accompanied by challenges to other hierarchies of authority. In addition to government, seen as pursuing an immoral and unnecessary war, and law, seen as capriciously prohibiting marijuana while sanctioning alcohol, the counterculture rejected many other traditional authorities including those of religion, education, and many of the professions.

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Master narratives The counterculture’s connection to postmodernism is also illustrated by the fact that it largely rejected the traditional master narratives, thus illustrating Lyotard’s notion of their decline under postmodernism.25 The Crying of Lot 49 anticipates The Postmodern Condition by satirizing the very idea of a master narrative. The underground activities of the Trystero, which Oedipa either uncovers or invents, bear no relation to any actual movement, historical or contemporary. The outcome of her investigation, which should be produced by what she hears at the crying of lot 49 at the auction that concludes the novel, has no world historical significance attached to it. Moreover, passages in the novel mock traditional master narratives. Oedipa’s shrink, Dr. Hilarius, remarks about his intellectual relationship with Freud, “I tried . . . to submit myself to that man, to the ghost of that cantankerous Jew. Tried to cultivate a faith in the literal truth of everything he wrote, even the idiocies and contradictions.” When Oedipa explains that she “came . . . hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy,” Hilarius exclaims, “Cherish it! . . . What else do any of you have? Hold it by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away.” Later in the novel, we overhear the English professor Bortz and his graduate students dismissing “[t]he historical Shakespeare . . . the historical Marx. The historical Jesus . . . they’re dead. What’s left?”26 While it is true that Marxism became increasingly dominant within SDS as the 1960s unfolded, the counterculture more generally was suspicious of master narratives, rejecting both the dominant American one and the Marxist alternative. The subtitle of Roszak’s book, Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, reveals one of the master narratives the counterculture rejected, the linking of technological innovation to a general story of human progress. The idea of “getting back to the land,” of returning to some premodern way of life, was widely influential within the counterculture even if relatively few participants actually attempted to do so. Anti-technological rhetoric may be found in the Port Huron Statement and in the pronouncements of the FSM. Rejecting technological solutions was a major part of what Timothy Leary meant when he instructed people to “drop out,” but he also meant that they should reject the larger narrative of progress that is the foundation for “the American dream,” another master narrative the counterculture rejected.27 The counterculture shared also with postmodernism a rejection of the epistemological project. Knowledge of all kinds became increasingly

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understood as inherently interested, perspectival, and subjective, giving credence to Lyotard’s assertion that “science plays its own game; it is incapable of legitimating other language games. . . . But above all, it is incapable of legitimating itself.”28 Where Marxism had itself claimed science as legitimating its analysis of the present and prescription for the future as objectively true, the academic instantiation of the counterculture held that, “objectivity . . . is reducible to the weight of authority, the viewpoint of those who are in a position to enforce standards.”29 Science once delegitimized opened up the field for any kind of knowledge, including especially those that relied on personal experience. On the one hand, this resulted in various standpoint theories, asserting the special knowledge held by virtue of one’s oppression.30 Here knowledge is rooted in membership in a social group, caste, or class. On the other hand, purely individual experience was also now available as a source of knowledge, allowing for the idea that a drug such as LSD could be the basis for “expanded consciousness” or that the experience of music or art could transform one’s perception of the world. Another example of the rejection of objective knowledge was the New Journalism, which Fredric Jameson has called “one of the varieties of postmodernism.”31 The New Journalism was both an expression of the counterculture and one of the chief means by which news of its existence was disseminated. As practiced by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion among others, the New Journalism combined factual reporting with techniques borrowed from fiction.32 It often foregrounded the personality of the journalist, giving the form a distinctly subjective cast. It is evidence of this form’s postmodernism that it was largely the work of conservatives who, whatever their fascination with the counterculture, were certainly not of it or sympathetic to its transformational dreams. In the long run, it contributed to the growing skepticism about the objectivity of any news source, a skepticism that while it was first expressed on the Left, was soon exploited by the Right.

Utopia DeKoven implies that what keeps the counterculture from attaining full status as postmodern is its utopianism: the 1960s “represented the final, full flowering of modernism/modernity particularly of its utopian master narratives.”33 But if this describes certain elements of the sixties correctly, especially the shift of the New Left back to Marxism as the decade unfolded, it does not capture the counterculture’s utopianism. Even the

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SDS of the “Port Huron Statement” was not traditionally utopian. While it certainly draws on Marxism, the “Statement” could itself be understood as an expression of skepticism about master narratives. Indeed, the document asserts, “theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old.”34 A renewed idealism is needed, but no utopia imagined. The “Statement” reads rather more like a party platform, its chief concerns being large but immediate problems confronting the United States: the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, anticommunism, and the power of corporations. If its program seems utopian today, that’s mainly because the desired outcomes are now read in relation to a political spectrum centered much further to the right. Part of the problem in assessing the meaning of countercultural utopianism is that the term utopian has a complex history. Marx, for example, distinguished his own “scientific socialism” from the “utopian socialism” of Fourier and numerous others in the nineteenth century who created their own alternative communities, which came to be called “utopias.” Critics of Marx have longed asserted that his vision of a future communism was also utopian in the sense that it was mere wishful thinking. Fredric Jameson created a positive sense of the term within Marxist discourse when he observed that mass cultural texts typically involve a utopian element or moment wherein the audience is given access to a fantasy alternative to its present circumstances.35 The point is not that this alternative is possible, but that its very existence is evidence of the mass audience’s desire for an alternative. For Jameson, Marxism is utopian in the allied sense that the possibility of communism, of revolutionary social transformation, is what animates its politics, and that possibility is essentially temporal requiring a sense of history of previous, progressive transformations that presage the final, future one. For him, postmodernism is the death of utopia because it has killed history, but there is utopianism after utopia to be found not in temporal imaginings but spatial ones.36 Thus, even postmodernism cannot do without utopia. Jameson helps us see how the utopianism of the sixties differed from its nineteenth-century predecessors. Unlike the movement that grew up around Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in the 1880s, “the Utopian impulses of the sixties . . . produced a vital range of micropolitical movements (neighborhood, race, ethnic, gender, and ecological).”37 Jameson’s characterization of these movements as “micropolitical” comes out of his Marxism, in which a single macropolitics were to bring about a single revolution and utopia. In the 1960s, people began to speak of “revolutions” in the plural: “the draft resistance revolution,” “the sexual revolution,” “the

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civil rights revolution.” Clearly, none of these revolutions was understood as a total transformation, and none promised a utopia. The counterculture imagined changing the world by example, just as the utopian socialists of the nineteenth century had done. Unlike the utopian socialists, however, the counterculture conspicuously lacked a narrative of how the change would come about or a vision for what the new world would look like. Counterculturists believed in the possibility of radical transformation, but they lacked an agenda for it. The Living Theater’s late 1960s semiimprovisational, audience-participation production “Paradise Now,” notorious for its onstage nudity, was an example of this sort of utopianism. The Grateful Dead might be the ultimate expression of it, as the psychedelic experience provided by LSD is at the root of the Dead’s central trope, which I have named “alchemy.”38 Their lyrics, music, concerts, cover art – even their name – are connected to this idea. The Dead did not participate in political activities (though they did play numerous benefits for those who did), but bassist Phil Lesh described the band’s project as “our collective transformation program.”39 Of course, other members of counterculture took concrete steps to create alternatives. Communes of all sorts were established, including one the Dead inhabited in San Francisco’s Haight Asbury. Like the Dead’s, many communes were urban, but agricultural communes were established, an expression of the “back to the land” ethos. While a few of these communes, such as Twin Oaks, which took B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two as its inspiration, were utopian in the nineteenthcentury sense, most were understood more as a retreat from a failed system than as the establishment of a new one that would save the world. “Inherent in the establishment of the new communes was a deep critique of what Western civilization had become by the second half of the twentieth century . . . Those who chose the communal life were saying no to a system they perceived to be increasingly dominated by greed and materialism.”40 The tendency toward communal living is certainly an expression of antimodernism, but it also reveals one point where the counterculture and postmodernism would seem to part company. That point is not utopianism, but the quest for authenticity. The postmodern is typically associated with surfaces that lack depth and with the idea of the simulacrum, a copy for which no original exists. For Jean Baudrillard, in the postmodern, “simulation models come to constitute the world, and overtake and finally ‘devour’ representation.”41 In the postmodern, the real is displaced by the hyperreal, as signifying systems lose their ability to make reference to

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something outside themselves, and people increasingly expect simulation. Disneyland in Baudrillard’s view becomes more real than the world outside the theme park.42 The counterculture, on the contrary, assumed that it could penetrate beneath the surface of the consumer society, to find a more authentic way of life. The locus of that authenticity was often nature itself, which is why “back to the land” was such a powerful desire. Psychedelic drugs might have destabilized older conceptions of the mind or self, but the goal of psychedelic experience was often said to be, like many countercultural journeys, to find one’s true self. The counterculture as a whole seems to have strongly rejected modernism, but its alternatives were often premodern rather than postmodern. Countercultures during the 1960s were not limited to the United States, and they played important roles in the upheavals of 1968 in Paris, Prague, and elsewhere. Historian Arthur Marwick has argued that the 1960s spawned an international cultural revolution that included countercultural scenes in the United Kingdom, Italy, and France.43 While it is certainly the case that postmodern theory in France was percolating before 1968, the worker and student protests of May of that year in Paris were crucial for the development and influence of French postmodernism. This suggests that, whatever their differences, postmodernism and counterculture are essential to each other, with connections that run both broad and deep. Notes 1 DeKoven, Utopia Limited. 2 Jerry Garcia interviewed in Anthem to Beauty, Jeremy Marre, dir. (1997; New York: Eagle Vision, 2005), DVD. 3 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xl. 4 Jeff Kisseloff, A Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s: An Oral History (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 137. 5 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968). 6 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper, 1986), 103–4. Besides the Free Speech Movement, the other initials are decipherable as YAF, Young Americans for Freedom, a national conservative student group, and VDC, the Vietnam Day Committee, a Berkeley antiwar group formed by future Yippie leader Jerry Rubin. 7 Stefan Mattessich, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 59.

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8 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1953), 525–53. 9 Nick Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 68. 10 Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 71. 11 See McHale, Postmodernist Fiction. 12 McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, 152. 13 Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 12. 14 Glass, Counterculture Colophon, 17. 15 For example Attorney General v. A Book Named “Tropic of Cancer” (1962); Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch” (1966); United States v. A Motion Picture Entitled “I am Curious, Yellow” (1968). See Glass, Counterculture Colophon, 101–44, 188–90. 16 See Beth Bailey, “Sex as a Weapon: Underground Comix and the Paradox of Liberation,” in Peter Greenstein and Michael William Doyle (eds.), Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Routledge, 2002), 305–24. 17 Glass, Counterculture Colophon, 6. 18 Bob Dylan, Chronicles, vol. 1 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). “Apparently” because one cannot be sure what is fact in Chronicles and what fiction. 19 Dylan, Chronicles, 287. 20 Dylan, Chronicles, 269. 21 David R. Shumway, Rock Star: The Making of Cultural Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 75–7. 22 See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989); Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 23 See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 59–60. 24 Remedios Varo (1908–63) was a Spanish surrealist painter, while Cashiered, and The Courier’s Tragedy are Pynchon’s inventions. 25 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester University Press, 1984). 26 Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 134, 138, 151. 27 Leary popularized the slogan, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” See Timothy Leary, Turn on, Tune in, Drop out (Berkeley, CA: Ronin, 1999). 28 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 40. 29 “Statement of Purpose,” Studies on the Left 1 (Fall 1959): 2–4, rpt. in Irvin and Debi Unger (eds.), The Times Were a Changin’: The Sixties Reader (New York: Three Rivers, 1998), 65. 30 See, for example, Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). While

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standpoint theory traces its lineage to Georg Lukács and History and Class Consciousness (1919–23), there the standpoint of the proletariat is not rooted in lived experience, but in its place in the relations of production. While feminist theorists developed standpoint theory, the same epistemological (or antiepistemological) assumptions are found in the formulations of all identity politics. 31 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 56. 32 Some key works of the new journalism dealing with the counterculture include Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968); Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968); Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968); Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (New York: Popular Library, 1971). 33 DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 8. 34 Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement,” appendix to James Miller, Democracy in the Streets: Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 331. 35 Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 9–34. 36 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 154–80. 37 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 160. 38 Shumway, Rock Star, 121–47. 39 Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York: Little, Brown, 2005), 112. 40 Timothy Miller, “The Sixties-Era Communes,” in Peter Greenstein and Michael William Doyle (eds.), Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Routledge, 2002), 341. 41 Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 1989), 79. 42 Baudrillard, Simulations, 25. 43 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Transformation in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c.1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26.

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7

New novels: from the 1950s to 1970 Randall Stevenson

“Today we live in what has been categorized . . . as the Post-Modern Period,” Harry Levin announced in 1960, in a lecture published in August of that year.1 Though his categorization matches those of later commentators only approximately, Levin’s views appear intriguingly early in discussions of what “the Post-Modern” might mean, and of how literature concerned might be periodized. Innovative idioms apparent in French and English-language fiction by 1960, and their legacies among British and North American writers during the following decade, suggest that his categorization may be a valid one, indicative of areas in which foundations of postmodernist writing can be genuinely identified. Yet audiences in 1960 – perhaps startled to learn they were already living in a new age – might have noted that Levin’s conclusions were sometimes less radical than suggested by his lecture title “What Was Modernism?” For Levin, the initiatives of the modernist movement were indeed complete, but “the afterglow of the Moderns” nevertheless continued to illumine the present age.2 Even the most innovative of recent writing, in 1960, might have been envisaged, in this way, as part of a protracted sunset rather than as an entirely new dawn. Samuel Beckett’s translation of his Trilogy – Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable – had been completed and published the previous year, appearing as innovative as anything written in French or English since the Second World War. In suggesting that “it all boils down to a question of words . . . all words, there’s nothing else,” the Trilogy apparently denied comprehensively the representative capacities of fictional realism, even those of language itself.3 Yet questionings of words and their reliability could also be considered a feature of the literary landscape ever since the “day of dappled seaborne clouds” in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Stephen Dedalus divides his attention equally between pleasant seaside prospects and the “prism of a language many-coloured and richly-storied” through which they may be represented.4 Joyce’s self-reflexive interests in language greatly expand in 127

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parodies extending throughout Ulysses (1922), and still further in the linguistic playfulness of his later “Work in Progress,” published as Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s supporters were quick to emphasize, in 1929, how decisively this phase of his writing altered fiction’s interests. Following a suggestion in “Work in Progress” – “say mangraphique, may say nay por daguerre” – Eugene Jolas proclaimed the end of the writer’s attempts to “photograph the life about him through the mechanics of words redolent of the daguerreotype,” and that “the new artist of the word has recognised the autonomy of language.” Beckett was another early defender of “Work in Progress” – emphasizing like Jolas that Joyce’s writing was “not about something; it is that something itself ” – and on the evidence of the Trilogy, also the inheritor of some of the linguistic “autonomy” Joyce’s work deploys.5 By the time the Trilogy appeared, modernism’s continuing influence was evident in further forms of autonomy, or artistic self-consciousness, practiced in other recent novels. Modernist fiction regularly features artist figures – Lily Briscoe, in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927); the eponymous Tarr, in Wyndham Lewis’s 1918 novel; Stephen, in Joyce’s Portrait – who express, sometimes implicitly, their authors’ aesthetic interests. Lawrence Durrell resumes interests of this kind in his tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), which he considered “only half secretly about art, the great subject of modern artists.”6 His narrator’s discussion of his own strategies, along with another author-character’s reflections on aesthetic priorities, ensure that this subject is more explicit than secret. It figures even more prominently in another novel influential in 1960, At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien, another Irish writer working, like Beckett, in the wake of Joyce. Like Beckett’s, O’Brien’s narrators regularly function as creators of other storytellers, or as their creation, raising Durrell’s “great subject” through commentary on the literary tactics they deploy. The immediate influence of At Swim-Two-Birds, first published in 1939, had been deflected, like that of Finnegans Wake, by the Second World War, which broke out four months after Joyce’s work appeared. O’Brien’s warmer reception when At Swim-Two-Birds was reissued suggests – along with work by Durrell and Beckett – that modernism’s self-reflexive concerns with art and language were strongly reemerging around 1960. A new generation of British novelists offered further evidence of this. Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), comments frequently on authorship and its organization of life into “convenient slick plot.”7 In The Golden Notebook (1962), Doris Lessing’s narrator similarly questions fiction’s containment of the complexities of life and “the thinning of

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language against the density of our experience.”8 Self-reflexive tactics in all these works indicate the firm emergence of postmodernist idioms by the early 1960s, connected to the residual modernist influences Levin emphasizes. New novels, new stars and constellations, were steadily appearing in the fading “afterglow” he defines. Comparable developments – with comparable antecedents – had emerged during the 1950s in France, where Beckett’s Trilogy had first appeared between 1950 and 1952. A new novelistic idiom, following partly from Beckett’s example, had been recognized by critics since the publication of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes in 1953. By around 1958, the term nouveau roman (new novel) had been widely adopted to define this idiom, also identified in the work of authors such as Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute.9 Yet their writing had scarcely been proclaimed as new before it was being reclaimed as old, or at any rate derivative of earlier literature. Even the chosisme of the nouveau roman – its most celebrated, or notorious, distinguishing feature – was not exempt from designation as second hand. Chosisme – obsessive concentration on banal objects – was evident early in Les Gommes, in Robbe-Grillet’s startlingly detailed depiction of a tomato. Meticulous, coldly objective descriptions figured more extensively in La Jalousie (1957), in repeated accounts of a squashed centipede and obsessively exact delineations of the layout of banana trees. These and other idiosyncrasies in Robbe-Grillet’s work were early communicated to Anglophone readers through an account of recent French writing in the Times Literary Supplement in August 1957. Yet a correspondent claimed two weeks later that there was “nothing new” in the “school led by M. Alain Robbe-Grillet.” The supposedly “nouveau” roman, in his view, really belonged to an idiom established earlier by the detached, objective styles of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and in their concerns with a world troublingly existing independently of consciousness.10 The most vehement claims about indebtedness nevertheless came from the nouveaux romanciers themselves. Consistent with his emphasis on “afterglow,” Levin had suggested in 1960 that “much of the nouveau roman could be accounted for as a set of French exercises imparting the methods of Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf.”11 In an article published in the New Statesman the following year, Robbe-Grillet acknowledges a similar list of precursors, describing the nouveau roman’s “evolution” from the work of Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and Beckett. “We certainly don’t attempt to blot out this past,” he adds. “In fact, it is in admiration of our predecessors that we are most united; our ambition is only to move on from there . . . to follow in their

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trail, in our own way, in our own time.”12 This admiration was further emphasized with the influential publication of Robbe-Grillet’s early- to mid-1950s essays as Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel, 1963), indicating indebtedness to Sartre and including extended appreciation of Beckett. Though perhaps intended simply to consolidate the literary credentials of the nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet’s acknowledgment of distinguished antecedents clarifies both the initial stages and later evolution of the writing concerned. Les Gommes and La Jalousie are challenging novels – eliding boundaries between what characters may be imagining and what occurs in their world, and presenting events apparently defying chronology, somehow preceding as well as succeeding each other. Yet the challenges involved are neither wholly unfamiliar, nor unnegotiable, to readers of modernist fiction. In La Jalousie, difficulties of imagining a narrator whom the text never directly identifies are not much in excess of those in Joyce’s fiction, or William Faulkner’s. In his New Statesman article, Robbe-Grillet also reassures readers about temporality, asking why they should “try to reconstruct chronological time when our story is concerned only with human time? Isn’t it wiser to think in terms of our own memory, which is never chronological?”13 Such explanations, reminiscent of the memorious chronologies employed in modernist fiction, suggest that early nouveaux romans might be considered, as Levin suggests, in terms of continuity or adaptation rather than entirely radical innovation. Yet this early proximity to modernism highlights, in turn, how far the nouveau roman did “move on . . . in [its] own way,” during the 1950s, toward the kind of exclusive focus on words and representation distinguishing later stages of Beckett’s Trilogy. Writing itself emerges as a central subject in Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957). The Roman journey it describes is also a journey à un roman – possibly toward La Modification itself, comparable to the novel the protagonist explains he intends to write, and perhaps also to an untitled, unread volume that he carries on the train. Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe (1959) is likewise focused on representation and artistic creation. La Modification figures telephone wires, endlessly paralleling the railway track, in terms of a complex musical score, though without notes. In Dans le labyrinthe, a snowy landscape, punctuated by dark traces of still-uncovered objects, loosely resembles a page of print. Landscape or setting and artistic representation are in other ways strangely, sometimes inversely related, with a scenario at first confined within a painting eventually freely interchangeable with the characters and action

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of the text itself. Emphases on windows and doors, along with changes of scene introduced by phrases such as “the next image shows . . . ” further highlight the novel’s concern with its own devices of framing and representation.14 Concerns of this kind are likewise emphasized in RobbeGrillet’s account of the nouveau roman’s priorities generally. Like Beckett in the Trilogy, Pour un nouveau roman concludes that in fiction “there can be no reality outside . . . the words we hear,” and that in the contemporary novel “the movement of the style” and “invention and imagination” may legitimately become “the very subject of the book.”15 As Robbe-Grillet’s mention of Marcel Proust indicates, this “great subject” – though newly central – had as long a provenance in French as in English literature, retraceable, beyond even Stephen’s “day of dappled seaborne clouds,” to the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, published in 1913. Like Stephen, in Du côté de chez Swann Marcel realizes that pleasant prospects offered by the villages of Martinville and Vieuxvicq are less engaging than the business of “framing . . . words in [his] head” to describe them. As this framing proceeds, he finds that the villages’ “sunlit surfaces” have “peeled away” from his attention, replaced by pleasure taken in the “form of words” he finds for them.16 Though equally long-standing in French and English writing, this interest in a literary language “peeled away” – toward self-reflexive concern with the form of words themselves – had grown more influential in French than in Anglophone fiction by the early 1960s, principally through the impact of the conveniently labeled nouveau roman. Source of the term avant-garde – one apparently without a ready equivalent in English – French language and culture may have an inherent disposition toward coinages defining or promoting innovation. Nouvelle cuisine, nouvelle vague – even Beaujolais nouveau – offer further examples of phrases carrying a frisson of novelty, modish and marketable, into contemporary English. John Osborne’s central figure in Look Back in Anger (1956) may have recognized this potential from across the Channel – though scarcely welcoming it – when complaining in the mid-1950s that his Sunday newspaper contains “three whole columns on the English Novel. Half of it’s in French.”17 At any rate, in the dozen years after his remark was made, encouraged by Robbe-Grillet’s essays and his visit to Britain with Natalie Sarraute in 1961, several British novelists began to adopt the innovations of the nouveau roman. Along with its puzzling perspectives, even its excruciatingly detailed descriptions evidently appealed to Brian Aldiss in Report on Probability A

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(1968). Muriel Spark records finding some inspiration for her work in Robbe-Grillet’s writing, considering several of her own novels as nouveaux romans of a kind.18 Spark’s friend Christine Brooke-Rose, a bilingual lecturer at the University of Paris, gained particular familiarity with Robbe-Grillet through translating Dans le labyrinthe. Her own fiction remained relatively conventional until Out (1964), which deploys, like Aldiss’s novel, the kind of painstaking, chosiste descriptions used in Les Gommes and La Jalousie. In Such (1966), Brooke-Rose went on to extend some of Sarraute’s interests in almost undefinable movements of mind and psyche, beyond ordinary consciousness. Her later novels continue to challenge – often still more radically and through unorthodox typography – fiction’s imposition of order upon thought and experience. Similar challenges to conventional ordering figure in fiction by Rayner Heppenstall, a former student of French, acquainted with Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute personally as well as through their writing. Like La Jalousie and some of Sarraute’s fiction, The Connecting Door (1962) lacks a named narrator and concentrates exhaustively on description of inanimate objects, including an exercise book in which – as in Beckett’s Malone Dies – the narrative is ostensibly written. Heppenstall’s novel is further complicated by characters who apparently inhabit different time periods simultaneously, as in La Jalousie, or figure – like Beckett’s narrators – as projections of each other’s imaginations. Another former student of French, John Fowles brought the nouveau roman closer to popular or mainstream British fiction in the 1960s. Exposing a central character to near-magical illusions, the “godgame” described in The Magus (1966) implicitly questions the nature – even the morality – of relations between art, imagination, and life.19 Such issues are entirely explicit in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Raised from the beginning through Fowles’s pastiche of Victorian fiction, they are highlighted by his narrator’s emphasis on the artificiality of his own omniscient storytelling, and his explanation that such self-questioning is unavoidable in “the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes.”20 Though the popularity of The French Lieutenant’s Woman was probably due less to such elements of self-consciousness than to its romantic plot, even Fowles’s love interest exhibits metafictional elements. The novel’s iconic opening shows the heroine staring across the Channel, ostensibly toward a lost lover. But her pose could be interpreted as vindicating Jimmy Porter’s conclusions – as a figuration of the desires of her author and some of his contemporaries, looking toward France for avant-garde influences more strongly marked than they might have seemed in British writing at the time.

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Other writers found encouragements for experiment as readily available across the Irish Sea – in ways evident in the Joyce-inspired linguistic inventiveness of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), or more generally in B. S. Johnson’s fiction. Though Johnson was aware of writers of the nouveau roman and an admirer of contemporary French literature generally, he declared himself particularly “besotted by Irish writers like Sam Beckett, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien.” His first novel, Travelling People (1963), begins with a pastiche of At Swim-Two-Birds, and declares its determination to “expose the mechanism of the novel” in order to “come nearer to reality and truth.”21 In Albert Angelo (1964) this determination reappears in the narrator’s insistence that fiction, his own included, is merely a form of lying. It also figures in challenges to linear, conventional forms of plot more emphatic even than those undertaken by Heppenstall or the nouveau roman. Holes in the pages of Albert Angelo, allowing readers to see into the future, seem a modest innovation in comparison to Johnson’s presentation of The Unfortunates (1969) in a box, containing loose-leaf sections of narrative, to be ordered as the reader chooses. In an essay published at the time, “The Novelist at the Crossroads” (1969), David Lodge invokes these experiments, and others in view by the end of the 1960s, to qualify doubts about the strength of innovation in British writing. Lodge acknowledges the “unambitiousness . . . built into the literary programme of the Movement,” reflected in the renewed formal and often political conservatism of 1950s writers such as the novelist Kingsley Amis and the poet Philip Larkin. Lodge also suggests, more generally, that “the English literary mind is peculiarly committed to realism, and resistant to non-realistic literary modes.” He nevertheless considers this conservatism to have been “greatly shaken up since 1960” by “formidable discouragements to continuing serenely along the road of fictional realism” offered by writers such as B. S. Johnson, alongside wider influences of Beckett and the nouveau roman.22 Views of the “shaken-up” 1960s help confirm Levin’s suggestion of 1960 itself as a turning point in literary history – a moment when the modernist project seemed to be complete and fully in view, allowing its tactics to be adopted or extended in a later age. Fiction in Britain in the 1960s also confirms, in this way, models through which the emergence of postmodernist writing was later influentially defined. Writing described earlier clearly belongs to the idiom Brian McHale outlines in Postmodernist Fiction (1987) – one following “after the modernist movement,” and as its “logical and historical consequence” with Beckett and the nouveaux romanciers as intermediaries between 1960s developments and initiatives marking the earlier period.23

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Looking closely at these developments reveals an especially clear line of descent, with only one generation, at most, intervening between the modernists and writers concerned – ones who might be considered grandchildren of modernism, with affiliations clearer than the more distant, complicated relationships appearing in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. *** Fiction in the 1950s and 1960s illustrates other forms of “logical and historical consequence,” reflecting not only the “afterglow” of modernist literature, but the fate of modernity generally. When Levin mentioned a “Post-Modern Period” in 1960, he referred not only to literature following modernism, but to judgments of a wider history Arnold Toynbee had delivered in 1939. In A Study of History, Toynbee offers an early example of what became another principal strand of postmodern analysis, tracing the twentieth-century’s experience of the faltering, or failure, of a “project of modernity,” which had long sustained the rational, ameliorative ideals established by the Enlightenment. For Toynbee, this failure could be retraced to much the same period identified earlier, in which embryonic forms of postmodernist literary imagination appeared in linguistically selfconscious works published by Proust, and by Joyce, in 1913 and 1916. “Our own ‘Post-Modern Age,’” A Study in History suggests, had been “inaugurated by the general war of 1914–18.”24 This “inauguration” – or possible terminus of Enlightened ideals – was immediately evident to writers at the time. In a letter written on the day the Great War began, Henry James was already describing it as a “thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering.”25 Toynbee’s views confirm the long provenance of skepticism about Enlightenment “bettering,” though if he had been writing even slightly later, he would probably have pointed – like many subsequent commentators – to a second “general war” as more decisive proof of modernity’s failures. Yet during the war years themselves, even the Enlightenment’s most vehement critics seemed reluctant to forego altogether ameliorative aspects in its thinking. For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” – a result of over-confident assumptions about the “happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things,” and “the possibility of world domination” this was presumed to allow. Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless continue to envisage some “positive notion

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of enlightenment,” disentangling affirmative potentials from destructive forces it had also unleashed.26 As later commentators suggest, such hopes survived even the catastrophes marking the war’s conclusion, with the full implications of the concentration camps, and of the use of atomic weapons, partly deferred until the Eichmann trial and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s. For Thomas Docherty and David Harvey, elements of Enlightenment idealism lasted as far as the exceptional flourishing, though ultimate failure, of utopian political thinking in 1968.27 Faith in Enlightenment ideals, in this view, did not wholly collapse either in 1914 or in 1945. Skepticisms of the project of modernity hardened, instead, toward final, postmodern forms only gradually, between the end of the war and the 1960s – a process in which the theories and practices of the nouveaux romanciers and their followers once again occupy a paradigmatic position. In his New Statesman article, Robbe-Grillet reflects that there was “not much left” of beliefs that “man was the reason for everything, the key to the universe, master by divine right.” His 1950s essays had already noted a “general change in the relations man sustains with the world in which he lives” – a world that no longer seemed “stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable.” Instead of any “happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things,” Robbe-Grillet considers of “the world around us” that we had thought to control it by assigning it a meaning, and the entire art of the novel, in particular, seemed dedicated to this enterprise. But this was merely an illusory simplification . . . we no longer consider the world as our own, our private property, designed according to our needs and readily domesticated.28

Such comments indicate that the characteristic chosisme of the nouveau roman had a role more significant than sometimes supposed by contemporary critics, ready to dismiss it merely as an irritating stylistic idiosyncrasy. It can be seen, instead, to demonstrate the nouveau roman’s wider, Nietzschean pessimism about the competence of mind – its theories, coherences, and categories – to comprehend the inanimate world surrounding it, one which Robbe-Grillet insists must be envisaged “without signification, without soul, without values.”29 In this “universe of things which simply are” – as a character describes it in another early postmodernist novel, Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) – writers could, if they chose, continue “cloaking . . . innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor.”30 Sharing in postmodern skepticisms developing in the 1950s and 1960s, the nouveaux romanciers chose instead to avoid

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comfort, piety – or much representation of “the world around us” of any kind – in favor of self-conscious examination of literature’s means of representation themselves. The nouveau roman and its successors offer, in this way, an illustration of what Lyotard defines in The Postmodern Condition as the “flight of reality out of the metaphysical, religious, and political certainties that the mind believed it held.”31 Like its demonstration of lines of descent from modernist literature, this illustration appears early in the evolution of postmodernism, and in ways potentially innocent of some of the criticisms it later attracted. In his influential criticism of postmodernism, Jameson envisages all its manifestations, literature included, as driven by – and complicit with – forms of late capitalism, globally extending their powers after mid-century. Though these powers may already have been nearly inescapable in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the darker phases of twentiethcentury disillusion, outlined earlier, which probably remained the principal influence on the new fiction of the time, and a focus, explicit or unstated, for its critical awareness of its historical situation. Contemporary commentary, at any rate, often emphasizes connections between the nouveau roman and recent history. That early Times Literary Supplement assessment, for example, envisages Robbe-Grillet’s work – described as “anti-romanesque” – as further evidence of the “gloomy atmosphere” that knowledge of the concentration camps had established, and of the resulting “disintegration of the contemporary French novel under the pressure of depressing historical circumstances.”32 Contemporary readers could likewise hardly avoid connecting Beckett’s work with the gloomy, dis-integral atmosphere following the war. They might also have reflected that the war had not only suppressed the influence of Joyce’s “autonomy of language,” but also changed its nature when elements of it reappeared in the Trilogy. For Joyce in Finnegans Wake – or for O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds – idiosyncrasies and fallibilities in language and narrative are mostly a source of humor, invention, and play. In Beckett’s Trilogy, they are altogether more somber – the despair of narrators equipped only with “words, other’s words . . . all words” in attempting to secure for themselves any sense of order and identity. As their attempts successively collapse, as each narrator is revealed merely as a construct of a subsequent one, the Trilogy suggests language and narrative as indispensable refuges from the “black void” confronting the self, yet ones entirely lacking in foundation or authority. “Words . . . with no ground,” futile yet essential, ensure an articulation both impossible to abandon, yet unable ever to fulfil desire.33 The “afterglow of

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the Moderns,” in the Trilogy, diffuses into a darkling, Spenglerian sundown of faiths in art or language itself. Several of the nouveau roman’s admirers indicate entirely explicitly recent history’s influence on the nature and authority of their novelistic practices. In The Magus, Fowles describes the “strange illusionisms” practiced by a Prospero-like character, Conchis, as those of “a god like a novelist,” or “a sort of psychiatric novelist sans novel.” If any explanation can be found for these godgames and their near-magical authority, it may lie in Conchis’s experience of the unscrupulous powers of Nazism “back in 1943.”34 In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Muriel Spark explores another figure endowed with a quasi-novelistic power for “making patterns” or “convenient slick plot” – one associated, in this case, with an earlier phase of Fascism in the Spanish Civil War.35 In these novels and later ones, such as Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), the godlike role of artist or novelist figures, imposing pattern and order on those around them, is heavily tainted by association with malign flauntings of authority during the Second World War. As Charles Bernstein suggests, in his discussion of “postmodern memory,” “it’s difficult to see order in the same way after the war, hard to accept control as a neutral value.”36 Jorge Luis Borges predicted, in 1940, the kind of skepticisms that would come to be directed on a period when “any symmetry with a semblance of order – dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism – was sufficient to entrance the minds of men.” Later writing often justifies his expectation that fiction, rather than imposing semblances of order on “the world around us,” would offer a separate, detached, and self-evidently artificial world instead – “a labyrinth devised by men.”37 With its introspective explorations dans le labyrinthe of narrative and representation, the nouveau roman and fiction following it offer particularly clear evidence of this change. It also emphasizes consequences of recent history for language, within and beyond fiction. For the narrator of The Magus, Nicholas Urfe, “words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.”38 Like Urfe, Spark’s heroine in The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) finds words driven toward empty abstraction by historical occurrences almost beyond representation. Witnessing Eichhmann’s trial in Jerusalem, she is appalled by gaps between unspeakable Nazi massacres and the bland language of judicial process seeking to account for them. Sampling simultaneous translations of the proceedings – French and Italian alongside English – she concludes that “the effect was the same in any language . . .

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the actual discourse was a dead mechanical tick.” Finding the feelings this produces strangely familiar, she “presently located the sensation as one that the anti-novelists induce.” She continues to reflect on “the novels and plays of the new French writers . . . repetition, boredom, despair, going nowhere for nothing, all of which conditions are enclosed in a tight, unbreakable statement of the times at hand.” Dead, mechanical discourse the defendant produces makes him seem like “a character from the pages of a long antiroman,” and the trial, more generally, close to the atmosphere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.39 Connections of this kind with “the times at hand” strongly confirm postmodernism’s early phases as logical and historical consequences of the Second World War – though this scarcely offers, in itself, a new or unexpected conclusion. As the latter half of the twentieth century recedes into the past, histories of the postmodern should be able to identify, ever more firmly, this whole phase of culture as consequent on depressed skepticism in the decades following the Second World War. One advantage of looking closely at new or nouveau writing in the 1950s and 1960s is that it enables this broad conclusion to be sophisticated in detail, allowing the war’s influence to be measured alongside other factors. Beckett, Durrell, and Sarraute all had early work in print by 1939, and, as the previous discussion suggests, their later writing – along with other innovative fiction appearing in the decades after the war – also had antecedents much earlier in the century. Critics rightly avoid construing the Great War as an exclusive influence on the emergence of modernism, pointing to cognate developments in the years before 1914. Scrutiny of new writing in the 1950s and 1960s, and its origins, similarly allows criticism both to confirm, yet qualify, the influence of the Second World War on the development of postmodernism in the years that followed. Another advantage this scrutiny offers may be as much in terms of literary geography as literary history. Borrowing an epigraph from the writing of Steve Katz, Brian McHale suggests in Postmodernist Fiction that the “the logic of literary history brought writers in various cities” – in Europe, North America, and elsewhere – to a “crossing” between modernist and postmodernist poetics. Katz implies that this crossing was reached – and that “the lights changed” – at much the same time, globally.40 This picture is worth adjusting. By the early 1970s, in novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1960), Kurt Vonnegut’s whimsical Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Thomas Pynchon’s V (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow, US fiction had confronted the historical challenges of the Second World War as decisively and innovatively as any writing in Europe. Gravity’s Rainbow,

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in particular, consolidated the kind of “zone,” aesthetic and historical, in which later postmodernist imagination could thrive. By 1970, a postmodernist idiom had in any case begun to emerge strongly in US writing, in the work of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Coover, Federman, Nabokov, Reed, and others. This experimental idiom sometimes reflected the alternative lifestyles Brautigan chronicles in novels such as A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), or influences from the Beats, or from Burroughs’s attempts to “cut the control lines of word and image” in fiction such as The Ticket That Exploded (1962).41 It also had some strong European roots – naturally, in the work of Nabokov, an immigrant to the United States in 1940. Other authors involved exhibit more specific debts to recently emerging European idioms, or point to the same set of antecedents acknowledged by RobbeGrillet and fellow nouveaux romanciers – to Beckett, particularly, in the case of Barth, Barthelme, and Federman. Zany collage in Barthelme’s early fiction – seeking to “affirm the absurdity” in Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and Snow White (1967) – follows Beckett’s theater more closely than his fiction, extending an Absurdist idiom also influentially practiced by Eugene Ionesco, and partly descended from the work of Camus and Sartre.42 Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968) or Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) include features more comparable to those of the nouveau roman – interchangeability between worlds characters inhabit and ones they imagine, for example, along with self-consciousness about textual practices, or Beckettian highlighting of the opacities of language. Though widely marked in US writing by 1970 – and, in Canada, in Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966) – postmodern idioms of this kind had nevertheless emerged slightly later than new forms of fiction appearing to the east of the Atlantic. Similarly, the emergence of a new fiction in Britain lagged some years behind the nouveau roman and was often dependent, in ways discussed, on extending its initiatives. This tardiness in the British context could be attributed to the inherent conservatism Lodge identifies – in English fiction specifically – in “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” A more productive conclusion might be that the pace at which postmodernist phases of writing appeared was directly related to their authors’ proximity to immediate experience of the Second World War. As Paul Crosthwaite has argued, a factor distinguishing “the major continental thinkers of recent decades from the most prominent Anglo-American theorists of postmodernism . . . concerns the degree of significance granted to World War II.”43 This distinction can be applied to literary practitioners as much as theorists. Writers on the devastated, Nazi-haunted continent of

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Europe were likelier to internalize wartime trauma more fully than authors in Britain, or ones at the still safer distance of North America – further consoled, in each case, by being able to reflect on an eventually victorious intervention in the struggle. The “logic of literary history,” in this analysis, points not so much to simultaneities in the emergence of postmodernist forms of fiction, but ultimately to a single time, place, and author – to Paris in 1940, and to Samuel Beckett, resident there during the Fall of France to the Nazis. Beckett could hardly have been more fully aware of modernist techniques – through thorough acquaintance with Joyce and his work, and by other means – or of ways these might be extended in a later generation’s writing. Yet the key influences on this extension were political and historical, rather than only literary – consequent on Beckett’s witnessing the collapse of social, civic, and governmental orders hitherto sustaining the state, and on his struggle, in the Resistance, to maintain a purposeful moral existence among the ruins that remained. The regressive, iterative collapse of domains of order – of spheres of imaginative, aesthetic, or linguistic coherence, bravely but vainly projected around the self – embodies this wartime experience in Beckett’s work after 1945, most clearly and influentially in the Trilogy, written between 1947 and 1950. In his admiring account of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet praises the way his writing constitutes “a kind of regression beyond nothing.”44 It was that unrelieved nothingness – a universe that “simply is,” “without signification, without soul, without values” – that the nouveau roman and other new fiction went on to address in the 1950s and 1960s. The novels concerned demonstrate the intimate connection between “the times at hand” in those postwar years, and the emergence of postmodern idioms, bleakly comprehending how far “the lights” had not only changed, but been extinguished. Notes 1 Levin, Refractions, 277. 2 Levin, Refractions, 282. 3 Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1959; London: Picador, 1979), 308, 381. 4 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 166–7. 5 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939; London: Faber, 1971), 339; Eugene Jolas “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His

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Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929; London: Faber, 1972), 14, 79. 6 Lawrence Durrell, interview in Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, second series (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963); The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60; London: Faber, 1963), 231. 7 Muriel Spark, The Comforters (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 104. 8 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962; London: Panther, 1976), 301. 9 See Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (London: Elek, 1972), 40–1. 10 Christopher Johnson, letter to the editor, Times Literary Supplement, August 30, 1957, 519. 11 Levin, Refractions, 272 12 Alain Robbe-Grillet, “The Case for the New Novel,” New Statesman, 17 February 1961, 261. 13 Robbe-Grillet, “The Case for the New Novel,” 261. 14 Alain Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth, trans. Richard Howard, in Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet (New York: Evergreen, 1965), 235 and passim. 15 Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 32, 34. 16 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), I, 197. 17 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1957; London: Faber, 1978), 10–11. 18 See Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2009), xviii, 352–3. 19 John Fowles, The Magus, (1966/1977; London: Panther, 1983), 627. 20 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969; London: Panther, 1977), 85. 21 B. S. Johnson, “Fat Man on a Beach,” in Giles Gordon, (ed.) Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction (London: Heinemann, 1975), 155; B.S. Johnson, Travelling People (London: Constable, 1963), 25. 22 David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 7, 9, 22, 27. 23 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 5. 24 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), V, 43. 25 Henry James, letter to Howard Sturgis, August 4/5, 1914, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Macmillan, 1920), II, 398. 26 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), xvi, 3, 11. 27 See Docherty, Postmodernism: A Reader, 35; Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 38. 28 Robbe-Grillet, “Case for the New Novel,” 264; For a New Novel, 32, 23–4. 29 Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, 71. 30 Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963; New York: Bantam, 1971), 305.

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31 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 77. 32 “France: Engagement Dégagé,” Times Literary Supplement, August 16, 1957, Supplement, viii. 33 Beckett, Trilogy, 278, 356, 381. 34 Fowles, Magus, 144, 242, 378, 539. 35 Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 72. 36 Charles Bernstein, “The Second War and Postmodern Memory,” Postmodern Culture 1/2 (1991) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/ 1.2bernstein.html. 37 Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 42. 38 Fowles, Magus, 190. 39 Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 177, 179, 180. 40 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 13, 3. 41 William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (1962; London: Corgi, 1971), 54 42 Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964; London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966), 182 43 Paul Crosthwaite, Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23. 44 Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, 116.

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The Latin American boom and the invention of magic realism Wendy B. Faris

Definition Because of its great variety, magical realism has been difficult to define. In addition, it has migrated as a term from art history to literature, where it has primarily blossomed, and beyond, to film, and is written in many cultures. Its most crucial feature is that it embeds elements of magic – nonempirically verifiable phenomena – within a realistic narrative. Beyond that very basic definition, other elements often include the narrative’s presentation of magic with little or no comment; magical elements that merge individuals and hence question the unity of personality, reconfiguring our habitual notions of identity; nonrealistic presentation of temporal progression or spatial arrangements that alter our usual senses of time and space – a perspective that, together with the preceding one regarding identity, has been called “ontological,” as it concerns the nature of existence; magical elements stemming from hidden voices and beliefs and/or myths that have been suppressed – sometimes in a colonial situation – a definition that has been called “anthropological” because it concerns cultural features. However, a clear definition evaporates when cultural borders are crossed, because what one culture calls magic, another culture, with a different belief system that includes faith in phenomena beyond empirically defined reality, calls real. In any case, the genre is often considered to embody liminality – the in betweenness of beings, cultures, and discourses; hence in magical realism “the world’s liminality and changeableness is not asserted merely as an article of faith but is actualized in a literary form of writing that oscillates constantly between the real and the magical and thus seeks to obliterate the boundary between them.”1 Most basically, perhaps, magical-realist magic serves to highlight certain phenomena – love, pain, unconscious desires, individual or collective beliefs, family and communal ties, political atrocities. What the magic highlights varies immensely from text to text. More generally, as the 143

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magic coexists with the real, though it does not erase it and lead the reader into fantasy, it frequently underscores the amazing – or apparently magical – nature of reality. According to an early formulation by Arturo Uslar Pietri, magical realism embodies “man as a mystery in the midst of realistic facts.”2 As Salman Rushdie says of Gabriel García Márquez’s texts, “[I]mpossible things happen constantly and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun.”3 In the end, however, given the great diversity among magical realist texts, what often divides one of them from either realism or fantasy is simply the amount of magic: too much magic, and it tips over into fantasy; no actual or too little magic, and it remains realism.

Historical trajectory From a global perspective, García Márquez’s Nobel Prize in 1982 for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) internationalized both the boom and magical realism. Thus, magical realism can be seen as contributing to the major early phase of postmodernism (the so-called long sixties), after which it was recognized as major force in 1980 by John Barth in his essay “Literature of Replenishment,” and later still by Franco Moretti when he defined “modern epic” as proceeding from Goethe to García Márquez (1998). Magical realism flourished as part of the Latin American boom from the 1950s to the 1970s, and continues from there worldwide. Perhaps magical realism was “invented” in Latin America because of the strength there of realism itself, which continues almost unabated today, if slightly weakened by other genres such as Gothic and Fantasy (in turn related to magical realism). For a serious challenge to realism to develop, it needed a region with strong indigenous arts and cultures that included belief systems predating Enlightenment reason and science-based ideology, which was the case in Latin America (though not in Europe or North America). In his well-known essay on “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (1975), Alejo Carpentier associates the development of magical realism with Latin America’s baroque nature and cultural mestizaje, which produce homegrown wonders from its reality. For example, Juan Rulfo’s early magical realist novel Pedro Páramo (1955), in which Juan Preciado encounters the dead in Comala, builds on strong pre-Columbian myths overlaid with Catholic traditions regarding the communal afterlife that continue in the vibrant Days of the Dead, and hence blurs boundaries between the living and the dead and between different individuals. At one point we hear Dorotea tell Juan that “they buried me in your grave, and I fit very well

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into the hollow of your arms. Only it occurs to me that I ought to be embracing you, not the other way around.”4 As Erik Camayd-Freixas comments on this passage: “all those fluid identities, all that ontological confusion of characters, occurs in a scenario of murmurs and voices, of unrecognizable bundles and shadows, that are felt throughout the novel, like an anonymous chorus of the living dead.”5 Likewise, as CamaydFreixas shows, Asturias achieves a modern cultural synchretism in Men of Maize (1949) by using Mayan ideographs, such as the yellow rabbit, separated from their native context, thus making them resemble surrealist random images but also thereby invigorating the language of realism in Latin America that lacked such images.6 However, while critics in the West often see magical realism originating in Latin America, and spreading around the world, to read globally is to realize that in non-Western regions magical realism draws on ancient indigenous beliefs regarding the actuality of spirits, for example, and on nonrealistic narrative traditions, and hence is not primarily an import (although imported boom writers such as García Márquez, Carpentier, Fuentes, and others have also been influential), a fact that helps to explain its continuing development worldwide. Antecedents for magical realism in Latin America include Spanish novels of chivalry, such as Amadis of Gaul (as well as accounts by explorers like Bernal Díaz or Columbus describing the new world as marvelous); novels of the land that portray it as mysteriously powerful, such as Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara (1929), or Rivera’s La vorágine (1924); Quiroga’s “The Dead Man” (1920); and Arlt’s The Furious Toy (1926). Early European precursors can be seen in the whole tradition of romance, as well as in moral tales such as Voltaire’s Candide, Johnson’s Rasselas, and others; relatively recent antecedents include Gogol’s “The Nose” (1836), Maupassant’s “Le Horla” (1886), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928–1940), and Woolf ’s Orlando (1928). North American antecedents include Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1908). Among Japanese antecedents are Soseki’s Ten Nights of Dream (1908) and Kyoka’s The Monk of Mount Koya (1900). Initiating the Latin American boom itself are texts by Borges (“The Aleph,” 1945), Asturias (Men of Maize, 1949), and Carpentier (The Kingdom of this World, 1949). Among the most important magical realist texts of the Latin American boom era are Cortázar’s Bestiario (1951), Fuentes’s “Chac Mool” (1954) and Aura (1962), Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Later texts include

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Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982), Fuentes’s Christopher Unborn (1987), and García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons (1987). The major magical realist masterpieces, apart from One Hundred Years of Solitude, are Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and one might add Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (2009–10).7 Many other titles could be mentioned. While a 2005 critical anthology treats magical realism as already having passed its apogee in world literature during the 1980s and 1990s, and Raymond Williams pronounced it “defunct” in 1995, magical realism continues to be written around the world. According to Sara Upstone, the MLA Arts and Humanities Index registers 125 entries for magical realism from 1985 to 1990 and over 300 in 2000 to 2005, and the same again in 2005 to 2010, leading her to reflect that magical realism has gone mainstream (a view shared by me and Hegerfeldt), and that contemporary criticism (in studies by Durix, Schroeder, Warnes, Quayson, Reeds, Upstone, and others) now explores diverse issues within magical realism, taking its existence for granted.8 Thus, it is currently a global mode (though not necessarily an entirely postcolonial one). As this trajectory suggests, magical realism is generally located after realism because it began during the dominance of that mode and departs from it; nevertheless, its characteristics can also be seen in much earlier literature, from the Odyssey, the Bible, the Mahabharata, Tale of the Heike, The Thousand and One Nights, and other ancient texts onward, as F. Abiola Ireli has recently confirmed by suggesting that Apuleius’s The Golden Ass might be “the earliest example of [magical realism] in prose fiction.”9 Its origins in the West are mixed, and stem also from surrealism, as indicated by the fact that Roh originally articulated the term to describe the turn back toward realism following the near-abstract and entirely unrealistic works of German Expressionism. Contact with European surrealism also affected the early boom writing of Latin American novelists such as Asturias and Carpentier. Thus, a possible formula might be: realism + surrealism = magical realism. But this genealogy would be too Eurocentric and leaves out of account the non-Western roots of the genre and its characteristic cultural hybridity. Surveying twentieth-century magical realism, one might posit an extremely general trajectory going from earlier nature-based rural texts, many of them from Latin America (Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo, García Márquez, Allende), to later urban non-natural international ones, based in cities around the world (Grass, Fuentes, Rushdie, Pynchon, Darrieussecq,

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Brockmeier, Murakami). But the facts of chronology fail to sustain that generalization, since other early examples are urban – Fuentes’s “Chac Mool” (1954) and Aura (1962) set in Mexico City, Cortázar’s “Áxolotl” (1951) in Paris, and Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” (1947) in New York – while a number of later texts feature rural settings, including Morrison’s post-Faulknerian Beloved, set partly in the rural South, and recent fictions by Okri, Castillo, Murakami, Mdaa, Obreht, Inoue, Oe, and others, including Native American novels such as Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1994), which privilege rural environments as repositories of traditional values. Some magical realist fictions are rural/ urban hybrids, such as Okri’s “Incidents at the Shrine,” set in both city and village, Thornton’s Imagining Argentina, split between Buenos Aires and the pampas, and Midnight’s Children, a Bombay novel that nevertheless includes a substantial forest section. Thus magical realism spans the era before and during what Jameson has described as postmodernism’s program of portraying “what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”10 When magical realism begins, nature has certainly not disappeared, but by now it has become increasingly urban, less and less concerned with the marvels of nature, as it was to some extent during the early boom. The narrator of Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales takes refuge in nature in the end, but in response to what are primarily urban (alienating) experiences in a primarily Parisian tale.

Characteristics In addition to the defining features mentioned, common elements of magical realism include the use of mythical figures – for example, the shape-shifter figure of Mackandal in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World; the young woman representing ancient Japan in fictions by Kyoka and Kawabata; the presence of history – the fighting that recreates the violencia of 1950s Colombia in One Hundred Years of Solitude; the Second World War in Grass’s The Tin Drum; the depiction of beliefs as actual – Azaro’s encounters with ghosts and gods in the forest in Okri’s The Famished Road; the presence of dream as real – the hallucinatory oneiric experiences of the voyagers in Harris’s Palace of the Peacock; primitivism – the power of an ancient statue to triumph over its proud possessor in Fuentes’s “Chac Mool”; the implied existence of more than one world – the existence of two moons in one of the worlds of Murakami’s 1Q84; the liminality of characters and phenomena often portrayed as passing between different realms – Azaro moving between spirit and actual village

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worlds in The Famished Road; different psychic worlds made real – Murikami’s chapter heading in 1Q84, “Something kicking at the far edges of consciousness.”11 Apart from the central dichotomy between the real and the magical, a number of other thematic dualisms structure magical realism: metatextual resonances versus political positioning, the psychic versus the territorial, myth versus history, primitivism versus cosmopolitanism, faith versus reason, nostalgia versus futurism, the erudite and esoteric versus the popular. Because it often overturns or intermingles such categories, magical realism has often been associated with the carnivalesque as formulated by Bakhtin, which reverses hierarchies. Moreover, the magic in magical realism may actively address certain problems. After her terrible pain and death at the end of Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), Lisa ends up in an idyllically portrayed Palestine, suckling her own mother. Actual magical and uncanny metafictional connections between characters in 1Q84 mitigate the otherwise often disconnected and alienating atmosphere of contemporary Tokyo. Finally, compared to much preceding modernism and some postmodernism, magical realism has broad appeal. It often (and increasingly) extends into popular fiction – Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume (1984), King’s Thinner (1984), Bender’s The Unbearable Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010), and movies – Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), Wolf (1994), Black Swan (2010), and Melancholia (2011).

Narrative techniques Many narrative techniques contribute to magical realism’s characteristic merging of realms and blurring of borders. Perhaps most importantly, magical events are described in realistic detail, and uncannily enough, the more realistically described details that accumulate around an impossible event, the more marvelous it seems. The trail of blood running from José Arcadio’s gunshot wound to Ursula’s kitchen came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, . . . went down steps and climbed over curbs, . . . crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, . . . made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, . . . and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.12

The narrator often presents magical elements amidst ordinary ones without registering surprise, displaying what Amaryll Chanady terms “authorial

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reticence,” causing readers to suspend disbelief. On the other hand, as Anne Hegerfeldt stresses, divergent viewpoints among characters may exist, so that the reader hesitates between different readings and worldviews, making “varying focalization” an important magical realist strategy. Similarly, Brenda Cooper maintains that what defines magical realism is “the mix of authorial reticence with authorial irony.”13 The merging of the real and the magical is facilitated by the text’s events often moving along a spectrum running between the amazing but real to the verifiably impossible. In One Hundred Years of Solitude¸ elements on that spectrum, ranging from real to increasingly magical, include ice, viewed as marvelous by Macondo’s inhabitants but real – even ordinary – for readers; the real yet amazing “light rain of golden flowers [that] fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm” during José Arcadio’s funeral; the still more amazing but perhaps still real body of José Arcadio, who remains for years in a kind of living death state, “huddled on a wooden stool underneath the palm shelter, . . . discolored by the sun and rain”; the doubtfully but almost plausibly real yellow clouds of butterflies that follow Mauricio Babilonia; the magnets that are miraculously strong enough to pull masses of iron household items behind them and even nearly draw nails out of buildings (“everyone was amazed to see pots and pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most”); the impossible event of the boiling pot that falls off the table without little José Arcadio having touched it; and the magical but very realistically described trail of blood cited earlier. 14 At the fully magical end of the spectrum comes the levitation of Remedios the Beauty, with all its realistic details: Ursula . . . watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.15

As mentioned, other magical realist techniques include the interfolding of different worlds, either actual or textual; reconfigurations of temporal sequence and spatial coherence; the reimagining of historical events; literalization that renders the verbal as actual; incorporation of myth into realistic narrative; and formal or cultural variation among focalizers.16

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Theoreticians of magical realism After initial critical interest in magical realism in the mid-1920s, then sustained attention during the 1940s through the 1960s, a critical lull characterizes the 1970s through the mid-1990s. A recent critical uptake around the turn of the millennium may stem from the increasing globalization of magical realism, the excellence of its texts, and/or its acknowledged importance as a postcolonial mode, coinciding with the development of postcolonial theory. Franz Roh’s 1925 formulation of magical realism as a revalorization of the actual world following expressionism’s excursions into the nonreal, is generally considered the initial recognition of the mode. “With the word ‘magic’ as opposed to ‘mystic,’ I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it,” Roh wrote.17 Roh’s essay reached Latin America in 1927 in Ortega y Gasset’s journal, Revista de Occidente, where it was applied to fiction by Borges and others in the literary avant-garde in Buenos Aires, as well as to Carpentier’s texts. Thereafter the term characterized and perhaps also inspired one strain of novels during the boom. Despite Roh’s seminal essay, Erik Camayd-Freixas and Christopher Warnes consider the most important critical link between European and Latin American magical realism to be Uslar Pietri. Pietri knew both the Italian theoretician Massimo Bontempelli, who (in his Journal 900) championed art that would present miracles in the midst of ordinary life, and which he also termed “magical realism,” as well as Carpentier and Miguel Angel Asturias, early Latin American practitioners.18 In contrast to more formalistically oriented descriptions, such as those by Chanady, Chiampi, and others, Carpentier’s culturally oriented notion of lo real maravilloso Americano (“the marvelous American real”) emphasizes the peculiarly American form of the marvelous real, in contrast to what he considers the “manufactured mystery” of artificial surrealist tricks such as Lautréamont’s famous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.19 Carpentier contrasts such a manufactured image with the marvelous indigenous synchretic baroque one of “an angel playing the maracas on the tympanum of a burning church” – an indigenous baroque marvelous real that grows out of Latin America’s marvelous nature and hybrid culture.20 That hybridity and complexity causes Carpentier to ally magical realism with the baroque, a subject recently pursued in studies of the Latin American neo-baroque, such as Lois Parkinson Zamora’s The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American

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Fiction (2006) and Zamora and Monika Kaup’s anthology Baroque New Worlds (2010). Earlier, Camayd-Freixas followed Carpentier’s lead in studying magical realism as a Latin American phenomenon, arguing for an ethnographic approach, and documenting its ties to a cultural primitivism that valorizes indigenous culture in Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo, and García Márquez, but also tying them to vanguardist literary tendencies: magical realism is not, then, a “school” or a literary “movement.” It is . . . a spontaneous phenomenon that arises at a given moment of cultural history, when primitivist and postvanguardist sensibilities, the fondness for anthropological topics referring to local and continental identity, and the search for a language with an American shape, cristalize in a new form of expression with universal aspirations.21

Similarly, Ato Quayson argues that Okri presents animism “as a surrogate for indigenous beliefs in spirits,” but also emphasizes that Okri’s texts “should be read more as a literary defamiliarization of indigenous beliefs than a true replica of such beliefs in reality.”22 Christopher Warnes importantly distinguishes between “faith-based” and “irreverent” magical realism. The first transmits a non-Western worldview without authorial intervention, presenting magical events and the faith they represent as real and valid; the second, self-conscious about language itself, “deconstructs the processes of narrativization,” casting an irreverent eye on all storytelling. Many texts contain both forms; significantly, the ur-text, One Hundred Years of Solitude, moves between the poles of faith and irreverence.23 It presents indigenous beliefs or attitudes – such as belief in the magical quality of magnets – as true, as well as instances of the self-conscious defamiliarization of language, such as the labeling of objects to stave off total amnesia when people have forgotten their names, which ultimately serves to question the automatic link between sign and referent. Slightly earlier, similarly probing the question of spirit, I attempted to articulate common denominators within all magical realism as a genre, despite different cultural traditions and themes, namely the “irreducible elements” of magic and what I called “defocalized” narrative, whose origin is uncertain, making way for the implicit presence of spirit within the discourse of realism. The term magical realism has had its naysayers, such as Toni Morrison and others who see its critical use as a suppression of inconvenient history in fiction, and the Latin American McOndo group, which protests the commodification of magical realism as a Latin American literary product – an export from the third world to the first. Critical controversies about

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how to study magical realism, whether as a global phenomenon or one attuned to more local concerns, mirror similar controversies over the dangers of globalization.

Globalization, postcolonialism, and magical realism Magical realism became an increasingly global phenomenon from the 1970s on. Nearly all magical realist novels involve the interpenetration of at least two cultures; indeed that contact zone often generates the elements of magic in the narrative. Given its early articulation in Latin America and continuing global spread, magical realism has both contributed to and drawn from what Moraru sees as a “cosmodern imaginary . . . the extension of the ethical and relational impetus in much recent philosophy, theory and imaginative literature across cultures, globally.”24 Homi Bhabha’s statement that “‘magical realism’ after the Latin American Boom, becomes the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world” confirms its prominence. That Bhabha embeds that statement in his consideration of nationhood in which “the margins of the nation displace the centre; the peoples of the periphery return to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis” suggests the global reach and hybrid nature of magical realism.25 And since it began before the global articulation of postcolonial theory, it both embodies that development avant la lettre and contributes to it. Magical realism’s movement beyond Latin America coincided with a turn toward history in post-boom Latin American novels such as Carpentier’s Rite of Spring (1978), García Márquez’s The General in his Labyrinth (1989), Fuentes’s The Campaign (1990) and Destiny and Desire (2008), and most recently in the new narco novels of the twenty-first century. Latin American magical realism has persisted beyond the boom, however –for instance, in García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons (1987), Fuentes’s Cristóbal nonato (1987), and García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992 ) – although it seems much less realized in the new millennium. Examples of magical realism abound in mainstream US fiction (Stephen King, Russell, Bender, Obreht, Brockmeier, and others) and, also in Latino and Native American texts (Robert Kroetsch, Cristina García, Ana Castillo, Ron Arias, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Thomas King).26 Operating at the intersection between Western realism and elements of other cultures – often myths and nonrealist narrative traditions – magical realism’s radically hybrid texts frequently valorize indigenous voices silenced by colonialism, embodying a postcolonial stance and hence performing the cultural work of literary decolonization, highlighting problems

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of cultural interface. Furthermore, as Stephen Slemon formulated it early on, like the postcolonial subject who lives between native and colonizing cultures, magical realism exists between two different literary modes, magic and realism, neither of which entirely dominates the other.27 In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Sir Francis Drake’s galleon mired in the jungle and the Banana company’s massacre of thousands satirize and critique colonization, while the marvels of Latin American reality like the yellow butterflies that follow Mauricio Babilonia or the levitation of Remedios the Beauty amidst a flurry of drying sheets celebrate its cultural imaginary. The magical irruption of the riotous and heterogeneous voices of midnight’s children in Saleem’s head counters and implicitly critiques both the homogenization of the colonial past and its continuation in the inclusive and often repressive Congress Party, verbally embodied in “All-India Radio.” The magical spirits that both entrance and terrify Azaro in the forest cause much less damage than the thugs that beat his father and hold the village in the grip of political terror, perpetuating the colonization of village life by brutal urban-based politicians. But such a postcolonial viewpoint is not necessarily always present in magical realism, and not always in an optimistic, progressive way. For example, many protagonists, while transmitting forgotten voices, affirming alternative realities and social possibilities, die at the end of their texts, confirming the inexorable realities of history and denying the possibility of escape beyond them into a magical realm of fulfillment; on the last page of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, the last Buendías perish, “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” Similarly, on the last page of Midnight’s Children, Saleem disappears into the multitude of “one two three, four hundred million five hundred six” “pieces of my body are falling off . . . bones splitting breaking . . . [reduced] to specks of voiceless dust.” And in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Tamina swims away from the distopically magical island of children and sinks like a stone, weighed down by her past.

Postmodernism and magical realism Studies of magical realism contain similar controversies to those that occur in treatments of postmodernism as to whether a text can be both postmodern and postcolonial. Maggie Bowers and I have both aligned the heterogeneity of magical realist practices that erode dichotomies and that use magical realist devices to disrupt categories of truth, reality, and history with Lyotard’s call for postmodernists to “be witnesses to the unrepresentable”

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and to “wage war on totality.”28 Accusations that the postmodern selfreflexive textual mode precludes political and historical relevance are often defused by the concurrence of such textual self-reflexivity and paratactic prose with political critique, as in García Márquez, Fuentes, Grass, Rushdie, Okri, Morrison, and others. Thus, there can exist a fruitful dichotomy between linguistic innovation and political consciousness, often (although not always) embodied in the conjunction of postrealist, self-conscious literary style and postcolonial liberationist politics. Not always, but not infrequently, magical realist texts contain postmodern metafictional asides or threads: Melquíades’s clairvoyant chronicle of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude resembles the novel itself; the title of Brockmeier’s The Illumination suggests how magical realism highlights certain features of texts. More rarely, metafictional moments seem to describe the characteristic real/ magical duality of magical realism itself. In García Márquez’s “Light is like Water,” “household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, flew with their own wings through the kitchen sky”;29 in Midnight’s Children, Saleem has adopted “matter of fact descriptions of the outré and bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday.”30

Magical realism, feminism, and ecology Just as magic can empower postcolonial subjects in magical realism, so in a number of texts magic is used to empower female subjects. Various critics – including Doris Meyer, Patricia Hart, Deborah Cohn, and Shannin Schroeder – have aligned magical realism by women with female empowerment. I have speculated that elements of mystery in female magical realism (even in texts by men) may ally it with Irigaray’s idea of la mystérique, “a sensible transcendental coming into being through” women.31 Magically articulated connections between bodies and places in texts such as Beloved, Castillo’s So Far from God, Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales, and others can sometimes be related to theories of female bodily relatedness to the land advanced by feminist theoreticians such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval. Most strikingly, perhaps, in this regard, is The House of the Spirits, in which Allende can be seen to rewrite One Hundred Years of Solitude in a mode of female empowerment. Carrying on from the matriarchal figure of Ursula in García Márquez’s novel, she transposes Melquíades’s magical narrative powers into Clara’s telepathy. Such clairvoyance, together with Alba’s rejection of her father’s tyrannical rule, and the survival of Clara’s notebooks and her story, creates a female genealogy that imagines beyond the

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historical atrocities of the Pinochet regime, but without camouflaging either public horrors such as corrupt elections and the killing of the regime’s critics, or private violence such as “the grandson of the woman who was raped [repeating] the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist.”32 A similar female empowerment via magical events emanates from the feminocentric novels Beloved and So Far from God, and the movie Like Water for Chocolate, all of which enact a female genealogy of power and resistance that lasts for several generations. Given its primarily intercultural and ontological bases, for the most part magical realism has not frequently treated ecological concerns. If nature appears, it is more frequently as a resource than a ruined site, though I would predict that this trait may change in future magical realist texts, with increasing public attention to ecological damage. Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) is centrally concerned with imagining ways in which the earth might be saved from our encroachment on it, and is thus ecological. Russell’s Swamplandia (2011) plays off the old-timey alligator show performed by the narrator’s family against its rival, a fake corporate and Disneylandesque theme park, the “World of Darkness,” on the mainland, thus privileging relatively unspoiled nature. As mentioned earlier, recent magical realist novels with rural settings often implicitly valorize village culture that exists in proximity to nature in contrast to urban corruption or alienation, thus constituting what we might call a postmodern primitivism. In Okri’s early story, “Incidents at the Shrine,” Anderson experiences a crisis of alienation, including wounds from a “fire [that] was intent on him because he had no power.”33 On returning to his village, he undergoes a magical dream cure by a “raw and god-like” “Image-maker,” in which he encounters mythical ancestor figures, and from which he emerges with a renewed sense of vigor, a “new heaviness,” and a “new simplicity of his life.” The Image-maker tells him that “around this time, spirits from all over the world come to our village. . . . You must come home now and again. This is where you derive power.”34

Envoi: magical realism, its own thing Seen as belonging to postcolonialism or postmodernism (or late modernism), by the twenty-first century magical realism is now recognized as a prominent contemporary genre in its own right. Moving beyond the flowering of postcolonial magical realism, the intersecting worlds in more recent fiction may be cultural, but also they may not be, or the cultures may coexist within one society rather than between them. Anne Hegerfeldt

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focuses not on the marginal status of the author but on that of the characters. For her, “authors writing from the cultural centre may equally feel an interest in challenging the dominant world-view, and to this end choose to employ the magical realist mode,” selecting as “focalizers . . . characters who can be considered in some way Other.”35 The intersection of different kinds of actual and textual worlds proliferates in twenty-first century magical realism. One concluding example: Murakami’s 1Q84 embeds magic, such as little people emerging from one character’s mouth, and near-magic, such as another character’s ability to kill with a homemade needle inserted in the back of the neck, in an otherwise realistic textual collage organized via characters whose interactions constitute what we might term proximate distances, or tenuously intersecting worlds, including textual worlds. As we read, we realize that what we thought were separate stories may be embedded fictions. For example, Aomame’s and Fuka Eri’s stories of estrangement from family bear uncanny similarities to each other and, in turn, to those in Fuka Eri’s novel that Tengo has been translating, so that we are no longer sure what is fiction and what is reality, nor whether the two women are separate, the same, or magically joined, since Tengo sleeps with Fuka Eri and Aomame becomes pregnant. In short, then, while it is crucial to attend to cultural specifics in magical realist texts, and not to critically over-homogenize it, comparative literary studies must contribute to an understanding of the broad appeal of the genre and to analyze how and why its particular characteristics have enabled cultural voices and styles to develop and to create new international literary communities that bridge cultural gaps. Given its eclectic features derived from a variety of genres, its widespread dispersal and attendant crossing of cultural borders, its continuing appeal worldwide, magical realism is a pervasive force in contemporary international literature and a central component of global postmodernism. Notes 1 Ato Quayson, “Magical Realism in the African Novel,” in F. Abiola Irele (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 162. 2 Arturo Uslar-Pietri, “Realismo Mágico,” in Godos, insurgentes y visionarios (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), 34. 3 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1992), 301–2. 4 Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Random House, 1959), 59.

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5 Erik Camayd-Freixas, Realismo mágico y primitivismo: Relecturas de Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo, y García Márquez (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), 232. 6 See Camayd-Freixas, Realismo mágico y primitivismo, 179–82. 7 Other key international texts otherwise not mentioned in this chapter include Kawabata’s “One Arm” (1961), Schwartz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude (1972), Kennedy’s Ironweed (1979), Oe’s The Game of Contemporaneity (1979), Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said (1983), Saramago’s The Stone Raft (1986), Ben Jelloun’s The Sacred Night (1987), Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989), Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Byatt’s The Conjugal Angel (1992), Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Okri’s Songs of Enchantment (1993), Mdaa’s The Heart of Redness (2000), and Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (2011). 8 Sara Upstone, “Magical Realism and Postcolonial Studies: Twenty-First Century Perspectives,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 17/1 (2011), 162. 9 “Introduction: Perspectives on the African novel,” in Ireli (ed.), Companion to the African Novel, 3. 10 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late, 1. 11 Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (New York: Random House, 2011), 743. 12 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1971), 29–30. 13 Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye (New York: Routledge, 1998), 34. 14 Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 11, 84, 137. 15 One Hundred Years of Solitude., 223. 16 For additional narrative techniques, see Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 88–132. 17 Franz Roh, “Magic Realism: Post Expressionism,” trans. Wendy B. Faris in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 116–17. 18 For a good succinct history of magical realism see Christopher Warnes, “Naturalizing the Supernatural: Faith, Irreverence, and Magical Realism,” Literature Compass 2 (2005), 2–6. 19 Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” trans. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Tanya Huntington in Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 104. 20 Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Avon, 1979), 109. 21 Camayd-Freixas, Realismo mágico y primitivismo, 52–3. 22 Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, and Ben Okri (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 149. 23 Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (London: Palgrave, 2009), 76, 96.

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24 Moraru, Towards Cosmodernism, 30. 25 Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 199), 6. 26 See also the discussion by Shannin Schroeder in Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 2004), 121–52. 27 Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism and Postcolonial Discourse” in Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 410. 28 Maggie Bowers, Magical Realism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 81–2; Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 142, 145; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82. 29 Gabriel García Márquez, “Light is Like Water,” in Strange Pilgrims, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Knopf, 1993), 160. 30 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Avon, 1982), 261. 31 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 212; Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader edited by Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 144. 32 Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, trans. Magda Bogin (New York: Knopf, 1985), 367. 33 Ben Okri, Incidents at the Shrine (London: Heineman, 1986), 55. 34 Okri, Incidents at the Shrine, 64. 35 Anne Hegerfeldt, Lies That Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen Through Contemporary Fiction from Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 116–17.

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9

Rise of theory Thomas Docherty

Introductory: ancients and postmoderns “Theory” is not new. It has been with us at least since Plato asked us to consider the relation of poetry to politics in his Republic. That argument is “theoretical” because it attempts to deal with poetry and the arts in general terms, and not in relation to the particularities of one text or another. Plato was concerned to find what it was that many texts held in common as a means of understanding the power and purchase of each in particular. That was important because poetry mattered, carrying serious implications for the organization of the polity. Thinking thus theoretically – or in terms of general abstraction – allows us to see that poetry and the arts shape everyday material history and the way that we live together. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, followed similarly in his Poetics when he tried to abstract general “rules of tragedy” from particular plays that won popular approval.1 Theory, then, in this fundamental and ancient form, invites us to understand the particular in the light of more general abstraction, but it does this to be able to attend more fully to material history or politics. These ancient precursors reveal that “theory” is there to protect the political sphere from the potentially dangerous powers – the subversive powers – of poetry or art. This persists through the twentieth-century “rise of theory” in our university institutions and general culture. That is an ostensibly paradoxical claim, given the supposed radical credentials of theory in its contemporary institutionalized forms. However, the emergence of various problems that we identify as “the postmodern” helps us to clarify and prove the claim. The famous and extreme cliché is that Plato banished the poets from the ideal Republic. That, however, is not strictly true. It is only one specific kind of literature that is suspect; and the argument is uncannily prescient of some key aspects of what we identify as the postmodern. Plato proposes, via his “character” Socrates, that mimesis – those passages in a text that are 159

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direct speech – should be banished. Meanwhile, diegesis – the narrative – can remain. Storytelling is fine, but the adoption of voices other than one’s own, the mimicry of other people, is incipiently dangerous and should be discouraged, even banned. The problem with mimesis, it is argued, is that it can mislead us in the sphere of education, itself seen as politically central to, and even constitutive of, society. If the future guardians of a society have imitated the speech of bad characters too much, the argument runs, then they may begin to “inhabit” those bad characters, and indeed to become as bad as them, to assume that the way the bad speak is authoritative and normative. However, Republic – and especially those key passages arguing that mimesis should be banned – is itself a mimetic text, the representation of direct speech (Socrates and his various interlocutors). The profound irony is that, if mimesis must go, then so, too, must go the argument in Republic suggesting that mimesis must go; which means that mimesis is re-permitted, which in turn means that Republic can be re-admitted; once re-admitted, so too is the argument against mimesis, which entails the banishment of Republic; and so on ad infinitum. Such radical Platonic irony is something that, in our times, we recognize and label as undecidability; and, indeed, such self-reflexivity is usually construed as axiomatically postmodern.2 We are left unable to judge in a determining or finalized fashion; and we are constantly being driven to paralogy and to paradox. Self-reflexivity such as this is one characteristic much associated with postmodern art and culture; yet it has ancient roots. Not only, then, is “theory” not new; neither, in fact, is the postmodern. Indeed, at least one source of what Lyotard thinks of as a prime characteristic of the postmodern mood stems from one such ancient paradox, that of the Cretan liar. Consider the sentence: “I am lying.” It is either true or false. Yet, if it is true that I am lying (i.e., if the statement is true), then logically I am lying when I say that “I am lying” – which means that I am telling the truth (and therefore lying). Yet, if it is a lie (conditional upon it being true), then it is a true statement – which means that it is a lie. The consequent see-saw of indeterminacy gives us what Lyotard thought of as the fundamental postmodern problem: how do we judge? His reply is that proper judgment – the quest for a just judgment – requires that we abandon stable criteria or rules for judgment.3 We must “judge without criteria,” he says; otherwise put, abandon theory, if we construe theory as our stable governing principle. This is a postmodern undermining of “theory” from within theory itself.4 If theory depends on the establishment of general principles (as in

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Plato’s idea), then theory is useful to the extent that it gives us grounds for judgment. However, Lyotard’s postmodern is one whereby we must abandon such theory in favor of judging itself, and any judgment that is based on established grounds or criteria is, ipso facto, not judgment at all, and certainly not a move that is interested in the pursuit of the just. Rather, it would simply be the filling of an invoice, the bureaucratic or technocratic fulfilling of a role in a preestablished routine.5 Much of this can be explained by a consideration of “the rise of theory” through the late twentieth century and into our contemporary institutional, cultural, and political predicaments. In what follows, I will identify two contrasting theoretical accounts of the postmodern. I can then explore a brief history of “the rise of theory” in relation to these prevailing understandings of the term, and this will enable my argument about the place of theory now, in the contemporary institution. The trajectory of the argument will suggest two controversial things: (1) that “the rise of theory” leads inexorably to the undermining of theory; (2) that the crisis brought about by this enables – and even requires – a rehabilitation of some of Plato’s concerns about the proper relation of the aesthetic to the political. What we will discover is an uncanny and extremely uncomfortable intimacy between the ostensibly radical credentials of theory as it arises and the advances of “management” and of money as the prime concern of education.

Two postmoderns There are two prevailing attitudes toward the postmodern. One – associated primarily with Fredric Jameson – sees it as a historicizing term. Here, the postmodern is characterized by that often rather baffling experimental art that has become our dominant mode ever since the end of the Second War, essentially “after” the radical experimentations of modernism.6 In his elaboration of this, Jameson delineates the intimacy, even correspondence, between what he identifies (after Ernest Mandel) as a moment of “late capitalism” in the political and economic sphere and what he identifies as a series of aesthetic predispositions (pastiche, the “waning of affect” for example) that are occasioned by that set of political and cultural determinants. Late capitalism produces postmodernism as its “cultural logic,” according to this; and there is, as it were, a historical necessity at work, the unmasking of which is the critic’s primary task. Theory here explains the baffling event or experience of the art. The other conception of postmodernism – more often associated with Jean-François Lyotard – considers the postmodern as a kind of mood, a

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mode or attitude.7 Postmodernism is not something specific to a particular historical moment as its cultural logic or product; rather, the postmodern describes a particular set of conditions in which we are called to “judge without criteria.” In this, the postmodern is episodic and can arise at any juncture. Further, when it does so arise, the resolution of the postmodern mood – that is, the judgment when it is made – is actually the founding condition of the modern. Paradoxically, the postmodern here predates (or preconditions) the very possibility of the establishment of the modern or of modernity itself. A crude and oversimplified explanation might go like this: Virginia Woolf, say, abandons the rules (the theory) of the novel, but continues nonetheless to write; the result (say, Mrs. Dalloway) is of the nature of an “event,” something that could not have been predicted from preexisting “rules of the novel” but that now demands attention. In engaging with that event, we find that Woolf was “working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done” when she has made her text.8 We can now, after the fact, describe those new rules, and, in doing so, we are formulating the theory of modernism. But equally, once we do so, we have abandoned the postmodern, and have abandoned the demand for judgment. It is now the rules of modernism that will provide the criteria against which we judge Woolf ’s text. The judgment is, as it were, “contained” (in every sense) in those criteria, and is given and predictable. “Event” is constrained by “theory.” In Lyotard, a postmodern disposition is characterized by uncertainty and indeterminacy, a radical difficulty in finding the grounds on which judgments, both aesthetic and political, can be safely based. This postmodern describes a mood that produces “events,” whereas Jameson’s postmodern is a product of the economic conditions of late capitalism and is explained by a theory adequate to our understanding of capital. Where these two postmoderns collide productively is over the question of whether we can have some kind of grand unifying theory that will help us understand, explain, and predict material conditions and realities, including aesthetic and cultural realities. In short, the relation between the postmodern and the rise of theory is one whereby we are required to explore the conditions governing “just judgment.” It is this that is at the cornerstone of any question considering “the rise of theory” in a context of postmodern culture and in our contemporary institutions. That argument sets up issues that persist right through to the contemporary moment; and the issues in question come to a specific kind of end in the arguments around the realities of our intellectual institutions: the university and its functions.

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A brief history of theory’s rise Given that theory is not new, it follows that to speak of its rise is really to address how it became prominent, controversial, and almost an autonomous discipline throughout the later twentieth century. One fairly crude history might explain this. Until the great mid-century wars, higher education was the preserve of the sociopolitical elites. In the wake of such catastrophe, and in the wake of decolonization, there came a massive pressure for greater democratization. There can be no question that the constituency for higher education was greatly expanded, and demographic change modified higher education’s disciplinary demands. In advanced literary study, say, the route to scholarly authority would have been through bibliography: the editing and establishment of a so-called primary text. When many are involved, this is no longer practical. Quite apart from anything else, the “primary texts” and/or manuscripts are not widely distributed. Advanced study now moves not into the establishing of the text as stable monument, but rather to what we can do with those monuments once established. Criticism replaces bibliography; and “textual criticism” changes its sense: no longer working out the placing of a semicolon, but rather the semantic significance of such a placing. Instead, then, of editing John Donne’s writings (as did Herbert Grierson in 1912, or even Helen Gardner in 1952), we now write extended, argumentative, and often contradictory analyses of his texts (John Carey and Arthur Marotti, say in the 1980s). There are other, more theoretically important, explanations for the rise of theory, however. These explanations are nonetheless aligned with the great political changes and are shaped by them. Yet they also remain haunted by those ancient anxieties: what is the point of art? Does poetry matter? The period of modernity, especially in its twentieth-century guise, identifies itself through a post-Enlightenment ideal of the triumph of science and reason. Science matters; and it matters politically because it can be shown to have direct and immediate empirical effect. When Enola Gay drops Little Boy, the effect is clear. This is material. Yet those in arts, humanities, and cultural studies all know that one reason why this is so powerful is precisely because of the image and the conditions of its reproducibility: the mushroom cloud as a representation of power.9 Politics funds the material reality of the bomb and manages the aesthetic signs around it. The uneasy relationship between politics, science, and art is probably best illustrated precisely by a physicist. When André Geim was asked in 2006 whether his discovery of graphene would have political consequences, he replied sardonically, “It’s a

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physics paper!” meaning that nobody except physicists would take any serious notice of it. “So,” he goes on, “I am sure that our research will not cause any civil unrest, and no government will fall.”10 This issue had troubled poets as well; and Plato’s ancient anxiety continues through into contemporary times. Yeats famously asked in “The Man and the Echo:” “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot”; and Auden replies, in his elegiac poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen.”11 Historically, many theories have been elaborated precisely to enable us to deny any such material efficacy for poetry or literature. This is exactly the kind of “anti-theory” position proposed as normal and normative by the Great Books curriculum that constituted the proper domain of literary study for the elite. Even when theory starts its rise, it finds the relation to politics awkward. Consider some of the most dominant theories of modern times in this light. Russian Formalism eschews any idea of straightforward linguistic referentiality, preferring instead to focus attention inward to the architectonics of the text, like Shklovsky finding literariness (literaturnost) in de-familiarization techniques (ostranenie). Others, like Jakobson, attend to the formal systems of communication itself, in which the social relation of “sender” and “addressee” becomes highly and systemically formalized, avoiding material realities (such as tact, say, identified by Bakhtin in his critique of the Formalists). American New Criticism likewise strives to isolate literature from its material effect or efficacy. It eschews authorial intention and issues of “affect” upon the reader, inviting us instead to construe the text as “verbal icon” with all the religiosity that that implies, or as “well-wrought urn” with all the classical certainty and stability that such phrasing ensures.12 In all of these, there is a Thomist quidditas to the text, which protects it from being sullied by human historical engagement. Those two modes dominated twentieth-century criticism, albeit with the many variant forms deriving from them. Despite the fact that FrancoGerman “theory” explodes precisely by challenging the orthodoxies of such neo-formalist techniques, it nonetheless remains constrained precisely by those orthodoxies, despite itself. Theory, in its “high” and risen moment, eventuates in the extraordinary scientific (some would say “scientistic”) sophistication of postwar structuralism, through which aesthetic theory tried to gain some of the same standing socially and culturally as the sciences. The clearest example of such “scientism” can be found in the work of Jean Ricardou in his work on the French nouveau roman, and, less dramatically but still formally constrained, in the work of Michael Riffaterre or Gerard Genette.

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There is an enormous paradox here, in that structuralism was controversial – but for the wrong reasons. It was presented as something that might bring governments down, because (in its form as semiotics) it demystified all ideologies that paraded themselves as “natural” and revealed that that which presented as “nature” was always really a construct of culture, and thus shaped by vested but covert interest.13 This was what Nathalie Sarraute referred to as the “age of suspicion” in her 1956 “manifesto” for the new novel. And it coincides with the period not just of the nouveau roman in all its evident “constructedness,” but also with the emergence of a writer such as Thomas Pynchon, whose massively overplotted texts such as The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) radiate the culture of paranoia. Once we know that everything is constructed – and constructed by covert hands in the interests of others who are blinding us to their devious ways – we can then reconstruct or (in due course) deconstruct, or change things. However, the “structuralist controversy,” both the controversy itself and also the 1966 conference of that title held in Johns Hopkins in 1966, and which brought “theory” storming into the US – with its threat of bringing about political change – was simply a kind of “scandal” generated in order to maintain the formalist sequestration of literature from political activity and, beyond that, the formal isolation of the university from the material conditions of social life. So, in the heyday of structuralism, while the literature professors screamed revolution, the finance and other merchants enriched themselves and entrenched their social and political position and power.14 It is at this moment that we witness the rise of several theoretical positions that are explicitly concerned to widen literary study, and to attend to a broad series of cultural issues.15 Thus feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, deconstruction, and so on all go beyond the text, while at the same time construing the general culture as if it were a text: readable, re-readable, and – like the scholarly texts of the Great Books canon that theory ostensibly derides – able to be changed or “reedited” to make them appear to be saying things that the theorist needs them to be saying in order to justify her or his own activity.

From deconstruction to postmodern despair Ostensibly, deconstruction is the great “revolutionary” theoretical moment. No more is the text a stable verbal icon or venerably “ideal” form, Platonic or otherwise. The great fundamental understanding of deconstruction is

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that it is shaped by the prioritization of différance: texts are conditioned by “difference” (they somehow do not quite cohere and are organized around structural oppositions whose relative priority can be changed) and by “deferral” (in that we can never arrive at a final and definitive meaning for them). A “classical” deconstruction would operate by identifying the structural oppositions that hold a text together (say, the opposition between nature and culture, or that between Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights in Emily Brontë’s novel) and that structure our understanding of it (one pole of each opposition is proposed as normative, the second deviant). It would then destabilize the opposition by showing that the opposed elements cross-contaminate in some way (nature is always conditioned by cultural constructions of it, say; or the wildness of the Heights actually provides a shelter and seemingly cultured security from the storm that began outside the Grange when Lockwood walks from one to the other). The hierarchy that governed the semantic shape of the opposition is thereby reversed; and so, the text “differs” from itself and its structural form is exploded, leaving us with a radically unstable “force” that is unamenable to straightforward semantic reduction to one meaning. The process, however, cannot stop there, for we now have a different structural opposition in play, and this, in turn, is ripe for deconstruction. Any hope for a meaning is thus “deferred” potentially indefinitely. This, while obviously akin to Platonic irony in the form of “undecidability,” actually owes a great deal to the Enlightenment, and, most specifically to its modern project of philosophical Leibnizian Optimism. The “project of modernity” once identified by Habermas subscribes to the view that Enlightenment proposes the possibility of human emancipation from myth and superstition through the use of reason in the advancing of a progressive history.16 Faced with a difficult material reality, including obvious evil and the fact of death, Leibniz, in common with other Christian exponents of Enlightenment, was at pains to recover a benevolent God. Hence we derive the famous simple formulation, satirized by Voltaire in Candide, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Thus, for example, the “meaning” of something that is ostensibly evil or nasty can be shown to be “different” and “deferred:” the Lisbon earthquake looks bad, but, seen sub specie aeternitatis (i.e., its meaning deferred until a later moment), it is actually a positive good (i.e., it differs from what it seems: Lisbon is rebuilt as we now know it, a city of great beauty and advanced technology). For the postmodern, this Optimism is clearly a delusion, a set of semantic tricks whose effect is to allay the difficulty of our engagement

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with material reality, biopolitics, mortality, and history, and – crucially – with issues of how to judge events in a just fashion. Derrida, of course, would not himself have easily parroted the Optimistic worlds of a Miltonic Satan, “Evil, be thou my Good.” Derrida’s trouble with structuralism – indeed with all existing theory – was precisely that it evaded the issue of force and its unavailability for a reduction to sense. In this sense, oddly, Derrida himself is at odds with the prevailing understanding of deconstruction: when it becomes an iterable “method,” deconstruction is as structuralist as the theory it wishes to oppose and question. In “Force and Signification,” Derrida takes structuralism to task for its fascination with scientific abstraction. For Derrida, the great problem was how we could possibly address actuality and its powers, and he shows that structuralism – precisely in its concern for “form” – is too abstract, too “theoretical” in its desire to establish comparability between discrete particulars. When theoretical work fails to attend to particularity (the singularity of events), it also thereby fails to attend to material realities, to force. The problem that Derrida sees with the prevailing structuralist mode of theory at this moment is that it reduces force to form. As he puts it, “Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is, to create. This is why literary criticism is structuralist in every age, in its essence and destiny.”17 Here, only here, is the possibility of a proper overlap between Derrida’s work and the postmodern. It is not “deconstruction” that is postmodern: in fact deconstruction when it becomes a method or theory is precisely modern, all too modern. The intimacy of Derrida and Lyotard, such as it is, lies here: Derrida is eager to release and acknowledge “force”; Lyotard respects the “event.” Like force, an event happens when that which occurs could not have been predicted by a preexisting state of affairs or by a predetermining set of conditions. The event “erupts” like force itself: uncategorizable, unpredictable, unprepared for. The name we sometimes give to it is “love” (if we are Plato or Badiou) or “history” (if we are Marx)18. As Marx knew when he advanced the thinking of modernity under the sign of Enlightenment, the problem with history is, quite simply, to get it started.

Despair, therefore Adorno In 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their own version of this: Dialectic of Enlightenment. This makes the startling, shocking claim that “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” and that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster

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triumphant.”19 Why would these be so critical of a philosophical and political drive that is governed by the demand for human emancipation from our enthrallment to superstitions through the progressive use of critical reason? The issue is that one specific kind of reason – mathematical logic and computation – asserts itself as the only form of reason. Though they do not put it in these specific terms, the case is that algebra (the re-casting of particulars as generalized abstractions) and geometry (the organization of force into form) assume a totalizing power in modernity. It is through the prioritization of these that we construe the world and its history as “if p, then q:” a logic of “necessity” that is purely abstract and formal, and that absolves us of any requirement for material action. In this state of affairs, “From now on, matter would at last be mastered without any illusion of ruling or inherent powers, of hidden qualities. For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect.”20 In fact, for the Enlightenment, nothing can be permitted to escape from the rule of computation and utility, because Enlightenment is precisely about overcoming nature, mastering matter, overcoming – reducing the force of – the biopolitical fact of death. As Wittgenstein later has it, “Death is not an event in life. It is not lived through.”21 Enlightenment logic reduces death (or the fact of force) to abstraction (the death of others), and it thus explains technological warfare. Such a thought is developed much further in the work of Bauman, for whom there is a logical relation between modernity and the Holocaust. It is not that modernity “leads to” the Holocaust; rather, the camps are organized around precisely the same logic as that which governs scientific progress and efficiency.22 In reason such as this, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that “The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter.” Everything here is translated and reduced thereby, and Enlightenment “works” precisely by abstracting from particulars to yield generality. Thus we get “principles” that will eventually yield also the “principles of literary criticism”: theory.23 The “rise of theory,” in this sense, is entirely complicit with precisely the kind of politics that it is ostensibly designed to counter. It gives us the world well lost. As Rorty succinctly put it, while the world inside the sequestered university was becoming nicer (people were no longer casually racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on), in the world outside, people were being routinely shafted.24 The university thus becomes the “scandal” that justifies, in material reality, what it condemns in its advancing and rise of theory.

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After Adorno and Horkheimer, we can see that the risen theory not only habitually reduces force to form, but it also establishes “exchangeability” as its guiding principle. This is the algebra of theory, and we know it as semiotics, which forms the core of all cultural studies.25 “The bourgeois world is ruled by equivalence,” they write and we might recast this as “the bourgeois world is consolidated by the mutability of signs.” A theoretical consciousness typically fails to engage material reality, preferring to operate at the level of the “signs” of reality: we do not see the gun pointed at our heads, we see the gun as a signifying practice and analyze it in terms that avoid the pending fact of death. Might it be more appropriate to fight in order to disarm the gun? This is the question theory must now face: as Philip Sidney would have thought it, how does gnosis become praxis?26 If the bourgeois world is ruled by equivalence, then it makes sense to engage one of our most dominant locations of “the mutability of signs”: money. Money, in one sense, is profoundly immaterial: it typically consists of promises and debts or duties. It works as a bond, without itself having any intrinsic value. To ask, as Lyotard did during the exhibition that he curated in 1984 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, called Les Immateriaux, “what is a franc worth?” is meaningless, for it depends on the franc’s location within an ever-shifting system of values and significations: franc or euro against sterling; sterling in turn against dollar; dollar again yen; and so on, indeterminately and undecidably. Money is at the center of our concern with theory in the postmodern, for in both we find the logic of undecidability combined with the necessity of decision: just judgment, or the judgment of justice and justness itself. As I turn to this, we will see, shockingly, that “the rise of theory” is consistent with and supportive of the rise of neoliberalism.

Follow the money In his 2003 book, The Immaterial, André Gorz argues that typical labor no longer brings the human into direct contact with the resistant materiality of the world; rather, labor is now characterized as “service.” Formal etiquette is more important than force, which would be appropriate to making steel, tilling soil, and so on. In “the knowledge economy,” work becomes “the management of a continuous information flow,” in and through which it is not the specific knowledge or vocational skill of the worker that is important. Now, instead, “behavior” is key: “behavioural skills, expressive and imaginative abilities and personal involvement in the task at hand.”27 This is, of course, the “business” of the university, site and

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progenitor of the Wissengesellschaft, the société de la connaissance, in which the university thinks that knowledge is “a business.” Gorz cites Pierre Lévy: “from now on, everything and everyone is a business”; and all is subject to management, self-entrepreneurship. “Such, at least, is the neo-liberal vision of the future of work: the abolition of salaried employment, generalized self-entrepreneurship, the subsumption of the whole person and the whole of life by capital, with which everyone identifies entirely;”28 so, now, “Everything becomes a commodity. Selling oneself extends to all aspects of life. Everything is measured in money”— including the institution of the university.29 This – money – is what the university is now for, and it has learned its trade partly through the successful neutering of “theory” as the ground of bourgeois exchange. Theory is domesticated as a university discipline or field of study, extending the principle of equivalence that governs modern life and capital. It is the rise of theory, especially within the university, that has contributed to the advance of a neo-liberal ideology. Marx famously argued that we should always start from the real conditions of everyday life; and theory as we now know it is precisely what stops us from doing so. It stops us because it “formalizes” force, reduces everything to “comparability” via a semiotics that collapses things into the signs-of-things. The “rise of theory,” paradoxically, has arrested the drive of the postmodern, which would want to release force and to produce events; but this – experience – is what the modern world cannot abide. Experience must be managed, just as people must be managed – lest they disturb existing vested interests. Plato would have understood. “Theory” in this constricting form has yielded the cult and culture of “management” that blights contemporary study.30 The ideology of modern management fulfills the destiny of “theory.” First, it ignores the particular in a bogus democracy in which all have to be treated as if they are equal, instead of addressing the historical fact of inequality and its problems. This starts with managing a curriculum in which, say, a module in deconstruction “equals” one in macroeconomics because, considered at the abstract level of a lowest common denominator, they are prescribed the same number of hours of study. It continues through all evaluations of “quality,” which have to be reduced to the abstractions of quantity or measure (the UK’s REF evaluations, say, or Australia’s ERA evaluations – a now-internationalizing process whereby an institution’s funding is dependent upon evaluation of the quality of its research output every five years or so). At its extreme, it presupposes (as in HR ideology) that all human interaction can be an object of management, which leads to the troubling

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attack on academic freedoms precisely when critical statements have to be recaptured and redomesticated. Everything is managed: research, teaching, faculty, students, experience, thought and criticism. It is “the rise of theory” that has facilitated this, for it is this that has permitted and encouraged us to believe in the “mastery of nature” – through its management by abstraction, and especially the abstraction of money or capital. This may be dispiriting, but the outcome is more positive: it means that, as Marx said with respect to history, the problem is not to understand theory but, in the postmodern, to get it started. If it is to rise, then that rising can be called for now: it calls us to judgment and to the ongoing search for justice, but a justice that has no single and stable unchanging ground: no God, no verbal icons, no guru, no abstract form. It calls us, in short, to make judging and the quest for justice a material and historical reality. Then, we might see the rise of theory. Notes 1 See Plato, Republic, especially Books 2, 3, 10; and cf. Aristotle, Poetics. 2 See, for example, Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity (London: Hutchinson, 1985); cf. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 3 See especially Jean François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester University Press, 1985). 4 See also Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester University Press, 1986). 5 The best account of the rise of bureaucracy is in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958). 6 For detail, see Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 7 See Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition. 8 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. 9 The classic discussion of this is Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” See Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973). 10 Interview with André Geim, http://sciencewatch.com/articles/andre-k-geiminterview 11 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), 393; W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1976), 197. 12 See, for example, Shklovsky’s 1917 essay on “Art as Technique” in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism (University of Nebraska, 1965); W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (Kentucky University Press, 1954); Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York, 1947).

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13 The greatest exemplars of such semiotics were Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco. 14 See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 15 This is a movement described and argued for by Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991). 16 See Jürgen Habermas, “Project of Modernity,” in Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader. 17 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 6–7. 18 See Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012) and Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 19 T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cummings (1944; Verso, 1968), 6. 20 Adorno Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7. 21 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 6.4311. 22 For more on this, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); but cf also Paul Valéry, La Crise de l’esprit (1991) available at http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/Valery_paul/crise_de_lesprit/ valery_esprit.pdf; and see also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Danel Heller-Roazen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 23 For an explanation of the Enlightenment sources of this, see Thomas Docherty Criticism and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 1993). 24 See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press, 1998). 25 It is important to distinguish the study of cultures, such as was carried out in Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK, influenced by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, from institutionalized forms of “Cultural Studies” that are less rigorous, less historically meticulous. These latter tend to reduce material “things in the world” to the “signs” of things, which allows for semiotic analysis of signs, while leaving “things” themselves intact. The classic analysis further reduces the complexity of the signs in question to signs of class, race, gender, sexuality; and while analyzing the signs of these things, real oppressions based on them continue. 26 Philip Sidney, “Apology for Poetry,” in Edmund D. Jones, ed., English Critical Essays XVI-XVIII Centuries (Oxford University Press, 1975). Consider also the work of Stanley Fish, for whom it has been an axiomatic principle of pragmatic reading that texts “do” things. 27 André Gorz, The Immaterial, trans. Chris Turner (Chicago: Seagull, 2010), 6–7 28 Gorz, The Immaterial, 24; see also Pierre Lévy, World Philosophie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000). 29 The Immaterial, 23. 30 See Liz Morrish, “Institutional Discourse and the Cult(ure) of Managerialism,” in Discover Society, available at: www.discoversociety.org/2014/05/06/institu tional-discourse-and-the-culture-of-managerialism/

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part iii

The major phase: peak postmodernism, 1973–1991

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Introduction: branding Brian McHale

Yet another entry in the “when-did-postmodernism-begin?” sweepstakes: according to Charles Jencks, on July 15, 1972, at precisely 3:32 pm, several high-rise blocks of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, were imploded. Their demolition signaled the failure of International Style modernist architecture to deliver what it promised – safe, healthful, inexpensive, and above all rational housing for the masses. Waiting in the wings to supplant modernism was a new mode of architecture, one hospitable to such nonmodernist qualities as popular appeal, historical allusion, legible symbolism, and pleasure: postmodernism. The outlines of this new mode could already be glimpsed in a book of that same year, the manifesto Learning from Las Vegas by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Jencks’s dating of the onset of postmodernism is every bit as mythological as Raymond Federman’s dating of it to October 1, 1966. The specific time of Pruitt-Igoe’s destruction – 3:32 pm – which contributes so much to the story’s air of circumstantial precision, turns out to have been fabricated.1 In any case, the demolition of the complex, though begun on that day in 1972, actually continued into the next year, 1973.2 Nevertheless, the dating of postmodernism’s onset to on or about 1972–3 finds ample corroboration at the level of world-historical developments. On the worldhistorical stage, 1972–3 does seem like a threshold, or a whole series of thresholds, in ways that 1966 was not – a watershed year, the end of one era and the beginning of another. The Arab nations’ oil embargo of that year, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, heightened awareness of the world’s dependency on fossil fuels and the vulnerability of its energy resources, and arguably planted seeds of a new sense of global interconnection.3 Nineteen seventy-three was also the year when details of White House involvement in the Watergate break-in emerged and the Nixon administration began to unravel, with long-term consequences for the American presidency. It was the year of the 175

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176 the major phase: peak postmodernism, 1973–1991 Paris Peace Accords, the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, and consequently the beginning of the still ongoing contest over the meaning of the sixties; and it was the year of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, marking the first round of the still-ongoing “culture wars” over gender and sexuality.4 Americans around 1973 experienced a rupture in their history, a collective “nervous breakdown,” and began to suffer from that inability to think historically that Fredric Jameson would later identify as a key characteristic of the postmodernist sensibility.5 Cultural developments seem to synch up with world-historical developments much more decisively in 1973 than they did in 1966. If Jencks is right, then postmodernism architecture emerged decisively around 1972–3. In other spheres of culture, something that would later come to be called “reality TV” began appearing on U.S. television screens in the form of the PBS series An American Family, nearly twenty years in advance of MTV’s breakthrough series The Real World. A new, iconoclastic American cinema of directors flowered outside the moribund studio system (Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Terrence Malick, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese). Andy Warhol was ubiquitous in American culture, both high and low. The New York Dolls, gender-bending rockers poised between glam and punk, enjoyed a short, raucous career. Finally, in that same year there appeared such postmodernist literary landmarks as J. G. Ballard’s notorious Crash, Don DeLillo’s early novel Great Jones Street, and above all, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Nevertheless, despite 1973’s credentials as a world-historical watershed year, and despite the ample corroboration of its threshold status on the cultural front, I think Jencks and others are mistaken to date the onset of postmodernism to 1973. What Jencks misconstrues as the onset is actually something else: postmodernism’s branding. On or about 1972–3, the postmodern culture that had been “lurking in the wings” since at least the mid-60s acquired its brand name. As we have seen in earlier chapters, throughout the early 1970s, literary scholars had begun using the term postmodernism – Fiedler from about 1970, Hassan from 1971, William Spanos from 1972.6 By the time of Barth’s important manifesto of 1979, “The Literature of Replenishment,” it had become entirely normalized as the term for the period’s fiction. From 1975 Jencks began using it in an architectural context, mapping the concept and extending its range in successive editions of his influential book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, from 1977 on. The term postmodern never appeared in Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, but by the

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end of the 1970s the sort of architectural practice they advocated, incorporating the legibility and populism of the Las Vegas Strip, had become identified all but universally with postmodernism. From its beachhead in architecture, the concept of postmodernism, and the aesthetic associated with it, radiated outward into the culture at large, from popular film and genre fiction to the art world, from fashion and advertising to the academy. Having in this way acquired its brand name, postmodernism next acquired its justification; it acquired, in other words, its theory. Crucial theoretical interventions by Jencks, Lyotard, Huyssen, Jameson, and others appeared throughout the decade and a half after 1973, so that by the end of the 1980s postmodernism could be said to possess a rather fully developed (if contestable and somewhat incoherent) theoretical profile. Jencks’s key contribution was the notion of double coding. Postmodern buildings, he argued, such as the ones he championed by Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, Frank Gehry, and others appeal simultaneously to two different audiences: on one level, through their sophisticated reflection on design, structural techniques, and materials, to a minority constituency of architects and connoisseurs; on another level, through their decorativeness, their legibility, and their playful and pleasurable allusions to familiar historical styles of architecture, to a broader public of consumers. Jencks would eventually (1986) extend the range of double coding to include the new figurative and narrative painting of Sandro Chia, Eric Fischl, Robert Longo, David Salle, and others and the “literature of replenishment” described by John Barth (1979) and conspicuously practiced by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose (1980). Linda Hutcheon would apply Jencks’s model of double coding more generally to postmodernist fiction of the type that she dubbed historiographic metafiction (1988). Jencks’s notion of double coding is only one version, albeit an influential one, of a larger, more encompassing thesis about postmodernism, articulated particularly powerfully by Andreas Huyssen (1984). This thesis holds that, in the postmodern era, the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture that the modernists had striven so hard to maintain and police finally, definitively broke down; henceforth, high and low culture would mingle indiscriminately, for better or worse. Lyotard, by contrast, associated postmodernism not with the encroachment of popular culture but with the persistence of avant-garde experiment, identifying the postmodern with that part of modernist art that perpetually resists being domesticated and reduced to any familiar period style – for Lyotard, “postmodernism” is the name for the avant-garde impulse within modernism.

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178 the major phase: peak postmodernism, 1973–1991 Lyotard’s most influential contribution to the theory of postmodernism, however, was his thesis, developed in La Condition postmoderne (1979), that postmodernity is characterized by a general incredulity toward the master narratives that up until now have underwritten and sustained modern culture and society in the West. We no longer place our faith, Lyotard claimed, in the narratives of progress, enlightenment, and human liberation that once served to legitimate modernity. Skeptical of such “grand narratives,” we postmoderns instead value the self-legitimating language games, or little narratives (petits récits), of affinity groups, local institutions, and subcultural enclaves. Where modern culture had aspired to universalism and “totality,” postmodern culture prefers pluralism, particularism, and local knowledge.7 Finally, Frederic Jameson over the course of the eighties (1983, 1984, 1991) developed a comprehensive theory of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” identifying a set of features characterizing postmodern culture across the board. These include a peculiar “depthlessness” attributable to postmodern culture’s saturation with images; a weakening of our sense of historicity; a “schizophrenic” fragmentation of postmodern cultural products that shatters temporal organization into disjointed moments of intensity; a new technological sublime, arising from technologies of electronic reproduction rather than the machine-age technologies of speed and power; and a distinctive new mutation of space, including the architectural spaces of our built environment, calling for new skills of orientation and navigation that Jameson terms “cognitive mapping.”8 All of these cultural features, Jameson contends, heterogeneous though they may be, derive from the underlying logic of the late-capitalist system (which perhaps ought to be identified with what Harvey and others call “neo-liberalism”). The years between the branding of postmodernism around 1973 and the threshold years 1989–90, roughly a decade and a half, constitute the peak period of postmodern cultural expression. The forms of postmodernism’s expression are various, ranging across genres, media, and cultural contexts, and the chapters that follow, are correspondingly various. They begin where the dissemination of the concept of postmodernism itself began, its ground zero: architecture (see McHale, Chapter 10). While Jencks’s attribution of postmodern architecture’s origin to a particular time and date in 1972, even a specific time of day, is polemical and mythological rather than factual, it is nevertheless the case that high modernism in architecture had already been subject to fierce criticism for some time before the emergence of a postmodernist alternative in the early 1970s.

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By the end of the decade, the postmodern movement for which Jencks and other propagandists lobbied had become highly visible, and in the next decade would alter for better or worse the built environment worldwide. Owing to its high visibility, postmodern architecture became the focal point from which the term and concept radiated outward into the culture at large. Four major threads connect the remaining chapters, linking them with each other as well as with developments in the preceding period, the long 1960s, and the interregnum of the 1990s that would follow: Visual arts in the postmodern decades. By the beginning of the 70s it appeared that art had “dematerialized” itself (see Mercil and Gluibizzi, Chapter 11). Partly in reaction to Pop Art of the 1960s and its contemporary rival, minimalism, partly as a continuation of them, art turned from object to concept. Lucy Lippard in Six Years: The Dematerialization of Art from 1966 to 1972 (1973) documents the process by which art practices in the tradition of earlier avant-gardes, such as Dada and Fluxus, converged in the late 1960s to produce conceptual art, a range of practices in which the “art object” itself is rendered incidental, ephemeral or nonexistent. Associated with DeWitt, Kosuth, Beuys, Art & Language, Bochner, Baldessari, and others, and both competing and overlapping with more material-oriented countertendencies, such as installation art, earth art, and body art, conceptual art remained a dominant force throughout the 1970s and 1980s, retaining its vitality down to the present. Surprisingly, after it had seemed that conceptual art had finally demystified even as it dematerialized art, the art object returned in the later 1970s and 1980s (see Ward, Chapter 22). It had never really gone away, of course, any more than the traditional medium of easel painting had, but nobody could have foreseen the vigor of painting’s revival in the 1980s, driven by a lively market in contemporary art. German and Italian neo-expressionists (e.g., Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente) and the British neo-pop artists Gilbert and George were assimilated to the same international postmodernism as appropriation-based painters such as David Salle and Robert Longo (affiliated with “pictures generation” photographers including Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman) and the Downtown graffiti painters Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others. Popular music in the postmodern decades. The energies and ambitions of rock music, so crucial to the countercultural movements of the 1960s had become somewhat dissipated by the early 1970s when, first in New York, then a couple of years later in London, the music received an adrenaline injection from a younger cohort of iconoclastic musicians

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180 the major phase: peak postmodernism, 1973–1991 who valued expression over expertise (see Shank, Chapter 20). Punk bands such as the New York Dolls, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash were affiliated with an entire subcultural style (reflected in fashion, visual art, photography, writing, etc.) and, especially in the United Kingdom, with confrontational politics. Punk quickly subsided into a more conventionally virtuosic and less confrontational New Wave, perfectly suited to a new medium for music consumption, MTV, launched in 1981. The MTV music video showed promise of emerging as a new artistic medium, but its aesthetic heyday was brief. Initially excluded from MTV and the rest of the mainstream pop music industry, rap music and its associated hip-hop culture eventually came to dominate it (see Peterson, Chapter 23). The elements of African American hip-hop culture, including graffiti, breakdancing and, crucially, rapping and DJ’ing (which initially entailed the manipulation of turntables and later introduced electronic sampling), had begun to converge in New York’s South Bronx by the late 1970s. Hip-hop’s explosion into popular culture and its international proliferation in the course of the 1980s is one of the most distinctive phenomena of postmodernism’s major phase. By the end of the 1980s it was already skewing toward gangsta rap, arguably the dominant popular music form of the 1990s. Liberation movements and their alternative cultures. The liberation movements that emerged in the 1960s, including second-wave feminism from the mid-60s on and gay/lesbian liberation at the very end of the decade but also including the worldwide struggles against colonial powers both old and new, each produced distinctive forms of cultural expression. The second wave of feminism (see Warhol, Chapter 13), which can be conveniently dated from the founding of the NOW in 1966, became a pervasive cultural presence, as well as a political force, only in the 1970s. By the 1980s a backlash had begun to develop against some of the perceived shortcomings of second-wave feminism, which some controversially sought to characterize as “post-feminism,” but which can also be seen as the first stirrings of the third wave that would carry the feminist movement into the 1990s and beyond. The camp aesthetic associated with the urban gay subculture forms part of the DNA of postmodernism, and in general the imprint of gay artists and communities on postmodern culture is indelible (see Dines, Chapter 14). Nevertheless, individual artists largely remained closeted and the community’s contributions unacknowledged, until the belated emergence of a gay liberation movement at the end of the 1960s, catalyzed by the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969. Gay communities

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suffered a savage setback from the onset of AIDS, first observed in 1981 and reaching epidemic proportions by the end of the 1980s. The AIDS crisis decimated the ranks of cultural producers, but it also elicited powerful artistic expression, of which Tony Kushner’s Brechtian “gay fantasia on national themes,” Angels in America (1990, 1992), coming right at the end of the period, is exemplary. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” asked Anthony Kwame Appiah in 1991, and the question is a vexed one, with complex ramifications (see Upstone, Chapter 15). Appiah distinguishes between the “postrealism” of postcolonial writing and the “postrealism” of postmodern Western writers such as Pynchon, which he located in a different set of motivations, particularly in terms of the political. Yet at the same time, high-profile synergistic readings such as Hutcheon’s use of Salman Rushdie as an exemplar of her theory of historiographic metafiction illuminated how the postcolonial and postmodern productively coexisted. Even for Appiah, despite the perceived differences, the “post” in both postmodernism and postcolonialism represents a “space clearing gesture” that challenges legitimizing narratives of the past. Postmodern literature in the peak decades. Almost all of the chapters in this part have implications for the practice of print literature in the peak decades of postmodernism, but five of them address literary postmodernism directly. Jameson attributes to postmodern culture a weakening of historicity, yet it is also the case that arguably the most typical form of fiction to emerge during the major phase is a postmodern mutation of the historical novel (see Elias, Chapter 17). Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” becomes a genre capable of “complicitous critique” of its own postmodernity, and capacious enough to include Ackroyd, Coover, Doctorow, Eco, Fowles, Fuentes, Pynchon, Reed, Rushdie, and a great many others. Some of these novels purport to expose “secret histories,” thereby edging into the territory of conspiracy theory and the “paranoid style,” which Jameson has taught us to think of as a “degraded attempt” at the cognitive mapping of the postmodern world. It is commonplace for postmodernist critics to attribute to postmodernism the erosion of hierarchical distinctions between high and low culture (see McHale, Chapter 18). One symptom of this erosion of hierarchy is the crossover phenomenon so typical of postmodernism in its peak phase: elite culture’s embrace of the products of popular culture (e.g., rock music, comics, the novels of Philip K. Dick) and vice versa, the popular success of demanding or even avant-garde work (e.g., Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and other minimalists,

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182 the major phase: peak postmodernism, 1973–1991 Laurie Anderson’s performance art). Another symptom is what McCaffery has dubbed Avant-Pop: work that “combines Pop Art’s focus on consumer goods and mass media with the avant-garde’s spirit of subversion and emphasis on radical formal innovation.”9 Practitioners range from Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, J. G. Ballard and other sixties-era avant-gardists to Angela Carter, Mark Leyner, and Kathy Acker in the seventies, down to David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, and beyond. Literary cultures across the constituent parts of the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s offer a telling illustration of the convergence of postcolonialism and postmodernism (see Platt, Chapter 16). Here versions of Scottish and Irish national literatures were energized in protest against Thatcherite state politics. They combined separatist instincts with “liminality, border-crossing and linguistic virtuosity” to produce the “protean, multivalent, multilingual and multiform” Scottish and Irish writing as it was conceived by such figures as Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Eoin McNamee, and others. The OuLiPo group (short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) was and still is dedicated to literary experiments involving fixed, artificial procedures for generating texts (see Epstein, Chapter 19). Founded in Paris in 1960, it remained a secretive coterie until the 1970s when two of its members, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, emerged as major figures on the international scene. OuLiPo’s emergence coincided with that of a school of North American poets, known as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, radically leftist where OuLiPo was apolitical, but similarly committed to procedural experiments to push the envelope of literary expression. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets also practiced forms of sampling, appropriation, and radical collage, an aesthetic of the cut-up that they shared with William Burroughs, a figure of the Beat generation, and their punk contemporary Kathy Acker, as well as with the hip-hop DJs who would break through in the 1980s. Science fiction had begun to emerge from its cultural and aesthetic ghetto during the 1960s, and in the course of the 1970s it allied itself ever more closely with postmodern developments. It also diversified itself, both demographically and in terms of content, making room for writers and experiences that were not male, not white, and not heteronormative (e.g., Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler). In this respect, the crossover success of the new school of cyberpunk science fiction in the 1980s, beginning with William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), was retrograde, a return to a straight white male demographic (with the

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lone exception, in the first generation, of Pat Cadigan). Nevertheless, cyberpunk (see Gomel, Chapter 21) left an indelible mark not only on science fiction but on popular culture generally, and even, beginning in the early 1990s, on the design of the Internet, whose engineers were manifestly influenced by Gibson’s imagination of cyberspace (a word that he coined). Apparently standing somewhat apart from these four threads is the case of the New Hollywood cinema, a characteristic development of the 1970s when, in the aftermath of the crisis of the Hollywood studio system, younger directors were given opportunities to experiment with conventional formulas (see Hellmann, Chapter 12). Actually the phenomenon of the New Hollywood is more deeply implicated in other developments of peak postmodernism than might initially appear to be the case. Its fullest expression, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), poised right at the hinge between the 1970s and the 1980s, gathers together in its complex and difficult fabric many of the threads of postmodern culture, even as it glances back at the foundational modernism of its literary source, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Notes 1 Charles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (Chichester: John Wiley, 2011), 27 2 Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown, 211. 3 See Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA; London: Belnap, 2011), 9. 4 See Rodgers, The Age of Fracture, 145. 5 See also Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown, 1–11. 6 See also Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), 29–52. 7 See Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern, 123–31. 8 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51–4. 9 Larry McCaffery, “Avant-Pop: Still Life After Yesterday’s Crash,” in After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology (New York: Penguin 1995), xvi–xvii.

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10

The architectural paradigm Brian McHale

The spatial turn “A certain spatial turn,” Fredric Jameson once wrote, “has often seemed to offer one of the more productive ways of distinguishing postmodernism from modernism proper, whose experience of temporality – existential time, along with deep memory – it is henceforth conventional to see as a dominant of the high modern.”1 Space is to postmodernism as time is to modernism: the thesis, while intuitively appealing, has been widely contested, for good reason. Nevertheless, corroboration of a kind can be found in the crucial role played by architecture in the emergence, dissemination, and popularization of postmodernism. In the modernist era, arguably, the most symptomatic and representative form of cultural expression was the movies – a time-based art. Cinema impacted and shaped every aspect of the new experience of time in the modernist era, rendering it malleable and reversible, fragmenting it, speeding it up and slowing it down, producing effects of simultaneity.2 If we ask what form of cultural expression played the equivalent role in the postmodernist era, then the answer would have to be architecture, the art of built space – postmodernism’s leading edge. Despite efforts to think of postmodernism totalistically, as a cultural dominant that inflects practices right across the whole spectrum of culture, its usefulness or relevance as a periodizing concept appears anything but uniform from field to field. Concepts of the postmodern took firm hold in dance and the novel, but less so in poetry, the visual arts, cinema, or music. This is not to say that critics, publicists, or even practitioners in these latter fields had no use whatsoever for the term, but only that in these fields its use seemed optional or arbitrary, whereas in dance or the novel it came to seem difficult or impossible even to speak of contemporary practices without invoking some version of postmodernism – if only to dismiss it as inadequate. Of all the forms of cultural expression where the term came

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to be applied, however, in none of them did its use seem more cogent and compelling (for a time) than it did in the case of architecture. Postmodern architecture had a special status in the public perception of postmodernism. It was the form in which most people were apt to encounter postmodern aesthetics (if they encountered it at all), and the one that occasioned the most public discussion and controversy. Moreover, it also has a special status in theories of postmodernism, and ultimately in its practice across a range of art forms, media, and genres. It is, in a sense, the privileged model, to which all other manifestations of postmodernism are referred. Postmodern philosophers and theorists came to regard discourse in the Western tradition as “architectural.” According to Karatani Kojin, the “will to architecture” was “the foundation of Western thought.”3 Derrida put it another way: “the deconstruction of philosophy should be at the same time the deconstruction of the architectural metaphor, which is at the core of philosophy, and of the architectural tradition which is philosophical through and through.”4 Meanwhile, from the other side, postmodern architects and architecture critics increasingly came to regard architecture as “discursive” – as linguistic or writerly. Writing came to be acknowledged as playing an integral role in architectural practice. The writing of architectural manifestos and polemical monographs was one of the legacies that postmodern architects inherited from their high-modernist precursors (Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright), but it became so endemic among the postmodernists that for a time it seemed as though architectural writing had displaced building in their practice. Moreover, in becoming writers postmodern architects also became increasingly “literary,” in the sense of incorporating in their texts allusions to many of the same critics and theorists on whom literary scholars relied. Thus, Robert Venturi, in his 1966 manifesto Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture mobilized the literary modernism of T. S. Eliot and the New Critics against architectural modernism; Bernard Tschumi alluded knowledgeably to structuralists and poststructuralists such as Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard; and Peter Eisenman showed himself to be an attentive reader (or perhaps innovative misreader) of Derrida. Beyond the writing of architectural manifestos, it also became increasingly clear how much of routine architectural practice could be seen as broadly “discursive.” Thus, Mark Wigley enumerated no fewer than forty “mechanisms of representation” – “discourses,” in the broadest sense of the term – that among them constituted a building, ranging from the curricula and pedagogy of schools of architecture,

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through professional licensing criteria, building, zoning and safety codes, fee structures, legal contracts, and copyright law, to interview and presentation formats, architectural jurying, competition protocols, and even model-making and photographic techniques and the structure of the architectural monograph.5 Not only did the practice of architecture involve writing, but architecture itself came to be conceived along the lines of language. Apologists for postmodern architecture such as Charles Jencks, having absorbed (in however reductive a way) the findings of semiotics, proposed to speak of architecture as a “language” or “code,” in which one could discern “words” (door, window, column, cantilever, etc.), “metaphors” (especially metaphors of the human face and body), “syntax” (what the architectural tradition through modernism called “structure”), even entire fields and systems of “semantics,” for example, the system of the three classical orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian), the nineteenth-century system of “revivalist” styles (Greek-Revival, Gothic-Revival, Italian, Hindu, Old-English), and so on.6 Eisenman, at the outset of his career, devoted himself to exploring the possibilities of architecture as language in a series of private houses – some actually built, others only projected. Like a good Chomskyan linguist of that era, he bracketed off architectural “semantics”– the functional “meanings” that high-modernist architects applied to buildings – in the interests of isolating the units and combinatorial rules of architectural “syntax.” At a certain point, however, he seemingly abandoned the model of architecture as language and, no doubt under the influence of Derrida and other poststructuralists, shifted to the more radical notion of the building as text – a fabric of differences, susceptible of deconstruction.7 These two alternatives – related but distinguishable – namely architecture as language or code, and building as text, between them indicate, however cursorily, the range of postmodern “discursive” approaches to architecture. One could see with what justice Jameson could conclude that “postmodern architecture is the property of literary critics after all, and textual in more ways than one.”8

Difficult wholes Already in the modernist period, of course, architecture had been pressed into service to model the “architectonic” or “spatial” forms of long poems such as The Waste Land, or novels such as To the Lighthouse, Ulysses, Nightwood, or Finnegans Wake, the “archicitidel” where HCE figures as “the masterbilker.”9 But in the second half of the twentieth century, a

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“discursivized” postmodern architecture served that purpose much more compellingly. It provided at least two such models, each with the potential to capture different aspects of postmodernist literature’s complex form. These models correspond to the two approaches to architectural discourse identified in the preceding paragraphs. One of them, which proposes to approach architecture as language or code, might be called the “semiotic” or “historicist” model. It reflects the architectural period style that most nonprofessional observers and consumers of architecture would associate with the term Post-Modernism. (In what follows, that spelling is preserved in order to distinguish this model from postmodernism generally.) The second, corresponding to the building-as-text approach to architecture, might be called the “deconstructivist” model. The Post-Modern model encompassed postmodernist architecture as it existed in the public mind, the Post-Modernism of half-serious historicist allusion: the classical appliques on Michael Graves’s Portland Public Services Building, the shaped crowns of Philip Johnson’s skyscrapers, and so on. The defining principle of this model was legibility. If architectural meaning was to be accessible to its users, so the theory ran, then architecture must deploy a repertoire of familiar signs, inherited from past architectural systems – mainly, as it turned out, those of classicism, often stylized to the point of caricature. The manifesto of this version of PostModernism was Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. First published in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas posited architecture based on the principle of the “decorated sheds” of the Las Vegas Strip: merely functional buildings with huge signs plastered to their facades, or free-standing along the roadside. The tension between the legibility of the sign out front and the modernist functionality of the building behind it could be reconciled, according to Venturi and his collaborators, through a saving irony. By way of precedent they adduced Pop Art, with its coupling of populist appeal and avant-garde self-consciousness. It was left to that prolific apologist of Post-Modernism, Charles Jencks, to reformulate Venturi’s irony in terms of a textualist “double-coding.”10 Post-Modern buildings, by this account, communicated on two different levels, to two different constituencies. On one level, through their modernist structural techniques (the shed itself ) and in-group ironies, they communicated with a minority constituency of architects and connoisseurs; on another level, they reached a broader public of architecture consumers through their historicist allusions (the decoration on the shed). The first true “major monument” of this double-coded architecture,

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according to Jencks, was not, as other critics had announced, Johnson’s Chippendale-top AT&T Building in Manhattan (still too modernist, in Jencks’s view), but Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, which simulates a Roman ruin, but one tarted up with neon lighting and modern materials. Designed to be the focal point for redevelopment of a downtown New Orleans neighborhood with a historical connection to the Italian community, Moore’s playfully sham-ruinous Piazza suffered years of neglect when the original redevelopment scheme was abandoned. Reduced to a haunt for the city’s homeless, the sham ruin decayed into a real ruin, then underwent restoration in the new millennium – just in time for Hurricane Katrina to ruin whole neighborhoods of New Orleans in August 2005. (The latest update is that the Piazza d’Italia has been restored once again.) An architectural in-joke that doubled as a kind of pocket theme park, simultaneously elitist and populist, the Piazza d’Italia was nothing if not accessible. It was legible architecture: it could be read like a book. Almost from the outset, Jencks was conscious of the “literariness” or “textuality” of double-coded architecture, not only in the sense of architecture’s own discursiveness, but in the sense of its literary analogues, particularly the postmodernist fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Umberto Eco, and others. On the literary side, it was Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism and elsewhere, who adopted Jencks’s notion of double-coding and developed it as a model for postmodernist literature. Hutcheon identified literary postmodernism with a particular genre of novel, that of self-reflexive historical fiction or “historiographic metafiction” – for example John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) – and historiographic metafiction, in turn, she characterized in terms of its double-coding. Like the Piazza d’Italia and other double-coded architectural works, historiographic metafictions were simultaneously legible and avant-garde, historicist reconstructions and self-reflexive parodies. They appealed both to academic specialists and to common readers, who made several of these novels (notably Eco’s The Name of the Rose) international bestsellers.11 Influential though Hutcheon’s account has been, hers was not the only direction in which one might develop a literary notion of double-coding on the model of Post-Modern architecture. If Hutcheon’s model coupled avant-gardism with the historicist aspect of Post-Modern architecture, another approach involved coupling it with Post-Modernism’s Pop Art

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aspect. This was Larry McCaffery’s approach in positing an “Avant-Pop” tendency in contemporary fiction, that is, a tendency that combined “Pop Art’s focus on consumer goods and mass media with the avant-garde’s spirit of subversion and emphasis on radical formal innovation.”12 While the two versions of double-coded fiction did overlap to some degree – Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Don DeLillo, for instance, satisfied the criteria of both historiographic metafiction and Avant-Pop – McCaffery’s Avant-Pop canon accommodated a number of surfictionists and other radical experimentalists (e.g., Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace) whom Hutcheon might exclude on the grounds of elitist illegibility. Under one rubric or another – that of historiographic metafiction or Avant-Pop (or both) – the double-coding model derived from architectural theory and practice helps to account for the distinctive features of a whole range of characteristically postmodernist literary works, from novels such as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966) and Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and long poems such as Kenneth Koch’s Seasons on Earth (1959, 1977, 1987), Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger (1968–75), and James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1976–82), through Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1985–86), Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), and Tony Kushner’s Brechtian drama Angels in America (1991–92), down to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Junot Díaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and beyond. Not every architect or architecture critic welcomed the Post-Modern aesthetic of historicism and legibility, to say the least, any more than all literary tastemakers welcomed double-coded literature. On both the progressive and conservative wings of the profession, architects protested Post-Modernism’s reduction of history to Disneyland-style simulacra, its neutralizing of architecture’s critical potential, and its perceived pandering to market and entertainment values. For radicals and conservatives alike, Robert Venturi was a target of particular hostility for his promotion of the Las Vegas paradigm of semiotic architecture. But, in fact, Venturi’s aesthetics were intriguingly divided, and his theory and practice have at least as much in common with Post-Modernism’s radical critics and the architecture of defamiliarization as they do with Post-Modern historicism. Before the manifesto of architectural legibility, Learning from Las Vegas, he had produced a different but equally influential manifesto on architectural

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form, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; 2nd edn., 1977). Some aspects of his approach to form in Complexity and Contradiction were unproblematically compatible with the Las Vegas paradigm, including his account of “vestigial” (i.e., historicist), “rhetorical” (i.e., double-coded) and ironic elements in architecture, his defense of “honky-tonk” (i.e., popularculture) elements, and his slogan, “Main Street [is] almost all right.”13 At the same time, Venturi betrays a modernist-style anxiety to unify, integrate, and reconcile the disparate and disjunct parts of the mainly Baroque and Mannerist (including Edwardian neo-mannerist) buildings he analyzes. He also reveals an openness toward and acceptance of architectural tensions and disjunctions that can be neither resolved nor easily “read” – “violent adjacencies” and “superadjacencies,” complex interiors and residual spaces, and unresolved contradictions, which Venturi compares with those of difficult poetry.14 Venturi’s architectural poetics of complexity and contradiction seems to anticipate Frank Gehry’s iconic Santa Monica house, Jameson’s touchstone of postmodernist disjunction and difficulty, the construction of which postdates Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by over a decade.15 The core of the Gehry House is a cottage in the traditional vernacular style, around which the new house has been wrapped. The new house partly absorbs the original house, and partly “preserves” or “displays” it as if in a museum; the new house in a sense places the old one between quotation marks. The materials are wildly heterogeneous: highmodernist materials and forms (e.g., a perfect glass cube, which, however, has been tilted disconcertingly onto one edge) are juxtaposed with the ad hoc materials of “cheapskate architecture” (corrugated metal, chain-link fencing), and both these kinds of materials are juxtaposed with the traditional building materials of the original cottage. The wrapping of one house around another creates a disquieting interior space, or, says Jameson, “hyperspace.” Jameson urges us to think of the house as an attempt to model or to allegorize the social space of the postmodern world. The Gehry House is a cognitive map, but a map in four dimensions, incorporating, in addition to the three dimensions of its architectural space, the fourth of time: the duration of lived experience in and of the house, which maps the experience of living in the space of postmodern society. Venturi’s resonant slogan for architecture in this complex and contradictory mode, “the obligation toward the difficult whole,” seems to anticipate Jameson’s enigmatic slogan of postmodernist aesthetics, “difference relates.”16 The obligation toward the difficult whole: it may be the phrase’s

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residual modernist connotations that have prevented its adoption as a postmodernist motto. “Obligation” retains more than a trace of modernist architecture’s high-minded purism and absolutism; “difficult” evokes the modernist conviction that difficult times call for difficult forms (“poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,” wrote Eliot in 1921); while “whole” sounds hopelessly dated, a relic of New Critical organicism. Taken together, the words can hardly fail to resonate with echoes of modernist constructivism, whereas postmodernist architecture (as distinct from the “Post-Modern” architecture previously discussed) tends to favor catchwords evoking or implying deconstruction. So we find de-composition in Eisenman, disjunction, disintegration, and a whole lexicon of other words prefixed by de-, dis-, or ex- in Tschumi, antiarchitecture and anarchitecture in Derrida’s characterization of Eisenman’s work, even de-architecture, as well as, of course, deconstructivist architecture itself.17 All of these coinages point toward an aspiration to trouble and undo architectural form in ways beyond what Venturi’s “difficult whole” implies.

Building and unbuilding “Architectural terms are more than just metaphors for reading,” writes the Language poet Charles Berstein, “yet it’s difficult to track the parallels without getting impossibly abstract or painfully elusive.”18 We have already seen how deconstruction and architecture became implicated in each other’s theoretical projects in the postmodern period. The fact that deconstruction and architectural theory learned to mimic each other’s discourse did not, however, make it any easier to understand how deconstruction could be manifested in actual buildings. Derrida himself expressed doubts about this possibility. Bernard Tschumi recounts how, on first approaching Derrida about collaborating on an architectural project (the Parc de Villette scheme in Paris), the latter asked, “But how could an architect be interested in deconstruction? After all, deconstruction is anti-form, antihierarchy, anti-structure, the opposite of all that architecture stands for.”19 It remains a good question. One example of deconstruction in actual practice is the architecture of Peter Eisenman – though, as one might expect, the “actual” is itself one of the concepts that Eisenman’s architecture problematizes, since his practice has consisted of buildings, texts about those buildings, texts in lieu of buildings, and buildings (actually built or only proposed) understood as texts commenting on other buildings. House X, for instance – unbuilt, but

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elaborately presented and theorized – can be understood as “a critique of the previous houses” in the series, some of them built, others not. In the House X project Eisenman pulls the building’s volumes apart to leave a “void center,” a concept also underlying his development, in this project and its successor, House El Even Odd, of the “three-dimensional el,” a sort of anticube that serves as the “base form” of these unbuilt buildings.20 Such houses illustrate, to the degree that a building can, the very notion of “loss of center”; they deny, says Eisenman, the “anthropocentricity of man.”21 House X, according to Rosalind Krauss, “incorporates the notion of difference at a very deep level,” and with it Eisenman’s architecture “has assumed the conditions of post-modernism” – by which she means, not Post-Modernism in the historicist mode, but deconstructivism.22 Illuminatingly, the postmodernist poet David Shapiro, a secondgeneration member of the New York School, has written a sequence of poems modeled on Eisenman’s deconstructivist practice.23 Shapiro’s poems are not so much about Eisenman’s architecture as they are about the same things that Eisenman’s architecture is about (to the degree that one can say architecture is about anything at all): absence, erasure, failure, the renunciation of mastery, the evacuation of authority, everything that is implied in the void center. “[T]o know nothing,/To taste something, dazzled by absence,” is how one of the poems characterizes this poetry, and by extension the architecture associated with it; or, in the words of another of them, “Everyone is growing stronger from the load of empty pictures.”24 Yet another proposes an austere renunciation of favorite motifs: “Snow, music and house I now avoid, as one avoids certain words, and they are words.”25 (The poet is bluffing; in fact, he uses all three of these motifs throughout these poems.) This is a poetry pieced together from gaps, voids, evasions. More holes than fabric, it aspires, like Eisenman’s architecture, to the condition of structure under erasure. A comparable poetics of voids and erasures, for which architectural deconstructivism can serve as a model, recurs throughout postmodern writing. The American poet Ronald Johnson, for instance, erases most of the text from the first four books of Milton’s Paradise Lost, leaving only a few dozen words scattered across the blank space of each page, publishing his version as RADI OS (1977), while the British artist Tom Phillips, in A Humument (published from 1970 on in successive editions), paints over an obscure Victorian novel, creating arresting visual images through which only isolated words and phrases can be glimpsed. Armand Schwerner’s long poem, The Tablets (1968–99), a pseudo-translation, is riddled with gaps and voids due to the damaged condition of the (fictitious) clay tablets

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on which it is allegedly based, written in an ancient (fictitious) language of which the translator has only limited knowledge. The gaps are scrupulously noted in the text by means of an apparatus of nonalphabetic signs, miming those that legitimate scholarly editors use: plus-signs (++++) for missing passages, dots of ellipsis (. . .) for untranslatable ones, questionmarks (?) for variant readings, and square brackets [ ] for material supplied by the translator. The two major European poets of the Shoah, Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, each thematizes erasure differently – Jabès through a lexicon of absence, Celan through proliferating negatives (Nichts, Niemands, Nirgands, etc.) and even explicit gestures of erasure: Die Liebe löscht ihren Namen (“Love blots out its name”). Celan inscribes erasure through his use of ellipses, asterisks, parentheses, and other signs of language’s lapse into silence, but also through the attenuated appearance of his poems on the page. Jabès does so through the volumes of white space that surround, interrupt, and all but overwhelm his texts. The short experimental fictions comprising Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1950–52) place elements of their storyworlds under erasure (sous rature), positing them at one moment and then rescinding them the next. Similarly written under erasure are various texts by Robert Coover (e.g., “The Elevator,” “The Babysitter,” “The Magic Poker” all from Pricksongs and Descants [1969]) and John Barth (“Lost in the Funhouse” [1969]) and by the American surfictionists Steve Katz (The Exagggerations of Peter Prince [1968]), Raymond Federman (Double or Nothing [1971] and Take It or Leave It [1976]), Ronald Sukenick (Out [1973]), and Clarence Major (Reflex and Bone Structure [1975]). Implementing the poetics of erasure in the most literal way possible, Jonathan Safran Foer in Tree of Codes (2010) punches holes in the text of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (1934), physically perforating the original text to produce a new one. Can texts composed (or de-composed) of such insubstantial and disjointed elements, more holes than fabric, actually hang together and construct a whole, difficult or otherwise? Interviewed by Thomas Fink, David Shapiro is quoted as boldly asserting that “poetry is always already architecture, and architecture is a structure of meaning,” and that poetry is “a simultaneous structure as much as it is a structure over time.”26 These confidently constructivist assertions ring slightly hollow if the architecture on which the text is modeled – the architecture that a text always already is – deconstructs the very concept of structure, replacing built space with voids and evacuating meaning. When the components making up the sequence are themselves modeled on deconstructivist architecture, surely its structuring potential must be fatally compromised.

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Apart from Eisenman, another exemplar of deconstructivism is Bernard Tschumi, whose practice of architecture, like Eisenman’s, has combined built spaces with the “paper spaces” of architectural drawing and writing.27 Tschumi proposes to think of architecture as sequences of frames – in effect, stagings of events – but at the same time, recognizing the ease with which sequences can be recuperated as narratives, he has sought to disturb and interrupt these architectural sequences in ways that prevent any facile narrativization. In citing precursors for his model of architectural sequence, Tschumi expands the field of architecture well beyond its normal limits to include, for instance, theatrical spectacles and outdoor pageants, from the Renaissance masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones through the fêtes of the French Revolutionary period to Russian Constructivist stage designs and even (more sinisterly) stagings of Nazi Party rallies by Albert Speer, Hitler’s court architect. One outcome of Tschumi’s reflection on “dys-narrative” sequences is the elaborate Parc de Villette project, for one part of which he commissioned a collaborative work from Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida.28 This three-way collaboration is documented (inevitably) in a text – an alarmingly peculiar book, Chora L Works (1997). At the outset (as we have seen) skeptical of the possible relevance of deconstruction to architecture, Derrida, by the end of the process documented in the book, could conclude that, together with law (and for similar reasons), architecture figures as one of the “ultimate tests of deconstruction.”29 Analogues of Tschumi’s discontinuous, “dys-narrative” sequences can readily be found in the fragmentary, interrupted, cut-up and piecedtogether poetry of John Ashbery and of Language poets such as Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Ron Silliman. More striking still, however, is the appearance, across a range of postmodern culture practices, of the architectural model in the extended sense proposed by Tschumi: architecture as pageant, masque, party rally. Architecture as masque resonates with the masquelike character of much postmodern performance art. Ranging from the Happenings and Fluxus events of the 1950s, through the “actions” of Viennese Actionism and the street and guerilla theater associated with anti-Vietnam War protests, down to Robert Wilson’s theater of images (e.g., Einstein on the Beach [1976], with music by Philip Glass), Laurie Anderson’s multimedia performances and Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films (1994–2002), postmodern performance, heterogeneous though it is, exhibits certain common denominators: spectacle, mixed media, weak or incidental narrative, and often some degree of audience participation. Such features, inherited from the

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seventeenth-century court masque and other cognate forms, appear not only in performance art but even in narrative texts such as Gilbert Sorrentino’s “Masque of Fungo” (incorporated in Mulligan Stew [1979]), James Merrill’s narrative poem Scripts for the Pageant (1980, part of The Changing Light at Sandover) and John Ashbery’s prose-poem, “Description of a Masque” (1984). In all of these cases, masque serves to model a particularly centrifugal and heterogeneous kind of space – a world made up of fragments of many worlds, a heterotopia.

No outside-text Il n’y a pas de hors-texte, Derrida notoriously asserted: there is nothing outside the text, no “outside-text.”30 Here is one reason (not the only one) why conceiving of a building as a text has such radical consequences for architecture. A building, even a building conceived of as an “utterance” coded in an architectural “language,” has more or less sharply delimited boundaries; but a building understood as a text overruns boundaries, opening out into other texts, onto a limitless space of intertextuality. Such are the implications of a texualist, deconstructivist architecture: The division between inside and outside is radically disturbed. The form no longer simply divides an inside from an outside . . . the sense of being enclosed, whether by a building or a room, is disrupted . . . The wall breaks open, and in a very ambiguous way . . . It no longer provides security by dividing the familiar from the unfamiliar, inside from out. The whole condition of enclosure breaks down.31

There is no more apt illustration of the architectural equivalent of pas de hors-texte than, once again, Jameson’s postmodern touchstone, the Gehry House. In the Gehry House as built, the tumbling cube of the kitchen “bursts through the structure, peeling back the layers of the house,” and a new space opens, ambiguously inside and outside, between the outer wall of the old house and the new “skin” that has been wrapped around it. Plans (so far unimplemented) called for further disruption: the house’s frame was to erupt through the rear wall into the backyard in an avalanche of scaffolding.32 Just as the Gehry House abruptly juxtaposes the most heterogeneous building materials, so postmodern texts juxtapose technical registers, colloquial language, bureaucratese, advertising copy – in short, a sampling of the discourses that circulate in our postmodern world, as well as bits of verbal residue or junk. Just as the wrapping of one structure around another in the Gehry House creates a disquieting interior space, so too

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do postmodernist texts. Finally, just as the Gehry House, through its disjunctive and troubling deployment of spaces and materials, seems to aspire to “think a material thought” about postmodern society, as Jameson put it, so do postmodernist texts.33 They sometimes read like “translations” into verbal discourse of the architectural discourse of postmodern buildings such as the Gehry House. Notes Material in this chapter has been adapted, with permission of the publisher, from Brian McHale, The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole; Postmodernist Long Poems (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 6–17. 1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 154. 2 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 20–30, 70–2, 117–19. 3 Karatani Kojin, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans. by Sabu Kohso, ed. by Michael Speaks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), xxv. 4 Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works, edited by Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Lesser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 105. 5 Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 212–3. 6 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 4th edn., 1984), 39–79. 7 Peter Eisenman, “Misreading,” in House of Cards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 167–86. 8 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 99. 9 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1939), 73, 111. On modernist spatial form, the locus classicus is Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts,” The Sewanee Review 53/2, 53.3 and 53.4 (1945): 221–4, 433–56, 643–53. 10 See Jencks, Language, 129–32. 11 See chapter 17 in this collection. 12 McCaffrey, “Avant-Pop, xvii-xviii. 13 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2nd edn., 1977), 38, 40, 42, 44, 104. 14 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 56, 61, 70–4. 15 See Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 107–29. 16 See Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1896, vol. 2, The Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 59–60; Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 31. 17 See Peter Eisenman, X House (New York: Rizzoli, 1977); Derrida and Eisenman, Chora L Works; James Wines, De-architecture (New York: Rizzoli,

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1987); Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Boston: Little, Brown, 1988). 18 Charles Bernstein, “The Book as Architecture,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 56. 19 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 250. 20 Eisenman, X House, 44, 88, 54. See also Gavin Macrae Gibson, The Secret Life of Buildings: An American Mythology for Modern Architecture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985), 30–5. 21 Quoted in Macrae Gibson, Secret Life, 38. 22 Rosalind Krauss, “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” A&U: Architecture and Urbanism (January 1980); Eisenman, House of Cards, 182, 184. 23 Shapiro’s “House” poems preface several of Eisenman’s books: “To an Idea” appears in Eisenman’s House X (1982), “House (II)” appears in his Houses of Cards (1987), while a sequence of four short poems, “House” 1–4, appears in Suzanne Frank’s Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response (1994). All but one of the poems used in Eisenman’s books ultimately find their way into a sequence entitled “House,” in Shapiro’s 1994 volume, After a Lost Original. 24 David Shapiro, To an Idea, 2nd edn. (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1986),15; After a Lost Original (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1994), 47. 25 Shapiro, After, 41. 26 Thomas Fink, The Poetry of David Shapiro (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 33. 27 Tschumi, Architecture, 93, 102. 28 Architecture, 117–18, 125–6, 204–5. See also Johnson and Wigley, Deconstructivist, 92–101. 29 Derrida and Eisenman, Chora L Works, 167. 30 Derrida, Of Grammatology. 31 Johnson and Wigley, Deconstructivist, 18. 32 Deconstuctivist, 22. 33 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 129.

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The dematerialization of the art object – a conversation Michael Mercil and Amanda Gluibizzi

If postmodernism saw a move, as Roland Barthes would have it, “from work to text,” then Lucy Lippard’s book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object could serve as a primary document of that move.1 This exhibition-in-a-book takes the form of a collection of citations, blurbs, interviews, press releases, and artists’ statements to establish a chronology of the nascent field of conceptual art, visual art that was often ephemeral or completely objectless. Dematerialization, published in 1973, signaled a shift to artistic dematerialization as it was happening, but also stands now as a historical document, in which readers can track the development of new movements and the separation of object-centered art from the newly object-free goals of art that was purely conceptual. In keeping with the format of Dematerialization, Michael Mercil and I conducted several conversations about the volume and its reception in order to form a picture of its particular moment in the history of postmodernism. Our conversation refers to sixteen of the 217 artists, writers, and curators indexed in Dematerialization, and active during the book’s organizing frame of 1966–72. Two of the artists we mention are not included in Lippard’s book: the American minimalist sculptor and art critic Donald Judd, and Yugoslavian-born performance artist Marina Abramovic who was, between 1965–72, still a student in Belgrade and Zagreb. These artists’ activities fall loosely within and across several thematic categories of an emergent postmodernist practice that remains relevant in the visual arts today: language as form (Vito Acconci, Siah Armajani, John Baldesarri, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson); system and seriality as method (Carl Andre, Judd, Sol Lewitt); material presence and/or absence (Andre, Barry, Bill Bollinger, Robert Morris, Wilson); artist as material/body as site (Abramovic, Acconci, Naumann); painting as idea (Baldessari, Gene Beery, Daniel Burin, Jan Dibbets); recording (photography and video) as artwork (Abramovic, Acconci, Nauman, Jeff Wall). 199

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Unlike earlier post–World War II art movements – such as abstract expressionism, Pop Art, and, to some extent, minimalism – the conceptual strategies documented in Dematerialization are not perceived as originating within the United States. This is due in part to participants’ active engagement with newly accessible recording and communications technologies, in part to the affordability of air travel. Consequently, much of the material included in Lippard’s book was, from inception, international in scope and influence. AMANDA GLUIBIZZI: One of the things that Lippard writes about in her essay “Escape Attempts” is a distinction borrowed from artist Sol LeWitt between Conceptual art with a capital “C” and conceptual art with a lowercase “c.” Throughout the book there seems to be an attempt to figure out what Conceptual art is with a capital “C.” Conceptual art with a small c – for example, LeWitt’s own wall drawings, which were executed by others – is that “in which the material forms were often conventional although generated by a paramount idea;” while Conceptual art with a capital C is “more or less what I described above but also I suppose anything by anyone who wanted to belong to a movement” (D, vii). So the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary. MICHAEL MERCIL: So Joseph Kosuth’s Art as Idea as Idea (D, 31) is Conceptual with a capital C? Whereas we could place the serial arrangements of common bricks by Carl Andre as conceptual with a small c? That’s an interesting distinction. The artists themselves were certainly aware of such differences – particularly in the interviews. Dematerialization was released when you were a young artist. What sort of impact did it have? I have the first edition, which I purchased at my school’s bookstore for $5.95. It is a book about artwork of which I then knew nothing. Most of the artists in it were based in NYC, and few of them, as I recall it, were painters. It reveals a much broader concept of what was then contemporary art than I had at that time . . . The book itself is a conceptual work. Opening it, I began uncovering earthworks and conceptual art for myself for the first time. Dematerialization is not about things. It is about attitudes and approaches and systems. It radically realigned my thinking of what art could be. It was my first time seeing or hearing about this kind of stuff. To me, it was like entering a foreign country to which Lucy had written a guidebook.

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That segues nicely because I was going to ask, how did you use it? Sometimes it includes reproductions, but a lot of times it’s just excerpts or quotes. Who knows how I actually used it? Another book I read is Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art.2 The two books sat on my shelf next to each other. For a student like me, Lucy’s was the most useful. Perhaps I remember it best because it is so episodic. Like a Baedeker guide to Europe, it describes a world. Burnham’s book is about categories as organizing systems of art. Dematerialization is a document. This makes sense since it was organized year-by-year so you could travel through the art world or travel back in the art world. When I was first looking at Dematerialization, I had yet to visit New York City. The projects I recall from it reflected two kinds of remoteness. First was the remoteness of the Southwest desert where a lot of artists were working. From Minneapolis, where I was living, however, SoHo [South of Houston Street in Manhattan] appeared equally distant and mysterious. Maybe this stuff seemed mysterious to Lucy, too, and this book was an attempt to grapple with her own set of questions. Her approach is personal and the writing is fluid – it isn’t authorial. It doesn’t try to establish its authority in any way. At the same moment Lucy was writing Dematerialization, she was growing more aware of feminism and other political issues. The book was first published following on the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam and as feminism, environmentalism, and other social and cultural politics were rising to the surface of public consciousness. In the early ‘70s, Watergate was very much in the air. The time of this book and its politics reflects the arc of my own coming of age. Lippard mentions that she becomes “radicalized” – her word (D, ix) – when she’s in Argentina, and this sets her on different trajectories: the feminist one that you mentioned, but also an awareness of how artists maintain rights over their work, which she almost sees as a conceptual project. You’re right. There’s a question about the relationship between artists and institutions. One curious thing about the artists then passing through the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where I was a transfer student, is how many declared, “The smartest thing I ever did was leave college.” The reason I left a university for an art school was to find out what an art world was. I had no models. Yet, I had some sense that to become the artist

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I wanted to be, I needed to find a place where art was happening, and the most immediately available place was an art school. That may still be true. Art schools operate differently from art departments in universities and liberal arts colleges. They are closer to an art world that is gallery and commercially oriented, to an art world of artists not academics where verbal language is secondary and not primary. In Dematerialization, Lucy presents herself as a kind of reporter from the art world’s front lines. For someone who was, like me, trying to discover what that world looked like, her reporting was very important. One of the ways you’ve described the book is as a kind of a protoblog, which is funny because as I started looking it over I thought of it as a late-day commonplace book, which is kind of the same thing. What do you think that suggests for our consumption of the book? It’s not unlike the earliest examples we have of art critical writing: Diderot’s letters from the Paris salons.3 Those are notes and observations Diderot reported to a small group of subscribers in the eighteenth century. In his letters, Diderot describes the artworks he’s seen and offers his opinions and judgments. By simply choosing to write about particular artists and not to write about others, he renders a kind of judgment. This marks the beginning of a modern art critical awareness. What binds Diderot’s letters to Lucy’s book and to blogs is their description of a public or cultural experience alongside personal opinion. When earlier I mentioned the lack of “authority” in Lucy’s writing, I meant that although she assumes her perspective might be of interest to others, she does not presume to offer an authoritative accounting of anything. I like to think she assumes the book’s potential for authority resides within the judgment of the individual reader. Dematerialization is not about politics. It is about art. But it offers a radical vision of art. At the time I was reading it, I may not have recognized a separation between the two. Do you see them as separate things now? The radicalization of politics and aesthetics? No. My own politics and art have long been linked through an ethical awareness. The college I left behind to attend MCAD was an exceptionally liberal Catholic university where morals and ethics were part of everyday conversation.4 In art school I experienced my most difficult transitions during critique sessions, where the language was primarily formal and almost never ethical. That surprised me. At first, I couldn’t understand it. And that

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may provide another reason for my attraction to Lucy’s book. Although it was written in an unfamiliar language, she was not writing only about form. That’s an interesting way of thinking about it. Ordinarily we’d be thinking of the dematerialization of art as a foray into postmodernism, but there’s also this idea that the language with which you might discuss or build art would have a political aspect, which seems distinctly counter-modern. The book documents Vito Acconci trailing random people down New York City streets in Following Piece (D, 117), and Service Area, which involved having his mail delivered to the gallery . . . Forwarded to MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art, New York] . . . . It records a moment when the artist presents him or herself as subject matter, and hence as a body within a social space. When Dematerialization first sat on my shelf, Carl Andre visited MCAD where, dressed in overalls, he arranged several rows of steel plates on a small plaza near the building entrance. He also talked about his artwork and poetry in the school auditorium. Through all this he appeared to position himself, or at least his biography, politically. I didn’t know if he was acting or if it was real, but his was clearly a constructed personality. Andre is a good example of an artist who, at that time, I did not know how or what to think about. However, two of the artists included in Lucy’s book were teaching a class together at MCAD when I arrived there. Siah Armajani (D, 204) is a public artist, and Bill Bollinger (D, 116) made sculpture using common industrial and building materials. Siah was my teacher and we remain close. But I was not one of Bill’s students and he and his art were somewhat enigmatic to me then. All these experiences seemed a very long way from the relatively figurative abstraction informing the core of my previous university art education. It’s complicated to situate this book in that moment of my life. It was part of a whole process that is still unwinding for me. Maybe that’s why it’s such a great book – you can pull it off the shelf once again and still get a sense that “this continues to wind itself out into the world.” It was helpful that we were able to see the Materializing Six Years exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.5 Was there anything in the show that stood out to you that you had associated with Lippard’s intervention? We looked at a lot of things I was familiar with through my reading, yet had little first-hand experience of. What struck me was how loose and freespirited much of the work seemed.

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Jack Burnham’s book links to many of the same artists, but through another lens and viewpoint. Burnham imagines the radicalization of dematerialization differently. His issues seem more exclusively to be art issues. The Structure of Art suggests a postmodern language that is more theoretical than social or political in its focus. When we earlier spoke about Vito Acconci, I had forgotten the show was at MoMA, and I still cannot quite imagine it there. It was in Information.6 Compare that exhibition to the production of performance art in the last half-dozen years – of, for example, the celebrity condition surrounding Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present.7 In 1970, Vito had his personal mail delivered to the museum, and in 2010 people lined the sidewalks outside MoMA to see and be seen inside with Marina. In the seventies, Marina was a young woman doing actions as performance. How that work becomes re-presented and institutionalized is part of Marina’s current project and it is a valuable project. But back then performance had no history. It was the now. It was scrappy. It was scruffy. She worked from the back of a truck. Now performance is reproduced at MoMA or produced by MoMA. I don’t quite see how today’s art world can imagine itself as radical relative to what it once was. The art world was a very different place then. I think the art world would be embarrassed to think of itself as radical now, don’t you think? Yes, because it isn’t. One marvels at the systems of bureaucratization and institutionalization that permeate the whole structure of our contemporary culture of which the art world is simply another part. When I was doing a studio visit, an MFA student mentioned she was told that women didn’t have a place in systems art. She felt she was getting a very masculinized view of art. Frankly, the viewpoint of Jack Burnham is very masculine. So I asked the student, “Have you looked at Lucy Lippard, because she’s writing about the same people?” and even writing about them as systems. It is surprising how few women artists are in Dematerialization, but at the same time Lippard is curating her Numbers shows, and her last Numbers show was all women.8 Feminist politics nibbles at the book’s edges but is not located within its center. The world in which Lucy was then writing allowed little room for women or their voices. Dematerialization represents a hinge moment. As Lucy becomes more fully politicized, her writing creates a place and calls

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attention to others’ voices, others’ forms, others’ contexts. Making room for another’s story is the history of politics. The urgency of politics most often enters into the language and structure of everyday discourse only when there’s no way for it not to. As art becomes more institutionalized, artists feel less like outsiders and, consequently, their voices may become less political. I’ve thought a lot about American culture and the varied narratives we inherit about our peculiar place as artists within it. Visual art begins its rise in popular American consciousness just after World War II, and the economies of art schools and these other things we’re talking about – well, that art world Lucy described is totally gone. We now recall it nostalgically, though I’m sure some people aren’t nostalgic about it at all. Within the geography that Dematerialization covers, we witness the artists bumping into each other on the street or at a gallery opening or someplace like that. It was a much smaller, tighter art world then, and probably much messier and less organized. I want to return to my earlier thoughts about politics and outsiders. It is difficult now to conceive of the artist as radical because art has become culturally institutionalized. We seem to know (or think we know) what art is. And even if art is still not truly integrated into the culture as a whole – after all, NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] funding to individuals was never fully restored – it is generally understood to represent an economy. This is America, and through money – big enough money to sometimes make the front page of the New York Times – art and artists today play a different role than they did forty years ago. Because money and art are now news, the politics of art has changed. Artists operating utterly independently of, or organizing themselves outside of, some network of institutionalized support seem unlikely and rare. Lippard, of course, was very, very involved in that sort of thing in the 70s. It’s easy to assume or pretend that art without market value does not happen. That’s one reason Lucy asks artists for their documents. She archives a lot of political art, because she doesn’t want its story to be lost. By writing about it she’s writing its history. Storyteller may be her most radical role. She declares in effect, “I’m a storyteller. This story has significance and I’m going to keep telling it until people start to listen.” Perhaps we should talk about the relationship between storytellers and historians? That is really important because even in the course of the book, time shifts. It’s six years, from 1966 to 1971, and you sense that things are

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happening, she’s doing reportage on the ground, but she’s also collecting historical documents. The book has this really strange feel particularly to someone born after it was published. For me, it was always a historical document. For me, it was news, news, news. It’s a collection of what’s going on as it’s happening, but also it’s – ironically – making this work history, even though it was meant to be ad hoc or immaterial. Yes, it’s ironic that it’s about dematerialization and yet is materialized as a document. Sometimes you get the sense that Lucy’s been up all night writing in a motel room and is busy stuffing junk into the trunk of her car because she’s got to get back on the road. That makes the structure of the book echo the structure of the art world in the day. It’s peripatetic and episodic. Sometimes it’s just a citation; sometimes it’s a whole article . . . Things arrive by mail. At times she writes only briefly because . . . that’s it. Time is up. That’s how it becomes historical. There was interest then in ground-level history. The historian Ferdinand Braudel, of the French Annales School, was writing about everyday history at the bottom rather than from the top.9 That’s also Lucy. We could talk about being “on the ground” in the context of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. At that time there were only three television broadcast networks to choose from in the United States and there was intense competition among them for the nightly news audience. My memory is of Cronkite breaking away from the then-typical reporting structure. At some point, he begins questioning the official White House story on the war in Vietnam. He goes to Vietnam and realizes what he’s been told and what he sees happening around him do not align. Cronkite reports that on the television news, and my dad, in North Dakota, tunes in to watch the established social order unraveling. What or who becomes established is something to think about. Today’s art system certainly represents an establishment. In 1970, when Vito Acconci was showing at MoMA and getting his mail delivered to the Information show, what did that represent? What was that? Because whatever it was, one doesn’t feel like MoMA would now subject itself to such a low-level happening. It’s become like the world’s busiest airport terminal. It would now be a tough place to pick up your mail. It cannot tolerate the slowness of something that’s not a spectacle.10

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What Lippard puts her finger on is dematerialization’s deliberate dismantling of the gallery system. Because if it’s not material, there’s nothing to hang on the walls, there’s nothing to sell, and it takes art’s economics out of the equation. Looking at the illustrations from 1966, you see a lot of land or earth art. There are some performance works, and language is just emerging as material. In the pictures, spaces, and bodies in spaces appear everywhere. 1970 is one of the book’s longer chapters and by then language captures a lot of Lucy’s attention. Because she is a writer, of course she would become especially interested in language as art. One exhibition entry lists Lucy as an artist (D, 178). Yes, in the Information exhibition and catalogue. She objects to that. She’s very clear about her role. Elsewhere in the book she comments on the Art & Language group and questions if their writing should be understood as making art or art criticism. It seems Lucy cannot quite accept the published essay as an art form (D, 151–2, 187–9). Throughout the text of Dematerialization, Joseph Kosuth addresses language and/as art, as does Lawrence Weiner (D, 127–33, 161). Carl Andre in some ways refuses to address it. But this refusal confirms that his method and purpose align more closely to Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (D, 75–6) than to Donald Judd’s “specific objects.”11 Even as a student that was clear to me. Andre figures in this book again and again and again (D, 46–8, 100, 155–9). He reappears in ways that Judd does not.12 Robert Morris often reappears (D, 18, 27, 29, 45–6, 93, 256–8) because he was going through – and continues to go through – a lot of material and conceptual costume changes. Lippard describes him as “virtually styleless,” and therefore almost by default, Morris has to be put into this book (D, viii). Andre was the opposite of that: he never changed anything except the materials he worked with. The form of his work derives from a system, and neither the form nor the material nor the system is a metaphor. That is why Andre’s work remains interesting to me: it’s never a metaphor, it’s never a stand-in for something else. It simply stands there as its own thing. Other artists likewise play with language as its own thing, to be comprehended as just what it is. That’s why for so many of these conceptual artists, including Art & Language artists, Wittgenstein is so important. Yes. Because art is sometimes that thing you point to or at when language fails you. But you recognize it as some thing.

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Video is in different ways another presence in the book – in certain instances video appears as language-centered and at other times it is bodycentered. These differences are apparent in a variety of artworks by both Acconci and Bruce Nauman (D, 10, 162–3, 206–7). Language links to video time through its articulation of sequence. The body is linked to video space by the movement of the camera. The book captures a series of early events and conditions which are sometimes just as boring to read about now as they were to witness at the time. Still, they’re foundational in ways having less to do with what they are than with what they do and how they do those particular things. That’s why they continue to fascinate. The artworks documented in Dematerialization represent a fundamental break with the practice of an older faith. They really do. There’s not a lot about painting in here. I started going through and flagging pages that I thought could be considered painting, like Jan Dibbets’s Corrected Perspective on Studio Wall (D, 123), John Baldessari’s Everything Is Purged from This Painting but Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work (D, 58), for which he hired a commercial sign painter to paint the work, and Gene Beery’s, Note: Make a Painting of a Note as Painting (D, 110). Daniel Buren’s striped awning canvases are everywhere (D, 45, 246) . . . They’re trying to think about the ways that painting can be okay, in this new way of thinking about medium or dematerialization or conception . . . It’s painting as idea. The idea of painting and the act of painting are held in tension. Previously the act of painting was presumed to contain the idea of painting within itself. It’s almost the same thing as [Kossuth’s] “art as idea as idea.” Painting becomes a question mark. It’s no longer an assumption. Mastery is no longer the question, or is finally identified as the wrong question. That’s why it’s important for conceptual artists to outsource their painting, for example. Because then it’s not about mastery or technique or “the hand.” It’s entirely about painting as painting as painting. Shortly thereafter, in 1978, the New Image Painting exhibit organized by Richard Marshall for the Whitney Museum in New York flipped all that over on its head.13 Another, younger, generation of artists backed into figurative, narrative painting which was supposed to be dead. At that same moment we were listening to bands like the Talking Heads and to Patti Smith. They are musicians who, like me, came out of art school. Suddenly it was another, different art world. For the first time it felt like my world.

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The absurdity of reliance on a reproduction really gets pointed out in this period. Artists in several sections discuss the role of photography and photographic documentation – particularly in relation to earthworks (D, 87–90, 256–8). A variety of artists were using photography in new and different ways. This represents yet another revolution in contemporary art. It is difficult to remember that photography was then typically considered a commercial art medium. Photography classes at MCAD were taught only in the design department. As students we protested in order to get photo classes included in the fine arts curriculum. When the photo document itself became a work of art, the position and role of photography gained elasticity. This marks the time when photography becomes conceptual art with a small c. One of the photographers Lucy includes in Dematerialization is the Canadian Jeff Wall (D, 213–4). He must have then been very young. Jeff Wall goes on to write the very article you’re talking about in which he says that by documenting performance art and conceptual art the photograph finds its way into the gallery and becomes a medium in itself.14 It also had significance for video. When this book was written, video was still a crude, clumsy, and difficult technology. It was the era of the Sony Portapak, which was a portable camera and video recording deck weighing 70 pounds. To get 20 minutes of tape time the battery needed 24 hours of charging time. You had no means of editing. Consequently, early video art tends to show a lot of people’s feet on the sidewalks. With only 20 minutes of tape, that was about all you could shoot. You could point the camera at the wall or you could point it at your feet. You could follow people for a short distance or you could record words moving up or down or across the screen. Now, however, video is much more like photography: everybody has a camera in their pocket. Acconci later writes that one reason he felt okay about taking his art onto the street is because he saw the protests there and understood that as the place to be radical.15 This becomes important to him and you can see him taking a “civic turn.” Acconci became a public artist. He understood and still believes in the street as a democratic necessity. That kind of work appeals to me even if I don’t describe myself as that kind of artist. For me, it’s about the object and the action. That’s provided a point of inquiry throughout my career: when is the art an object and when is it an action and what’s the relation between them? Things are not easy to make, and dematerializing things isn’t easy either.

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No, you assume that there’s something to dematerialize. When Lucy talks about radicalization she is talking, in part, about herself. In other ways she’s writing about understanding herself in relation to a specific social and political structure. That’s something I wonder about as an artist who teaches at a public university. I’m very aware of a friction between the institution’s language and my own. Within Ohio State University, I sometimes play a reluctant and uncomfortable spokesperson. My academic colleagues may look skeptically at me as an artist while, simultaneously, my students are modeling what they understand or misunderstand about my behavior as an artist. It’s not about me personally, but it describes my biographical condition or context. You know: the politics of the self is also the politics of the culture or the politics of an economy or the politics of an institution. It’s a back-and-forth that, in the age of the selfie, becomes difficult territory to negotiate. I don’t wish to dwell on Marina [Abramovic]’s MoMA performance, but it was precisely pitched to its audience. The way in which the museum captured and posted pictures of everybody who stood in line to sit with her created the world’s most elaborately constructed, well-lit, in-focus, and institutionalized selfie possible. It’s the perfect work of art for our time. And it is so distant from Vito biting Trademarks onto his body in 1970. There was certainly nothing like the ad hoc nature that we saw in the Brooklyn [Materializing “Six Years”] show in the Marina Abramovic performance. The show in Brooklyn was a careful reconstruction of what is essentially a miscellany that was originally even less aestheticized than a Fluxbox. One might imagine the Fluxus artists as setting a precedent for this work, but a Fluxbox typically projected some sense of itself as an art object.16 Much of the stuff we see or read about in the Lippard book was more open than that. It raises the question: “So, this may be a work of art?” That “may be” is important. It causes you to wonder, Do you want this to be a work of art? Is it better as a work of art? Or is it better if it’s not? You may decide, “Because this may be a work of art it’s a failure,” or, conversely, “Because this may be a work of art it’s a success.” In Dematerialization, the way anything becomes a work of art is because of the activities surrounding it. It isn’t about the thing itself. The thing itself has been dematerialized by the book, and the book creates the space of and for the art. That’s what it’s about: it creates a space for artists. Everything else – the market, the collectors, the museums – feels secondary. It isn’t as if they’re

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not present at that time or in that place, but they’re not central to the narrative, and they’re not the creators of the space. In Lucy’s book they too are dematerialized. Then the politics we find here is a politics of the refusal of medium itself. The artists in Dematerialization were motivated by – in the best sense – nothing. The book includes an amusingly perceptive interview by Robert Barry with Ian Wilson called, “Oral Communication” (D, 179–83). In it, Wilson says, “What struck me as important with oral communication is that when a person makes something he’s attached to, and he wants to call it art, he has to call it art. To call it anything, you have to either speak it, or print it, or use sign language, if you’re deaf and dumb. Oral communication is a response to the anticipated question asked of artists – What are you doing? I was able to answer ‘I am speaking to you.’” Barry responds, “When you were first using oral communication I thought of it in terms of what I knew about materials that artists use. I myself was using radio waves which dissolve . . . I thought about it in those terms, or like the gas I was releasing into the atmosphere then, something that was gone, and you didn’t have a chance to do anything with it. Something released.” Wilson then suggests that, “Language could be action”; that “Language is the grammar of behaviour.” He comments, “The artist is not a mystic but the opposite of a mystic . . . the artist by his nature communicates, whereas the mystic is someone who experiences and does not place importance on his experience being communicated. Maybe a reason for this concentration on language as art is more acute consiousness on the artist’s part that he is really a part of the world . . .”17 Right there, Barry and Wilson answer the question of how and where to locate this art. Following these artists many of us began doing “projects” instead of making “pieces.” While I remained attached to objects, I was soon attempting to incorporate language into my work. But words reduced my art to a kind of illustration. At the time, my only way out of that was to drop the words. Nonetheless, my attitude and my relationship to art was utterly changed by the artists and artworks presented to me in this book. As an artist, I had become self-aware – which is different from becoming self-conscious. Dematerialization articulates the recognition that all artists operate within stuctured systems. This demands artistic selfawareness as well as artistic responsibility.

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Right, and there’s an implied politics in there, too. Its politics is not necessarily of the street sort, but it’s definitely of the life sort. I think we should stop right there. OK. Notes 1 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 155–64; Lucy Lippard (ed.), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Hereafter referred to in the text as D. Although the body text’s pagination remains the same, the 1997 edition was published with an introductory essay called “Escape Attempts” (vii–xxii). 2 Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art (New York: G. Braziller, 1973). 3 See Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, ed. and trans. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Diderot, Salons. Texte Établi et Présenté par Jean Seznec et Jean Adhémar, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). 4 From 1972–4 Mercil was enrolled at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He attended a preparatory school on the same campus from 1968–72. 5 Materializing “Six Years,” curated by Catherine Morris and Victor Bonin, was on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art from September 14, 2012, to February 17, 2013. Its accompanying catalog is Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, Morris and Bonin, eds. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012). 6 Information was an exhibition on display from July 2 to September 20, 1970, at the Museum of Modern Art, and was organized by Kynaston McShine. Acconci’s contribution was called “Service Area.” See Kynaston McShine (ed.), Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970) for the catalog and documentation of artworks included. 7 Marina Abramovic’s retrospective (curated by Klaus Biesenbach), The Artist Is Present, which featured reenacted performances of Abramovic’s early work as well as a new performance in which Abramovic sat unmoving and facing a single visitor, was on display at MoMA from March 14 to May 31, 2010. See Mary Christian (ed.), Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). 8 Four exhibitions were curated by Lippard between 1969 and 1974. Each show took the population of the city in which it opened as its title: “557,087” in Seattle, “955,000” in Vancouver, “2,972,453” in Buenos Aires, and “c. 7,500” in Valencia, California. See Cornelia Butler et al., Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows, 1969–74 (London: Afterall Books, 2012). 9 Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life: 1400 to 1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

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10 See also Chapter 22 in this volume. 11 Judd’s essay, “Specific Objects,” identified a type of art object that he noted was neither painting nor sculpture. Objects such as these needed, Judd wrote, “only to be interesting” (184). Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965); reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings, 1959–1979: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 2005): 181–9. 12 Donald Judd is not referenced in the book’s index. Lippard recalls that Carl Andre offered to compile Dematerialization’s index, not least because he could leave out the names of artists he felt did not warrant inclusion. Lippard noted that she has never checked Andre’s index against the book’s texts. Lucy Lippard, personal communication with Amanda Gluibizzi, October 24, 2014. 13 On display from December 6, 1978 to January 28, 1979. Richard Marshall, New Image Painting (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978). 14 Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or As, Conceptual Art,” in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (eds.), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 247–67. 15 Vito Acconci, “Some Notes on Illegality in Art,” Art Journal 50/3 (Autumn 1991), 69–74. 16 Fluxus artists, performers, musicians, and writers (active largely in the 1960s and 1970s) identified themselves and their works as anti-art and anticommercial. 17 Wilson may be referencing LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” which begins, “Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists.” Lippard, Six Years, 75.

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The New Hollywood cinema and after John Hellmann

I By 1966, Hollywood approached bankruptcy in its confused pursuit of an audience. Mass-mediated images from the Vietnam War and the growing turmoil in the United States left American movies appearing irrelevant and antiquated. Foreign films were meanwhile attracting a growing niche audience in art-house theaters in major cities. In December, MGM invented a subsidiary company for the purpose of daring to release Italian auteur Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language film, Blow-Up. With its nudity, drugs, unconventional sexuality, and ambiguous assassination, all left unpunished, the film violated nearly every restriction to which Hollywood movies had conformed during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Yet Blow-Up reflected the new conditions of the 1960s epitomized by the “swinging London” that it portrayed. While some theaters refused to show the film without the seal of the Hollywood Production Code, “other exhibitors stepped in to take their place.”1 In the early months of 1967, Blow-Up became a massive box-office and critical success across the United States. Hollywood abandoned the Production Code. That same year, in the opening created by Blow-Up, two upstart films made by comparative outsiders and mavericks, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, launched a revolution in American film. Inventive adaptations of the rebellious spirit and aesthetic innovation of the French New Wave, both films tapped the burgeoning youth audience, represented by the coming of age of the post–World War II baby-boom generation, while setting off critical and cultural debate. Then, in 1969, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, made by Hollywood brats Hopper and Peter Fonda on a shoestring budget, earned a phenomenal $19.1 million.2 The two leads, played by Fonda and Hopper, rode motorcycles in a loosely episodic narrative, performed no heroics, and were both 214

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killed at the end. Seeing the new youth- and counter-cultures flock to such films, the studios threw open their gates to a new generation of independent-minded filmmakers, many of them youthful film-school graduates. Dubbed the American Renaissance, American New Wave, or – most commonly – New Hollywood, these filmmakers proceeded to engage in an unprecedented critique of American history, institutions, and ideology. Shaped by European art cinema, especially the French New Wave and auteur theory, as well as by native underground and documentary experiments, directors such as Penn, Nichols, Hopper, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Terrence Malick, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola brought the modernist aesthetic of the autonomous visionary artist to the commercial genre structures of classical Hollywood narrative. For a time, this aesthetic seemed to triumph. Coppola, in particular, became preeminent among these auteurs with dark films of magisterial cinematic elegance that excoriated American society. Coppola’s The Godfather (1971) and The Godfather II (1976) became the first blockbusters, taking over theaters for extended runs; they were also acclaimed by critics, along with his smaller The Conversation (1974), as supreme works of high art. The critical consensus has been that the period of intense formal and thematic innovation of the modernist New Hollywood represents a golden age that lasted from 1967 until the mid-1970s, with either Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) or, more often, Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) seen as launching a new period. The reason for that shift, as it had been in 1967, was Vietnam. In the aftermath of the war, “Vietnam” stood for many as a slough of despond, perhaps even a cul-de-sac, in the master narrative of the United States as a uniquely positioned champion of freedom and progress, destined after World War II to meet the global challenge of Soviet-led international communism. Hardly a product of the New Hollywood directors, John Wayne’s jingoistic The Green Berets (1968) was the only film of 1967–76 to be set in Vietnam, and it unabashedly presented the war in terms of that cultural narrative, imposing upon it the classical Hollywood genres of the western and World War II films. But as one film historian observes, “Traces of Vietnam and its fallout have been identified in various other films of the period, in genres ranging from the western to horror and those featuring the alienated returning veteran.”3 In fact, New Hollywood films, as a group, registered the negative implications and effects of the war for American culture through subtext, allegory, and conspicuous omission. More foundationally, the disillusion and malaise in American society induced by the war created the sizeable

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popular and critical audience during 1967–76 for the modernist narrative conventions governing the New Hollywood films: an antihero or social outcast as protagonist, focus on character rather than plot, disruption of the illusion of objectivity, a strong effect of the real, genre revision, critical examination of society, distrust of political institutions, hostile portraits of authority figures, a cynical worldview, visceral sex and violence, a focus on the dark side of human nature, emphasis on ethnic identity, and a downbeat ending.4 This modernism for a mass audience might well represent a first stage in film of postmodernism as an aesthetic practice in which the opposition between high and mass culture had been erased. But this ascendancy of conventions associated with high literary modernism in a commercial industry thought previously to be its quintessential low antagonist would prove temporary. The several Vietnam films that finally appeared during 1978–9 represent the culmination of the New Hollywood critique of American society and its cultural narrative. Among these, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) were major box-office and critical successes, with the latter in particular winning several Academy Awards. But a third, long-awaited film, made by the preeminent auteur of the New Hollywood, would achieve the greatest and most enduring impact. In 1976, Coppola had gone to the Philippines to begin shooting his planned epic about the Vietnam War from John Milius’s script, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s classic early modernist novella about European colonialism in Africa, Heart of Darkness (1902). Coppola’s well-publicized struggles to complete the film would lead to bad publicity in a press that began referring to “Apocalypse Never,” waggishly amended after The Deer Hunter to “Apocalypse Too Late.” But Apocalypse Now, submitted as a “work in progress,” would be awarded the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and upon its release in 1979 came in sixth among box-office hits. Originally dismissed by many critics, Apocalypse Now has long since become almost universally recognized as a major masterpiece of world cinema, a judgment made clear in 2001 during the celebratory reception accorded the extended version, Apocalypse Now Redux. It is also widely understood to be the “apotheosis” in popular culture of an American literary discourse, most influentially shaped by Michael Herr’s journalistic memoir Dispatches (1976), through which the Vietnam War has taken its place as “a fundamentally unknowable conflict,” a “site of epistemological confusion.”5 Less recognized, but important in gauging the significance of Apocalypse Now, is that the cinematic text of this pivotal film enacts the broader

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passage of the Hollywood cinema through the alienated landscape of the modernist New Hollywood films of the late 1960s and 1970s to the postmodernist screen world of the 1980s. A meta-cinematic, historicized critical reading of Apocalypse Now affords a unique opportunity to track the logic by which the intensely skeptical, experimental, and revisionist New Hollywood of 1967–76 became the abstract, recycled, portentously magnified, but curiously depthless cinema of the 1980s.

II The opening sequence of Apocalypse Now virtually summarizes the inspiration of New Hollywood by formal techniques introduced in the French New Wave and American underground cinema of the 1960s. Coppola employs an array of these techniques to plunge us into the psyche of his Vietnam-veteran protagonist Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), while establishing the theme of the undermining of the cultural narrative that accompanied the United States on its mission in Vietnam. As James Bernardoni has observed, Coppola begins Apocalypse Now with “an elaborate directaddress image that reveals his intention to make his film conform to the modernist aesthetic.”6 The thematic use to which this intense application of modernist cinematic technique is put enables the viewer to inhabit at the outset the lonely separation of the film’s protagonist from the American cultural narrative of a special mission to further progress and liberation. As he will state in voice-over narration at the conclusion of the opening sequence, “I needed a mission.” Willard, who has returned to Vietnam from the United States after finding that the “home” he left back in the United States “just didn’t exist anymore,” exhibits the alienation, disillusion, and desperation common to the antiheroes of the New Hollywood. The film’s subject, the impact of the outside upon the inside, indeed the collapse of the former into the latter, is announced with the daringly unconventional opening dissolve from an apparent establishing shot of a panorama to revelation that it exists as interior reverie. A staccato, rhythmic whirr accompanies a black screen, the ominous sound continuing as a medium-long shot of jungle shoreline fades into view, still accompanied by the intermittent offscreen whirr, until helicopters with their rotating blades pass back and forth across the screen as the revealed source of the offscreen sound. As yellow smoke rises in the foreground from the bottom of the screen, partially veiling our view, and the sinuous instrumental music of the Doors comes onto the soundtrack, the incantatory lyrics of Jim Morrison pronounce, “This is the end,” and the palm trees burst into

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flame. The camera pans to the right, scanning the conflagration as the shot dissolves to an extreme close-up, a bird’s-eye view of the upside-down head of the film’s protagonist. As the inverted head of Willard fills the left side of the screen, a rotating ceiling fan is superimposed on the center and right half; on the dreamily split screen, the pupils of Willard’s eyes restlessly flit about, and the ceiling fan turns, both movements duplicating the rotating blades of the helicopters, still visible in another layer of superimposition. We understand that these turnings all mirror the protagonist’s inner turmoil. Coppola’s use of a circular image as metaphor for the inner chaos of a Vietnam veteran has a suggestive precedent in a key New Hollywood film. In Taxi Driver (1973), Martin Scorsese, himself inspired by a famous sequence involving a cup of espresso in Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave film Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1966), uses a crane shot over and down into the circumference of a fizzing glass of water, in which a tablet has been dissolved, to represent the pressure building within the consciousness of lonely marine-veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Vietnam is not explicitly mentioned, but Bickle announces that he was honorably discharged in May 1973, which would be less than a month after the last American combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. Since then he has been unable to sleep at night, restlessly moving about in cars and on the subways. Possessed by a nearly biblical revulsion from the social breakdown he sees around him, Scorsese’s veteran is rejected by a young woman (Cybill Shepherd) who works for a political candidate. Bickle is thwarted when he attempts to assassinate that politician, but the antihero “psycho-vet” of Taxi Driver ironically becomes a hero when he compensates by instead killing the pimp of a runaway girl (Jodi Foster). In a coda that may be an actual event or only his fantasy, newspapers declare Bickle a hero, and the young woman who worked for the politician and who rejected the veteran returns to express her new admiration. In Bickle’s story, Scorsese inscribes the post-Vietnam crisis of a masculine American national identity in an ironic fantasy of its violent regeneration. Willard, in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, echoes this representation of the disturbed veteran, and Coppola uses the circular movement of the ceiling fan as a device similar to Scorsese’s use of the fizzing glass for conveying psychological turmoil. Coppola’s use of the ceiling fan is, however, far more emphatic and sustained, and attains greater symbolic resonance. With the rotating ceiling fan now superimposed over Willard’s staring eyes as Morrison’s lyrics from “The End” unfold on the soundtrack, the camera, still in a bird’s-eye overhead shot, also begins to revolve,

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so that Willard’s head turns like the fan, further conveying to the viewer the protagonist’s experience of a loss of linear direction. Throughout the extended opening sequence, the fan assertively reappears, fading out and then in again, and otherwise coming back into view through low-angle shots framing Willard against the backdrop of the ceiling. Coppola’s use of the fan, including the mirroring rotation of Willard himself, is juxtaposed to Willard’s specific associational memories of the turning blades and circular movement of the helicopters as they pass back and forth over the fiery conflagration below. The totality forms a metaphor of the antihero adrift, having lost the progressive linear narrative of his culture’s myth. In this same sequence Coppola also follows Nichols’s The Graduate in employing a montage of matching shots to convey a consciousness repeatedly turning over events that have destroyed the certainties of home. The “generation gap” of the sixties that is the focus of Nichols’s romantic comedy was generated above all by distrust of American leaders’ deceptions regarding Vietnam, a connection hinted to the viewer when Benjamin’s mission to win Mr. and Mrs. Robinson’s daughter takes him to Berkeley, the hotbed of antiwar ferment, where his landlord suspects him of being one of “those outside agitators.” In the five-minute sequence that conveys the confusion that the affair with Mrs. Robinson (Ann Bancroft) has created for Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), the montage of matching shots fusing Benjamin’s life at home with his parents and with their friend Mrs. Robinson in hotel rooms is anchored in shots of the daydreaming protagonist as he lies on a bed or on an air mattress in the pool (just as Coppola positions the remembering Willard in Apocalypse Now). Glenn Man terms the resulting effect in The Graduate “perceptual realism.”7 A similar depiction of a consciousness connecting events across time and space is achieved in Apocalypse Now through the match of helicopter and fan blades, particularly as the shot of the former dissolves firmly into Willard’s hotel room even as the whirr of the helicopter grows louder while Willard stares up at the rotating fan. The two films employ this technique for a shared deeper purpose. The montage of matching shots in both The Graduate and Apocalypse Now conveys the obsessing effects of alienation. We watch the superimposed burning jungle in Willard’s consciousness as he applies a lit cigarette to a photograph of his wife. A parallel of mise-en-scène and editing links the opening scene of Apocalypse Now to the other founding work of New Hollywood, Bonnie and Clyde. Both films eschew the initial establishing shot of classical Hollywood cinema, a convention designed to orient the viewer firmly in time and space, for a confusing first shot calculated to convey the

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protagonist’s subjective state, the jungle-set-aflame of Willard’s internal reverie and an extreme close-up of the rouged lips of Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway). Physically, Willard and Bonnie are subsequently shown to be in precisely the same situation: alone in a room, within tightly framed shots emphasizing isolation, entrapment, and anxious discontent. Both Willard and Bonnie lie restlessly on a bed, strike out irritably at their surroundings, and get up to walk over to a window. Bonnie looks out to find Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) attempting to steal her mother’s car and flees her mother’s home, and with it her dull prospects as a waitress in a small town, for a criminal life of excitement and glamour. Willard also rejects domesticity (“I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce . . . All I could think of was getting back into the jungle”) and reacts impatiently to the view outside his window (“Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon”). Bonnie and Willard each look unhappily into a mirror, after which jump cuts, indebted to Godard’s Breathless (1960), express in the opening sequence of both films the protagonist’s agitation. As one commentator observes, Bonnie and Clyde was “appealing to the cultural discomfort growing at the time, the ripening of a rebelliousness that was just beginning to find the Vietnamese war an object for rebellion.”8 Penn’s 1967 crime film and Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam film are both focused at the outset on employing innovative formal devices to establish the “cultural discomfort” with domestic society during the Vietnam era through the depiction of the protagonist’s interior restlessness. In setting up the hallucinogenic climax of Willard’s drunken descent into self-confrontation, his retrospective voice-over narration reports an ominous loss of realistic perception: “Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.” Coppola represents Willard’s alcohol-fueled descent into an agonized psychological breakdown through extreme camera angles, hallucinatory imagery, and discontinuous editing in a montage that looks back to the techniques employed in Easy Rider to convey a group acid trip in a New Orleans cemetery descending into “excruciatingly painful memories of failure, loss and solitude.”9 In addition to these visual techniques that can be traced further back to the influence of the French and other European new waves of the 1960s, both the soundtrack and the raw material portraying Willard’s breakdown reflect American underground experiments that earlier influenced Easy Rider. Coppola’s reintroduction of non-diegetic music by the Doors to help express Willard’s narcissistic aggression, as he drunkenly performs martial arts exercises in front of the mirror, may be traced back to the experimental shorts of Kenneth Anger. Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), which combined

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rock songs with footage of “Satanic homosexual motorcyclists,” was “the source of the appropriation of rock in Easy Rider and The Graduate.”10 The unusually raw effect of Willard’s state of near spiritual as well as physical nakedness during this montage resembles the stag-movie atmosphere of a work by another underground filmmaker, one whose films Hopper had twice briefly appeared in before bringing the filmmaking methods he observed to Easy Rider. Andy Warhol encouraged the nonprofessional performers in his films to “engage in improvised role playing as opposed to following a carefully constructed plot,” with the result that, “Many of Warhol’s films contain scenes that develop into psychodrama.”11 As documented in Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), her husband Francis, to elicit hidden aspects of his actor’s psyche, set up two cameras in a hotel room, and then let Sheen have a few drinks. At first, Coppola had his assistants roll the cameras without telling Sheen what to do, but at a certain point Coppola, from out of the frame, began instructing and goading Sheen, who was wearing only a tiny pair of briefs; this situation strikingly parallels Warhol’s Beauty #2 (1965), in which we can hear the offscreen Chuck Wein comment to his former lover Edie Sedgwick, clad only in a skimpy bra and panties, as she drinks and makes out on a bed with another man. Coppola similarly can be heard in the raw footage included in Hearts of Darkness, as his offscreen voice urges Sheen on with instructions and taunts: “Marty, go look at yourself in the mirror. I want you to look at how beautiful you are. I want you to look at your mouth and your hair. You look like a movie star. Now frighten yourself, Marty.” In Beauty #2, Warhol’s unsparing camera captures Sedgwick’s spontaneous throwing of an ashtray at Wein; in Hearts of Darkness we view Sheen’s unscripted smashing of the mirror, cutting himself and collapsing over to the other side of the bed, smearing himself in blood and wailing in furious agony as Coppola continues the hectoring. Filmmakers of the New Hollywood drew upon underground experiments to attain more daring expression of the real.

III In the 1960s technology altered the experience of observed reality. The development of lightweight portable cameras and tape recorders enabled documentary filmmakers to record intimate experience in semipublic locations. Television brought the new documentary capability to the public sphere. The resulting cinema vérité in France and Direct Cinema in the United States thus helped to erase the boundary between private and

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public realms, a major constituent of the postmodern condition. The assassination of JFK and its chaotic aftermath in Dallas, followed by the racial violence in Watts and other ghettos in American cities, the intensifying unrest over the war on college campuses, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, combined with the images coming back from the first “television war” to unsettle the ideological representation across media that Guy Debord described in The Society of the Spectacle.12 To match the startling new effect of the real on television news, New Hollywood filmmakers both contrived images modeled on shocking images of violence and employed Direct-Cinema methods of multiple roving cameras for capturing random behavior during location shooting. In Medium Cool (1969) Haskell Wexler even inserted a lead character of the fictional narrative into the actual demonstrations and violence taking place in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention of 1968, following his actress with a movie camera as actual events unfolded before the gaze of television cameras. Dark subgenres of the major forms of classical Hollywood, rejections of those vehicles of ritual and myth upholding American ideology, structured the screen world of the New Hollywood. When the antihero of Apocalypse Now first goes ashore with the crew of the boat that is taking him on the river-journey through the film, explosions go off around them as an offscreen voice shouts: “Go on, keep going. It’s for television. Act like you’re fighting. Don’t look at the camera.” Coppola himself comes into view as the diegetic source of this seemingly extra-diegetic voice. Standing beside a cameraman (Vittorio Storaro, the director of cinematography for the film we are watching) and a soundman, Coppola ushers his protagonist into the realm of the mass-mediated. Until he arrives at the end of his river-journey to be met by another camerawielding gatekeeper, Willard will enter into and exit out of a succession of separate “worlds,” each bearing the markers of the reality effect of Direct-Cinema technique and also of a characteristic subgenre of the New Hollywood. Coppola thus places the viewer in a distanced, self-aware perspective, enabling contemplation of the news images that television transmitted back from Vietnam and also of the effects those mass-mediated images had on the cultural narrative of the United States as manifested in the subgenres constructed by New Hollywood films. Each major episode of the river journey in Apocalypse Now surreally mimics a New Hollywood subgenre, in the deadpan way of postmodern literature and art that Fredric Jameson calls “pastiche” or “blank parody.”13 The river journey of Apocalypse Now is

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experienced as a postmodern pastiche of the separate worlds of the New Hollywood, making us aware that we are moving through uncannily familiar worlds. It is precisely this sense of passing in and out of different worlds, each with its own fictive conventions and modes of being, that Brian McHale has argued distinguishes postmodernist from modernist fiction.14 In the Kilgore episode, Willard and the boat crew enter the world of the New Hollywood subgenre known as the anti-western or Vietnam western. This New Hollywood subgenre revises the classical western to accord with mass-mediated images of American atrocities in Vietnam, as well as with New Left interpretations of such American military policies as free-fire zones and search-and-destroy missions as a repetition of the nineteenthcentury genocidal conquest and dispossession of Native Americans. Frank Nelson’s Soldier Blue (1970) depicts the massacre of a Cheyenne village, originally incorporating images duplicating photographs of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, footage the filmmakers were compelled to remove to avoid an X rating by the ratings administration that succeeded the Production Code. An aesthetically more sophisticated treatment of similar material is presented in Penn’s Little Big Man (1970). Portraying General George Armstrong Custer as a racist and genocidal egotist, Penn also brings the identification of the counterculture with Native Americans to his portrayal of an idealized Sioux.15 The themes of this subgenre come closer to an explicit critique of the role of Hollywood in misrepresenting this history in Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), with its exposure of the lies and artifice of William F. Cody’s Wild West Show as the protoclassical western. In Apocalypse Now, the Kilgore episode incorporates each of these elements. Using the device of an Air Cavalry division that has exchanged its horses for helicopters, Coppola transports the Vietnam anti-western directly into his Vietnam film. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) flaunts the heritage of the Plains Indian wars, descends onto the battlefield in a helicopter with crossed cavalry sabers on its nose, and wears a cavalry hat and yellow ascot. In his flamboyance, egotism, and genocidal racism, he repeats Penn’s Custer. In his showmanship (he leaves calling cards on the dead and lectures a South Vietnamese ally for not giving water to a wounded Viet Cong) and his employment of language to alter the real (he labels as “savage” a Vietnamese woman who defends her village by tossing a grenade into a helicopter), Kilgore is a far more vivid exhibit in the critique of American history as illusory spectacle than Altman’s pallid Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman).

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In the Playboy Bunnies episode Willard enters the world of the downbeat musical drama, the subgenre of the New Hollywood that rejected the utopian expression of American dreams in the classical Hollywood musical. In a surreal condensation of the USO shows in which comedian Bob Hope brought Hollywood starlets to heavily fortified major coastal bases in Vietnam, televised back to the United States, Willard and the boat crew come upon a USO show in which American capitalist enterprise seems to have transferred the Whiskey a Go Go from the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles to the middle of the Vietnam jungle. With its amphitheater surrounded by phallic representations of pillar-sized rifle rounds emblazoned with unit insignias, the setting is reminiscent of the Kit Kat Club in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972). There the Master of Ceremonies played by Joel Grey presides over bawdy entertainment that mirrors the regression of Weimar Germany from decadence to Nazism. In the Bunnies episode of Apocalypse Now, the agent played by famous concert promoter and Fillmore West manager Bill Graham cynically rouses the audience of assembled soldiers. The triumphal descent of the Playmate of the Year on a platform of M-16 rifles held by two obeisant servicemen follows such downbeat musicals as Cabaret, Altman’s Nashville (1975), and Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977) in critiquing a society preoccupied with celebrity, hedonism, and romantic fantasy within the context of an ominous, declining, or gritty social reality. In the Do Lung Bridge episode Willard and the boat crew enter an even more surreal version of the world of the “rockumentary,” Direct-Cinema documentaries centered on the countercultural music festivals of the sixties. The episode culminates in a scene that reworks a vignette from the chapter of Herr’s Dispatches depicting the siege of the remote American base at Khe Sahn for several months during 1967–8, widely covered in the press among mounting fears that the soldiers would be overrun despite the assurances of the generals to President Johnson. But Coppola surreally connects the Vietnam scene to the underlying aimlessness of the countercultures gathered in their similarly remote festival-sites back in the United States. At the Do Lung Bridge, as in Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) – on which Scorsese served as both an editor and the first assistant director – the viewer is presented with youth huddled in a muddy wasteland underneath a kaleidoscope of beautiful flares and lights, a phantasmagoric spectacle dreamily enrapturing the acid-tripping former surfer boy Lance (Sam Bottoms). As psychedelic guitar by Jimi Hendrix plays on a soldier’s portable cassette player, a black soldier who has accessorized his uniform with a necklace emblematic of savagery, evoking

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Hendrix’s costumes, shows the same preternatural skill with his M-60 grenade launcher as Hendrix in his fierce performance of “Wild Thing” in D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968) and in Woodstock with his eerily imploding rendition of “The Star Spangled-Banner.” The plight of American youth in Vietnam becomes part of a larger panorama of a generation left abandoned and adrift by the failed cultural narrative. Willard’s futilely repeated question to the frightened, violent soldiers (“Who’s in charge here?”) echoes Mick Jagger’s unanswered plea (“Who’s fighting, and a-what for?”) from the stage of Altamont in Albert and David Maysles’s rockumentary Gimme Shelter (1970) as Hell’s Angels beat spectators, killing one of them, during a free concert modeled on Woodstock, but destined to symbolize the end of the sixties. Willard experiences his mission to assassinate the American officer Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) within the conventions of the New Hollywood subgenre known as the paranoid conspiracy thriller. Far darker than the classic noirs of the 1940s, this major cycle of 1970’s films uses “the detective or mystery genre to offer an investigation of what is wrong with contemporary America.”16 The playing of tape recordings, “monitored out of Cambodia,” of the genocidal ravings of Colonel Kurtz, resonates with the horrific discovery made by surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in the audiotape storyline of Coppola’s own 1974 film of high-level corporate conspiracy The Conversation, a film that itself in turn resonated with the Watergate scandal. The couching of the mission to kill Kurtz within the euphemism, “terminate the Colonel’s command,” evokes the subgenre’s view of the quietly mechanistic tenacity of the System, in its elimination of rebels or other madmen, represented by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). The clarification by a civilian operative (Jerry Ziesmer), as he offers Willard a cigarette and lights it for him, to “terminate with extreme prejudice,” is a phrase reported in the early 1970s to have been used by the CIA for its assassination orders; it resonates as well with the world-weary plotting of conspirators in a right-wing military cartel to assassinate President Kennedy in David Miller’s Executive Action (1973). The final imperative to Willard, “You understand, Captain, that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist,” concludes the scene on the eerie note of the power of authority to subvert democracy from behind the scenes that finds its most unsettling cinematic vision in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974). Like the paranoid-conspiracy novels of the period, of which Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is the paradigm, the cinematic paranoid conspiracy thriller draws upon the suspicions, speculation,

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theories, and revelations that both filled the news and gave rise to distrust of that news and other American institutions, from the assassination of JFK and other leaders through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. As in those New Hollywood thrillers, the assassination plot of Apocalypse Now puts forward a deeply pessimistic view of American institutions as corrupt and dangerous, the ultimate threat to democracy. Jameson calls “conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) . . . a degraded attempt . . . to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.”17 I would argue that Coppola’s “blank parody” of the paranoid conspiracy thriller elevates its degraded historical analysis into the realm of a speculative fiction that can help us to explore what lies further beneath this subgenre of the New Hollywood.

IV When we arrive at Kurtz’s Compound, we are met by a disconcerting successor to Coppola’s news director and New Hollywood auteur. With multiple cameras and a bag full of lenses strapped about his neck, Dennis Hopper, playing a countercultural photojournalist but also recognizably the iconic auteur of Easy Rider, directs the boat into the world of Kurtz’s Compound and comments on his reproduction of the event as he snaps an image: “Move it right in toward me. That’s a pretty one.” Hopper’s role is packed with meta-cinematic historical implication. Hopper’s ambitious attempt to follow up Easy Rider with a film about making a film, The Last Movie (1971), a New Hollywood equivalent to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work from the German New Wave, Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), was hated by his studio, scathingly rejected by American critics, and ignored by the public. Karl French thus terms Hopper’s film “the proto Apocalypse Now/Heaven’s Gate/One From the Heart self-indulgent disaster/masterpiece The Last Movie.”18 Dressed in tatters and talking in a drug-addled manner, Hopper’s photojournalist appears as a grim foreboding of what lies at the end of the first television war and the New Hollywood. Reinforcing the meta-cinematic effect, Coppola has the iconic director take multiple photographs (i.e., moving pictures) of Willard as he leads the New Hollywood antihero past a blank wall upon which is scrawled “Apocalypse Now.” The failed-auteur-asmagical-gatekeeper attempts to excuse the excesses of Kurtz’s theatrical display (“The heads. You’re looking at the heads. Sometimes he goes too far, and he’s the first one to admit it”). In what could serve as an epitaph on Hopper’s retreat after the rejection of The Last Movie to drugs and

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semiretirement in New Mexico, Hopper’s photojournalist subsequently flees Kurtz’s wrath, and exits Coppola’s movie, with a parody of T. S. Eliot’s modernist vision of cultural apocalypse: “Not with a bang. Whimper. And with a whimper, I’m fucking splitting, Jack.” As a meta-cinematic historical figure, Hopper represents the New Hollywood auteur as antihero. But before he departs, Hopper’s photojournalist has ushered us into the world where viewers of Hollywood cinema will mainly live during the 1980s. Kurtz’s Compound is an obvious example of Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and the precession of simulacra, the real that we have already experienced as a representation.19 Like Star Wars, Kurtz’s Compound is made up of recycled décor, costumes, and props from the 1930’s and 1940’s Saturday matinee, but portentously magnified. From Lucas’s Return of the Jedi (1983) to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), from Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985) to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986, the film in which Hopper would return to stardom), from Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), the films of the 1980s follow Apocalypse Now in seeking resolution through overblown ritual and psychodrama in abstracted settings, in which fantasy, sometimes horror, sometimes exorcism, sometimes salvation-by-superhero deemphasize historical specificity for “epic and/or spiritual resonances.”20 The settings might be a distant galaxy far in the future or even further in the past, or an exotic land in the 1930s, or a kitsch 1950s suburb, or – revealingly – Vietnam. As the prototype for what lies after the New Hollywood, the climactic sequence of Apocalypse Now offers a particularly vivid example of the method by which films of the 1980s will attempt to emerge from the debris left by the failure of the cultural narrative in Vietnam. The sequence depicts Willard rising from the water, his face painted, with the Doors’ hallucinogenic music and Morrison’s incantatory lyrics to “The End” returning on the soundtrack, then walking down a passage toward the waiting Kurtz. The cross-cutting sequence, in which the antihero of the New Hollywood slays the failed utopian hero of JFK’s Camelot, the Green Beret, in parallel to the Montagnards’ sacrifice of a water buffalo, foreshadows the portentous ritualistic encounters that repeatedly climax the major films of the 1980s. Both the Kurtz section of Apocalypse Now and the 1980s films have justifiably been accused of bombast and depthless allegory. The danger of a vague self-absolution is evident. But at least some of these works might arguably be performing another form of cultural work. Like films such as Lucas’s Star Wars cycle, Lynch’s hallucinogenic thrillers, and Scorsese’s

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Kundun (1997), the climactic sequence of Apocalypse Now reflects the influence of Anger’s ritualistic and occult Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1970–81). Where Anger saw his Scorpio Rising as representing the death of a sick culture, in these psychedelic films he attempted to depict the rebirth of repressed pagan deities to release dormant forces into the culture. After slaying Kurtz, Willard refuses to take Kurtz’s place and begins the journey back to the United States, into the postmodern world in which he informs us they intend to promote him in an army of which he no longer counts himself even a member. In the words of one historian of 1980s films, “viewers must now perform themselves rather than decipher the world, and old authorities, interpretive rituals, and ideological positions, fully vacated of traditional coherencies and stabilities, become discourses without walls.”21 In these performances, the viewer after the New Hollywood cinema seeks to discover some new basis from which to return from the endpoint called Vietnam. Notes 1 Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin, 2008), 265. 2 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 74. 3 Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 19. 4 I draw here from the list enumerated by Lester D. Friedman, “Introduction: Movies and the 1970s,” in Lester D. Friedman (ed.), American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 21. 5 Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 139. 6 James Bernardoni, The New Hollywood: What the Movies Did with the New Freedoms of the Seventies (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991), 63. 7 Glenn Man, Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967–1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 40. 8 Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 2nd edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45. 9 Lee Hill, Easy Rider (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 50. 10 David E. James, “Rock and Roll in Representations of the Invasion of Vietnam,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990), 63, 64. 11 J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 7. 12 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (1976; Detroit: Black & Red, 1983). 13 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 17.

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14 See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction; Constructing Postmodernism. 15 David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 174. 16 Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 49. 17 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 38. 18 Karl French, Apocalypse Now: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide (New York: Bloomsbury, 1998), 109. 19 Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, 42. 20 Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (New York: Wallflower, 2005), 98. 21 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 47.

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Second-wave feminism and after Robyn Warhol

If postmodernism is characterized by irony, parody, pastiche, and ahistoricism, feminism would seem to be antithetical to the critical trends of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Feminism was very much in earnest between 1960 and 2000, committed to overturning the real social and cultural oppression of women, queer people, and other marginalized persons. Postmodernist play made its way into the feminism of the latter part of the century – for instance, with the Guerilla Girls’ bumper sticker assaults on the androcentric world of art, in Laurie Anderson’s multimedia performances, and in the ultra-pop fusion of feminism with femininity in a group like the Go-Go’s – but it was always in the interest of a serious politics. As one of the many lightbulb jokes from the 1980s frames it: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? THAT ISN’T FUNNY!” The ability to tell this joke about themselves shows a selfreflexive awareness of feminists’ perhaps undeserved reputation for defensive humorlessness, but the joke certainly points up the contrast between postmodernism’s prevailing attitudes and feminism’s fundamental sincerity. Nevertheless, feminism in the 1960s and 1970s paralleled postmodernism in critiquing the master narratives underwriting dominant ideology, and in the 1980s and 1990s feminism joined postmodernism in dismantling the idea of the unitary subject. “Second-wave feminist,” like “politically correct,” is a term mainly used to describe somebody else: it is not an identity originally embraced by those whom it purports to define. While feminists engaged with political and cultural theory and activism between the 1960s and the 1990s identified strongly with earlier feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), to the suffragists, to Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), to Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), the period from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries was too long and too complex for late-twentieth-century feminists to conceive of it as a “first wave” for their own movement. “Second wave” 230

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gained currency in the 1990s in the polemics of “third-wave” feminists seeking to distinguish themselves from foremothers they saw as too white, too straight, too bourgeois, and too theory-oriented. Certainly over the past three centuries there have always been feminist theorists and activists whose perspectives can be read ahistorically as racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, or even misogynist, but dividing the movement into “waves” oversimplifies the internal debates within feminism in each of its historical moments. Feminism of the so-called second wave was actually an intricately interrelated set of feminisms, often developed in opposition to one another. Indeed, the perspectives of lesbians, women of color, and working-class women were central to academic feminism throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Although differences among feminists – as well as the interests of “theorists” and “activists” – often surfaced during this period as being in conflict with each other, these supposed divisions did not hinder feminism from transforming certain institutions during the postmodern era, most particularly literary history. For the purposes of this essay, feminism signifies an interrelated set of theories and actions whose goal is to identify, analyze, and – where possible – overturn systematic oppression or discrimination that is based on assumptions about biological sex or culturally conceived gender. Feminists proceed from the observation that dominant social, cultural, and political attitudes and practices have worked to the disadvantage of people positioned as “Other” with respect to the straight, white, elite, male norm. Simply identifying or analyzing systems of oppression is not adequate to making a theory or practice “feminist,” however: inherent in the movement is a mandate to take action toward rectifying inequities. Feminist activism in the postmodern period usually meant organized political activity, but it also could take the form of intellectual subversiveness in academia or the arts, thus uniting activists and theorists in feminism’s project of changing the world. Divided into sections for each decade between 1960 and 2000, this chapter briefly identifies some of the social, political, and legal issues specific to women in the United States during those ten years, then sketches out the corresponding moments in academic feminist theory. The chapter is limited in scope to North American and Western European feminist theory, as political and cultural developments in Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America are largely beyond the range of this volume. The contributions of women from the so-called Third World to feminisms in the West have, however, been profound.

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The 1960s – social history Following on the post–World War II push to move middle-class and working-class women out of their wartime jobs and back into their “traditional” roles as stay-at-home mothers and homemakers, the cultural revolutions of the 1960s opened up the range of life choices for many women. While upper-class women had options that were underwritten by the resources they needed to enable them to live on their own or, if married, to hire household help, middle-class and working-class women had been relegated after the war to “women’s work,” whether inside or outside the home. Two important developments in the 1960s established the ground for individual women in the U.S. to achieve more economic and personal autonomy. One was the passage in 1964 of Title VII, the Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” While the Civil Rights era is remembered mainly for its impact on the lives of U.S. people of color, its implications for women in the workplace were equally profound. Even more influential was the emergence of reproductive rights in the 1960s. The birth control pill was approved for use as a contraceptive in 1960, and though the original high-dosage formula had serious side effects, by the end of the decade a lower-dose pill was the most popular form of birth control in the United States. Not until 1972 did the Supreme Court make birth control legal for all citizens, whether married or single, and the Catholic Church vociferously opposed contraception; nevertheless, millions of women in the 1960s embraced the pill’s convenience along with the ability to manage their own chances of becoming pregnant. The pill was not without its detractors, even outside the Church. Advocates criticized Planned Parenthood for distributing free contraception in African American communities, suggesting it was tantamount to genocide. This placed women of color in a position of being torn between women’s rights and race consciousness, establishing a pattern that would often erupt through the end of the century. Long celebrated as the chief catalyst of the sexual revolution, the birth control pill did free heterosexual women to enjoy sex without bearing the burden of worry about pregnancy. Women’s gains in pleasure and desire were important to feminists of the era, but even more important was the possibility for women to achieve a social and economic autonomy that had not been available to mothers, whether married or single. Even at its highest dosage, the pill was not infallible, and feminist activists advocated for the right to safe, legal abortions for women who

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wanted to terminate pregnancies. Abortion became the chief issue for what was then called the women’s liberation movement, which along with the Civil Rights and antiwar movements made public protest its medium for effecting change. Activists linked antiabortion laws with gender discrimination, and they organized underground efforts to provide safe illegal abortions. By 1970, abortion was legal in several states. Women writers in the 1960s protested the constraints upon women within political movements, the career world, and personal relationships. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) presents Free Women, a fictional woman writer’s novel that is interrupted at intervals by the woman’s “notebooks” representing various aspects of her life experience, including activism in the Communist Party, the painful breakup of a love affair, her dream life, and her psychotherapy. With its fragmentation and broken chronology, the novel’s structure is unmistakably postmodern, but its criticism of social structures and its promotion of feminist ideals are entirely sincere. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (published under a pseudonym in 1963) presents a college-aged heroine whose decline into suicidal depression is linked to sexism experienced as an intern at a famous ladies’ magazine as well as the fear of becoming pregnant and being forced into marriage. Although the character feels more optimistic by the novel’s end, Plath killed herself shortly after the novel appeared in the United Kingdom under her own name in 1963. Poet Anne Sexton – whose 1967 Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry treated sexuality, abortion, addiction, and depression with unprecedented frankness – also committed suicide in 1974. Postmodern women artists were increasing their presence, particularly among abstract expressionist painters, including Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler (one of the Color Field painters), Elaine de Kooning, and Sonia Sekula. Like Plath and Sexton after her, Sekula suffered from clinical depression and killed herself in 1963. That the suicide of brilliant women in the arts has become less commonplace is perhaps one sign of feminism’s having gained some ground in the past fifty years. Feminism in the 1960s faced opposition from the mainstream media and from religious and social conservatives, who ridiculed “Women’s Libbers” and questioned their right to be considered heterosexual or even female. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 to give voice to feminist positions in the face of politically motivated misrepresentations. On the Left, women’s rights activists also encountered resistance from men whom they regarded as political allies. For example, asked in 1964 whether there was a position for women in the Black Power movement, Stokely Carmichael joked, “The only position for women in

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the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, active in Civil Rights protests] is prone.” Extending the sexualization of African American women beyond Carmichael’s quip, Eldridge Cleaver suggested in 1968 that they should exert “pussy power” by withholding sex from Black men who would not get serious about progressivist politics. Conceiving of female sexuality solely with reference to heterosexual men, this discourse was radically opposed to 1960s’ feminists’ call for the sexual self-determination of women.

Literary and cultural theory Feminist theory in the 1960s launched a systematic critique of maledominated culture. Controversial and influential, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) challenged the sexism inherent in the era’s deployment of Freudian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on penis envy and its depiction of frustrated or dissatisfied women as immature and neurotic. Friedan decried the culture’s pressure on women not to enter the professions, locating its source in mass media’s depictions of women as either happy housewives or unhappy careerists. Five years later, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) extended the critique of psychoanalysis as an instrument of patriarchy. Her scathing readings of novels by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer criticized the authors for positioning female characters in their works solely as objects of male desire. Uncovering what she identified as the misogyny at the core of classic literature, Millett’s book became for many the emblem of “man-hating” feminism, an image that persisted even though feminist theory quickly moved past the critique of male culture to focus more extensively on the lives and cultural productions of women. In France Monique Wittig’s 1969 utopian fiction, Les Guérillières, pits a literally militant band of women against men, ending with a world free of heterocentrism and sexism where women are in charge. The idea that women are superior to men soon passed out of feminism, though feminists are still accused of aiming to reverse the power structures that have so far kept men on top. More significant for later feminisms even than Friedan, Millett, or Wittig was The Second Sex, published in French in 1949 and translated (albeit not very well, as readers of French have complained) into English in 1953. A long and complex work comprising history, psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and political economy, The Second Sex inspired the 1960s’ feminist critique of psychoanalysis by outlining a counternarrative of female emotional development and positing female sexuality as

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something far greater than Freud’s theories could comprehend. Beauvoir’s famous statement that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (reworded in the 2009 unabridged English translation as “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman”) inspired the idea that biological sex and socially constructed gender are not naturally determined, but are arbitrarily linked. As Beauvoir explains, a child born female is raised to fulfill the identity of “woman” as that role is understood in the time and place where she grows up. Beauvoir theorizes that if women and men were educated in exactly the same way, women would be able to own their sexuality and their reproductive choices, marriage would be dissolvable at will, and society would bear the expenses of maternity leave and child support. In a brilliantly counterintuitive gesture, her book concludes with a call for women to assert their “brotherhood” ( fraternité) with men as a way to achieve equality, invoking a term that carries powerful revolutionary connotations in the context of French history.

The 1970s – social history In 1972 the U.S. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first introduced in 1923 (just three years after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote). The ERA, which would have guaranteed women equal rights with men under federal law, required ratification from thirty-eight of the fifty states, but fell three states short. Opposition to the amendment mobilized conservative women’s fears that equal legal rights would eliminate the advantages they attributed to traditional gender roles. Concerns about the potential for women to be drafted into the military and forced into battle duty (during the Vietnam era, when conscription was a reality for U.S. men) were pivotal, as were perceived threats to alimony, girls’ schools and women’s colleges. Anti-ERA activists also claimed that single-sex public restrooms would disappear if the amendment were to pass. The deadline for ratification went by, and to this day, women do not have equal rights with men under federal law. In 1973 the reproductive rights movement achieved its main goal when the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade struck down laws prohibiting abortion. The Court determined that a woman’s right of privacy, understood in terms of the Fourteenth Amendment’s formulation of personal liberty, must be protected. This was a significant victory for feminism. Educating women about the female body became a feminist priority in the 1970s, with the Boston Women’s Health Collective, founded in 1969, publishing a trade edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1973. This widely

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circulated paperback addressed the mainstream media’s silence about women’s health by covering traditionally medicalized topics such as reproduction, abortion, and menopause, but also sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Lesbian, trans-, and bisexual sex appeared alongside uninhibited heterosexuality, presented as being equally normal, healthy, and unremarkable. Illustrated with frank line drawings representing women of different races, Our Bodies, Ourselves set a standard for feminist inclusiveness. Gay-straight alliances between heterosexual and LGBT activists characterized feminist politics, as did advocacy for lesbianseparatist feminism and “minority women’s issues,” as nonwhite women’s political agendas were called. The 1970s saw increased attention to the ways language has historically functioned to marginalize or erase women, especially in public and educational discourse. Feminists drew attention to the androcentric usage of “mankind” or “man” to refer to humans, and objected to using “he” as the default pronoun for speaking generically of an unknown individual. “S/he” was introduced as a gender-inclusive pronoun, much reviled by traditionalists who preferred “he or she” or the alternation of the two pronouns. (The ungrammatical use of “they” for the third-person generic singular pronoun has in the meantime increased not just in casual conversation but also in more formal writing, suggesting that the rules governing the English language may ultimately make this gender-neutral accommodation through popular demand.) A more widely adopted linguistic innovation was the introduction of “Ms.” as an alternative to women’s having to publicize their marital status by using either Miss or Mrs. If the original intention was to achieve gender equality by making Ms. parallel to Mr., however, that equivalency has not come about, as both Miss and Mrs. are in wide use along with Ms., while there are still no titles to indicate men’s marital status. Gender-neutral language has also evolved with the elimination of “ess” from most occupational titles, many of which had made gender distinctions among people in the creative arts, such as poet/poetess, author/authoress, sculptor/sculptress, and actor/actress, always implying disparagement of the woman writer or artist. “Actress” has not fallen out of common usage despite many female actors’ expressed preferences. In a profession where roles are so consistently constrained by sex and gender, the difference marked by “ess” persists. Feminism in the 1970s came to connote androgyny, partly through the belated influence of Virginia Woolf, whose complete diaries were published in five volumes beginning in 1978. The release of Woolf ’s unabridged accounts of her own childhood sexual abuse, gender bending

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and sexual experimentation among the Bloomsbury Group, and her passionate relationships with other women sparked a Virginia Woolf craze among feminist readers, bringing into the foreground Woolf ’s previously obscure feminist manifestos A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). The former lays out the historical obstacles to women’s writing before imagining what modern women’s writing will look like, then proposes Woolf ’s ideal of “the androgynous mind,” dominated neither by masculine nor feminine modes of experience. Androgyny became a style trend, signified by David Bowie’s gender-ambiguous persona Ziggy Stardust, Diane Keaton’s menswear-inspired costumes in 1977’s Annie Hall, and Grace Jones’s presence on fashion runways and the disco music scene. In the performing arts, feminism began to find a voice in the 1970s. Yoko Ono, whose performance artworks like 1965’s “Cut Piece” had strong feminist content, would probably be unknown today if it were not for her alliance to John Lennon, but together with him she composed and circulated radical antipop songs such as “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” released in 1972. Judy Chicago began in 1974 to construct “The Dinner Party,” a massive triangular table adorned with place settings for 39 women from history and mythology. Using mixed media and techniques from the feminine world of craftsmaking, Chicago decorated each woman’s plate in a style that connoted her particular form of feminine sexuality. Women’s art collectives took shape in Australia, Europe, and North America, and exhibits of women’s art proliferated in galleries and museums.

Literary and cultural theory The semantic distinction between “gender,” “sex,” and “sexuality,” a fundamental principle of postmodern-era feminist analysis, took hold in the 1970s. Articulated by Gayle Rubin in “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), the sex/gender difference was grounded in feminist structural anthropology. Rubin assigned the term sex to mean biological and anatomical difference between males and females and the term gender to mean the cultural construction of what is supposed to be appropriate to males (masculinity) and to females (femininity) in a particular historical time and place. “Sexuality” refers to a person’s preferred erotic object(s), and the sex/gender matrix shows that sexuality and gender identity have no natural or obvious correlation. Being able to analyze masculine and feminine gender as separate from male and female

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bodies made it possible for feminist theorists and critics to gain a more detailed understanding of how gender norms work within literature and culture. Detaching gender from sex also enabled a critique of essentialism, or the belief that men and women feel and behave the ways they do because of inherent sexual difference. In the 1970s some feminists embraced essentialism, believing that men – unable to menstruate, bear children, or be mothers – were intrinsically incapable of comprehending women’s experiences. Feminist essentialism held that the commonalities among women were more important than the differences of race, ethnicity, class, age, and nationality which divided them. Essentialist criticism looked for female archetypes in texts, emphasizing the similarities among representations of women throughout the history of Western culture. Feminist essentialists celebrated biological femaleness, as distinct from cultural constructions of femininity, rejecting traditionally prescribed roles and styles assigned to women while rejoicing in the “natural” female body. The problem with essentialism soon emerged for critics who asked whether biology must necessarily be destiny. If the differences between men and women were inherent and ineluctable, they reasoned, then the status quo of social and economic inequality would not be subject to change. Working toward social transformation, antiessentialist feminists therefore challenged the assumption that gender difference was inborn, launching a critique of the elaboration of gender in the context of Western culture. Their analysis of Western thinking identified the binary oppositions that organize it, such as mind/body, intellect/emotion, civilized/ savage, light/darkness, good/evil, innocent/guilty, man/woman, and masculine/feminine. Observing that the negative terms in such pairings tend to line up in philosophical, theological, and political discourse (bodyemotion-savage-darkness-evil-guilty-woman-feminine), antiessentialist feminists called binary thinking into question. If the distinction between man and woman was as arbitrary and culturally contingent as Simone de Beauvoir had already demonstrated, then the entire system of Western thought was open to reassessment. The so-called French Feminists, building on Beauvoir and recasting psychoanalytic and Marxist analysis in the interest of promoting women were among the most radical critics of conventional thinking, in the sense that “radical” critique aims at the most deeply rooted of its subject’s assumptions. Though they did not affiliate themselves with one another as a school of thought, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig have been grouped together under the label of French

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Feminism to distinguish their highly philosophical and experimental writing from that of their contemporaries in the United Kingdom and North America. They advocated (and sometimes exemplified) an écriture féminine, a mode of writing that defies traditional standards of logic, grammar, and style, expressing female subjectivity in language they conceived as emanating from the woman writer’s body. Although French Feminism has been construed as a form of essentialism, the Marxisminflected historical awareness of a thinker like Kristeva (“Woman’s Time,” 1979, translated into English in 1981) or the psychoanalytic orientation of one like Cixous (The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975, translated in 1976) reveals a sensitivity to the cultural inflections of gender difference. Psychoanalysis was redeployed by feminism in the 1970s. What had been reviled by American feminists in the 1960s as a mechanism for keeping women down became, in the 1970s, a mode of understanding how sexual difference gets reproduced through familial relationships and cultural patterns. Dorothy Dinnerstein (The Mermaid and the Minotaur, 1976) used Melanie Klein’s take on Freudian theory to argue that misogyny (or what she called “matrophobia”) can be traced to infantile resentments fostered in a world where child-rearing is relegated only to women. Feminist film theory used psychoanalysis to account for the objectification of women in Hollywood film, among other phenomena. Laura Mulvey posited the theory of the “male gaze” in psychoanalytic terms (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1975), showing how the fragmentation of the female body and the appeal to the viewer’s scopophilia place the audience in a heterosexual male position vis-à-vis filmic representations of women. Feminist psychoanalysis drew on Lacanian revisions of Freud, building upon the gendered implications of Lacan’s mirror stage and of his model for how the subject comes into being through language.

The 1980s – social history With the failure of the ERA, legislation on gender equity proceeded in a piecemeal way. In 1979 alimony laws changed to apply equally to men and women, so that the right to continued financial support now depends on a spouse’s income rather than on his or her gender. This shift in the law’s conception had the ironic effect of benefitting men whose soon-to-be ex-wives earned more money than they did. Sexual harassment in the workplace became illegal under Title VII in 1986, discouraging though by no means eliminating unwanted sexual advances, quid pro quo

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arrangements whereby a person is required to perform sexual acts in order to keep a job, and hostile work environments where women are subjected to sexist remarks or actions. Like laws preventing rape, Title VII has often had the effect of shaming the woman who comes forward to name the crime in her own case, forcing her continually to relive the experience in its retelling, and opening her up to blame for having “asked for it.” While feminist rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters became common in the 1980s, no similarly organized support for those who are subjected to sexual harassment has emerged. A “hostile workplace” is often one where women are subjected to pornographic language or images that objectify the female body under the heterosexual male gaze. An ongoing debate about feminism’s position on pornography got started in the 1980s, as antiporn feminists including Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon sought to classify pornography as a form of violence against women. Opposing this position, sexpositive (or pro-sex) feminists in the 1980s embraced pornography along with the entire range of human sexual predilections from “plain vanilla” heterosexual intercourse to lesbian S&M. Pro-sex feminists argued that promoting sexual freedom and celebrating sexual difference were intrinsic to overcoming the oppression of women. In an effort to blend in at work, many women employed in business and the professions from the mid-1970s into the 1980s began to “dress for success” in shoulder-padded suits that mimicked menswear, substituting a scarf or jabot for that signifier of Western masculinity, the necktie. Popular culture promoted the myth that feminists were women who wanted to be men, and who, like men, were supposed to be motivated by personal gain. A popular icon like Madonna passed for “feminist” because she signified female desire for male attention, sex, and material goods, but her “me first” priorities contradicted the well-established feminist agenda that sought to improve conditions for all women across differences of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. In colleges and universities, interdisciplinary Women’s Studies programs proliferated in the 1980s, providing feminism with an institutional home. The ‘80s were rife with feminist critiques of the traditional academic disciplines; hence, feminist scholars did not always find support among colleagues committed to the disciplinary practices that shaped academic departments. Women’s Studies (later recast in the spirit of inclusiveness as Women’s and Gender Studies, or even Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) was supposed to offset antifeminist bias in other departments, but its existence also could have the effect of ghettoizing and

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therefore marginalizing a mode of thinking that was associated with activism outside of academia. As Gayle Rubin had done in the 1970s for anthropology, feminist scholars began to question the epistemological premises of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Among many others, Joan Wallach Scott, Natalie Zemon Davis, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Gerda Lerner challenged the androcentric bias of history; Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow modeled alternatives to male-centered psychology; and Sandra Harding and Helen Longino theorized feminist approaches to science. As Shulamit Reinharz explained in her critique of social science methodologies, 1980s feminist research emphasized self-reflexivity on the part of the scholar, acknowledging that every observation is located in the social and cultural perspective of the observer, whether or not the observer is explicit about his or her politics.

Literary and cultural theory By the 1980s, literature departments were engaged in the “canon wars,” a debate over which texts ought to be taught and researched. The curriculum of U.S. English departments in the 1970s had included very few women writers: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, only Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and George Eliot counted among the undisputed “great” authors of the English language. Not only was the canon overwhelmingly male, it was also white and straight. If James Baldwin made his way onto a twentieth-century American literature syllabus, it was for his “Black” content, and his being gay was typically not mentioned; if Gertrude Stein was on that same syllabus, her formal innovations and her relationships with literary giants such as Ernest Hemingway were up for discussion, while her being a woman or a lesbian was not. By the early 1980s feminists engaged in what Elaine Showalter called “gynocriticism” were calling out the androcentric aesthetic norms that defined certain male-authored writing as great, and starting to trace an alternative tradition of women’s writing. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) had produced a feminist psychoanalytic alternative to the “anxiety of influence” that Harold Bloom attributed to male authors who were working within an oedipal relation to their literary forebears. Positing a nineteenth-century women’s literary tradition, Gilbert and Gubar read white British and American women writers as finding means to express and protest their relegation to the private sphere. Showalter, too, had proposed a separate women’s tradition in A Literature of Their Own (1977). This reinterpretation of women’s poetry and fiction in the late 1970s brought

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more female authors’ work into classrooms during the next decade, as did the reclassification of memoirs, diaries, and letters (genres more accessible to women writers in past centuries) as literary texts, and the rediscovery of previously neglected writers from Aphra Behn, to Harriet Jacobs, to Kate Chopin. Protest against women’s exclusion from the literary canon was by no means limited to straight, white feminists in the 1980s. Poet and critic Adrienne Rich, in a crucially important 1980 essay, identified “compulsory heterosexuality” as the norm governing individual subjectivity and critical judgment. The Black Feminists, including Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, Barbara Smith, and others, called attention to the exclusion of African American women’s voices from literary history. Alice Walker coined the term Womanist as a counter to the reputation feminism had gained for ignoring women of color and working-class women and for depreciating men. Latina and Mestiza feminist theory found voices in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others; Paula Gunn Allen articulated a Native American feminist perspective on American Indian literature; and Shirley Geok-lin Lim spoke up for Asian American feminist criticism. Women of color theorists frequently wrote in genres that broke with academic norms, blending memoir and creative writing with theoryoriented scholarship. They argued, and many feminists across racial divides agreed, that – as Audre Lorde put it in 1984 – “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.”1 Many feminists joined them in advocating unconventional modes of critical writing and eschewing the jargon and abstraction of much mainstream literary theory. The 1980s was also the era of the “theory wars” in the U.S. academy, and feminism was in the thick of those skirmishes. Feminist theorists both affiliated themselves with and critiqued the major schools of poststructuralist theory, proposing methodologies that would build on the gains of mainstream critical theory while refusing to overlook gender as a central category of literary and cultural analysis. In the work of critics like Judith Lowder Newton and Josephine Donovan, Marxist feminism complicated the critique of capitalism while paying particular attention to the material conditions of working-class women. Feminist deconstructionists such as Barbara Johnson brought psychoanalysis and gender theory to bear on the methods of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, making space for women writers of color among the texts that they deconstructed. Lacanian psychoanalysis underwent a feminist rereading in the hands of Shoshana Felman, Jane Gallop, and Kaja Silverman, among others. Feminist new historicists such as Nancy Armstrong, philosophers like Susan Bordo, and

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film theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis recast Michel Foucault’s histories of subjectivity and sexuality with an eye to the gendered body. Taking structuralist literary theory to task for its predominantly male-written corpus of examples, Nancy K. Miller, Susan Sniader Lanser, and Robyn Warhol began building a feminist narratology. By the end of the decade feminist methodologies were combining the insights of diverse poststructuralisms: Gayatri Spivak frequently described her emerging postcolonialist critical position as “practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist.” She critiqued the liberal individualism inherent in gynocritical celebrations of white women’s literary traditions, and she advocated for a more rigorously historical, archive-based approach to women’s experiences in what she termed “the so-called Third World.”

The 1990s – social history By 1990 feminism was besieged on a number of fronts. Susan Faludi’s 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women drew attention to the antifeminism and misogyny that had dominated the mass media and popular culture in the 1980s. Though her examples of women were overwhelmingly white and heterosexual, Faludi successfully challenged popular myths like the belief (supposedly supported by an Ivy League research study) that a single career woman over forty had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than she had of getting married. The conservative backlash Faludi identified in the films, advertisements, TV shows, and journalism of the 1980s joined with “post-feminism” in the 1990s to claim that the time for feminist activism was over. Post-feminism held that women had made all the gains in employment, education, and legal rights that they needed, and that women ought to settle down and enjoy their privileges, which post-feminists asserted were better for women than equal rights would be. Popular opinion was widely divided over the 1991 congressional testimony of attorney Anita Hill, who accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in the workplace. The 52–48 vote placing Thomas in the Supreme Court reflected deep political ambivalence about Hill’s assertion of her rights under Title VII. At the same moment, reproductive rights were consistently eroding throughout the 1990s, as in 1992 when the Supreme Court upheld state laws requiring the distribution of antiabortion information to women who sought to terminate pregnancies, as well as putting into place enforced waiting periods and parental consent. Not until 2000 did the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rule that employers who offer

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health insurance could no longer exclude the birth control pill among those medications covered by medical benefits, a policy that had been operating to the disadvantage of women. Countercultural feminisms were nevertheless very much alive. Starting in the mid-1980s and continuing into the next decade, a group of anonymous women artists wearing gorilla masks protested sexism and racism in the art world under the name Guerrilla Girls. The post-punk music and fanzine scene included the strong feminist voices of the Riot Grrrls, women in their teens and twenties who embraced a self-sufficient femininity while infiltrating the male enclave of alternative music. First named by Rebecca Walker in 1992, third-wave feminism also emerged during this period as an affirmation of the relevance of feminist theory and (especially) activism to women of color and queer women. While they sometimes credited their predecessors with good intentions, feminists of the third wave tended to characterize feminists of the previous three decades as essentialist, antisex, antiporn, antifemininity, heterocentric, homophobic, and racist. It is not difficult to find examples of so-called second-wave feminism that meet some of these criteria in retrospect, but the third-wave emphasis on diversity and inclusiveness had the effect of diminishing the multivalent feminist positions and debates that had gone before. By the turn of the millennium, feminists of an even younger generation were appropriating identities that had operated earlier in the century to keep women down. Bitch magazine and the online blog Bitch Media commented on pop culture while embracing the assertiveness “bitch” is supposed to derogate, paving the way for the twenty-first-century Slut Walks that would bring provocatively dressed women out on the street to protest the shaming of rape victims.

Literary and cultural theory If “sisterhood is powerful,” as 1970s’ feminists proclaimed, sisters also fight. Conflict between and among women across generational, theoretical, racial, ethnic, sexual, (dis)ability, and class lines came into the foreground for feminists during the “culture wars” of the 1990s. Identifying the longstanding cultural pressure on women to internalize comparisons and to compete with one another, Helena Michie called the phenomenon Sororophobia (1992). Kimberlé Crenshaw addressed the need for feminism to chart gender and sex in conjunction with those many other identity categories, proposing “intersectionality” as a new method within critical legal studies in 1993. An intersectional approach acknowledges that

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“gender,” as a culturally constructed category, is always inflected by race, sexuality, and class, not to mention historical period and geographical location. Intersectionality asserts something antiessentialist feminist theorists had long been acknowledging, that generalizations about “women” both homogenize the category and marginalize those women who do not share the identity positions taken for granted as the “norm.” Carefully delimiting the applicability of their claims, feminist critics had become increasingly scrupulous about naming their own identity positions, as well as the identity categories they did and did not address in their scholarship. Intersectionality challenged feminists to move beyond self-reflexivity by enriching each assertion about “gender” with observations about the complex grid of identities where every human subject can, in theory, be located. After Judith Butler’s intervention in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), the notion of identity as a category began giving way to an understanding of gender as a process or, as Butler called it, a performance. Butler borrowed the idea of performativity from J. L. Austin’s linguistic distinction between constative utterances (which state something) and performative ones (which bring the thing they state into being). For Butler, gender is not what you are but rather what you do: there is no preexisting “self ” underlying a person’s performance of gender. Gender is not a performance in the theatrical sense, in that it does not mask a “real” identity, but rather consists of actions, gestures, styles, postures, and language that are associated in a given time and place with masculinity, femininity, and all the gendered positions along a wide and varied spectrum in between. For Butler, the most feminine woman is inevitably in drag, just as the man-to-woman trans person who adopts the makeup, hairstyle, clothes, and other trappings of Western femininity is in drag. Gender and sexuality are intertwined in Butler’s model, as they are in lived experience. Her work on performativity, along with Eve Sedgwick’s axioms in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), laid the foundations for queer theory, closely identified with feminism at first, but later becoming a separate though intimately related field. Postmodern feminism combines Butler’s performativity with the posthumanism introduced into feminist theory by Donna Haraway. Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” published as an essay in 1985, came into prominence when it appeared in Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991). Like the feminist writing of the 1960s it begins with a critique of the Freudian oedipal model of the self, but it moves into areas Kate Millett and Betty Friedan did not anticipate. Combining the insights of deconstruction,

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cultural anthropology, feminist Lacanian psychoanalysis, zoology, and high-tech engineering, Haraway’s cyborg feminism dismantles the oppositions between human and animal, human and machine. Haraway discards the notion of the “natural” body, equating women with cyborgs in the sense that gender is not an essential identity but a technology. Posthuman feminism recognizes affinities between women and animals as well as between women and machines, rejecting the liberal-capitalist emphasis on man as superior to other kinds of beings. Critiquing the way Western thinking has consistently excluded women from the category of the human by demonizing or deifying them, posthumanist feminists say along with Haraway: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”2 Feminism and postmodernism part company where postmodernism skips away from a concerted politics, but postmodern feminism is not the oxymoron it might have been if feminists had adhered to the critique of male culture that dominated the movement in the 1960s or the gender essentialism that characterized the first part of the 1970s. Through the early formulation of the cultural constructedness of gender, the acknowledgment of the performativity of identity, the rejection of patriarchal master narratives, and the embrace of formal experimentation, feminisms have moved in concert with postmodernism from the 1960s to the century’s end and beyond. If postmodernism is over, however, feminism can’t afford to be: too much work still needs to be done to promote gender and sexual equity in the West and everywhere. Notes 1 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (New York: Crown Publishing, 1984), 110–13. 2 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 181.

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14

Gay and lesbian subcultures from Stonewall to Angels in America Martin Dines

This chapter’s title would appear to provide an inauspicious frame for a discussion of the relationship between gay and lesbian writing and postmodernism. On the one hand, it projects a linear history which imagines sexual minorities advancing from marginalization and oppression and toward mainstream recognition and success. On the other, it seems to go nowhere at all, suggesting that gay and lesbian culture is coterminous with New York City. The account that follows then promises to be one that denies difference and ignores discontinuity – hardly moves that are ordinarily associated with postmodern narrative and politics. But while the Stonewall riots of 1969 have commonly been understood as a historical watershed, indeed, the moment at which sexual minorities in the West began to take control of their own history, they are also frequently invoked precisely to express concerns about the way other configurations of samesex intimacy – in particular, those of earlier times and of places outside of the American metropolis – have been occulted by this master narrative.1 And then Tony Kushner’s celebrated epic play Angels in America (1990, 1992) is not meant to mark some terminal point at which gay cultural production has become part of the establishment firmament or has developed fully fledged postmodern credentials. Rather, the play typifies the way gay and lesbian writing from this period elaborates multiple histories, competing ideological paradigms and interactions across noncontiguous spaces, while remaining committed to a clear sense of futurity and a politics rooted in a specific community. Indeed, the similarities between the gay liberation movement, which arose immediately after the Stonewall riots, and Angels – both, for instance, articulate the situated knowledge of sexual dissidents, while simultaneously offering up millenarian visions to the world – indicate how this chapter is little concerned to chart the progress of a putatively postmodern mode of gay and lesbian writing.2 Instead, it examines a range of material by British and American authors in order to highlight the close affinities yet frequently ambivalent 247

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involvement between gay and lesbian culture and postmodernism.3 If the works discussed later – novels, biography, poetry, as well as Kushner’s play – revel in the pleasures of postmodern textual maneuvers, they also recognize their utility: their potential for subversion, and their capacity to foreground contingency, diversity, and dissonance. Yet the same material often equivocates over whether the fragmentation and skepticism typical of postmodern modes of writing help realize other needs – for instance, to account for embodiment and sexual intimacy, or to claim a cultural inheritance and articulate a coherent collective identity that might provide the basis for solidarity and political action. A brief history of one gay cultural mode, camp, charts some of these tensions. With its tendency toward irony, its preoccupation with performance and surface, and its seemingly indiscriminate appreciation of artifacts from high and low culture, camp may reasonably be considered a tributary current of postmodern culture. Yet, proclamations of the death of camp have studded the period. In the early 1970s, gay liberation, with its political imperative to “come out,” seemed to render the dissimulations of camp obsolete. On the other hand, the following two decades saw concerted efforts by intellectuals to reclaim camp for a sexual minority or, more specifically, a gay male constituency, following its mainstream appropriation and commodification (which included its mobilization under the banner of postmodernism). By the late 1980s, camp’s traditional fascination with the démodé, and in particular, the body past its prime, in decay, became for many utterly unpalatable as thousands of gay men wasted and died of AIDS-related illnesses.4 However, spurred by the indifference of authorities in the face of the ongoing disaster, and bolstered by emergent theories that articulated the radical potential of drag and other performances of gender, camp seemed to find renewed purpose. The conclusion of this little historical detour, however, foregrounds the most obvious peculiarity about plotting gay and lesbian culture and politics alongside “peak postmodernism”: the period’s close was marked by the rise of queer theory in the United States. Although drawing on the work of earlier theorists, Foucault particularly, this body of thought provided sexual dissidents in the 1990s and beyond with vital new critical frameworks through which to challenge institutionalized homophobia and, to use Michael Warner’s phrase, “regimes of the normal.”5 An avowedly poststructuralist enterprise, queer theory demanded a shift from a politics of identity to one of signification. For Judith Butler, compulsory heterosexuality was underwritten by gender differences presumed to be natural but enacted and established through the repetition of bodily acts.

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Cultural interventions that foregrounded the performativity of gender had the potential also to reveal its contingency, thereby undermining the authority of normative codes of gender and sexuality, and creating opportunities for disavowed and wholly new desires and social relations to find expression and flourish.6 With a somewhat different focus that nevertheless leads to similar conclusions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that the heterosexual/homosexual dyad was a centrally organizing principle structuring not only understandings of sexual identity but numerous other sites of knowledge in the West from the nineteenth century onward. It was, though, a distinction ever unstable, contradictory, and as such susceptible to reversal and subversion.7 The deconstructive projects of Butler, Sedgwick, and others necessarily also contested the “ethnic” model of sexual identity that became the ascendant and most enduring configuration of gay and lesbian politics following gay liberation’s brief millenarian phase. Queer theorists contended that the discrete identity categories “lesbian” and “gay” were as much predicated on exclusion as was “heterosexual.” If this charge seemed somewhat technical it certainly corresponded with criticisms of, first, the assimilative tendency in gay and lesbian culture – how the desire to take up a place at the table often entailed a disavowal of the conspicuously nonnormative, for example, sex radicals, drag queens, and butch lesbians – and, second, the frequent racism and classism of a “community” that was predominantly white and middle class. Yet one of the reasons why such identities have endured is because they provide bases for socialization and political organization. As Steven Seidman succinctly put it, “whereas identity politics offers a strong politics on a conceptually weak, exclusionary basis, poststructuralism offers a thin politics as it problematizes the very notion of a collective in whose name a movement acts.”8 Moreover, even while Butler insisted that her seminal book Gender Trouble emerged out of her own involvement in activist networks (and its subsequent influence on queer activism has been considerable), many questioned the efficacy of queer theory’s politics of signification. Alan Sinfield, for instance, suspected that “we have supposed too readily that to demonstrate indeterminacy on a dominant construct is to demonstrate its weakness and its vulnerability to subversion.” Indeed, gay pastiche and its excesses may easily be pigeon-holed as illustrating all too well that lesbians and gay men can only play at true manliness and womanliness . . . The Stonewall queens instigated Gay Liberation not because they were camp or wore drag – there was nothing new about that; but because they fought the police.9

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Queer theory’s principal tenets – and controversies – have left an indelible imprint on the work of many gay and lesbian authors writing in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Ali Smith’s effervescent reworking of Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe, Girl Meets Boy (2007), even offers a line from Butler’s Gender Trouble as an epigraph. Smith’s novel seeks to show how the fluidity of sexuality and gender is kept in check only by convention and institutional practices: in a pivotal sex scene between two female characters that extends over five breathless pages, intercourse is shown to be infinitely transformational, its pleasures not determined by fixed subject positions. Smith’s retelling of the already “very fluid” stories of the author of Metamorphoses is indicative of a desire to demonstrate that some of the imperatives of queer theory have always been known and lived. In so doing, ironically enough, Smith’s fiction compares with earlier essentializing projects that sought to identify and celebrate homosexual individuals and subcultures throughout history.10 Moreover, as if to register doubts about the capacity for articulations of the fluidity of sexuality and the instability of categories of gender to effect change, Smith insists on the importance of other traditions of political activism. Smith’s lesbian lovers become activists, leaving a trail of very public graffiti messages damning global sexual inequality across their hometown of Inverness. Their guerrilla sloganeering undeniably recalls the direct action and iconoclasm of the suffragettes; indeed, the novel opens with an account of a suffragette arsonist. By situating its protagonists within the long historical march of feminist endeavor, Smith arguably confirms Linda Hutcheon’s contention that feminism and postmodernism ought never to be conflated, as the latter, while “certainly political,” “has not theorized agency; it has no strategies of resistance that would correspond to feminist ones.”11 The novel’s opening anecdote, however, is told by the grandfather of one of the protagonists – he begins, “let me tell you about when I was a girl.”12 Girl Meets Boy is then decidedly optimistic about the capacity for a distinctly queer politics to effect change. Narratives of personal transformation appear to foster confidence in the possibility of social change – “things will always be different because things can always be different.”13 What is more, the grandfather’s account suggests that self-conscious enactments of gender facilitate access to, and enhance an appreciation of, diverse histories of struggle. Prior to the publication of the cynosures of queer theory in the early 1990s, many gay and lesbian writers were grappling with the possibilities of postmodern narrative to provide adequate accounts of queer desire, politics, and everyday life. In the United States the nearest thing to a literary

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school of sexually dissident authors committed to narrative experimentation emerged in the late 1970s. The so-called New Narrative movement, mainly comprised of writers based in the Bay Area, including Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Boone, Sam D’Alessandro, Robert Glück, and Kevin Killian, grew out of the urban queer subcultures that were flourishing in the decade following Stonewall. Says Glück: “gay identity was . . . in its heroic period;” “in the urban mix, some great experiment was actually taking place, a genuine community where strangers and different classes and ethnicities rubbed more than shoulders.”14 Sexual and social experimentation, he implies, helped foster radical forms of writing, though the self-designation as a movement was as much a response to the lack of interest on the part of the ascendant literary vanguard of the moment, the Language Poets, in sex generally and queer experience especially. Glück has described the central problematics he faces as a writer to be the urgent need to articulate the corporality of desire, “to write close to the body – the place language goes reluctantly,” as well as to register the particularity of gay experience, but crucially in ways that do not reproduce falsely coherent portraits of either self or community.15 Glück declares that his writing attempts the seemingly impossible task of expressing “total continuity and total disjunction,” since that is how he experiences both himself and the world, and to recognize how the gay “community” produces for itself a necessarily stable identity while simultaneously “speaking to itself dissonantly.”16 Glück’s 1985 novel Jack the Modernist, a thoroughly self-conscious retrospective account of an affair between narrator Bob and the perpetually inscrutable Jack, continually traces the uneasy interactions between bodies, narrative, and community. From its opening, though, the novel looks like it will chart the familiar enough terrain of a boy-meets-boy story; by the end, by Bob’s own admission, “banality has set in” – he has merely narrated how “I loved someone who loved me not.”17 But this all too conventional structure packages all manner of disruptions, digressions, and excesses. Bob declares “Society wants its stories; I want to return to society the story it has made . . . as a revenge, a critique” (Jack, 171). Bob’s narrative, while more or less linear and marked by predictable turns, is continually torn apart along diverse axes. These multiple polarizations foreground and deconstruct the false coherence produced – and demanded – by conventional story-making. Notably, Bob is impelled to employ different narrative modes to account for particular individuals and interactions. Jack “the modernist” requires a mode of writing that can relate his seeming fragmentariness, his “lack of story” (Jack, 18). Sex

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between Bob and Jack is similarly characterized as being beyond conventional temporal framing: We eroticized a finely-honed attention which challenged terms as soon as our bodies invented them, which addressed my sudden shifts of context, his mid-gesture costume changes. Instead of an oceanic welling with its always-in-the-future-until-it’s-in-the-past crescendo, we remained moment by moment. (Jack, 11)

Bob’s older friend Phyllis, on the other hand, “demands a realism complete with revelation of character and epiphany that would not suit Jack” ( Jack, 30). Phyllis’s inclusion in the story is vital – Bob declares, “I feel an urgency to know personalities that include the passage of time. I borrow their sense of the future which makes storytelling possible.” This prompts the question of how to synthesize the two modes, or, “how do I mesh modernism’s disjunction with continuity and depth of feeling?” Bob answers, “I’d have to add a sub-plot which duplicates the first explosion that began story and time: the body” ( Jack, 31). The body here is not being articulated as prior to language; rather, the body is a process, and one that is generative – an “explosion” continually producing new situations that invite interpretation. But Bob’s corporal subplots, like all of his narratives, tend toward two extremes: excess and banality. For instance, he delights in sucking Jack’s cock because the act has no other meaning: “a rock bottom agreement that rejects any possibility of substitution” ( Jack, 26–7); intensity exceeds articulation, and the language of sex, even the concept of pleasure, seems “hopelessly inadequate.” Hence his declaration “I wanted [his cock] to be a place: to be unconscious there, to sleep there” ( Jack, 28). Yet, when getting fucked by Jack, it is less the act than narrative conventions that become allconsuming, obliterating: “The more you get fucked, the more you want it; eventually the pornographic hungry hole becomes merely accurate” ( Jack, 29). Bob’s visit to the bathhouse is similarly informed by commodified images – the interchangeable pieces of male bodies of the bathhouse ads are exactly what he finds there. Yet because of the proximity of so many desiring bodies he is able to focus as much on the apparent continuity of experience as its fragmentation. Bob declaims “we watch the pleasure rather than the men, feeling the potential interchangeability . . . their collective mind said he’s doing it which my finite mind repeated” ( Jack, 54). The “dreamtime logic” of the orgy in darkness has “a unity that can’t be dismissed or broken into parts” ( Jack, 56), and yet that is precisely what his narrative does at this point, breaking into two parallel accounts – one

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engages in poetic simile, the other considers, among other things, society’s anxieties about group sex. The reader is obliged to follow one or the other narrative strands or be faced with meaningless fragmentation. Glück’s novel is repeatedly disrupted by such short-circuitings, combustions of two conflicting imperatives: the articulation of the fragmentariness of experience, and narrative coherence. Despite Glück’s contempt for the latter, it never drops out of the picture due to anxieties over the implications of embracing the former. Bob asks, “[I]f I am so dispersed, what happens to the possibility of intimacy for me?” ( Jack, 59). Further, while fragmentation more closely corresponds with experience than coherence, it precludes the working toward social justice, or for that matter the imagining of any kind of future. Ultimately, the novel puts its trust in gossip – which for Bob refers to the diffusion of meaning across a community and constitutes community: “Gossip registers the difference between a story one person knows and everyone knows, between one person’s story and everyone’s. Or it’s a mythology . . . a community and a future” ( Jack, 9). Gossip has traditionally been a maligned form of discourse – associated with the trivial chatter of women and gay men, with sexual conduct, and with insinuations lacking empirical, verifiable evidence. But as such, gossip provides scope for a counter discourse, which according to Irit Rogoff, has the potential to mobilize a “distrust of the false immutable coherence of master narratives but also perhaps the false, immutable coherence of our identities as subjects and tellers of those narratives.”18 In Glück’s novel, gossip noticeably also enables all kinds of ethical maneuvers within communities: the articulation of reciprocity, the confirmation of insincerity, and the facilitation of collective mourning. In a postscript to Jack the Modernist, Glück declares that his “art of collage” invites readers to identify shifts in “tone and century” ( Jack, 176); the novel packs in reflections on both Minnie Mouse and the Mabinogion, borrows from Baudelaire, Bataille, and Barthes – and a good deal of porn. British gay writers, however, have been much more inclined than their American counterparts to consider subcultural life from earlier periods. For instance, Neil Bartlett’s collage-text Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988), which the author refers to as a scrapbook, scrutinizes the significance of Wilde and his times for a gay subculture that occupies the same urban spaces in the present. Bartlett admits that he once saw his own arrival in London as the beginning of his story, and that, “like a lot of other men, I’d seen America and 1970 as the start of everything.”19 Researching the life and work of Wilde and other fin-de-siècle queers, Bartlett increasingly comes to realize that, contra Glück et al., there is little

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that is new about his narrative. Indeed, his own subcultural habits – the willing or subconscious quotation, the “shameless pleasure of repeating our own clichés” – demonstrate that the notion of modern gay life and identity as some kind of heroic self-creation is way off the mark. Rather, to “come out” is to immerse oneself in “a library of other texts.” This is no bad thing: “being predictable is a small price to pay for sharing something” (Who, 205). But it is not only gay men in the 1980s who were interminably quoting each other and their forbears; Wilde and his company did just the same. Wilde’s contempt for originality – evidenced in his endless plagiarism and recycling of his own material – is of course legendary; Bartlett though identifies in the raiding of biographies of the past a desire for self-definition of the part of an emergent subculture. Unable to “believe that theirs was a unique experience” queer men in the late-nineteenth century “found their peers not in other men, but in other texts” (Who, 199). But this was not – or was not only – an academic trawl through history for reassuring textual traces of themselves. First, their historiographical method often verged on camp: “They perfected the arts of a much less scholarly approach. They engaged in the inspired queenly assemblage of fragments of history. They were masters of allusion, suggestion, the misinterpretation and reinterpretation of images” (Who, 227). Second, the continual reworkings by these “magpies, thieves, bricoleurs” were often ambivalent toward or subversive of the sense of a discrete, authentic personage. For instance, with regard to Wilde’s short story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” Bartlett asserts: At the very moment at which, historically, we begin to exist, he created a biography of a homosexual man in which the fake and the true are quite indistinguishable. He proposed that our present is continually being written by our history; that the individual voice can hardly be separated from the historic text which it repeats and adapts. (Who, 209)

To be clear, by insisting that “the present is continually being written by our history” describes gay life in the 1980s as well as it once did Wilde’s world in the 1890s, Bartlett is not merely saying that history repeats itself or that the two periods of homosexual subculture are indistinguishable. For, first, unlike Wilde, Bartlett identifies the limitations of his own historiography. There are lacunae in the historical record: the voices of young working-class men, for instance, are largely absent. The only record of the words of the lads Wilde rented are the statements they made in court; as is so often the case, nothing is otherwise known about their experiences. Second, and more pressingly, Bartlett recognizes the particular risks and

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responsibilities he faces in doing such historical work as a gay man. On the one hand, he warns against simply romanticizing Wilde as a gay pioneer while ignoring the fact that he exploited his wealth and status to get what he wanted. On the other, Bartlett instructs the gay historian never to lose sight of what he wants. Indeed, the enticements of history should be handled with the same “practical methods” that might be used in a crowded gay bar: “admit your interest, your position, your hunger” (Who, 225). Such history-as-cruising facilitates counter readings to the hostility of the law courts, substituting the prosecution’s dismay with delight, and rereading the “amateur criticism” of the courts as evidence of the practices of a sophisticated subculture (Who, 137–8). The danger, however, is that this kind of interested rereading is channeled into the confirmation of current identities and practices, producing a singular, unreflexive account quite devoid of the camp dissembling of Wilde. “Having worked so hard to achieve this identity,” Bartlett warns, “there is little reason to scrutinize it, to poke around in it for possible sites of alteration and adjustment. We remake history in our image, rather than to looking to our history as a source of doubts and hopes” (Who, 218). The risks of this kind of presentist revisionism are obviously greatest in periods of crisis, as history seems entirely directed entirely toward termination: “Since we persuaded ourselves that all our previous history had served to usher in a golden age, we now see the challenge that AIDS presents as a very particular kind of disaster: the end of a golden age” (Who, 221). Wilde’s fall can serve to reinforce this bleak historical narrative: then as now, a whole newly emergent and increasingly confident subculture is suddenly subdued by a single calamity. But of course, even though Wilde’s final words in the 1895 court case were famously “And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?” he was not silenced by his downfall, just as homosexual life on the streets of London did not evaporate upon his being carted off to Pentonville Prison. Wilde went on seeing the men, and boys, he loved and continued to fabricate new identities based on recycled materials. One of the last, his adoption of the moniker “Sebastian Melmoth” – part gay saint, part wandering outcast – was yet another piece of camp: “From 1894 to 1900 he was posing, camping not just to save his life, but to find out if any life was possible” (Who, 168). This suggests the possibility of camp to be paradoxically unoriginal and inauthentic and at the same time exploratory and experimental – even in the most difficult of circumstances. It is this kind of historical insight that is most helpful, suggesting that camp may after all be a useful subcultural resource in the era of AIDS. But if both Wilde and Bartlett produced camp biographies and histories,

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Bartlett insists his work articulates a challenge that Wilde’s could not: “We suggest that a gay culture is something to be struggled for, not dreamt or bought. At this point, our rewriting of history becomes a truly dangerous activity” (Who, 229). The discussion so far has been dominated by metropolitan experience. Some non-Anglo lesbian and gay writers have looked insistently to a variety of cultural texts, histories, and spaces to articulate the complexity of their own experiences and to delineate a politics which can fully account for and build upon them. One striking and influential example is the mixed-genre work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) by Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa. For Anzaldúa, the borderland – like the area of southern Texas along the Mexican border where she grew up – is a space where two or more cultures meet, though rarely on equal terms. Borderland dwellers are typically considered troublesome and transgressive. Neither one thing nor the other, they “cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal.’”20 Residents of this third space are often conflicted, damaged, because torn between worlds. Yet they are potentially tolerant of contradiction and ambiguity because they are used to living within and crossing between different cultures. Extending W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness, Anzaldúa’s figure of the “new mestiza” is predicated on a pluralistic mode of thought and behavior. Instead of attempting always to synthesize opposing elements, “mestiza consciousness” excludes nothing; its inclusivity and its perpetual codeswitching enable the building of a nondualistic mythos, “a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (Borderlands, 103). Borderlands are not only physical environments; they are imagined spaces, states of mind, “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Borderlands, 25). Anzaldúa suggests the term might also refer to “where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (Borderlands, 19). Sexuality, too, for Anzaldúa is a form of borderland, but she also closely affiliates queerness with mestiza consciousness. For while Anzaldúa argues that, “for the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behaviour,” queerness is also “a path of knowledge (and of learning) . . . a way of balancing, of mitigating duality” (Borderlands, 41). Perhaps, though, her sense of identification with the hermaphroditic “half and half,” a figure frequently ostracized from Chicano culture for being “a work of nature inverted,” appears to verge on a questionable, dusty essentialism: queerness here approximates inversion,

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or some other kind of embodied difference. Equally, her later claim that “I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races” seems to overreach into universalism. However, her concern is rather to critique the “despot duality” that renders the likes of the half and half abnormal, and to examine the potential of the queer’s “embodiment . . . of the coming together of opposite qualities within” (Borderlands, 102). Also, Anzaldúa typically reinterprets and redeploys the tools of feminist and gay and lesbian critique. For example, “homophobia” is reconfigured as “a fear of going home” – which immediately problematizes the maneuver that has proven to be so central to gay and lesbian narrative and politics in the West: coming out. The structure of Borderlands/La Frontera and its constituent parts reflects Anzaldúa’s concern with the pressures of dualistic modes of thought and the need to move beyond them. The book is divided into two parts, one made up of essays, the other poetry. As Norma E. Cantú and Aída Hurtado remark in their introduction to the fourth edition of Borderlands/La Frontera, “the essays contain poetry and have a poetic and allusive quality to them, while the poetry in the latter half of the book records brutal ‘facts’ about the oppression suffered by Chicano/as throughout their history in the United States” (Borderlands, 7). Nevertheless many of the poems also focus on the emotional effects of “crossing borders” – which happens to be the title of the first part of the book comprised of essays. Several of the poems are riven by contradictions, which often makes for challenging reading. For instance, “Interface” combines at least two senses of borderland: sexual intimacy and the coming together of two cultures in one territory. The intersection of these two kinds of borderland is marked by an ambiguous doubling. The poetic speaker, a Chicana woman residing in Brooklyn, describes discovering in her apartment the presence of an other-worldly female, one who is “pulsing colour, pure sound, bodiless . . . noumenal” (Borderlands, 170). They are only able to experience each other with considerable effort at the border between their respective worlds, and it is at this interface where they are able to lay as lovers, “enclosed by margins, hems/where only we existed” (Borderlands, 171). This “Leyla,” as she is named, gradually takes on physical form and is then socialized by the speaker to the point where she is able to return to Texas and present her lover to her family. Yet there is a clear sense that Leyla is also a projection of the speaker. The first line asserts “She’s always been there/occupying the same room,” and for some time, Leyla occupies the same space as the speaker’s own body. Leyla’s desire to become physical, for a body of her own, articulates a confidence to explore sex

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and sexuality, and perhaps even a willingness to take on a sexual identity; after all, these transformations occur in New York City – the celebrated site of countless stories of gay and lesbian migration and self-realization. But the poem’s conclusion counters such unidirectional metropolitanism. To her brothers’ query “is she a lez?” the speaker responds, “no, just an alien” (Borderlands, 174). This is a term that elsewhere Anzaldúa correlates with the emergent figure of the new mestiza, the “consciousness of the borderlands,” which has far less to do with arriving, than a constant “crossing over” (Borderlands, 100). Kushner’s Angels in America returns us to New York City, but his apocalyptic vision is of a city – and a physical and moral universe – “about to crack wide open.”21 Kushner’s characters have much in common with Anzaldúa’s border dwellers: they feel themselves pinioned by history but also impelled toward a nomadic existence; they too are continually crossing over, which is, once again, rarely a simple or painless process. In presenting subjects as burdened by history, restless and torn between worlds, Kushner, rather like Anzaldúa, connects the present to long histories of migration to and across the North American continent. The presence of gay people in New York City, then, is presented as the result of just one more wave of migration. But Kushner’s play also shares with Anzaldúa’s writing a utopian impulse. Like many apocalyptic narratives, Angels works toward reconstruction, and its epilogue scene features a vision of a diverse queer community critically engaged with the world. If Anzaldúa focuses on how individual experiences of contradiction may bring forth a consciousness that can foster new stories and a new politics, Kushner’s ensemble of characters negotiate these contradictions and challenges together. The fact that most of play’s actors are required to play several roles – many of which cross gender, age, and ethnicity – has often been interpreted as a trust in the fluidity or performativity of these categories. Yet the play does not so much argue that these categories can and should be transcended (the closeted Mormon Republican Joe, who tears off his temple garments to prove his attachment to Louis – “No past now. I could give up anything” [Angels, 206] – is noticeably absent from the play’s optimistic final scene), but rather that all manner of movements and interactions are possible, some dangerous, some fruitful. What is certainly valued more is the way that spaces and imaginaries are shared or relayed between characters. The AIDS epidemic has resulted in a collapse in confidence among gay men: “you know you’ve hit rock bottom when even drag is a drag” (Angels, 37); “faggots; we’re just a bad dream the real world is having, and the real world’s waking up” (Angels, 168). The pooling or relaying of utopian

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imaginaries from a variety of standpoints – African American, leftist, Jewish, Mormon – provides a subculture in crisis with vital new resources, and the capacity to reach out to and find common cause with other constituencies. These transferences are portrayed metadramatically during some of the play’s numerous “split scenes,” in which events taking place in different locations are staged simultaneously. Occasionally characters break the frame of their scene and cross over, sensing “some sort of profound displacement” (Angels, 198). Prior and Harper, for instance, meet each other in a shared dream/hallucination. They are able to perceive painful truths about the other that their new acquaintance alone cannot. Yet this “threshold of revelation” (Angels, 39) is neither divinely inspired nor, as Harper supposes, a consequence of the overactivity of a single mind: “Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions” (Angels, 38). (Harper’s assessment would preclude the possibility of divine intervention; indeed, later Prior seems to borrow from this, understanding Angels to be little more than “incredibly powerful bureaucrats . . . they can do anything, but they can’t invent, create” [Angels, 175].) An isolated imagination may not be able to conceive of the world anew, but it seems two might meet at some threshold (akin to Anzaldúa’s “interface” perhaps) thanks to the “magic of the theatre” (Angels, 199). The imagined space that is most frequently relayed between characters is of an apocalyptic/celestial city – more often than not a vision of San Francisco. Sometimes these transferences enable others to take propitious action. The torpid version of heaven in which Prior and Harper meet toward the end of the play disappoints – it is a ruined, moribund incarnation of San Francisco – but Prior provides Harper the impetus to go see for herself the “real . . . unspeakably beautiful” city on earth (Angels, 253), and set her life on a new trajectory. Otherwise, such visions are designed to exclude. Belize’s account of heaven – “like San Francisco . . . overgrown with weeds” (Angels, 209) – for the dying Roy Cohn borrows from Prior’s earlier prophecies, which in turn draws on Louis’s understanding of a Jewish afterlife. Belize’s adaptation, however, in which “all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers,” leaves no place for Cohn: “Race, taste and history, finally overcome. And you ain’t there” (Angels, 210). All of these visions contrast with Cohn’s own chilling view of socialization which involves little more than the transfer of patriarchal power. As he advises Joe, “Don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone [. . .] Let nothing stand in your way” (Angels, 64). Cohn’s death and

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Joe’s unremarked disappearance silence those voices that articulate New Right values, which leaves space for a polyvalent communion to flourish. The religious term here is as appropriate as the secular “community”: even if the Angels’ reactionary instruction to humankind to remain still, to cease changing, is ultimately rejected, religious tropes inform the play’s concluding visions of reconstruction – whether Harper’s dream of souls of the dead ascending to repair the hole in the ozone layer, the prophesy of the return of the healing waters the fountain of Bethesda, or Prior’s final blessing of the audience – the last of a chain of blessings made throughout the play. Noticeably, the play concludes on a note that is at once emphatically modernist and decidedly biblical – Prior’s exclamation, previously voiced by the Angel, “The Great Work Begins” (Angels, 280), is an instruction to all to participate. While this puts trust in a better future, there is no presumption of a “new book of Beautiful Theory” (Angels, 148) or a divine plan to set things right. Prior’s demand for and his offering in that final blessing of More life speaks of a future, certainly – and his declaration “you are fabulous creatures, each and every one” (Angels, 280) reminds us that this is first and foremost a gay fantasia – but it imagines a future that is messy, diverse; a work in progress. Notes 1 For example, the temporal framing of Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) explicitly “eschews 1969 as an historical turning point and resists its before and after effects upon historical interpretation” (15). See also Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton (eds.) De-centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2000). 2 See, for example, Dennis Altman, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation (New York: Avon, 1971); Karla Jay and Allen Young (eds.), Out of the Closets (New York: Douglas, 1972). 3 This chapter only indirectly addresses transgender experience. For two important accounts of transgender cultural production and politics, see Jay Prosser, Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) and Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York University Press, 2005). 4 Caryl Flinn, “The Deaths of Camp,” Camera Obscura, 12/2, 35 (1995): 52–84. 5 Michael Warner, “Introduction,” in Michael Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii-xxxi [xxvi]. 6 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).

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7 See Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 8 Steven Seidman, Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137. 9 Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 33. 10 See, for example, Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992). 11 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 168. 12 Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 3. 13 Smith, Girl Meets Boy, 160. 14 Robert Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative,” Narrativity, 1 (n.d.); www.sfsu .edu/~newlit/narrativity/issue_one/gluck.html. 15 Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative.” 16 Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative.” 17 Robert Glück, Jack the Modernist (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995), 170. Hereafter referred to in the text as Jack. 18 Irit Rogoff, “Gossip as Testimony: A Postmodern Signature,” in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge, 1996), 58–65 [65]. 19 Neil Bartlett, Who Was that Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1993), xxi. Hereafter referred to in the text as Who. 20 Glorua Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, (1997; San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2012), 25. Hereafter referred to in the text as Borderlands. 21 Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1900; London: Nick Hern, 2007), 118. Hereafter referred to in the text as Angels.

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The “post” in postcolonial Sara Upstone

Introduction From postmodernism’s very inception, its ideas have been rooted in the discursive relationship between conflicts in Europe and Europe’s overseas empires. Postmodernism was a response in many ways to fascism: a distinctly postwar sensibility shaped by the desire to respond to the seismic shifts of the Second World War, in the same way that modernism was in many senses a response to the First World War. Aimé Césaire’s contention that fascism needed to be seen as colonialism in Europe starkly illuminated how this aesthetic, simultaneously an engagement with anticolonial sentiment, responding to the power structures embodied by fascism, was also a response to the totalitarianism of colonialism.1 Likewise, there has been recognition that race functions as a powerful metaphor in postmodern theory: a symbol of the Other, and of the complex power negotiations of late-capitalist culture.2 The seminal texts of postmodernism such as Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture (1989) and Brian McHale’s Constructing Postmodernism (1992) placed questions of identity and debates surrounding the possibility of cultural authenticity at the center of postmodern activity. When postcolonial literary criticism emerged as a critical force in the 1980s it drew attention to the experimental, postrealist strategies of postcolonial writers in a way that aligned postcolonial texts with postmodern concerns for disruptive and radical play with form. Yet critics were also keen to point out the differences between postmodern and postcolonial approaches. While noting the significance of these differences for postcolonial literature’s political project, this chapter, however, suggests that although such distinctions played an important function in terms of preventing the postcolonial from being subsumed into a Western discourse, they overlooked the impossibility of separating such practices where the very existence of empire has made the colonized Other an irrepressible presence in Western philosophy. 262

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Whose “post” is it anyway? The relationship between postmodernism and postcolonialism, of course, exists only in the context of who defines it, and the theoretical positioning of the definition has significant consequences. To approach postcolonialism from a broadly postmodern perspective is likely to draw differing conclusions from the reverse – approaching postmodernism from a postcolonial perspective. For those who would align themselves with neither of these schools the task then is to navigate these sometimes divergent perspectives. Complicate this further with the unstable conceptual territory of each school itself and it is easy to see why the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonialism has been and continues to be debated and contested. Both movements have been subject to similar revision and qualification. Suggestively, both terms have lost their original hyphenation, illustrated by the title of Helen Tiffin and Ian Adam’s early study Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (1991), as they moved from being signifiers of historically bounded periods to more broadly representative of a set of approaches to issues of modern and contemporary literature and culture. More substantively, both fields of criticism became situated within an ethical turn that reevaluated their relationship to questions of political agency, ideology, and class politics. How then to navigate these illusive and ambiguous “posts”: these empty and yet heavily laden signifiers that have often been representative not of time, but of some more complicated movement “beyond”? Implicit in Césaire’s statement is the suggestion that European conflict is a later expression of overseas European power structures, rather than the reverse. If this is the case, it opens the way for the suggestion that postmodernism might in fact be the Western expression of postcolonial concerns. This indeed would allow an explanation of the symmetry between the two modes of expression. Yet often postcolonial critics have been at the forefront of rejecting suggestions that the “post” of postcolonial is also the “post” of postmodernism, largely because of a fear of the reverse: that postcolonialism under this kind of critical framework will become subsumed into postmodernism, and lose the specificity of its concerns. More specifically, resistance stemmed from the suggestion that postmodernism would reduce the political purchase of postcolonialism, because of perceptions about postmodernism’s potential a-politicism, and tendency toward abstraction. Thus, while critics were happy to acknowledge the shared aesthetic practices of postcolonial and postmodern literature, they have tended to equally stress the two modes as overlapping but distinct, and

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with seemingly divergent political concerns. Most notable in this regard was Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” (1991).3 For Appiah, although postmodernism and postcolonialism were united by their “postrealist” discourse, they were divided by the nature of the motivations that underlie such generic choices. This then may have become a matter of reading practice, rather than textual content. As Tiffin in her introduction to her collection with Adam noted, “Very often it is not something intrinsic to a work of fiction which places it as post-modern or post-colonial but the way in which the text is discussed.”4 Rather than straightforward differences or similarities, we are faced with “intersecting and diverging trajectories.”5 For example, if one looks at the postcolonial novel par excellence, Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize–winning Midnight’s Children, then we find a text that equally can be read as postmodern. Rushdie’s epic narrative of postindependence India, with its unreliable narration, fantastic events, and nonlinear form could easily be used to illustrate the central features of a postmodern novel. Yet whereas a postcolonial reading might emphasize Rushdie’s playful intertextuality, deconstruction of historical authority, nonlinear time frames, and linguistic innovation as a magical-realist disruption of colonial realist narratives and the imposition of European culture on the Indian subcontinent, a postmodern reading, while acknowledging Rushdie’s political concerns, would place emphasis on the same devices as part of a more generalized shift away from metanarratives. The playfully political becomes the politically playful. More recently, however, a number of critical works, while acknowledging potential differences of emphasis and their political importance have tried to bring the two traditions more definitively together. Critical studies such as Marie Vautier’s New World Myths: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction (1998), Ato Quayson’s essay “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism” (2007), and Len Platt and Sara Upstone’s Postmodernism and Race (2015) all ask us to see the value of recognizing the convergence of postcolonialism and postmodernism as each school has refined and revised its critical positioning.6 In this context, while it would still be fair to support the suggestion that the strategies shared between postmodernism and postcolonial texts – pastiche, parody, intertextuality, self-referentiality – are to differing purpose in each case, this is often (though not always) a matter of difference of degree, rather a difference in kind. Adam and Tiffin’s suggestion, for example, that “far from endlessly deferring or denying meaning, these same tropes function as

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potential decolonizing strategies which invest (or reinvest) devalued ‘peripheries’ with meaning” in the postcolonial text obscures the ways in which the postmodern text has also taken up a politicized advocacy of the marginalized.7 Such conjunctions have been profitably furthered by the conceptualization of postmodernism not as a literary historical period defined in various terms as a break from modernism or a manifestation of late capitalism, à la Jameson, but rather as interrogative positioning which both relates to and yet exceeds these historical milestones, an awareness that this current essay collection in fact attests to.8 To explore these possibilities and their literary expression one can turn to authors writing from postcolonial nations at the height of postmodernism proper. Take, for example, the postcolonial writer Wilson Harris. Harris has typically been identified as more modernist than postmodernist precisely because of his belief in the moral imperative of art, and a certain “uncertain enigmatic reality which, for Harris, is the substance of tradition” and “differs from what is usually called the post-modernist indeterminancy.”9 Yet this might be seen as early evidence of a particular kind of postmodern literature that was also postcolonial – a deconstructed worldview nevertheless committed to partial and relative ideas of meaning and truth. If one looks at Harris’s literary output as the conventionally identified high point of postmodernism in the late 1970s one sees exactly how the postmodern might have served questions of race. In Da Silva Da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness (1977), Harris tells the story of Da Silva, a painter. Spanish and Portuguese Brazilian, of black heritage, and orphaned after a flood and cyclone, Da Silva is adopted by a British ambassador Giles Marsden-Prince and taken to England. The novel’s opening is an excellent example of Harris’s approach: The instant the aircraft crashed into the lake everything seemed still yet threaded into explosion and seizure by the elements. Da Silva saw himself a stranger to himself in the mirror of the lake as a giant chair drew him up and a brush stroke of water rose into the air to paint the sky. Perhaps he had been painted there himself by another hand a breath’s passage away from earth. Perhaps this was a new and involuntary beginning, another cultivated wilderness. He sat facing the mirror and the stranger there himself who rose from the chair in which he sat. How could one sit so still and yet see oneself move he wondered, with a new coolness, new in the sense that he could no longer take himself for granted as opaque flesh-and-blood. To be cold in the light of an inner sun motivated by stars, by animal hindsight, was to possess the guidelines of migrating species on the wing.10

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The defamiliarization of the everyday, the dreamlike vision: these elements speak to a postmodern consciousness. At the center of this is an awareness of multiple realities: Under the floor beneath them were other floors, other beds, tables, chairs; other bodies that sat, moved, ate, like features of space to match those out there against the sky, implicit shapes hidden from each other yet witnessing to a universal statement or proof of self-survival, frame within frame of the genealogy of a house, flat built over flat, varieties of unstated collaboration mirrored in unfathomable person and non-person.11

We might see in this vision Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Yet Harris’s postmodernism is equally in acknowledgment of material realities. In one of the novel’s many dream sequences, Da Silva is met by a demon who tries to tempt him into selling his painting: “Give me your price, Da Silva, your price, your price, your price, for whatever you hold dear.” Da Silva’s refusal leads him instead into a world of spiritual revelation centered on the awareness of multiple realities, most notably those denied by colonial histories. He goes to the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, London, to “paint alternative galleries or stages upon which to exhibit his paintings.” Here, Da Silva paints the real commonwealth institute, reimagining it as a tent, but with a lower, middle, and upper deck resonant with the slave ship.12 The institute transformed into a ship, Da Silva then moves through this new exhibition, drawn away from the “great exhibition” of imperial London: It gave him the approach to his second alternative stage or painting of the exhibition. Skeleton stage or commonwealth institute he named it. The flesh upon a tent’s bones, within a tent’s helmet, were his paintings. A comedy of empire, a dying empire, a newborn commonwealth, were his epitaph and cradle.13

Deconstruction of absolute spaces is evident in this passage, certainly: of the authority of the logos as enshrined in public places and exhibitions, yet with an alternative clearly at work – an ethical alternative in which an ethnic artist like Da Silva (and like Harris) can be given the right of expression. Something here then is still being asserted: there is not an endless free play of meaning. Something still must stand, must root a subject who exists, even as that existence is fluid and amorphous. In Robert Eaglestone’s terms, such positioning is a rejection of the said, the totality of the logos, for the saying: that which underlies the fixed sign, and is never erased by the said’s imposition of meaning.14 This is something we also see at

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work in those texts that came in the wake of both Harris and Rushdie, for example, in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1984) or J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986). Hulme’s story of a mixed-race New Zealand woman, Kerewin, and her powerful relationship with a Maori man, Joe, and his white adopted son centers around the relationship between speech and power. The boy, Simeon, is autistic and mute. Likewise, Coetzee’s retelling of Robinson Crusoe gives us a Friday who has had his tongue cut out. The temptation is there to give these characters a moment of speaking, to give the said over to them. Yet in both novels there is instead the recognition that this is impossible – that the definitive word, the “said,” the voice of authority, will always fix identities in ways that can only serve to drive the very prejudice that discriminates against the disabled, the racial minority, or the cultural outsider. “Saying” is rather seized upon: Friday “speaks” through a bodily performance; Simeon finds that although he cannot talk, he can sing. Both characters are in profound connection to nature, and to water more specifically, as a powerful symbolism of their meaningful and yet unconventional assertions. These alternative communications testify to the ability to express oneself from a marginal position, while emphasizing open, performative speech acts that cannot be easily reduced. They are thus postmodern ways of speaking, but in the service very explicitly of anticolonial discourses. The wealth of influences that writers such as Harris, Rushdie, Hulme, and Coetzee drew upon attests to texts that were simultaneously postmodern and postcolonial, rooted equally in both European and developing world traditions. Rushdie’s allusions moved from Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, to Hindu philosophy, to A Thousand and One Nights. Harris fused Christian symbolism, Jungian psychoanalysis, and South American myth, while Coetzee drew metaphors of apartheid South Africa via intertextual reference to Daniel Defoe’s quintessentially English novel. Hulme’s novel, with its European, Maori, and mixed-race protagonists was a metaphor for this kind of cultural fusion: it is Kerewin, representing a vision of cultural hybridity akin to Homi Bhabha’s now well-known model, who provides the acceptance of difference required to resolve the dialectical opposition presented by Joe and Simeon. Ironically, however, these powerful works of Harris’s, Coetzee’s, and Hulme’s also illuminated why some critics found a conjunction of postmodernism and postcolonialism problematic. As my reading earlier attests, these works are difficult. Meaning in Harris’s work is elusive: the narrative is geographically situated, but at the same time its nonlinear time frames make the work less applicable to specific historical incident, and more

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abstract and universal. Likewise, Hulme’s text avoids explicit commentary on the racial politics of New Zealand in favor of allusion to Maori myth and the pursuit of dreamscapes. Coetzee’s novel plays exactly to Gayatri Spivak’s well-known proclamation that “the subaltern cannot speak,” but in doing so it refuses to give us access to the experience of the slave. Meaning here becomes fluid, unstable, and transferable. In Stephen Slemon’s early opposing of the function of parody in postcolonial and postmodern texts, his distinction rested upon the recuperation of a strategic essence by postcolonialism which postmodernism eschewed: But the first difference here, as I have been arguing, is that the location of textual power as an especially effective technology of colonialist discourse means that post-colonial reiterative writing takes on a discursive specificity . . . Whereas a post-modernist criticism would want to argue that literary practices such as these expose the constructedness of all textuality . . . an interested . . . post-colonial critical practice would want to allow for the positive production of oppositional truth-claims in these texts. It would retain for postcolonial writing, that is, a mimetic or referential purchase to textuality, and it would recognize in this referential drive the operations of a crucial strategy for survival in marginalized social groups.15

The rising popularity of more conventionally realist postcolonial narratives spoke to this distinction. Whereas magical realist writers were “‘postcolonials’ who availed themselves most forcefully of ‘postmodernism,’” realist writers drew less readily from these techniques.16 Such narratives have been perhaps particularly relevant from a feminist perspective, where the intersectionality between anticolonial and antipatriarchal discourses has perhaps asked for more transparent and hard-hitting representation, but they have also become more generally popular since the mid-1990s. These texts are surely still influenced by postmodernism, but they eschew the fantastic to give alternative “truths,” relying less on irony, and more on the impact of mimetic representation. They also avoid the formally difficult, to make sure narratives are more readily accessible. Here we might turn to Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Tsitsi Dangaremba’s Nervous Conditions (1988), or another Booker winner, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). These novels are more easily interpreted as “political,” in that their politics propose an alternative said: they offer a counterdiscourse, rather than a saying. For instance, Half of a Yellow Sun makes use of a classic postmodern strategy: self-referentiality. The extracts from the book we read throughout the novel, we find near its conclusion, are in fact written by the young houseboy, Ugwu, who is one of the novel’s three central characters. Yet Adichie’s choice here does not serve a destabilization

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of truth, but rather a reaffirmation of it: it gives the least powerful character in the novel a significant voice in the telling of the story. Here, then, the subaltern does speak in ways that are directly opposed to Coetzee’s strategy in Foe: the destabilization of history in the narrative comes not to present history as narrative, but rather to correct history’s narrative.

How many “posts” are there anyway? In this context, seeing postmodernist texts as of equal political import has relied upon not simply a repositioning of postmodernism, but also of poststructuralism, the influence of which on postmodernism was often identified as being the root cause of divergences between it and postcolonialism, despite the fact that much of the latter school was itself heavily influenced by poststructuralist theory, and despite the simplifications of the suggestion that poststructuralism was “the theoretical and critical practice intrinsically interwoven with post-modernism.”17 This existed in a context where a Marxist turn in postcolonial theory, preempted by the work of critics such as Benita Parry and Aijaz Ahmed, had recalibrated the field away from the earlier enthusiasm for critics such as Spivak and Bhabha – both heavily influenced by Derrida – and Edward Said – strongly influenced by Foucault – towards a more circumspect engagement with their deconstructive practices.18 In this reading, there was the suggestion not only that postcolonialism was more overtly political than postmodernism, but also that the adopting of postmodernism into postcolonial cultures marked a continued European hegemony:19 Post-modernism, whether characterised as temporal or topological, originates in Europe, or more specifically, operates as a Euro-American western hegemony, whose global appropriation of time-and-place inevitably proscribes certain cultures as backward and marginal while co-opting to itself certain of their cultural “raw” materials. Post-modernism is then projected onto these margins as normative, as a neo-universalism to which “marginal” cultures may aspire, and from which certain of their more forward-looking products might be appropriated and “authorised.” In its association with post-structuralism, post-modernism thus acts . . . as a way of depriving the formerly colonised of “voice,” of, specifically, any theoretical authority, and locking post-colonial texts which it does appropriate firmly within the European episteme.20

Often, such authority was located in postmodernism’s ambivalent relationship to modernism, itself identified as a marker of the crisis within European colonialism; the haunting of postmodernism by its generic/ genetic precursor, the incomplete Freudian murder of the parent, meant

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that it was a discourse that could only avow the colonial past and the neocolonial present even as it enacted a supposed disavowal.21 A reevaluation of poststructuralism, and through it postmodernism, was therefore central to reconciling materialist concerns with the possible relevance of seeing postcolonial and postmodern literatures as two parallel and intersecting paths towards the same end-point, namely the destabilizing of Western ideological structures. In these terms, one might see the critique of poststructuralist influences on the field by Marxist postcolonial critics as instrumental in driving if not a reinvention of poststructuralism then at the least a recalibration of its positioning to increase awareness of its political and real-world valence. Revisionist accounts of poststructuralism offer then a useful opportunity to reconsider the apparent tensions between postmodernism and postcolonialism. These revisionist accounts largely argued for the political import of poststructuralism in ways that pertained to postcolonial concerns. Thus alongside their shared dialogue with modernism, the disciplines came to share a reformulated politicized and materially rooted deconstructive impulse directed at the unravelling of logocentric metanarratives within the context of a continued universalist project.22 Saul Newman, for example, in his Unstable Universalities: Poststructuralism and Radical Politics (2007) argued that postmodern critiques of metanarratives and Enlightenment discourse have had important consequences for radical politics, and have led to a general displacement of its conceptual categories. Instead of the essentially rational subject who was to be emancipated from power and ideology, we have a subject who is dispersed amongst a multiplicity of desires and intensities, and whose identity is deeply interwoven into discursive and power structures. Related to this also is the displacement of the category of class from the summit of radical politics: the proletariat is no longer the essential radical subject, and political struggles are no longer overdetermined by “class struggles” as they were in the Marxist schema. Instead, many have pointed to the emergence over the past few decades of new radical political subjectivities and forms of activism – blacks and ethnic minorities against racism, feminists against patriarchy, gays against homophobia and so on. These are the “new social movements” that have coloured the postmodern political terrain.23

Newman’s own project is one in which he attempts to recuperate for postmodernism a less abstract politics of difference that might pertain to social and political movements, centered around antiglobalization, and retaining the notion of the universal as something that might exist

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alongside a deconstruction, a project he shares with Paul Gilroy and his recent work on planetary humanism.24 Attention to the later works of seminal influential poststructuralist thinkers was central in opening up these possibilities. Foucault, once read as the master of genealogy, was in more critical work exposed as a profoundly spatial theorist. This allowed a more precise tethering of his work to that of Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) was notably Foucauldian, as it expanded concepts of what Said called the “geographical violence” of colonialism. Yet it also meant a greater use of Foucault’s work in relation to ideas of territory, nation-state, settlement, and spatial justice, which pertained particularly to postcolonial interests. Postcolonial novels here were read productively through Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, a space explicitly recognized in Rushdie’s later novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) with the characters’ “heterotopian tendencies . . . forays into alternative realities” but also of relevance to a large number of novels.25 For example, Ngũgĩ’s Devil on the Cross (1982) takes the space of the public bus and transforms it into a site that disrupts the capitalist and neocolonial spaces outside it.26 On the bus, Ngũgĩ’s diverse cast of characters sing anticolonial songs, position themselves against the car with its service to capitalism and social status, and make connections that disturb the social hierarchies of the world outside. The bus has, in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, its own spatial rhythm: its time is not that of the streets it moves through, and its anticolonialism is only made possible by the passengers’ entry into a space of heterotopic possibility. The reevaluation of Derrida’s work, however, has been of most note in this regard. In this context Derrida has been repositioned from his location as the poster boy of apolitical textual play, via the much mistranslated “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” to a figure associated rather with the real-world applicability of poststructuralist thinking. Ostensibly, Derrida’s work always contained an implicit if not explicit postcolonial impulse. In the early Of Grammatology (1967) Derrida made an explicit association between the poststructuralist critique of logocentrism and identity politics: “It has long been known that the power of writing in the hands of a small number, caste, or class, is always contemporaneous with hierarchization, let us say with political difference.”27 In Writing and Difference (1967) his suggestion that “One can say with total security that there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism – the very condition for ethnology – should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the destruction of the history of metaphysics” announced an association between the poststructuralist deconstruction of

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metanarratives and critique of logocentrism and Eurocentric, colonial and neo-colonial discourses.28 It was this impulse that postcolonial historians such as Robert J. C. Young and linguist Peter Pericles Trifonas drew attention to.29 Readings of Derrida’s later work in particular, however, have emphasized its political purchase, as they do so reimagining his earlier work to draw more explicit attention to their own implicit politicizations. One can look, for example, to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), not merely for its rooting of deconstructive practice in Marxist influences, but also for its concern for identity politics, once eschewed by poststructuralist criticism: the dedication to antiapartheid campaigner Chris Hani, the reference to immigration and race conflicts, brought together by a sustained interest in the intersectional differences that Derrida is clear must inform questions of justice:30 No justice – let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws – seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.31

This “revisioning” has extended to readings which in fact may draw Derrida closer to materialist postcolonial critics than to postmodernists. For example, postmodernism tends to eschew religious metanarratives, and postcolonial theory in its most poststructuralist incarnations tends to reinforce this by being critical of religious practice, or more often staying silent on the place of religion in postcolonial culture. Yet in contrast to this, Derrida’s later work acknowledged the need to recognize religion in a way that moved away from postmodern relativism and appealed instead to that branch of postcolonialism that was skeptical about postmodern deconstruction. In a lesser known work published after Derrida’s death, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (2008), the philosopher spoke about his own Algerian childhood, acknowledging its influence, as “the questions I have been led to ask from some difference, a certain exteriority, would certainly not have been possible if, in my personal history, I had not been a sort of child in the margins of Europe, a child of the Mediterranean”:32 The community to which I belonged was cut off in three ways: it was cut off first both from the Arab and the Berber, actually the Maghrebian language and culture; it was also cut off from the French, indeed European, language and culture, which were viewed as distant poles, unrelated to its

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history; and finally, or to begin with, it was cut off from the Jewish memory, from that history and that language that one must assume to be one’s own, but which at a given moment no longer were – at least in a special way, for most of its members in a sufficiently living and internal way. The arrogant specificity, the traumatizing brutality of what is called the colonial war, colonial cruelty – some, including myself, experienced it from both sides, if I may say so.33

Here Derrida declares, “I believe that the secular today must be more rigorous with itself, more tolerant toward religious cultures and toward the possibility for religious practices to exist freely, unequivocally, and without confusion.”34 It is this reimagining that has led critics such as Eaglestone to try and bridge postcolonial and postmodern thinking specifically via poststructuralism. For Eaglestone, the influence of Emmanuel Levinas on poststructuralism, and Derrida in particular, offers a “way of exploring in detail the philosophical discourse that underlies Western thought precisely in terms of its colonial and all-consuming power,” with the philosopher’s own “migrant’s double vision” informing his call to recognize the Other as Other.35 Such ideas might be seen to have paved the way for postcolonial concepts such as Bhabha’s mimicry, in which the recognition of difference is necessary to create a disjunctive slippage that destabilizes colonial authority. What exists here therefore is the possibility to suggest that the most postmodern, poststructuralist of postcolonial texts can also be the most political, because in fact each of these “posts” shares the same root political identification. This does not devalue Slemon’s important comment that “Western post-modernist readings can so overvalue the antireferential or deconstructive energetic of postcolonial texts that they efface the important recuperative work that is also going on within them.”36 For example, it is easy to read a text such as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), another Booker Prize–winning postcolonial text, as a powerful critique of Nigerian neo-colonialism and political corruption. However, a postcolonial reading needs to balance this against the powerful recuperation of indigenous practice that the text provides, in particular oral cultures and traditions, and the ways in which the dreamscape exists within a very rooted history. Such a reading needs also to place a concomitant deconstruction of colonial national boundaries alongside a recognition of the need for territorial stability and positive national identity. For Brenda Cooper, this possibility within African magical realism challenges what she sees as Bhabha’s denial of material realities and offers the potential to “reintegrate” postmodern

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diversity and movement with still-relevant Marxist concerns for social order and economic division: its “magic” exists at the borders of capitalist and precapitalist cultures.37 The novel’s use of a particularly African spiritual realism is something that those who have read Derrida’s discussion of Islam should be comfortable with, but it pushes back against some of the challenges to metanarrative that have become synonymous with postmodern thinking. The central character of Azaro, an abiku spirit child, sits in that same liminal space that the postmodern/postcolonial conjunction defines, continually torn between the call of the dream world and material reality. Yet the dream world is also the spirit world – a religious world of “divine dew . . . mystery and a riddle.”38 This world that interrogates the hard capitalism of neo-colonial Nigeria is a fluid, fantasy space, but it is also a space of alternative metanarratives: a world not of an absent subject, but rather a reimagined one. Azaro may question the spirits, but he never questions their existence. Not all criticism has yet to embrace the complexities reflected in such textual positioning, “the ambivalence, contradictions and discordances of its music.”39 Even more recent critical work, for example, Herman Rapaport’s Later Derrida (2002) can be seen to sometimes eschew the subject specificity of identity for the purity of philosophical discourse – an abstraction that Derrida’s work might lend itself to, but not explicitly support. Yet at the same time the work of critics such as Trinh T Minh-ha’s cut and paste practice in Woman, Native, Other (1989) reveals a different “destiny of deconstruction,” a tendency that can be located in Derrida’s Monolinguism of the Other (1998) that considers how “the legal construction of apartheid makes one an absolute other with respect to one’s own native tongue,” or in Archive Fever (1995) where “It is this mal d’archive that functions as the basis for a series of variations in which Van Gogh’s madness is not to be dissociated from a holocaustic annihilation whose aftermath the figure of Van Gogh survives as a cindery, mutilated, displaced person.”40 This reveals something fetishistic about poststructuralism, and philosophy more broadly: this subject which is always present but denied, but which postcolonialism relies upon for its political purchase.

Conclusion There was no postcolonial manifesto. There was no postmodern manifesto. To align such amorphous and shifting identifications, themselves evidence of postmodernist impulses, is therefore always problematic. Yet it is evident that postmodernism was deeply engaged with questions

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regarding national and cultural identities, extending in scope to those texts often considered “postcolonial.” This need not mean that postmodern theory appropriated the non-Western as raw material for its own Western uses. Although it might still be true to say that postcolonialist texts include “a theory of agency and social change that the postmodern deconstructive impulse lacks,” nevertheless it is also true that some postcolonial texts such as Harris’s and Hulme’s may obscure this political mandate, and that postmodern texts may have been less disconnected from a desire to inspire social change than some theories seemed to imply, condemned to being read as apolitical because of their poststructuralist influences.41 Indeed, there has been too little space in this essay to address the problematic that comes with the suggestion that the postcolonial text must be political. As Tejumola Olaniyan, has argued in the context of African literature: behind the relegation of the cultural is an implied assumption that any discourse must be fixated on the “political” to be considered as relevant to the study of Africa. This is an artificial circumscription of the multiple domains that must constitute Africa, as indeed other societies, at the level of epistemology. “Politics” or the “political” as such does not and cannot exhaust the meanings of Africa.42

The political, in fact, is part of what Graham Huggan referred to as “the postcolonial exotic”: it is one feature, alongside the magical and the otherworldly, that readers have come to expect from a postcolonial novel.43 Thus, while some writers have produced starkly realist novels to counter these Western stereotypes, so we might think that one way in which a postcolonial novel can be most political is simply to be postmodern, resisting instead of embracing identity politics. The academy continues to be driven by expectations of what “work” a postcolonial piece of literature does. In the end, therefore, we may need to accept that while the “post,” be it postcolonial or postmodern, is a useful classificatory designation, it will nevertheless continue to fall short of the complex interplay of factors that shape contemporary world literatures. Notes 1 See Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955), trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 2 See Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994). 3 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991), 336–57.

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4 Helen Tiffin, “Introduction,” in Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (University of Calgary Press, 1991), vii. See also Hans Bertens, “World Literature and Postmodernism” in Theo D’haen (ed.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (New York: Routledge, 2011), 204–12, 210. 5 Tiffin, “Introduction,” 11. 6 Marie Vautier, New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998); Ato Quayson, “Postmodernism and Postcolonialism” in Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson (eds.), African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 646–53; Len Platt and Sara Upstone (eds.), Postmodernism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 7 Tiffin, “Introduction,” x. 8 See also Fernando de Toro, New Intersections: Essays on Culture and Literature in the Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuet, 2003), 29. 9 Hena-Maes Jelinek, “‘Numinous Proportions:’ Wilson Harris’s Alternative to All ‘Posts’” in Smith and Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post, 47–64, 53. 10 Wilson Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness (London: Faber, 1977), 3. 11 Harris, Da Silva, 47. 12 Harris, Da Silva, 45, 61, 69. 13 Harris, Da Silva, 65. 14 Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 142–78. 15 Stephen Slemon, Past the Last Post in Adams and Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post, 5. 16 Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction (London: Routledge, 1998), 29. 17 Tiffin, “Introduction,” vii. 18 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004) and Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). See, also, Robert Young, Signs of Race in Poststructuralism: Towards a Transformative Theory of Race (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009) and also Cornel West’s critique of Derrida in “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October 53 (Summer 1990), 93–109. 19 Tiffin, “Introduction,” x. 20 Tiffin “Introduction,” vii. 21 See Slemon Past the Last Post 9, and also Djelal Kadir’s special edition of World Lit Today (Winter 1995), 69.1. 22 Tiffin, “Introduction,” vii. 23 Saul Newman, Unstable Universalities: Poststructuralism and Radical Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 3. 24 See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imaging Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).

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25 Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), 537. 26 Ngugi Wa’Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross (London: Heinemann, 1982). 27 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 130. 28 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 282. 29 See Robert J.C. Young’s discussions of poststructuralist thinking in White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990) and later in Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Peter Pericles Trifonas, “Teaching the Other/Writing the Other: Derrida and the Ethics of the Ethnographic Text,” Social Semiotics 11.3 (2001), 325–41. 30 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 80, 81. 31 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, xix. 32 Mustapha Cherif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 31. 33 Cherif, Islam and the West, 34–5. 34 Cherif, Islam and the West, 51. 35 Robert Eaglestone, “Postcolonial Thought and Levinas’ Double Vision,” Radicalizing Levinas, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 57–68. 36 Slemon, Past the Last Post, 7. 37 Cooper, Magical Realism, 1–2. 38 Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 229. 39 Cooper, Magical Realism, 114. 40 Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida (London: Routledge, 2002), 2, 32, 95. 41 Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire,” in Adams and Tiffin (eds.), Past the Last Post, 167–89. 42 Tejumola Olaniyan, “Postmodernity, Postcoloniality, and African Studies,” in Olaniyan, and Quayson, African Literature, 642, 637–45. 43 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001).

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Celtic postmodernism – Scotland and the breakup of Britain Len Platt

Calls for Scotland to leave the political union with England have led to the referendum on independence which will take place on September 18. Some argue that Scotland would prosper better as an independent country, while others say doing so would be hugely damaging and that the two countries are better off together. The Telegraph, September 11, 2014.

“Remarkable fecundity of mind” – the swordsman and his “familyar” On its seventy-seventh page, The Bridge (1986), up to that point developing as a serious “ontological” novel about being and identity, breaks into a completely unsignaled sword and sorcery fantasy. The sudden shift is marked by a move into dialect, or, rather, a twisted version of Scots that parodies the dialect novel. Far from aiming at any authenticity, this comic narrative draws exaggerated attention to itself as curious and slippery. A first-person narrative tells the story of an earthy swordsman, or “barbarian,” and the “familyar” given to him by a “majishin” who “sed it woold tel me things.” After revealing where the “majishin” keeps his gold, however, the good service of this creature ends – “fukin thing’s nevir sed enythin usefyull since, just blethers oll day long.” It remains part of the swordsman’s organic life, a parasite demanding to be fed and watered. Sitting on the warrior’s shoulder with its claws buried deep into his flesh, it induces no pain – as long as no attempt is made at removal. Try to detach it, however, and the host suffers the agonies of the damned.1 The familyar is strongly ethnicized and acculturated. He’s an English bore who thinks himself an authority on just about everything under the sun. Over the years the swordsman has learned that there’s no getting rid of the thing. Now he just leaves “it thare . . . an we get on as wel as can be expected. Wish it didnae shite doon ma bak thow.”2 278

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The scene moves to the cut and thrust of immediate battle, where the swordsman is assaulting a “fukin big towur” with the piratical aim of relieving a queen of her wealth. The English “familyar” resides as usual on the Scot’s shoulder, urging him on but also insulting him as the warrior battles through the castle’s defenses, his “sord cuverd in blud”: You still lost? I thought so. Worried about the smoke? Of course. A smarter chap would solve both problems at once by watching the way the smoke’s drifting; it will try to rise, and there aren’t many windows on this floor. Not that there’s much chance of you making that sort of connection I imagine; your wits are about as fast as a sloth on Valium. Pity your stream of consciousness hasn’t entered the inter-glacial age yet, but we can’t all be mental giants.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of response infuriates: “Wun day this fukin things goantae drive me right up the bleadin waw, so it wull, oil this mindless chatur in ma erehoal.” As this extract shows, although the broad time frame appears to be archaic the familyar is both characteristically modern in a classical kind of way and precociously contemporary. Not only does he know how to anthropologize myth and psychologize, he also has access to the world of benzodiazepines and the shopping mall. From the swordsman’s perspective, of another age altogether, it is the parasite that is indecipherable. They are, despite the obvious differences, doubles or counterparts of miscommunication, the familyar being almost “family” in some respects.3 The pair eventually arrives at a throne room. The queen is nowhere to be seen. The bemused swordsman sits down on her throne, which magically rises up to a room where “chopt up” women still alive are smiling and strapped to chairs. They are without arms or legs, as if these had been lost in battle, or surgically removed – “some cunt had dun a right neet job on them.” Finally, after slaughtering the queen’s priests, the swordsman and his familyar discover the queen, another magician, who immediately renders the swordsman paralyzed. Powerless, he is forced to watch on while “these two basturds . . . [jabber] away like I wisnay heer! Bludy cheek, eh!” It is clear that the queen and the familyar know each other of old. The swordsman might reasonably think of himself in terms of agency but the real conflict has been going on elsewhere all the time. Suddenly the queen “cums jumping oot the chare riyht at me like a fukin big bat or sumhin . . . Just aboot shit ma breeks so I did.” But her target is not the swordsman at all. The familyar is the real adversary and he must now relinquish his power over the swordsman to engage fully with the queen. He flies into her face and grips on, rather like the creature in the

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Ridley Scott film Alien, released a few years before this novel. “Coodnae bileev me gude luck. Got the wee basturd aff ma showder at last; fuk this fur a gaim aw sodjers, am aff.” The swordsman retreats. He never does find the gold. Deciding to cut his losses, he rapes the dismembered “wimin instead” and exits. He has not, he says, been so lucky since the “wee familyar” went, “an I miss the wee bam sumtines, but nivir mind. Still majic just been a sordsman.”4 This piece of writing both does and does not belong to Scotland. It appears to join up in various ways with genres familiar to Scottish literary tradition – fantasy, the historical novel, and the dialect novel.5 An allegory of the Union and Anglo-Scottish national identities, it operates in a contemporary political world, registering loudly in postcolonial terms and invoking the famous doubleness of “Caledonian antisyzygy” constructed by countless commentators as a fundamental of Scottish culture. But all these elements are at the service of a comically macho intervention. There is no real fantasy or dialect novel here and no essential duality either, blighting the implied maker of this narrative with the classic Scottish “predicament” of cultural schizophrenia. All are materials at someone’s disposal, used in ironic, masterful ways and all are subject to the layers of narrative that surround and envelop this tale of the swordsman and his “familyar.” For this story begins somewhere quite other, with a car crash. The “real” central figure of the narratology, we think, is the victim now removed (in his mind?) to a strange land which seems solely comprised of a huge bridge where people live and work without any real understanding of worlds beyond the bridge. He has lost all memory and is being treated by a psychiatrist who requires him to recount his dreams. The allegory just recalled is, “in fact,” a dream just had, one that sickens the narrator with its gore and sexual violence. Perhaps it is self-loathing that on this occasion leads Mr. Orr (or what?) to the decision not to reveal his true dream to his analyst and invent instead a sequence of three dreams from nowhere. The psychiatrist’s responses, however, seem to indicate that he is somehow hearing the true dream recalled, although Dr. Joyce denies ever voicing the articulations that Orr claims to hear. That other name, by the way, recalls the high priest of modernist literary iconoclasm, interior monologue and the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, the art of which is termed “hallucination.” But so what? None of that helps much with the obvious question. Who is fooling whom here? Orr returns to his apartment where a screen persistently plays what appears to be the drama of a man in a coma being treated in hospital – there are strong echoes of the cult television series The Prisoner in all this,

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especially of episode three, originally broadcast in the UK in October 1967 where in a paranoid scenario typical of the series and the sixties more generally, Number 2 tries to manipulate Number 6’s dreams and the result mysteriously appears as film. For some reason he can’t quite pin down, Orr is bothered by the hospital show. He calls the engineers, believing his screen to be broken. He has taken a bath before his appointment with Dr. Joyce. The steam has condensed on the bathroom mirror obscuring his image. He feels “rubbed out” or, as the other Joyce’s consubstantial son puts it in relation to the artist and his work, he is “refined out of existence.”6 This was one version of the Scottish postmodern novel as it appeared in 1986 – a rich, inventive, genre-breaking “metafiction.” It looked back to earlier traditions but was hardly of those traditions in any straightforward way. Although various mapping exercises have traced links between Scottish fiction of the 1980s and 1990s and pretty well all phases of Scottish culture from the reformation onward, there can be no doubt that this great outburst of writing from such figures as Banks, Janice Galloway, Andrew Crumey, Alice Thompson, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, and many others was something new. If, as some maintain, it was indebted to 1960s Scottish counterculture via such figures as Alexander Trocchi, Muriel Spark and R. D. Laing, it owed a further and more substantial debt to a precise set of immediate historical circumstances outlined later.7 Poets, playwrights, critics and other artists were also constitutive of this cultural movement – Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Tom McGrath, Douglas Oliver, John Davidson, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan. Frank Kuppner’s early collections of poems, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984) and The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (1987) and the prose/poem volume Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting! (1989) ran the full catalog of postmodern aesthetics from parody and pastiche through to intrusive author, vanishing subject, narrative dead-end and philosophical absurdity; his work constituted the most radical version of deconstruction to be found in any cultural product belonging to this place and time.8 But the period and its character became especially focused around novels, some of them, like Gray’s Lanark (1981), constructed on a grand scale. This, Gray’s first full-length publication, made no claim to be the originary, ground-breaking text of Scotland’s “second renaissance,” far from it – a fourteen-page “index” near the end of the book owned up to 108 cases of plagiarism, organizing the theft into three kinds – “block,” “imbedded,” and “diffuse.”9 But as a four-part gospel combining classic

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Bildungsroman with dystopic future fantasy, Lanark had acculturated and nationalized, if not racialized – not least through its sheer size and scope. It became immediately central to the idea of a revival in national literature. Described by Alan Massie as “a quite extraordinary achievement, the most remarkable thing done in Scottish fiction for a very long time,” Gray’s first novel drew immediate comparisons with Ulysses, that other “Celtic” highstatus masterpiece.10 Indeed, for some, Gray’s monumental book marked a shift in the locus of the experimental novel from one Celtic margin to another. Introducing The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction some twenty years later, Colm Toíbín invited his readers to “compare the calmness of contemporary Irish writing with the wildness of contemporary Scottish writing.” Drawing, ironically enough, on nineteenth-century English stereotypes of the fierce yet magical Celt, he imagined “a legacy of Sterne and Swift, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien [that] had taken the Larne-Stranraer ferry.” In new Scottish novels, Toíbín was finding “political anger, stylistic experiment and formal trickery.”11 Gray’s great anti-Thatcher novel 1982, Janine appeared in 1984. Eight years later a new generation writer, Banks, published The Crow Road, underrated by the literary establishment but one of the great novels of the period. This was followed shortly after by Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) – even more difficult to assimilate into a conservatively constructed Scottish canon but indisputably a game-changing text of brilliance and great energy that was self-consciously postmodern in its aesthetic. A year later Secker and Warburg published Kelman’s How Late It Was How Late, which became the controversial winner of the Booker prize. Many distinguished but less-celebrated novels besides featured across the period, including Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989), and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995), with Banks and Welsh in particular achieving great commercial success. A string of genre-busting novels in detective fiction and science fiction from such figures as Ian Rankin and Ken MacLeod contributed to the sense of new localized centers of fiction writing, notably Glasgow and Edinburgh based, with a developing publishing and critical culture to match – although prominent figures in this movement, Tennant, Banks, and Welsh for instance, were publishing mostly outside Scotland. There were elements of postmodern culture and criticism appearing simultaneously in Northern Ireland and Wales, but nothing like this concentration of high-quality experimental prose fiction appeared anywhere else in Britain, except arguably across a range of new writing from England that could never have identified itself as “English.” The Irish

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Republic was becoming exemplary in terms of postmodern economics and critical culture, but its revolution in radical postcolonial fiction had come confusingly early in the twentieth century and somehow seemed to belong to distinct traditions. For the 1980s, the Thatcher decade, there can be no doubt that Scotland was the definitive home of a new writing cheaply sloganeered in this chapter as “Celtic postmodernism.”

“You’re no trying to tell us Pontius fucking Pilot was born in Scotland!” – historiographics, neo-nationalism, and the postmodern moment As many commentators have pointed out, Scottish writing of this period was a cultural formation specific to its time and place. It wrote back to its literary pasts but, like Yeats’s formation of Celtic revivalism at the turn of the previous century, was much defined by the political present, the local manifestation of conditions playing out across the world and being analyzed by figures such as Jameson and Terry Eagleton in terms of a crisis in “late capitalism.” From this perspective, modern Scotland, often constructed from both inside and outside positions as a cultural backwater, was reformulated as a microcosm now resonating in global terms. The second Scottish renaissance, thought by many to pack “as much cultural punch as the First Renaissance of the 1920s,” came out of a complex politics and economics not least focused through the development of the North Sea oil fields in the 1960s and 1970s.12 Seen by nationalists as a vast Scottish economic resource flowing back to England and Westminster, that scandalous combination of international business and empire politics was of a piece with the chicanery behind the 1979 referendum on independence.13 Postindustrial decline, a collapse in social and political structures as well as economic forms, taking place simultaneously across Europe and the United States, powerfully circumscribed these events. The devastation of its effects in places like Clydeside was closely related to the failure of political process under a long period of Tory government for which Scotland never voted. Margaret Thatcher, a newwave personality politician drawn to the international stage, was particularly despised in Scotland, but the issues promoting renewed interest in Scottish nationalism went deeper than resistance to her version of radical conservatism.14 In the later 1990s, the failure of Blair’s long-awaited Labour government to deliver on social contract constituted a political betrayal in some ways even more destructive of any optimism about Scotland in Britain.

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Writing for the New Left Review in the mid-1970s, the Scottish radical Tom Nairn produced powerfully prescient analyses of what he saw as the inevitable “break-up of Britain.” Published in book form in 1979, the first three of these accounts – “The Twilight of the British State,” “Scotland and Europe,” and “Old and New Scottish Nationalism” – were designed to render Britain’s past incompatible with Scottish futures, a splitting essential to the development of a genuinely populist neo-nationalism in Scotland capable of seriously challenging the historical authority of the Union. Highly suggestive of the climate in which Scottish writing developed in the 1980s and a direct influence on the earliest generation of new Scottish writers, especially Gray, these accounts formulated a radical reconstruction of the nineteenth century.15 Here Britain figured not as the prototype modern nation but as a particularly historicized failure, one condemned to archaism by the peculiarities of a political settlement geared toward the preservation of a corrupt and decaying English elite. Nairn went on to argue that Britain, forever tied to the past by virtue of a unique political conspiracy, never actually modernized at all. A long way in reality from the balanced, rational compromise of Whig myth, “the pioneer modernliberal constitutional state” thus viewed was incapable of becoming contemporary. It retained “the archaic stamp of its priority,” remaining “a basically indefensible and inadaptable relic, not a modern state form” at all. With that analysis, the idea of Britain representing a wider consensus “outside England (empire, federation of Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales)” became nothing more than a “delusion.”16 Neo-nationalism, especially in its Scottish formation, emerged as the only intervention that could displace a failed class politics. More than a viable alternative to the Scottish Labour Party, it took on the status of a historical imperative if Scotland was to avoid the awful fate of the British mess – “social sclerosis, an over-traditionalism leading to incurable backwardness.” Stability became a paralytic “over-stability” (my emphasis) operating across the political spectrum from Conservatism to the “so-called ‘social revolution’” of the Labour Party in the postwar years and leading only “to rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay, and cultural despair.”17 Nairn’s historical redirection did not produce Scotland’s second renaissance, of course, but it echoed across a Scottish new writing that was conducting its own versions of Britain’s breakup more or less simultaneously. The doubleness of Lanark’s end-stopped and romanticized pasts (progressivist, humanist, individualist) and terrifying presentist futures

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(militarist, consumerist, materialist) strongly evoked Nairn’s analyses, as did the dark fantasies of 1982, Janine where sexual violence took on “a convincing political structure” and vice versa – “Scotland has been fucked. I mean that word in the vulgar sense of misused to give satisfaction or advantage to another.” Throughout this novel, focused through a singular I-narrative, Nairn’s analysis is reproduced in demotic terms. Britain becomes a “Falstaffian” heritage culture dominated by an elite: “our colourful past has returned, we display as rich a pageant of contrasts as in the days of Lizzie Tudor, Merry Charlie Stewart and the Queen Empress Victoria. Our royal millionaire weds in Westminster Abbey and departs in a luxury cruiser to the cheers of the nation while unemployed children loot shops and battle with the police in slums.” Democratic process is rendered meaningless – “it does not matter how the British worker votes at an election, because the leaders of the big parties only discuss small things which do not disturb their investments.” This “perfectly frank and open conspiracy,” already mapped out in Nairn’s “The Twilight of the British State,” transforms individual agency into pointless performance. For all his espousal of right-wing ideas, the central figure through whom this novel is articulated, “Jock” McLeish, cannot be a true Conservative any more than he can be called “true” in any sense. Like Edinburgh itself, “a setting for an opera nobody performs nowadays . . . an opera called Scottish history,” “Jock” is a fabrication, entirely contingent on his imagined imperial Other – indeed impossible to formulate outside of this mirror image and entirely at the State’s disposal.18 Gray’s more carnivalesque Poor Things (1993) was shaped in even more fundamental ways by Nairn’s essays. The central narrative dynamic of this novel is precisely a breakup of Britain, reimagined in terms of Bella Caledonia’s dramatic escape from her brutal husband – the vile Anglo-Saxon aristocrat par excellence, General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington Bart VC. Digging deep into a nineteenth-century past, the novel is reworked through the pretense that the text itself is a concoction of lost memoirs, diaries, and other historical detritus. The idea of a hidden history forms the basis of an interrogation of claim and counterclaim, both engaged in the novel’s wider structure where the fantasy narrative of the lost book is countered by a wife’s letter to posterity and both are made subject to Gray’s “notes historical and critical.” Such historiographic techniques, such as Nairn’s dialectic, open up the past to a radical reinscription, as does the central conceit of Poor Things where the world is perceived through the brain of an unborn child transposed into the body of her dead mother – Gray’s revisionist version of Edinburgh Gothic.

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Bank’s The Crow Road was similarly formulated around the historiographic. Its central figure and narrator, Prentice, is brought up in a landscape where Celtic myth and history are everywhere evoked and often conflated. Thus, Prentice as a child is confused by his father’s story of “the mythosaur and the cairns,” which he thinks must be “history.” Gripped by a family past slowly turning into detective mystery, the older Prentice, now a failing undergraduate historian, embarks on an attempt to reconstruct events that seem highly evocative of a blighted nation in a postmodern world. Idealizing a science of history that can get to the truth, Prentice is attracted to “just being a historian,” while at the same time strongly gripped by the problematics of historiography. Suspicious of his own motives, he questions whether he is making “something out of nothing, treating our recent, local history, like some past age and looking too assiduously, too imaginatively for links and patterns and connections, and so turning myself into some sort of small-scale conspiracy theorist.”19 Nairn’s account conducted itself in terms of neo-Marxist discourses, but its radical interference with progressivist historiographies would have been quite impossible without the space-clearing generated by the broader deconstructive intellectual culture with which it was contemporary. This partly explains why these essays resonated so widely. The Break-up of Britain (1979) was part of the same cultural climate that produced novels such as Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1979) and Sian Hayton’s The Cell of Knowledge (1989), both second-wave feminist appropriations of Celticism with the latter particularly devoted to interrogation of the authority of master narrative. The former, like Banks’s tale of the swordsman and his “familyar,” turns on a central doubling unearthed in “an ancient story of bitterness and revenge.”20 At formal levels the Thaw sections of Lanark and the early novels of James Kelman – The Bus Conductor Hines (1984) and A Chancer (1985) – often read in terms of “social realism,” were in fact just as deconstructive of the center. They produced powerful “images of a working-class for whom the future, as traditionally envisaged by progressivist politics, has been abolished,” one reason why Kelman’s work has remained so much fixed in a 1980s world.21 Even science fiction, a genre traditionally “beyond nation,” found ways of including “speculative nationality” in its “thought experiments.”22 John Garrison has argued that the Culture’s encounter with the Azad Empire in Iain M. Banks’s 1988 novel The Player of Games, for example, “offers a fruitful analysis for examining the current stance of Scotland in relationship not only to Britain but also within the broader geopolitical imaginary continually redefined by globalization, multiculturalism and transnationalism.”23

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Some Scottish novelists, uneasy if not actually riled by what was perceived as the trendy intellectualism of postmodernism, attempted to separate themselves out in public pronouncement. Gray distinguished himself from the multiform pluralism of a tricksy cultural fad to declare himself a straightforward propagandist “for democratic welfare-state Socialism and an independent Scottish parliament.” At the same time, he insisted that his fictions were geared toward seducing “the reader by disguising themselves as sensational entertainment,” a sentiment immediately undercut by the further half-joke that his “jacket designs and illustrations – especially the erotic ones – . . . [were] designed with the same high purpose.”24 All of which indicated how far Scottish new writing and its makers remained firmly implicated in postmodern identities and aesthetics. These novels, in whatever sense nationalist, registered in postmodern terms, not least as “historiographic metafictions.” They represented a sophisticated return to place and localism that exploited and opposed both cheap kitsch, the “multiple caricatures haunting Scots society,” and the centralizing authority of master narrative.25 Here, especially in the writing of figures like Kelman and Welsh, “the local and the regional,” for all the difficulties, were “stressed in the face of a mass culture and a kind of vast global informational village that McLuhan could only have dreamed of.” This complex concoction put into play a particular form of the decentered perspective, the Scottish version of the marginal – what Linda Hutcheon, also writing in the 1980s, termed the “ex-centric” – but it did so in an intellectual culture where purist versions of national identity were routinely declared to be “entities” that have little or no meaning.26 Thus, at the height of his activities as a public intellectual, Kelman talked about the urgent need for clarity. In talking about “indigenous culture” he was, he wrote, not referring to “some kind of ‘pure native-born Scottish person’ or some mystical ‘national culture.’” Neither, he continued, has “ever existed in the past and cannot conceivably exist in the future.”27

“Thirdly, when discussing the extinction of all human life, the most important thing to do is not to exaggerate” – an inconclusive note on the subject of Frank Kuppner For some commentators – Cairns Craig would be the classic example – the sketching out of a generic context for Scottish new writing of this period points to an encompassing cultural frame. Here “serious” contemporary Scottish writing becomes subsumed under a general postcolonial dynamic

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where a culture attempts to deliver itself from the thralldom of an imagined and highly singularized English hegemony. In reality, postmodern Scottish writing and the cultures surrounding it was distinct but multiple in all kinds of ways. It was often opportunistic and much more contracted to cultural contexts beyond both Scotland and Britain than some writers had been prepared to admit. It was also characterized more by fractious contestation than communal solidarity. Kelman’s assaults on the cultural orthodoxies promoting Glasgow as a European city of culture in the 1990s were symptomatic of an environment where virtually all aspects of decolonization, including the very idea of Scotland as colony, had been both exploited and strongly disputed.28 Some objected to the commercializing of Scottish identities and the “nation novel” in a market where “ethnic” literature had been much promoted by transnational publishers. Writing in 1983 Joyce McMillan, theater critic for The Scotsman, wrote about how, in her view, the urge to preserve Scottishness went “far beyond what comes naturally and truthfully to writers.”29 Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that the imperative toward reconfiguring the dimensions of national identity produced its own form of counterculture, especially at the popular level. Thus, in a novel such as Trainspotting the English are “wankers,” but the Scots far worse because “we are colonised by wankers.”30 At the more self-consciously cerebral end of things, a figure like Frank Kuppner becomes the true iconoclast of Scottish writing in this period, an apologetic antihumanist who cannot in truth describe himself as “a British writer,” but does recall with some nostalgic fondness a time of his life when, “for quite a few years,” he was on unemployment benefits and experienced some positive feeling for the old order. “Every time I went into the Post Office to cash the giro I would feel a sort of distant warmth toward the British state.”31 This survey concludes with Kuppner for a number of reasons, not all of them connected with discursive necessity – which is probably just as well given Kuppner’s overturning of such notions. One of the less-celebrated figures in Scotland’s “second renaissance,” Kuppner has received some critical recognition but relatively few proselytizers. He deserves more. One suspects that the critic Richard Crawford is not wrong to feel that the difficulty with Kuppner, quite outside of the genuine demands of his work, is that that he somehow seems the most “un-Scottish” of the figures writing at this time.32 The problem is not that he is “half Polish” – Scottish neo-nationalism has already and consistently articulated its distance from any form of race-based politics – but, rather, that his “models,” the intertextualities that have inspired so many of his works, have been so

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emphatically outward looking. In what appears to be an overdone determination to look beyond Scotland, Kuppner, like Trocchi before him, has been strongly influenced by the French avant garde – Robbe-Grillet and especially the nineteenth-century forerunner of surrealism, Lautréamont – as well as by the New York School and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing.33 Where intertextuality has deeply shaped his work, and it often has, the models range across “other cultures” and, on occasion, their mediation by “the West.” His first collection of poetry, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, plays with Western scholarship in relation to Chinese traditions of poetry worked through 501 quatrains; in the second collection, The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women, one long poem interferes with a 1930s guidebook to Prague; another, “Five Quartets” rewrites Eliot; a third “Fifty-One Border Ballads” is closer to home but operates precisely at territorial margins. Likewise “In a Persian Garden,” published in the 1994 collection Everything Is Strange, constructs itself as a radically altered version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, itself powerfully mediated through what the back cover note describes as the “paraphrase” of the English author and poet with the French-sounding name, Richard La Gallienne. Here deliverance from the stereotypes of the kailyard is rendered not by the kind of historigraphic intervention described earlier but by the comic and highly transgressive appropriation of something like “world culture” on a massive scale. Where Kuppner does invoke the “local,” he does so, again, in sharply transgressive ways that tend to have the effect of undermining the very idea of national culture and the strategies that try to render such concepts in intelligible terms. In the remarkable 1990 work A Concussed History of Scotland, “a novel of another sort” or “another sort of novel,” eminent figures of Scottish culture are contaminated, not least with a vulgar and highly gendered eroticism that appears to operate at the end of philosophy.34 Robert Louis Stevenson is remembered for his “dictum that every woman has been fitted with at least one aperture which properly belongs to quite another female, but I cannot believe that that, even if it were true, would be true. But that is a very dangerous remark to make, I’m sure you’ll agree, for one should not be flippant about the truth.” Carlyle figures via a narrative commitment to the truth of his “aperçue that to be fully human is to be obsessed by little tits”; the “narrator” of this writing distances himself, however, from the view of J. C. Maxwell, the Scottish physicist, “that every woman at heart is a 13-amp fuse,” and so on.35 For some there remains something usefully local about this comic name checking; some have seen in the techniques of A Concussed History an

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identification with Carlyle’s extraordinary reproduction of German idealism in Sartor Resartus.36 That, it is said, instates a Scottish connection of some significance. At the same time this text and its precursor, Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting!, are masterpieces of classic deconstruction. They have neither character nor plot, or, rather, they construct themselves as exercises in the thwarting of all plot and all identity. Here the narrator of A Concussed History can claim to be at various times a man, a woman, a dog, a plant, and a skirt. As the above suggests, the even more destructive mode in which these texts operate has as much to do with “metaphysical ruminations” as literary aesthetics, the former wickedly comprised of internal discrepancies, contradictions and hopeless overqualification as well as being wrecked by the persistent interpolations of mundane, ordinary life.37 How do such texts really operate in terms of national culture and how do they articulate against any meaningful form of national politics? Kuppner himself warns that the whole enterprise is a “crystallization of authority which inheres in writing in general.” At the same time, and crucially, it carries with it a “watermark saying ‘Beware of such Authorities.’”38 Nothing here, it seems, can be taken at face value, especially any evaluation arrived at by self-reflection – a radical position that in no way excludes the “political”; far from it. Truly, on the day when entirely by my own efforts I liberated the whole country from tyranny and established a type of society and a mode of government which enlightened unprejudiced judges everywhere hail as one of the greatest successes of our time – I could go further now but modesty precludes such a course of action – I must be honest with you.39 Notes Iain Banks, The Bridge (1986; London: Abacus, 1994), 77. Banks, The Bridge, 78. The Bridge, 79. The Bridge, 79–84. For a distinguished conservative account of tradition and the Scottish novel see Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 1999). For a dissenting version, see Eleanor Bell, Questioning Scotland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 6 Banks, The Bridge, 7; James Joyce, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916; London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), 245. 7 On the second Scottish renaissance as counterculture and “resistance as mutual experience” see Michael Gardiner, From Trocchi to Trainspotting: Scottish Cultural Theory Since 1960 (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Spark was an early champion of Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman. See Gardiner, 46. 1 2 3 4 5

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8 Kuppner’s work is less well-known than some, perhaps most, of his contemporaries but central to an understanding of Scottish postmodern writing in this period. See Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets – Self and Territory in Twentieth Century Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1993); Roel Daamen, “A Confluence of Narratives: Cultural Perspectives in Postmodernist Scottish Fiction,” in Theo D’Haen and Peiter Vermueken (eds.), Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing (Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2006), 119–45. 9 Alasdair Gary, Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (London: Granada, 1981), 485–91. 10 The Scotsman (February 28, 1981). Anthony Burgess, for example, made the comparison in Ninety-Nine Novels, The Best in English since 1939: A Personal Choice by Anthony Burgess (London: Allison and Busby, 1984). 11 Colm Toíbín, The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), xxxii. 12 Gardiner, From Trocchi to Trainspotting, 153. 13 See Cairns Craig, “1979,” in Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century Literature s in English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 14 Thatcher had a particularly poor understanding of Scottish Unionism. See Richard Finlay, “Thatcherism, Unionism and Nationalism: A Comparative Study of Scotland and Wales,” in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge University Press: 2012), 165–79. 15 A number of writers have noted the influence of Nairn on Alistair Gray, especially on 1982, Janine and Poor Things. See, for example, Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel, 249 and Len Platt “‘How SCOTTISH I Am’: Alasdair Gray, Race and Neo-Nationalism,” in Len Platt and Sara Upstone (eds.), Postmodern Literature and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The account of Nairn’s The Break-up of Britain in this chapter is adapted from this essay. 16 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain (1977; London: Verso, 1991), 22, 75, 78. 17 Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 40, 43, 51. 18 Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), 136, 151, 233. 19 Iain Banks, The Crow Road (1992; London: Abacus, 1993), 32, 432, 402. 20 Emma Tennant, The Bad Sister (1978) in Travesties (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 54. 21 Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel, 103. 22 See Istvan Cisery-Roney Jr, “Dis-Imagined Communities: Science Fiction and the Future of Nations,” in Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (eds.), Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 217–37. 23 John Garrison, “Speculative Nationality: ‘Stands Scotland Where it Did?’ in the Culture Novels of Iain M. Banks” in McCraken-Flesher (ed.) Scotland as Science Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 55–67 [57]. 24 Quoted in Susan Windisch Brown, Contemporary Novelists, 6th edn. (London: St James Press, 1966). 25 Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, 170.

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26 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 12. 27 James Kelman, “Oppression and Solidarity” in Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political (Stirling: AK Press, 1994), 72. 28 The Scottish academy is now impatient with that debate. See Michael Gardiner, Graeme McDonald and Niall O’Gallagher (eds.), Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Gardiner’s introduction to this collection seeks to “leave behind” the question of whether Scotland “is postcolonial” (1). 29 See Bell, Questioning Scotland, 43; Joyce McMillan, “The Predicament of the Scottish Writer,” Chapman, 35/6 (1983), 68–71 [70]. 30 Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1993), 78. 31 Attila Dósa, “Conversation with Frank Kuppner,” Scottish Studies Review, Spring 2005, 84–100 [96]. 32 Crawford, Identifying Poets, 121. 33 See Identifying Poets, 122. 34 The reversed terms appear on the front and back cover respectively of A Concussed History. 35 Frank Kuppner, A Concussed History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), 106. 119, 126. 36 See Crawford, Identifying Poets, 121. Daamen refers to the Carlyle connection in “A Confluence of Narratives,” 138–9. 37 Daamen, “A Confluence of Narratives,” 135 38 Dósa, “Conversation with Frank Kuppner,” 87. 39 Kuppner, A Concussed History of Scotland, 130.

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17

Historiographic metafiction Amy Elias

The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion.” Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)

Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot was an instant postmodern classic, one of the oft-quoted texts of the 1980s that included, among other books, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Christa Wolf ’s Cassandra (1983), John Fowles’s A Maggot (1985), Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor: A Novel (1985), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986), Don DeLillo’s Libra (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989). This novel, like the others in this grouping, continued a subgenre of fiction proliferating from the 1960s through the 1990s that seemed to question what constituted a society’s (or an individual’s) ethical and politically valid relation to history. These postmodernist novels resembled historical fiction but didn’t read like realism and somehow weirdly swerved from the narrative conventions of historical romance. They seemed more like metafiction, but they often had deeply politicized historical plotlines and appeared obsessed about the meaning of history – unlike “pure” metafiction, which tended to be about the meaning of fiction itself, or of art, or of language use in relation to human intentionality, or of the self as language construct. They were produced in a decade following the countercultural 1960s and many colonial liberation movements, a decade that included Great Britain’s invasion of the Falkland Islands, continuing tension and violence in the Middle East, the opening of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, international sympathy with antiapartheid movements in South Africa, the first measurements of 293

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the ozone hole in the Earth’s atmosphere, the famine in Ethiopia, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the Tiananmen Square violence – yet also ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. They were produced also as the culture industry and digital technology shifted into full throttle, particularly in the United States: this was the decade of Star Wars, the TV show Dallas, Michael Jackson, and MTV, and it was the decade that birthed Pac Man, introduced the Internet Protocol Suite, saw the computer named “Machine of the Year” by Time magazine (substituting for the publication’s annual “Person of the Year” award), and, at the end of the decade, saw the birth of the World Wide Web. Increasingly, irony seemed to permeate popular culture as well as many approaches to politics, now seen as more akin to the movies than to the transparent political operations of liberatory political systems. It was in 1981 that Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra was published in French and insinuated that the Vietnam War was more akin to a scripted blockbuster movie (filled with special effects and psychedelic fantasy) than a conflict between politically coherent positions. But these novels of the 1980s also were kin to earlier novels of the 1960s and 1970s that similarly questioned the nature and politics of historical knowledge. Books such as Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Flight to Canada (1976), Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Gore Vidal’s Burr (1973), E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975; English publication, 1976), Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), and Günter Grass’s The Flounder (1977), among other novels and short fictions, implicitly or explicitly raised questions such as what is history, exactly, and how does it enable both individual and collective agency? What is the difference between history and memory and fantasy? What events of the past have become lost to us in the present, why have they become lost, and why should we want to recuperate them? What political forces work against our understanding or even knowledge of the past? The 1980s novels also set the stage for later 1990s explorations of these questions, in William T. Vollman’s Seven Dreams series, A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992), Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover (1992), Anthony Burgess’s A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising (1995), Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1996), Lawrence Norfolk’s The Pope’s Rhinoceros (1996), Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), and in other novels.

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All of these works asked a question germane to their own existence as a kind of historical novel: what is the relationship between history and fiction? After the 1980s, however, literary criticism worked to unearth the important differences between postcolonial fiction such as Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) and postmodernist historical fiction when both seemed to use similar metafictional strategies to interrogate the reliability of history and historical accounting.1 These novels asked questions about historical knowledge in a distinctive, experimental form of the novel, one which refused easy divisions between “real historical” and fictional worlds. Often they included a mocking, ironic tone that seemed to attack everything Western liberalism held dear, including democracy and current forms of civil law, individualism, and historical progress; created characters who often were more caricatures than realist depictions; portrayed historical times and places in a way that sometimes veered into surreal landscapes; and often championed social justice themes based in the cultural politics of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, yet seemed to hold in place a skepticism concerning Western cultures’ “metanarratives” that seemed to lead these texts to a philosophical relativism concerning standards of value, particularly those constructed by institutions such as religion or law. Questions concerning the nature and reliability of historical narrative were thus important to novelists of the mid-century, who rebelled against the historical paranoia generated during the Cold War decades, voiced postcolonial, racial, and gender politics in their writing, and/or expressed the disillusionment produced by the seeming failure of the 1960s’ countercultural revolutions in Europe and North America to stay the acceleration of multinational capitalism. Understood as explorations about the nature of history, memory, and cultural identity, postmodernist historical novels brought together the topos and social concerns of postcolonial and postmodernist fiction with a late modernist formal experimentalism. These are the novels that Linda Hutcheon, in her groundbreaking book A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), called “historiographic metafictions” and which I later termed metahistorical romances.2 For decades, they created a kind of foundation for debates about fiction and history as well as the political investments of a certain kind of postmodernist and postcolonialist experimental literary art.

Background Underlying any discussion of postmodernist historical fiction are three major yet sometimes incompatible theoretical streams of thought. The first is the entire range of gender, race, and ethnicity criticism that gained force

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in the academy and in politics after the 1950s and that is discussed at length elsewhere in this volume. Emerging out of newly redefined political contexts defined by civil rights movements in the United States, 1968 student revolutions worldwide, the end of the age of Empire, and global women’s rights movements, these perspectives radically challenged the versions of history present in U.S. and European textbooks that privileged white, male, heterosexual, Anglo-European subjects, perspectives, and actions in the writing of world history. It is no accident that the “culture wars” of the 1980s in the United States coincided with the interrogation of history in postmodernist fiction. The fiction of the time reflected the anger toward biased history and the cry for revision of it by peoples excluded from the master narratives of their respective societies. At the same time, the mainstream also was reminded by research undertaken by a politicized academy that human actions in history sometimes eluded our logic and ability to comprehend them, no matter how many times we told their stories. This was the case with World War II Holocaust history, which often returned again and again to the Nazi death camps but never seemed to be able to make “sense” of this horrific moment in a way that could satisfactorily explain how such an atrocity could have taken place in modern civil society. Trauma theory – reaching a kind of heyday in the mid-1990s – as well as class, race, gender, and postcolonial theories all undermined the notion that historical accounts were empirically pure, unmotivated, and unmediated stories about “the way it really was,” and these theories spawned research on new (or recovery of older, preEnlightenment) strategies of historical narration as well as new theories of historical causation. The second stream of thought important to postmodernist historical fiction was Marxism, primarily articulated by post-Frankfurt school meditations on the culture industry and Fredric Jameson’s magisterial work on postmodernism in art and culture. Jameson has asserted throughout his writing that late capitalism produces cultural productions (visual art, architecture, literature) that both mark and repress capitalism’s own processes of global hegemony, fragmentation of the social sphere, alienation, schizophrenic consciousness, and anti-utopian presentism. Unpacked and formally analyzed, such fiction could, however, for the astute reader be the site of “cognitive mapping” of the absent center of capital and the oppressive logics of class and reification upon which it relied. Key here was form: Jameson (like Lukács before him) understood form itself to be the inscription of the social in the work of art, the location of the “return of the repressed” within postmodernist late capitalism. At the mid-twentieth

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century, stylized and emptied of political content that was not already absorbed or part of the total system of capital circulation, art nonetheless revealed something of this system itself in the very forms in which expression took place. Jameson, whose injunction to “Always historicize!” became a battle cry for leftist arts criticism throughout the late twentieth century, argued that postmodernist art such as that by Andy Warhol or video art constructed a chain of signifiers not vertically (in relation to a master signified) but horizontally, in the manner of schizophrenic equivalence: the work of art set a number of things in relationship but could not formulate a hierarchical ontology that allowed one thing to be interpreted in relation to a general or overarching idea or value. Instead, what we got in postmodernist art was a flattening of signifieds, a synchronic relationship between the elements of a work or between different works, a never-ending equivalence between different elements but no resolution or synthesis or hierarchy. This flattening led to historical depthlessness and a pastiche of styles rather than any real engagement with history. The radical instability of the things that were presented (in the case of fiction, the represented things tend to be fictional worlds) and the tendency of the work to jump laterally between reality and dreamworld or surreal psychomachia often contributed to the undermining of its political values and, for Jameson, revealed its renunciation of Utopian ideas: artworks such as metafiction were about nothing but themselves, and thus were the pure representation of capitalist reification.3 In the case of the postmodernist historical novel, the very flattening of history and metafictional strategies that make art about nothing but itself become indices of the values of capital: reification, renunciation of utopian politics, distrust of history. Embedded in Jameson’s analysis, however, was a covert accession to the high art/low art distinction that he claimed was eradicated in postmodernism: some artists (the real ones, apparently) were not subject to false consciousness in the sense that they could manipulate this new form of pastiche into an art of critique, but one unique to postmodernism.4 The experimental form of the postmodernist historical novel, in fact, encouraged the return of the historical novel in what looked like an allegorical form.5 In this fiction, two elements of the work – its historical and political topic and its “flattened” form that turned all of history into pastiche – produced a tension that was itself postmodern. The artist and the critic, however, could engage with this postmodern episteme by working this flattened form (which was an allegory of the operations of capitalism) into a new allegorical method of interpretation, called cognitive mapping: “the

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invention of ways of using one object and one reality to get a mental grasp of something else which one cannot represent or imagine.”6 Jameson writes of the work of E. L. Doctorow, for instance, Here is a radical left-wing novelist who has seized the whole apparatus of nostalgia art, pastiche, and postmodernism to work himself through them instead of attempting to resuscitate some older form of social realism, an alternative that would in itself become another pastiche . . . I find it an intriguing attempt to undo postmodernism “homeopathically” by the methods of postmodernism: to work at dissolving the pastiche by using all the instruments of pastiche itself and to reconquer some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I have called substitutes for history . . . This, if you like, is negative dialectics, or negative theology, an insistence on the very flatness and depthlessness of the thing which makes what isn’t there very vivid . . . And it is not ironic.7

Whether or not Doctorow’s technique is ironic may be debatable, but Jameson’s point was that Doctorow refuses to recuperate a past nostalgically by using older forms of historical realism or taking up postmodern experimentalism uncritically: instead, he turns to the techniques and approaches of late capitalist postmodernism against itself to reveal its own elisions, the emptiness of its own historical consciousness and the absence of any utopian politics at its core. I use the word “metahistorical” deliberately here because it signals the third and perhaps most influential theoretical stream important to any discussion of postmodernist history: the postmodern turn in historiography, best represented, perhaps, by the work of Hayden White but also in the work of Dominic LaCapra and others. White’s redescription of historiography seemed to squint in two directions. The first was toward the “linguistic turn” in high theory of the mid-twentieth century. Based on the insights and debates of poststructuralism and the Continental philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and others, this theoretical perspective underscored and analyzed the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of understanding human perception and cognition as essentially linguistic, or language-based, without any grounding in empirical “reality.” The upshot of poststructuralism in history studies was a “linguistic turn” that adopted the idea that history was nothing more or less than a story, a narrative construction, a form of discursive protocol. In its most radical formulations, writers claimed that history was nothing more than this, and thus attempted a subversion of the ethos of historical accounting.

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White’s formulation was a bit less radical and much more nuanced, but equally controversial: that history was a story that was based on past events but was shaped according to the available tropes of narrative, as any narrative accounting, by definition, had to be. Thus, there was no way to determine “true” history and fiction, no way to prove empirically that history could be practiced like a science in the manner of the other natural or hard sciences, and no clear method for distinguishing between written history and written fiction.8 The second direction in which White’s theory squinted was toward a neo-humanist politics of history that took such radical claims about the nature of historical writing into account but that then theorized what the purpose and import of history would be after we acknowledged this accounting. One of White’s famous claims was that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was necessary to separate history from fiction in order to “discipline” history, and that this separation was fatal to any real utopian or even ethical vision that history might provide. Caught in disciplinary battles, and attempting to make their profession legitimate in a culture of science, practitioners of history tried to make history synonymous with empirical realism in political and social thought. White argued, however, that the same moment that history was separated from fiction (especially from the realist novel), it also was separated from utopian thinking in all of its forms. Thus, as history was made into a proper professional discipline, a division was created between utopian thought (as a precondition for revolutionary action) and political thought (associated with realism and a precondition for professionalization).9 Similar claims can be found in slightly different formulations in work by Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog.10 White, however, uniquely claimed that this division “consisted in subordinating written history to the categories of the ‘beautiful’ and suppressing those of the ‘sublime.’”11 Any theories that claimed to have found the reasonable “pattern” to history lost the sense of the sublimity, or unknowability and terror, of history – a sense that had given force to older, premodern eschatological and religious versions of history that asserted that history was basically beyond human understanding. For White, when historical narrative was thusly “disciplined” (in both an institutional and a Foucauldian sense), it was forced to privilege realism along with evidential and descriptivist writing. White contended that this supplantation of the sublime by the beautiful was central to defining historical studies for both the Left and the Right and posited that a visionary politics intent on real social change might be based less upon an attempt at archival empiricism and more upon a notion of

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history as, unavoidably, narrative compensation for what is actually the sublime unknowability of the past. White opted for a wedding of the aesthetic and the ethical in a re-recognition of the historical sublime, the space of the violent and chaotic past that can only be comprehended through narrative but that can never be reduced to narrative. In later work, drawing from the work of philosopher Michael Oakeshott and others, White expanded this notion of history in relation to what he called the “practical past,” an ethics of history that recognizes that we draw – from the archival facts of history – interpretations that are culturally meaningful rather than “true” in an empirical sense, though this does not mean that all historical accounts are equally valid in terms of their representation of the past.12 For White, the “practical past” opposes “the historical past” created by professional historians: the historical past contrasts “to ‘the practical past’ which is elaborated in the service of ‘the present,’ . . . and from which, therefore, we can draw lessons . . . and provide reasons, if not justification, for actions to be taken in the present on behalf of a future better than the current dispensation.”13 For White, unlike Oakeshott, constructing a practical past isn’t a regrettable thing: it is something that we simply can’t help doing if history is to have any meaning at all for lived reality. This means, however, that we must shape the past into history, and when we do this, we inevitably use the tropes fundamental to narrative construction.

Historiographic metafiction Historiographic metafiction is the important term coined by Linda Hutcheon in the 1980s that built upon many of these ideas to describe a form of experimental historical fiction that seemed sympathetic to a Marxist analysis but swerved from it to merge critiques of Western colonialism, multiculturalism’s attack on white Anglo-European hegemony, and poststructuralism’s theorization of linguistic intertextuality and play.14 Part of Hutcheon’s project was to rescue postmodernist experimental fiction from the charge that it was decadent, simplistically metafictional, and/or nihilistic or antipolitical – a prime example of an exhausted modernist avant-garde program. In response, she argued that fiction such as John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Susan Daitch’s L.C. (1986) turned the postmodern flattening of historical depth, pastiche, and nostalgia against itself in the interest of a new postmodernist politics of critique. Early in her work, Hutcheon noted that postmodernism could not be equated to “the contemporary” because postmodernism “is less a period

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than a poetics or an ideology.”15 As a style or a set of aesthetic assumptions and techniques, postmodernism was a theory of form rather than an historical episteme or socioeconomic condition. She in fact equates the techniques of historiographic metafiction with the general category of postmodernist fiction itself: “The term postmodernism, when used in fiction, should, by analogy, best be reserved to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts of the past. In order to distinguish this paradoxical beast from traditional historical fiction, I would like to label it ‘historiographic metafiction.’”16 For Hutcheon, anything termed postmodernist literature was historiographic metafiction, but that did not mean that it was necessarily fiction produced after 1945. However, her writing always focused on post-1950s literature, and this combined with her extensive referencing of post–World War II Marxist and Continental theory and post-1960s historiography tended to periodize the concept for many literary critics. Neither limited to the last phase of triumphant capitalism nor bound to the aesthetics of false consciousness, historiographic metafiction is for Hutcheon the self-contradictory, yet critical, revisiting of (and ironic dialogue with) the past along the dual sightlines of the political and the metafictional. It “is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical and inescapably political” because it raises questions about reference and representation.17 Specifically, this fiction expresses postmodern loss of faith in the ability to know reality beyond the mediation of language. Thus it asks not “to what empirically real object in the past does the language of history refer?” but rather “to which discursive context could this language belong?” It participates in the poststructuralist project of revealing the discursive nature of all “reality”: history (even our understanding of reality itself ) is shown to be subject to political and personal bias and the limitations imposed by language on thought and expression. Thus, historiographic metafiction “rejects projecting present beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts, in strong terms, the specificity and particularity of the individual past event. Nevertheless, it also realizes that we are epistemologically limited in our ability to know that past, since we are both spectators of and actors in the historical process.”18 Even what we consider a “fact” in the present is already determined by our discursive paradigms in the present. The postmodernist historical novel she identifies as historiographic metafiction operates through language play, pastiche, and irony. It is irony and parody, in fact, that inscribe postmodernism’s dominant approach to both aesthetic and sociological history, and intertextuality is one of its key

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strategies: “Irony does indeed mark the difference from the past, but the intertextual echoing simultaneously works to affirm – textually and hermeneutically – the connection with the past.”19 What she contends, in other words, is that historiographic metafiction embeds intertextual references that locate the reader in a specific past historical moment, but then it uses metafictional techniques to defamiliarize that historical moment to expose its ideological character as a specific telling of history in relation to other possible narrations. Its “parodic intertextuality forces readers to look again at the connections between art and the ‘world.’” This fiction thus constructs a “complicitous critique” of Western narratives of historical progress and Anglo-European dominance: “Historiographic metafiction . . . installs totalizing order, only to contest it, by its radical provisionality, intertextuality, and, often, fragmentation.” What this means is that “the formalist and the historical live side by side, but there is no dialectic.” 20 Hutcheon’s claim that historiographic metafiction does not advocate historical relativism or presentism is important to her definitions of the form and of postmodernism in general. Like Jameson’s claim for Doctorow’s fiction, she asserts that “novels like these parodically use and abuse the conventions of both popular and elite literature, and do so in such a way that they can actually use the invasive culture industry to challenge its own commodification processes from within.”21 Historiographic metafiction does not point to the historical past and attempt to render it realistically, but rather points to our discourse about the past, since it assumes that this is the only access to the past that we have. As a result, “It is the narrativity and the textuality of our knowledge of the past that are being stressed; it is not a question of privileging the fictive or the historical.”22 Among her examples are intertextual novels that reference the forms, specific texts, and historical events of the past ironically, parodically, and anachronistically to create a form of historical fiction that raises questions about how we know and articulate the past. They do so in order to provoke questions about cultural and political representation in the present as well as historical/archival representation of the past – that is, to raise ideological as well as epistemological (even, in Brian McHale’s terms, ontological) questions about history.23 Providing strong readings of scores of exemplary novels, Hutcheon identified specific techniques in historiographic metafiction that allowed this metafictional defamiliarization of discourse: 1.

an inclusion of protagonists who are “ex-centrics” and outsiders and an inclusion of real historical personages in parodic roles;

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2. a privileging of two modes of narration that problematize the notion of subjectivity: multiple points of view (on history) and an overtly controlling (first-person) narrator who cannot make sense of history; 3. use of parody and intertextuality (including inclusion of quoted or rerewritten texts from the past but also including references to earlier novels and past styles, political ideas, and personages, all rendered ironically) to both close the gap between past and present and to rewrite the past in a new context; 4. a doubled and contradictory ideological approach to the past that represents it but assumes any representation is produced and sustained by cultural discourse and ideological formations and specific deployments of these in political contexts; an obsession not with whether the truth is told, but whose truth is told.24 She notes that these strategies link historiographic metafiction to its sister arts through a “poetics of postmodernism.” For example, such strategies link historiographic metafiction to the intertextual “double-coding” and ironic classicism of architecture; the historicism and retreat from objectivity in New Journalism; the ironic postmodern painting and sculpture of the photorealists; and the politics of (what will be understood later to be) a “third-wave” feminist aesthetic. Literary critics writing about postmodernism and history have had to take Hutcheon’s groundbreaking concept of historiographic metafiction into serious account. Excerpts from her books have appeared in many anthologies dealing with postmodernism in the arts as well as the history of the novel, and her work has been referenced and supplemented by numbers of literary critics.25 Hans Bertens noted that since the 1980s, “what one may without exaggeration call a Hutcheon school has further promoted this poststructuralist postmodernism and succeeded in practically cornering the market.”26 Composing the present chapter, I googled “historiographic metafiction” and received 33,800 results. This only begins to indicate Hutcheon’s enormous influence on, and importance to, any discussion of postmodernist art, an influence that enjoined critics to focus on the “problematizing of the nature of historical knowledge . . . [that pointed] both to the need to separate and to the danger of separating fiction and history as narrative genres.”27 Responses to her work have extended the range of her literary examples or revised her understanding of the history/fiction relationship in light of consequent theories. For example, key reevaluations or refinements of Hutcheon’s theory of postmodernist fiction as historiographic metafiction

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often took into account the increased presence and sophistication of postcolonial theory and “trauma theory” of the 1990s and early 2000s as well as the continuing debates about the “truth of history” and the methods of historical writing in the field of historiography. This is, in fact, where my own term metahistorical romance entered the conversation. Metahistorical romance was a term that took the long history of the historical novel as a starting point. Thus, while Hutcheon claimed that (1) historiographic metafiction usefully described the poetics of postmodernism itself and that (2) “generic blurring has been a feature of literature since the classical epic and the Bible . . . but the simultaneous and overt assertion and crossing of boundaries is more postmodern,” I thought that Walter Scott’s nineteenth-century historical romances seemed to have anticipated this at the genesis of the genre.28Scott’s historical romances contaminated the then-dominant form of the novel-as-romance with history (valued in his moment at the heyday of modern historicism and historical empiricism). In contrast, almost two hundred years later, the postmodernist historical novel (written in a time when history had become so disciplined that it considered itself distinct from fiction) innovated the historical novel form by including increasingly metafictional and fantastic content, contaminating history with romance. Between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, through movements such as naturalism and experimental modernism to postmodernism, the historical romance seemed to swing like a pendulum between these two different dominants, romance and history, but always including some admixture of both. Hutcheon had asserted that historiographic metafiction plugged into a postmodernist episteme that asserted that “there are only truths in the plural and never one Truth, and there is rarely falseness per se, just others’ truths.”29 For me, this fiction seemed agonized over this condition as much as energized by it – particularly when the social, environmental, and political stakes for truth-telling after the Holocaust and the other atrocities of the twentieth century were so high. Faced with revelations about violence and human suffering coming out of World War II history, postcolonialist history, feminist history, critical race history, and gender history, postmodernist historical fiction seemed to be about the West coming to terms with its own originating (or death-gasp) traumas, something that demanded a yardstick of ethical and aesthetic measurement that it no longer had after its seeming abandonment of metanarratives of value. Hutcheon had made clear that she believed that “[h]istoriographic metafiction espouses a postmodern ideology of plurality and recognition of difference . . . There is no sense of cultural universality.”30 Yet it seemed that novels by, for example, Rushdie

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and Leslie Marmon Silko expressed this recognition with a different ethical and social valence from someone such as Coover, necessarily so given their positions in different national, ethnic, and historical structures. This might mean that the postmodernist historical novel (historiographic metafiction) was not necessarily the same thing as a postcolonialist novel that used seemingly similar techniques of defamiliarization and critique. Metahistorical romance incorporated Hayden White’s notion of the historical sublime as a humanistic “secular-sacred” space: the space of desire for a historical equivalent to religious or Romantic sublimity. It reflected the massive upheavals of thought in postmodernist historiography and Lyotard’s call for the rejection of metanarrative – but also Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as sublime antirepresentation pregnant within modernity itself. In its turning back to the generic history of historical romance, metahistorical romance also bore similarities to Diane Elam’s assertion that postmodernism was, essentially, a return to the novel’s romance tradition.31 While Hutcheon emphasized the ethos of contestation in historiographic metafiction, I emphasized ethics and desire in metahistorical romance. The latter seemed a form of the historical romance unique to an Anglo-European post-traumatic, secular imaginary bearing the burden of its own history: losing much of its faith in both Enlightenment empiricism and macro-historical truth claims, knowing itself subject to the culture industry, and traumatized by the outcomes of its own historical agency, it returned to a notion of history as sublime, redoubling again and again to the past to find an ethical historical ground that it no longer believed to be “true” but that might be culturally meaningful. The yearning for historical knowledge evident in this form ties contemporary historical fiction to a literary history (that of the historical romance originating with Scott, always split between historical fact and the fabulation of romance); a type of historiography (postmodern, post-Annales historiography exemplified in White’s notion of the historical sublime); and a stultified ethical and epistemological questing characteristic of much art after modernism as well as the Lyotardian avant-garde. Both historiographic metafiction and metahistorical romance, however, potentially paved the way for a twenty-first-century novel of recovery or “sincerity,” a “new historical realism” that is not ironic and also not antihumanistic or prone easily to accept older political paradigms for its ideological framing. Historiographic metafiction is the crisis of the historical form and the full exploration of the romance of the historical romance genre – one that might swing the pendulum back yet again to realist (posthumanist) history, the other half of the historical romance binary.

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1 One thinks, for example, of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 2 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 3 I am here paraphrasing (and oversimplifying) Fredric Jameson’s discussion of postmodern allegory in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 167–76. 4 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983): 111–25. 5 This formulation of postmodern allegory is differently focused from Jameson’s controversial notion of “national allegory” formulated in his “ThirdWorld Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. 6 Anders Stephanson and Fredric Jameson, “Regarding Postmodernism—A Conversation with Fredric Jameson,” Social Text 17 (1987), 20. 7 Stephanson and Jameson, “Regarding Postmodernism,” 19. 8 See Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 81–100; and “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7/1 (1980): 5–27. 9 See White, The Content of the Form. Part of my discussion of White’s work here may also be found in Amy J. Elias, “Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Teslapunk, Dieselpunk, Salvagepunk: Metahistorical Romance and/vs. the Technological Sublime,” in Giuseppe Episcopo (ed.), Metahistorical Narratives and Scientific Metafictions (Napoli: Edizioni Cronopio), forthcoming. 10 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expèriences du temps (Paris: POINTS, 2003). 11 White, Content, 67. 12 Hayden White, “The Practical Past,” Historein 10 (2010): 1–19 13 White, “The Practical Past,” 16–17. 14 See Linda Hutcheon, Poetics and also Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism. 15 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction, Parody, and the Intertextuality of History,” in Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis (eds.), Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 28. 16 Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction,” 3. 17 Linda Hutcheon, “Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism,” in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (eds.), A Postmodern Reader (Albany: State University Press, 1993), 243–72.

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Hutcheon, Poetics, 122. Hutcheon, Poetics, 5. Hutcheon, Poetics, 100, 116, 122. Hutcheon, “Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism,” 262. See Poetics, 89, on Jameson and Doctorow. 22 Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction,” 22. 23 See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction. 24 This list is a compilation of Hutcheon’s claims in Poetics, 114–23. 25 See excerpts from Hutcheon’s Poetics and Politics in, for example, Peter Brooker (ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism (Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 1992) and Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Those who build from Hutcheon’s work include Elisabeth Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991); those who attack it include John Brenkman, “Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the Novel,” in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, vol. 2 (Princeton University Press, 2006), 808–38. 26 Hans Bertens, “The Debate on Postmodernism,” in Hans Bertens (ed.), International Postmodernism (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997), 12. Bertens notes Alison Lee’s Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction of 1990 (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) and Brenda Marshall’s Teaching the Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 27 Hutcheon, Poetics, 111. 28 Hutcheon, Poetics, 109. 29 Hutcheon, Poetics, 109. 30 Hutcheon, Poetics, 114. 31 See Diane Elam, Romancing the Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) in which postmodern romance “is an ironic coexistence of temporalities” (13). Elam’s focus is on how representations of female identity play key roles in postmodernist romance. See also Barbara Foley’s “Metahistorical Novel,” in Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 18 19 20 21

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High and low, or Avant-Pop Brian McHale

High and low High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, a blockbuster exhibition of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1990–1, sought to trace some of the many connections between the fine arts and “low” popular culture forms – including newsprint, graffiti, caricature, comics, and advertising – across the twentieth century. Curated by Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and the art critic Adam Gopnik, the show met with almost universal condemnation. Aesthetic conservatives such as Hilton Kramer reviled it for admitting low-art material to the precincts of high-art modernism. Others, less disposed to defend the “purity” of high art, criticized the show for using popular culture to reinforce MOMA’s canonical history of modernism.1 They also complained that Varnedoe and Gopnik’s narrative of high/low interactions petered out just at the point where the ground of that interaction shifted decisively: the 1970s and 1980s. High & Low, in other words, stopped short at the threshold of postmodernism – a term the curators seemed to have avoided as much as possible in wall texts and the exhibition catalogue.2 The curators’ caginess about postmodernism is all the more marked in view of the widely held assumption, definitively articulated at about the same time by Frederic Jameson, that one of postmodernism’s fundamental features was “the effacement . . . of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture.”3 A different narrative than the one that Varnedoe and Gopnik were committed to telling might have treated postmodernism as the very climax of the development that the exhibition traced – the moment when the barrier separating high culture from low finally, decisively collapsed. Arguably, the story they did tell – the one about modernism’s deep and continuing entanglement with popular culture – would not even have been tellable without the postmodern realignment of values and practices that made 308

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high/low relations newly visible, not only in the present but retrospectively across the whole century. In this sense, the curators’ intentions notwithstanding, the High & Low show was itself a symptom of postmodernism, made possible by a distinctively postmodern shift in attitudes toward the popular. Whatever modernist artists might have owed to popular culture in practice – quite a lot, as Varnedoe and Gopnik demonstrate – modernism in theory defined itself in opposition to popular culture. Modernism, Andreas Huyssen argues, “constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusions,” erecting a “Great Divide” between high and low culture, art and commercial entertainment. Postmodernism, by contrast, rejects the theories and practices of the Great Divide: “A new creative relationship between high art and certain forms of mass culture is . . . one of the major marks of difference between high modernism and [postmodernism].”4 Traces of that “new creative relationship” could already be glimpsed in literature of the 1950s and 1960s: in the Beat writers’ and New York School poets’ casual mingling of high and low culture; in the nouveaux romanciers’ appropriation of the imagery, themes and styles of the least reputable and most abject genres (hard-boiled detective, pornography, science fiction); in the legitimation of certain notorious “dirty books” – Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch – often as the consequence of high-visibility show trials that were invariably decided, sooner or later, in favor of the alleged “pornographers.” It is these tendencies that Leslie Fiedler, at the end of the sixties, celebrated as the “crossing of the border” and the “closing of the gap” between high and low literature.5 More decisive was the pop breakthrough in visual art, which made the visual materials of consumer culture (commercial packaging, advertising imagery, comics) and celebrity iconography (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley) available for the fine arts. Even more decisive, however, for the theory that underwrote this postmodern practice of the popular was Robert Venturi’s discovery of the vitality of vernacular forms and practices in architecture and urbanism. Already in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), Venturi polemicizes against the architectural purism of the high-modernist International Style, defending what he calls the “honky-tonk elements” of the urban and ex-urban landscape: its pop-cultural and commercial features, its signage, iconic forms, and visual busyness, its bad taste.6 He argues for an alternative set of values to those of modernism – not unity and simplicity but complexity and contradiction; not clarity and the expression of materials but ambiguity and the principle of “both-and”; not “less is more,” Mies van der Rohe’s modernist slogan, but “Main Street is almost all

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right.” It is these values that, in concert with his collaborators Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour, Venturi would further develop in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), an appreciation of the Las Vegas Strip that would come to be seen as a manifesto of what, within a few years, people were calling postmodern architecture. Nobody is more responsible for getting us to use that expression than the architecture critic Charles Jencks. If he didn’t exactly coin the term postmodernism (there are other claimants to that distinction), Jencks certainly promoted its currency in architectural contexts, especially through the successive editions of his influential book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, from 1977 on. Not only did he promote the term itself, but he cemented its association with the collapse of hierarchical distinctions between high and low culture. Postmodern buildings, Jencks argued, such as those he championed by Michael Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, Frank Gehry, and Venturi himself, communicate to two different constituencies at once, appealing on one level, through their modernist structural techniques and in-group ironies, to a minority constituency of architects and connoisseurs, while on another level reaching a broader public of consumers through their playful and pleasurable allusions to familiar historical styles of architecture. Jencks elevated this architectural practice of “double-coding” to a general principle of postmodernism in all the arts – something like a period style. He saw analogies to architectural double-coding in the contemporaneous revival of figurative painting by artists such as Sandro Chia, Eric Fischl, and David Salle, and in Umberto Eco’s international best seller The Name of the Rose (1980), which combined specialist knowledge and ironic self-reflection with the populist pleasures of historical fiction and the detective story. Jencks quotes a well-known passage from Eco’s Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1984), where the “postmodern attitude” is exemplified by the lover who, knowing that the language of love has been debased by its association with romance novels such as those of Barbara Cartland, nevertheless succeeds in communicating his love by ironically citing (and in the process presumably neutralizing) romantic clichés: “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”7 This, says Jencks, is how double-coding works, in architecture as in literature.

Avant-Pop Something like the same thing happens when avant-garde jazz musicians “cover” kitsch show tunes or pop songs, as John Coltrane did, for instance, with a catchy but pallid number from The Sound of Music, “My Favorite

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Things” (1961). The avant-jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie, a veteran of the intransigently experimental Art Ensemble of Chicago, titled a 1986 album of such covers Avant Pop. Capitalizing on the analogy with cutting-edge music, the critic and editor Larry McCaffery appropriated Bowie’s coinage for a pair of anthologies of new fiction (1993, 1995) that, in his view, merged popular culture with the avant-garde impulse. Avant-Pop, according to McCaffery, exploits the resources of popular film, television, comics, rock music, advertising, and franchising in much the same way that highmodernist writing drew on classical mythology, Christian iconology, and the literary canon. It appropriates, recycles, and repurposes the materials of popular culture, “combin[ing] Pop Art’s focus on consumer goods and mass media with the avant-garde’s spirit of subversion and emphasis on radical formal innovation.”8 A difficult balancing act, Avant-Pop walks a tightrope between, on one side, capitulation to market-driven mass culture and, on the other, the lure of an “avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations.”9 For McCaffery and others in his orbit, including the writers and critics Mark Amerika and Lance Olsen, Avant-Pop is the successor to postmodernism – post-postmodern. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the logic of Avant-Pop is that of double-coding, and if double-coding is characteristically postmodern, then so must Avant-Pop be. What distinguishes them, if anything, is their respective canons. McCaffery’s Avant-Pop canon is highly eclectic, accommodating everyone from uncompromising avantgardists (Kathy Acker, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick) to prestigious mainstream authors (Paul Auster, DeLillo, the New Yorker writer Donald Barthelme), and straddling several generations, from Burroughs in the fifties to Mark Z. Danielewski, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace at the turn of the millennium. Avant-Pop is evidently a “big-tent” category, catholic to a fault. Eclectic, too, are the inventories of characteristic Avant-Pop devices and strategies that McCaffery, Olsen, and Amerika draw up. The list has included, at one time or another, collage, montage, appropriation, recycling, sampling, mash-up, neologism, cut-up procedures, stylistic density, and so on. I propose, in what follows, to try to introduce some minimal order into the protean flux of Avant-Pop and double-coding, breaking them down into some of their most salient constituents: the cross-over phenomenon (both low to high and high to low); practices of collage and modularity, where high and low overlap; and the piecemeal appropriation and recontextualization of consumer-culture materials, to be

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distinguished from the wholesale repurposing of pop-culture genres. But first, let me briefly recap a crucial distinction on which the postmodern reconfiguration of high/low relations is founded: the one between kitsch and camp.

Kitsch and camp Kitsch is aesthetically toxic, as modernist ideologues “from [F. R.] Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School” never tired of telling us.10 Ironically enough, the concept of kitsch is a thoroughly modern one, comprising one of the “faces of modernity,” according to Matei Calinescu.11 Originating in the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century, the term itself only came fully into its own in the twentieth, where it served to designate pseudo-art mass produced by the “culture industry” – relatively inexpensive, readily consumed, pleasurable and unchallenging, the opposite of genuine art and especially of the avant-garde. The irreconcilable enmity between the avant-garde and kitsch was definitively articulated, at least as far as the United States was concerned, by the art critic Clement Greenberg in a 1939 essay. “Popular, commercial art and literature,” including “magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fictions, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing [and] Hollywood movies,” all fell under Greenberg’s censure, and serious artists who trafficked in such material did so at their peril.12 Greenberg’s strictures paved the way for the high-minded, kitsch-averse avant-garde practices of the immediate postwar: the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School painters, whom Greenberg championed, the austerities of Beckett and the Absurdists, and so on. Irreconcilable enmity toward the culture industry and its products persisted in various avant-garde circles throughout the postmodern decades, for instance, in the Paris Situationists’ practice of appropriating and ironically repurposing “found” imagery,13 or the “Capitalist Realism” of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, which diverged from American-style Pop Art in its more pointedly critical stance toward the popular.14 But critique was not the only stance that postmoderns could adopt toward kitsch. A different approach – we might call it the “British solution” – was adopted by the Independent Group (IG) in London in the mid-fifties. Arguably the first Pop Art movement in the world, preceding American developments by several years, the IG – Richard Hamilton, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Rayner Banham, Peter and Alison Smithson, and others – deployed the imagery, style, and themes of popular culture

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strategically, as leverage against a stultifying, over-refined, backwardlooking high culture.15 Not for nothing was their first show entitled This Is Tomorrow (1956). The IG demonstrated that popular culture had the potential to exert liberatory force, depending on the circumstances of its reception and use. Though the IG had a transformative effect on certain of their contemporaries, notably the crossover science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard, their most important legacy might be the impetus they gave to popular-culture studies, whose legitimation as an academic discipline is one manifestation of the erosion of the high/low cultural hierarchy in the postmodern period. The American solution to the problem of kitsch was different again. Neither intransigently critical, like the Continental avant-gardes, nor strategic, like the British IG, it proceeded on the assumption that kitsch could be de-toxified, redeemed for aesthetic purposes by a change of perception and attitude on the consumer’s part. That change of perception is the camp sensibility. First anatomized in print by Susan Sontag in the mid-sixties, camp is a style of reception, a sort of perceptual switch that allows one to toggle from recognizing the tasteless kitschiness of an object, celebrity, performance, etc., to valuing it precisely for it kitschiness. Originating in urban homosexual subcultural enclaves, camp is in some sense a gay sensibility: it “queers” the object of its perception, as it “queers” the subject who does the perceiving .16 An efficient means of overcoming kitsch by co-opting it, the camp sensibility can also serve as a template for the production of new art, as in Andy Warhol’s campy recycling of product packaging, celebrity iconography, and tabloid news, or Roy Lichtenstein’s virtuoso rehandling of comic-book imagery.17 Sontag herself thought Pop Art embodied a somewhat different attitude from camp, calling it “more flat and more dry” than camp, “more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.”18 No doubt there are distinctions to be drawn among kinds and degrees of camp; nevertheless, the camp attitude does seem to animate much of Pop Art, as it does much of the double-coded art of postmodernism generally.

Crossing over Varnedoe and Gopnik, the curators of MOMA’s High & Low show, sought primarily to demonstrate how particular artistic elements cycled between high and low cultural strata – styles, techniques and motifs, pieces rather than wholes. But they might just as pertinently have considered the cycles traced by larger wholes – integral artworks, artistic careers, whole

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genres – between high and low, because that, too, is potentially part of their story, especially for the postmodern decades. Avant-Pop was not the only symptom of the erosion of cultural hierarchy in the postmodern era. Another was the phenomenon of crossover, in both directions, from low to high and from high to low. The promotion of low popular genres to elite status is hardly a postmodern innovation. The Russian Formalist critics of the early twentieth century recognized it, under the name of “elevation of the cadet branch,” as one of the universal engines of artistic evolution.19 Nevertheless, the conspicuousness of this phenomenon in the postmodern period, and the perception that high culture was now more open than ever before to such crossovers, made upward mobility appear distinctively postmodern. The mid-60s mark an important threshold for this phenomenon, as they do for many other postmodern developments.20 These were the years when a number of major pop musicians – including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Mothers of Invention, the Beach Boys, the Who, and the Velvet Underground – until then regarded strictly as entertainers for the teenage market, began to think of themselves as serious artists, even as avant-gardists, and to make a case for being thought of in those terms by others. These were the years, in other words, when rock ‘n’ roll began to morph into rock, and to cross over from low culture to high. Indicative of rock musicians’ aspiration to artistic status was the emergence around 1966 of the rock album as a unified artwork. Credit for this breakthrough belongs to the Beatles’ Revolver, arguably the first rock album designed to be experienced as an integrated whole, with motifs, both musical and verbal, recurring across the album from cut to cut.21 Revolver anticipates highly integrated albums such as the Beatles’ own Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or later “concept” albums by the Who, Marvin Gaye, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and others. A second wave of low-to-high crossovers occurred in the 1980s, during postmodernism’s peak years. Literary science fiction, which had been tracing a steady upward slope of legitimation since the 1960s, made an abrupt leap into the avant-garde with the arrival of cyberpunk, dating from the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Following a similar rising trajectory from low to high was the genre of the graphic novel. Rooted in the disreputable low-art traditions of funny papers and superhero comic books, but sharing some of the iconoclastic energies of the avant-garde underground comix of the 1960s, the graphic novel definitively broke through to high-art status in 1986–7, with the appearance within a few months of each other of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight

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Returns (1986) and Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (1987), revisionist treatments of superhero conventions.22 Contemporaneously, Art Spiegelman published the first volume of his nonfiction graphic narrative Maus (1987), based on his father’s experience as an Auschwitz survivor, deploying the resources of kitsch (specifically, funny-animal comics) against the pervasive kitschification of the Holocaust, endemic in popular culture. While Dark Knight and Watchmen were recycled as commercial movies, fueling Hollywood’s appetite for comic-book adaptations, Maus appears to have achieved canonical status as serious literature. Even steeper, perhaps, than the graphic novel’s rise is the ascent of graffiti art in the late 1970s and early 1980s from the status of criminal nuisance, worthy only of eradication, to art-world legitimacy in the work of Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and especially Jean-Michel Basquiat. Associated with the crossover of hip-hop culture to a wider public, graffiti art began life about as far outside the gallery system as one could imagine, spray-painted, guerrilla-fashion, on urban walls and the sides of New York subway trains.23 The levees that had previously protected the art world from the imagery of the “street” seemed to have sprung a leak when graffiti art invaded the galleries. Ultimately, however, the levees were shored up, and only a few graffiti artists were fully absorbed into the art world. Two who did manage the crossing were actually art-school trained, as it turns out: Haring, who began his career drawing on unused advertising spaces on subway platforms, and Basquiat, who, beginning as a graffitist using the tag “Samo” (short for “same old shit”), eventually graduated to easel painting, developing a distinctive figurative iconography that often incorporated words. Complementing the upward mobility of pop-culture genres in the postmodern decades is crossover in the other direction, from the rarified precincts of the avant-garde to a broader (if never quite mass) audience. Crossover from high to low can be observed, for instance, in the case of minimalist music. Associated with composers such as Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams, musical minimalism began as an avant-garde practice, heard in such venues as performance lofts in SoHo, New York’s “urban artist colony.”24 The audience for minimalism grew from a narrow circle to a much wider one in the course of the seventies and eighties. Its successive expansions can be traced from Glass’s collaboration with the avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson on the opera Einstein on the Beach (1975), through Adams’s relatively accessible topical opera Nixon in China (1978), to Glass’s soundtrack for Godfrey Reggio’s documentary cult film Koyanisqaatsi (1982), until, by the end of the eighties,

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music by the British minimalist Michael Nyman could be heard regularly on the soundtracks of Peter Greenaway’s art films (including Prospero’s Books) as well as more popular ones, such as Jane Campion’s The Piano, winner of three Academy Awards in 1994. By the new millennium Glass’s soundtrack music was a staple of upscale commercial movies such as The Hours (2002), based on Michael Cunningham’s novel. A similar trajectory from avant-garde to popular is traced by Laurie Anderson, an avant-garde performance artist whose art practice was incubated in the same Downtown New York scene as Glass’s and Reich’s. The unexpected success of her single O Superman on the UK pop charts in 1981 dramatically expanded her audience, and by the end of that decade she had contributed music to the soundtrack of Wim Wenders’s art film Wings of Desire (1987) and had even hosted a short-lived program showcasing cutting-edge video art, Live from Off Center (1987), on the popular-music cable channel MTV. Her trajectory from avant-garde niche to wider popularity intersected with that of another artist, the rock musician Lou Reed, a veteran of the Velvet Underground, the proto-punk band that had once collaborated with Andy Warhol back in the mid-1960s. Romantically involved since the 1990s, Anderson and Reed married in 2008, following a pattern of crossover couplings initiated by John Lennon and the avantgarde Fluxus artist Yoko Ono in the 1960s and repeated by the performance and video artist Matthew Barney and the eccentric, aesthetically ambitious Icelandic pop singer Björk around the turn of the millennium. Such couplings are almost too perfect a symbol of the unprecedented alliances between high and low during the peak era of postmodernism.

Sampling and mixing John Lennon’s first collaboration with his new partner, Yoko Ono, yielded “Revolution 9,” an aural collage produced by laboriously splicing, looping, and otherwise manipulating prerecorded sounds. Released on the Beatles’ White Album (1968), it alienated many pop-music fans and left many others puzzled. “Revolution 9” reflected avant-garde practices of the found object (objet trouvé) and collage, yet it also represented a logical next step in the development of pop-music studio production that the Beatles, under the tutelage of George Martin, had helped to pioneer in the years preceding The White Album. Its aesthetics were as much pop as they were avant-garde. In other words, sampling and mixing – or, to use the equivalent artworld terms, appropriation and collage – constitute a zone of overlap where popular-art practices and those of the avant-garde converge; where,

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for instance, avant-garde sound artists and popular-music producers apply similar techniques, if perhaps to different ends. It is in such zones that the double-coded art of Avant-Pop flourishes. Collage, of course, is one of the cornerstones of high-modernist technique, from painting to poetry to the novel, and it persists in the postmodern era, for example, in Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages, in the poetry of Language writers such as Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Susan Howe, and in the prose fiction of Burroughs and Acker.25 Its nearest equivalent in the pop-culture realm is hip-hop music. Heir to the studio production practices developed by the Beatles and others, but implemented, from the 1980s on, using digital technology, hip-hop sampling, and mixing produced cuts rivaling the density and disjunctiveness of avantgarde art. The masterpieces of the genre, such as Public Enemy’s album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), incorporated scores of samples from other recordings, meticulously juxtaposed and layered. “We use samples like an artist would use paint,” said Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s production unit.26 Such thick impastos of aural samples would become impossible after 1991, when copyright restrictions made sampling on the scale of A Nation of Millions prohibitively expensive.27 Later virtuoso applications of collage aesthetics in popular music, such as The Grey Album (2004), a “mash-up” of Jay-Z’s Black Album and (appropriately enough) the Beatles’ White Album, created by the music producer Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), could only be circulated online, surreptitiously, in the face of “cease and desist” orders by the holders of copyright in the source material.28 Nor is music the only medium where legal restrictions limit sampling. Kathy Acker, too, the Avant-Pop appropriator and collagist, found herself on the wrong side of copyright law when lawyers for Harold Robbins, a bestselling author of steamy popular novels, sued her (apparently without Robbins’s authorization) for plagiarizing material from his 1974 roman à clef, The Pirate.29 If hip-hop is one popular art form where collage thrives, another is the crossover genre of cyberpunk science fiction. The dense, “imploded” quality that is so typical of cyberpunk style seems derived from some form of collage practice.30 Nowhere is this more visible than in William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s collaborative novel, The Difference Engine (1990), in which cyberpunk morphs into the retro-futurist subgenre that would come to be called steampunk. The Difference Engine’s quasiVictorian storyworld, Gibson explains, was produced by plagiarizing from

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actual Victorian texts, which the coauthors cut up and pasted, collagefashion, using word processor technology: a great deal of the intimate texture of this book derives from the fact that it’s an enormous collage of little pieces of forgotten Victorian textual material which we lifted from Victorian journalism, from Victorian pulp literature.31

Given the overlap of collage practices between cyberpunk and Avant-Pop, it comes as no surprise to discover that Acker plagiarized (or, more politely, appropriated) and reconfigured passages from Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer in her own Empire of the Senseless (1988).32 There is another, related feature that popular art and the avant-garde share in common, which we might call modularity. Here, too, cyberpunk is exemplary. Bruce Sterling, in a short story called “Twenty Evocations” (1984), set in the same universe as his novel Schismatrix (1985), cuts and reshuffles his own prose, producing new collage passages that continue to evoke the story’s world without always making literal sense. His procedure, though it disrupts the story’s realism, is nevertheless appropriate to a future world in which gene-splicing and prosthetic enhancements are normal.33 At the same time, Sterling’s cutting and reshuffling exposes for our inspection a generic feature of science fiction itself, namely its modular construction – the way motifs and images recur across the genre, to be shuffled and recombined anew in each new science-fiction text. Modularity, in fact, is a feature of all so-called genre fiction, that is, all popular genres. It is part of what we expect from genre fictions, part of what gives them their enduring appeal: we recognize the familiar motifs and appreciate the virtuosity with which they have been re-handled in the present instance. Think of the perennially popular board game Cluedo (Clue in North America), which reduces the genre conventions of the classic country-house murder mystery to its underlying repertoire of suspects, situations, and murder weapons (“Colonel Mustard in the library with a crowbar”). While the game amusingly travesties the mystery genre, it nevertheless captures a fundamental insight into the genre’s modular, repertoire-based construction. This is the same insight that Sterling captures in “Twenty Evocations,” in the case of science fiction, or that Ballard does in his cycle of modular stories, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), in which a limited assortment of motifs – car crashes, celebrities, motorway flyovers, abandoned runways, obsessed researchers, female victims – are shuffled and recombined from story to story. It is unsurprising that Ballard’s content, here and elsewhere in his corpus, is often pornographic, since pornography, too, is basically modular in construction, recombining

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more or less systematically a limited repertoire of organs, orifices, positions, props, costumes, and situations. Ballard’s writing is poised exactly at the intersection of high and low, avant-garde and genre fiction. So, too, is the fiction of other Avant-Pop pornographers, such as Brett Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991) or Robert Coover (The Adventurers of Lucky Pierre, 2002), or for that matter the figurative art of the postmodern painter David Salle, which often samples porn images. These Avant-Pop Artists occupy the overlap zone, faithful to the conventions of their chosen genres – science fiction, porn, crime – while also sharing the proceduralist poetics of avant-gardists such as the OuLiPo writers Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, and Italo Calvino, who cut, paste, and systematically permute and recombine words, plot motifs, and other modules, treating them as counters in rule-governed literary games.

Product placement A final distinction that might usefully be drawn within the Avant-Pop field is one between the piecemeal appropriation of consumer-culture materials and the wholesale repurposing of pop-culture genres. The first of these phenomena might be regarded as a form of consumer realism: it reflects the way we live now, in a world saturated with consumer items and services, their representations, brand names, slogans, and logos. Consumer realism of a critical kind is achieved when the signifiers of commercial culture are incorporated into “hostile” textual environments and de- and re-contextualized. Displaced from their normal contexts, such signifiers are reframed, exhibited as specimens or subjected to irony. Think of Andy Warhol’s replication of brand names and logos – Brillo, Coca-Cola, Campbell’s Soup – in his silk screens and hand-made paintings of the early 1960s. This phenomenon of piecemeal appropriation and reframing can be seen everywhere on the avant-grade wing of postmodernism – in Acker’s cut-and-paste fiction, the found-poetry practices of the Language writers, and the deadpan appropriation of entertainment-industry clichés by “Pictures Generation” artists such as the self-photographer Cindy Sherman.34 But the practice of consumer-culture appropriation also figures in more conventional-looking texts, such as DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (El beso de la mujer araña, 1976), in which the cliché-ridden plots of Hollywood B movies are retold in the context of a complex, metafictional narrative structure. (Ironically enough, Puig’s

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novel was itself recycled as a pop-culture product, first as a commercial film in 1985, then as a Broadway musical in 1992–3.) The entire process of what, in the context of movies and TV shows, we would call product placement is dramatized and scrutinized in William Gibson’s post- or para-sciencefiction novel Pattern Recognition (2003), whose heroine, a style consultant, suffers allergic attacks in the presence of egregiously bad commercial logos. Where the phenomenon of ironic or defamiliarized product placement occurs piecemeal and locally, even if on a large scale, the other phenomenon is global, encompassing entire texts. It occurs when the entire suite of conventions associated with some particular pop-culture genre is taken over wholesale and newly repurposed, as though the new text were piggybacking on the popular genre, or (to vary the metaphor) poaching it with the intention of exploiting it. Genre poaching or piggybacking is a very general phenomenon in postmodernism, resulting in such characteristically Avant-Pop hybrids as postmodern Westerns, postmodern science fiction, postmodern historical fiction, and so on.35 Constituting something like a cinematic postmodernism, both the French New Wave cinema of the 1950s and 1960s and the German New Wave of the 1970s piggybacked on Hollywood B movie genres of film noir and tear-jerking melodrama. Some postmodern texts piggyback on multiple pop-culture genres, shifting from one to the other in successive sections. This is the case, for instance, with Coover’s story cycle A Night at the Movies (1987), which repurposes, one after the other, a whole series of Hollywood genres: the Western, slapstick comedy, musicals, romance, even cartoons, serials, travelogues, short subjects, and previews of coming attractions. Something similar happens in Coover’s Adventures of Lucky Pierre (2002), as well as Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), and a number of other examples. Especially typical is the postmodern adaptation and repurposing of the detective story, which some have argued constitutes a separate genre of metaphysical detective fiction.36 In such adaptations, the epistemological quest that motivates the classic detective story and makes it a quintessentially modernist narrative structure is frustrated and betrayed, and the detective’s inquiry topples over from quest for knowledge into ontological doubt. Familiar examples include Puig’s The Buenos Aires Affair (1974) and Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1985–6).37 But the paradigm for this sort of deliberately sabotaged detective story is Eco’s The Name of the Rose.38 As we have already seen, The Name of the Rose is a model of postmodern doublecoding in Jencks’s sense. Reading it, “the reader seems to be reading two novels at once,” both a popular genre fiction – to be precise, several

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popular genres rolled into one, a detective story and historical novel with Gothic horror overtones – and at the same time a sophisticated antidetective metafiction that reflects on its own fictionality.39 Eco’s detective, a Sherlock Holmes figure displaced to fourteenth-century Italy, ultimately solves the case and identifies the murderer, but only through consistent misinterpretation of the evidence and by relying on irrational associational leaps, calling into question the entire epistemological project itself – the very enterprise of achieving reliable knowledge through direct perception and ratiocination. “There was no plot,” he is forced at the end to confess, “and I discovered it by mistake. . . . I arrived at [the murderer] by pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan.”40 Erudite and full of intellectual in-jokes – which was only to be expected from an author who was a medievalist and professor of semiotics – The Name of the Rose nevertheless crossed over to the mass market, becoming an international best seller, its crossover success crowned by its adaptation in 1986 as a big-budget film starring none other than Sean Connery – James Bond himself! Distinguishable in theory, the two Avant-Pop phenomena of piecemeal product placement and global genre-poaching often co-occur in practice. DeLillo’s White Noise, for instance, a text bristling with brand names, television messages, and other artifacts of consumer culture, also models itself on several popular genres, including the campus novel and the blockbuster disaster film. Similarly, Ellis’s controversial American Psycho, which piggybacks on the familiar pop-culture genre of serial-killer story, is also saturated with product placements – GQ fashions, high-end audio equipment, chic bars and restaurants, celebrity name-dropping – to the point of almost foundering under the cumulative weight of them all.41 From this perspective, the quintessential Avant-Pop novel must be Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. An encyclopedic compendium of popculture materials – song lyrics, advertisements, radio shows, comic books, chase scenes, slapstick, and much else – Gravity’s Rainbow also masquerades as a World War II action-adventure movie, as we learn on its very last page. Radically experimental but at the same time a best-selling “cult classic,” it is doubled-coded from beginning to end. In this respect, as in many others, it is the most typical of postmodern novels. Notes 1 Eleanor Heartney “A Little Too High-Minded,” ARTnews 89 (1990), 159; Roberta Smith, “High and Low Culture Meet on a One-Way Street,” New York Times (October 5, 1990). www.nytimes.com/1990/10/05/arts/review-arthigh-and-low-culture-meet-on-a-one-way-street.html.

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2 Heartney, “A Little Too High-Minded”; Bill Jones, “Truth, Justice, and the Comics, or, MoMA to NY: Drop Dead,” Arts Magazine 65 (1990), 72. 3 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 2. 4 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii, viii, 194. 5 Leslie Fiedler, “Cross the Border – Close the Gap,” [1972] in A New Fiedler Reader (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), 270–94. 6 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd edn. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 104. 7 Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 67–8; quoted in Charles Jencks, What Is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 18. 8 McCaffery, Avant-Pop, xvi–xvii. 9 Mark Amerika, “Avant-Pop Manifesto: Thread Bearing Itself in Ten Quick Posts,” in Lance Olsen (ed.), Surfing Tomorrow: Essays on the Future of American Fiction (Prairie Village, KS: Potpourri Publications, 1995), 19. 10 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 2. 11 Matei Calinescu, “Kitsch,” in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, AvantGarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 225–62. 12 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1939; Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 9. 13 Tyrus Miller, “Lettrism and Situationism,” in Bray, Gibbons, and McHale (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, 111–12. 14 Lynne Cooke, “The Independent Group: British and American Pop Art, A ‘Palimpcestuous’ Legacy,” in Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik (eds.), Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High & Low (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990), 205. 15 See Cooke, “Independent Group”; Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Vol. 2, 1945–2010, 2nd edn. (New York: Thomas & Hudson. 2011), 385–90. 16 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Elizabeth Hardwick (ed.), A Susan Sontag Reader (1964; New York: Random House, 1982), 117–18. 17 Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art & Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990), 194–208. 18 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 119. 19 Jurij Tynjanov, “The Literary Fact,” in David Duff (ed.), Modern Genre Theory (1924; Harlow: Longman, 2000), 29–49. 20 Brian McHale, “1966 Nervous Breakdown, or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?” Modern Language Quarterly 69/3 (2008), 391–413. 21 Russell Reising, “‘It Is Not Dying’: Revolver and the Birth of Psychedelic Sound,” in Every Sound There Is: The Beatles’ “Revolver” and the Transformation of Rock and Roll (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 251–2. 22 Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), 87–95.

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23 See Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Subway Art (New York: Henry Holt, 1984); Varnedoe and Gopnik, High & Low, 376–82. 24 Richard Kostelanetz, SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony (New York: Routledge, 2003), 7. 25 David Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” in Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 (1972; University of Chicago Press, 2011), 161–96. 26 Christopher R. Weingarten, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 39. 27 Weingarten, It Takes a Nation, 40–2. 28 Charles Fairchild, The Grey Album (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 40–2. 29 Andrew Wilson, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 260–1. 30 Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with Bruce Sterling,” in Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 231. 31 Daniel Fischlin, Veronica Hollinger, Andrew Taylor, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, “‘The Charisma Leak’: A Conversation with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,” Science Fiction Studies 19/1 (1992), 8. 32 McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, 233–6, 239–42. 33 Brian McHale, “Mech/Shaper, or, Varieties of Prosthetic Fiction: Mathews, Sorrentino, Acker, and Others,” in Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris (eds.), The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2004), 144–5. 34 Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 35 Theo D’Haen, “The Western,” in Bertens and Fokkema (eds.), International Postmodernism, 183–91; Brian McHale, “Science Fiction,” in Bertens and Fokkema (eds.), International Postmodernism, 235–9; Amy Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 36 Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (eds.), Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 37 Hans Bertens, “The Detective,” in Bertens and Fokkema (eds.), International Postmodernism, 195–202. 38 McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, 145–64. 39 David H. Richter, “The Mirrored World: Form and Ideology in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose,” in Rocco Capozzi (ed.), Reading Eco: An Anthology (1986; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 258. 40 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (1980; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 492. 41 See Elana Gomel, Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 32–62.

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19

The Oulipo, language poetry, and proceduralism Andrew Epstein

From the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs to Andy Warhol’s silkscreen reproductions of Campbell’s soup cans, from novels built upon secret algorithms to poems generated by mathematical formulae, one defining feature of postmodernism across the arts was its rejection of the Romantic concept of “genius” and related notions of originality, inspiration, and the heroic figure of the artist. Procedural methods, chance operations, constraintbased composition, conceptual projects, radical appropriation and recycling, and all manner of generative art, in which a system, machine, or set of predetermined rules helps create the work – such practices were ubiquitous in postmodernist literature, art, film, and other spheres of culture. Contemporary poetry, in particular, welcomed this development; as Brian McHale notes, these practices “recur throughout postmodernist poetry, where compositional methods designed to limit or channel the poet’s ‘free’ creativity abound.”1 Such practices were of course already of great importance to the modernist avant-garde, which pioneered the use of collage and the appropriation of found materials (in works such as T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades) and the use of chance operations (from Mallarmé’s Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance to the aleatory poetics of Dada and Surrealism). The modernist period witnessed the rise of many other playful and generative methods of composition, from Gertrude Stein’s radical experimentation with sound and sense to the intricate forms of punning and multilingual wordplay in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to the work of the eccentric French writer Raymond Roussel, who revealed in the posthumously published work How I Wrote Certain of My Books the secret rules and word games that he had used to generate the bizarre narratives of his novels. If modernism broke the new ground in terms of proceduralism and play, the postmodernists seized on such practices, making them central and taking them to an extreme. In the period following modernism, procedural 324

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poetics, playful generative methods, and the use of appropriation blossomed across the arts – in John Cage’s embrace of chance methods for the composition of music and poetry, including the flipping of coins to determine the pitch and ordering of notes; Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines,” hybrid constructions made from found objects and junk materials; the love of artifice and word games in the work of New York School poets such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Ted Berrigan; the procedures and mechanistic practices of Warhol and conceptual art; the poetics of plagiarism and plunder in the fiction of Kathy Acker or photographs of Sherrie Levine, and so on. This turn to what Marjorie Perloff calls “radical artifice” demanded a dramatic rethinking of the nature of originality, authorship, and creativity, insofar as it called for a constructivist, rather than expressivist, model of art and writing.2 Instead of imagining literature to be the product of the muse’s divine inspiration or the creation of a solitary genius, proceduralism and other ludic approaches to composition insisted that valuable literary works and inventive language could be generated by arbitrary and artificial constraints, predetermined methods, by chance, or by the appropriation of preexisting sources. Such works challenged the tendency to view language as transparent, as an unmediated expression of the author’s inner being, instead compelling us to be always aware of the materiality of language, text, and form; Barrett Watten refers to this phase as the “constructivist moment,” in which works of radical literature deliberately “foreground their formal construction.”3 This model also insisted that literature could be both born out of and produce play, pleasure, and jouissance, rather than being a realm wholly devoted to high seriousness and moral purpose. Although the notion of literature as a mode of play has a long, rich history, it has often been submerged and downplayed, as the French writer Georges Perec has argued: “exclusively preoccupied with its great capitals (Work, Style, Inspiration, World-Vision, Fundamental Options, Genius, Creation, etc.), literary history seems deliberately to ignore writing as practice, as work, as play,” relegating “systematic artifices” and elaborate constraints to “the registers of asylums for literary madmen.”4 This essay begins with the premise that the history of postmodernism and its legacy ensures that it can be ignored no longer. In order to better understand our own literary and cultural moment – in which procedural and constraintbased projects seem to be flourishing and the sampling and recycling of cultural materials has become a dominant expressive mode – I argue that we must attend to the history of procedural poetics, one of postmodernism’s most distinctive and lasting contributions. To that end, this essay

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focuses on two highly influential, representative avant-garde movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and were predicated on the use of constraints, proceduralism, and other related methods of textual production: the largely French movement Oulipo and the American poetry movement known as Language poetry. Why did such methods become so central and valuable during postmodernism’s heyday and why do they continue to serve as an important resource in the early twenty-first century? As Perloff, McHale, and many other scholars have argued, the surge of interest in generative procedures and radical appropriation during this period can be understood as a powerful response to the technological and social transformations of the mid-twentieth century, including the explosion of mass media and the onset of the information age, which threw traditional concepts of originality into crisis. McHale offers a version of this argument when he asserts that “machines of reproduction and simulation . . . have proliferated in the postmodern period and provide the model for ‘mechanical’ writing practices in postmodernist poetry.”5 David Huntsperger offers a somewhat different analysis of how procedural poetry responds to cultural and political forces, arguing that proceduralism “encodes a record of the poet's labor” and therefore “registers a commentary” on “production and consumption within a postindustrial capitalist society.”6 Broadly speaking, in the latter half of the twentieth century, many writers turned to playful and procedural methods of composition not simply because they found them liberating and stimulating, but also because of their potential for enabling new forms of cultural critique – challenging conventional language use, reflecting on technological transformations, and questioning and exposing oppressive political and social structures. When one considers the range of procedural works, stemming from numerous traditions and movements and featuring such a broad spectrum of generative devices and methods, it can be difficult to postulate a cohesive definition of proceduralism or constraint-based writing, or arrive at a thorough typology of its different manifestations. Questions quickly arise: how rigid or predetermined must a practice be to count as procedural? Is a text generated by an actual machine (a computer program, for example) different from one derived by a mathematical formula? Are the procedures that give rise to a given text hidden or made evident to the reader, and if so what difference does it make? Are there differences between works composed by random, chance-derived processes and those generated by fixed rules? Should works based on appropriation, but not driven by predetermined rules, fall into the same category as those in

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which a procedure determines the selection and use of found materials? Does it matter how much control or intentionality the author has over the results generated by a procedure, or how much “creative” or “original” content there is in the final product? Is there a social, political, or critical dimension to a given work or is the goal aesthetic play for its own sake? Clearly procedural poetics was never a monolithic or easily fixed category and studies of the topic should be attentive to its full range and complexity. But despite the abundant diversity and variety involved in these practices, it is safe to say that writing under constraint, proceduralism, radical collage, and other methods of generating texts and questioning authorship and originality were at the center of postmodernism’s major phase and cast a long shadow over contemporary culture.

The Oulipo Undoubtedly, the movement most closely associated with exploring the value of procedures and constraints for producing literary works is the “Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle” (the Workshop of Potential Literature), known as the Oulipo. The members of this largely French movement, which includes François Le Lionnais, Raymond Queneau, Marcel Duchamp, Harry Mathews, Jacques Roubaud, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino, share a fascination with fixed procedures and predetermined rules and a conviction that such methods can be used to generate fresh and innovative works of literature. Founded in 1960 by Le Lionnais and Queneau, two writers who were trained in mathematics, the Oulipo remained a primarily secretive coterie until the 1970s when two of its members, Perec and Calvino, emerged as major international literary figures. The Oulipo continues to this day, with about twenty living members who gather regularly to discuss their latest experiments and procedures.7 Driven by a commitment to literature as subversive play, the Oulipo tirelessly explored both the theory and practice of procedural poetics and the literature of constraint. In the 1963 essay “Potential Literature,” Queneau declared that the Oulipo’s goal was “to propose new ‘structures’ to writers, mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that will contribute to literary activity: props for inspiration as it were, or rather, in a way, aids for creativity” (Primer, 51). Oulipians divided the workshop’s “research” mission between “analysis” – which calls for rediscovering old forms and constraints, resuscitating them and pushing them to their limits – and “synthesis,” the invention and development of new modes for generating literary texts.

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Some of the best-known procedures associated with the Oulipo include the game “N + 7,” which calls for a writer to take an existing piece of writing and replace each of the source text’s nouns with the word appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary; the resulting work is, as one might expect, often strange and hilarious. Another is the lipogram, an ancient constraint-based form resurrected by the Oulipo, in which the author must refrain from using one or more letters (usually a vowel). The most famous lipogrammatic work is Georges Perec’s novel La disparition (1969), a 300-page book the author composed without using a single “e” (translated, remarkably, into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void). Members of the Oulipo have experimented with a long list of other constraints, manipulations of found language, and forms of wordplay, like Harry Mathews’ sestina “Histoire,” which pulls off the remarkable feat of using “militarism,” “Marxism-Leninism,” “fascism,” “Maoism,” “racism,” and “sexism” as sestina endwords. Other forms exploited or invented by the Oulipo have included elaborate palindromes, anagram poems, homophonic translations (in which the goal is conveying the sound rather than the meaning of the original text), preverbs (in which two proverbs are crossed and spliced together), and centos (an ancient practice of composing a poem from lines by other poets). At the heart of the Oulipo’s procedural poetics are several key insights and precepts. First, the Oulipo is animated by a fundamental paradox: literary constraints, which would seem to limit and inhibit a writer’s freedom, can actually be powerfully generative and liberating. As Perec put it, “I set myself rules in order to be totally free.”8 Following from this premise, the Oulipo levels a challenge to deeply ingrained ideas about both inspiration and the nature of conventions and predetermined forms. The Oulipo reject traditional, Romantic, and Surrealist concepts of inspiration, genius, spontaneity, and the importance of letting the unconscious run wild. As Queneau put it, “[W]e propose to elaborate a whole in arsenal which the poet may pick and choose, whenever he wishes to escape from that which is called inspiration” (Primer, 38). At the same time, the Oulipo holds that arbitrary procedures and constraints, rather than impeding the writer’s personal vision or creative freedom, are an essential part of all literature, and should therefore be accepted and exploited to provoke innovation and experimental creativity. As Jan Baetens has noted, this stance puts Oulipo at odds with other, earlier avant-garde movements, which often fetishized freedom from all constraints, dismissed “any form of traditional rule or convention” as retrograde and confining, and associated the use of constraints with

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“old-fashioned and empty hyperformalism.”9 In contrast, the Oulipo’s raison d’être has been to demonstrate that “the effects of constrained writing can be as corrosive, as playful, as creative, as revolutionary as the techniques that are identified as the core business of classic avant-garde: chance, montage, and subversion.”10 The Oulipo finds great pleasure, creative energy, and humor in the attempt to escape from and find solutions to the problems, puzzles, and obstacles they have invented for themselves. As one of the group’s oft-quoted self-definitions has it: Oulipians are “rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape” (Primer, 37). A second axiom dear to the Oulipo is that “a text written according to a constraint describes the constraint.”11 In practice, this means that Oulipean texts are usually, at some level, about the constraint that generates it – they turn the procedures and rules that underlie their own form into a theme of the work itself. The most well-known example of this feature of the Oulipo is Perec’s lipogrammatic novel, La Disparition (1969). Perec’s guiding constraint – the prohibition against ever using the letter “e” – becomes the mechanism driving the text and its central theme: as Perloff notes, the novel “tells the story of a group of people who disappear or die, one after the other, their deaths being occasioned by their inability to name the unnamable – the letter e in eux (them), for example, eux being the ‘undesirables’ who ‘disappeared’ in World War II” – a group which includes Perec’s own parents.12 A third guiding principle of the Oulipo is its belief in the importance of viewing literature and literary structures in terms of potential. Oulipians tend to feel that “the potential of constraints is more important than their actual execution.”13 To view literature as potential also means seeing it as never fixed, finite or contained in any of its individual manifestations, but as always filled with unrealized and unpredictable possibilities, with an infinite number of combinations and permutations, and with “productive capacity.”14 For the Oulipo, a potential work is one that is “not limited to its appearances, which contains secret riches, which willingly lends itself to exploration” (Primer, 65). Furthermore, a potential work “makes the reader play the game, demands his collaboration” (Primer, 66). With its insistence that “potential literature would be that which awaits a reader, yearns for him, which needs him in order to fully realize itself,” the Oulipo echoes many other instantiations of postmodernist aesthetics (Primer, 66). The Oulipo’s concept of potential literature was perhaps best exemplified in Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes (“One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems”) (1961). Generally considered the first Oulipian book

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and a seminal, originating text for the movement, Queneau’s experiment consisted of a series of ten sonnets that he designed so that “each line of each poem may replace (or be replaced by) its homologue in the nine other poems.”15 The result of this combinatory experiment is that a reader can assemble and read 1014 (ten to the power of fourteen) different sonnets – a process that would take a person reading the book twenty-four hours a day 190,258,751 years to complete.14 When the book appeared, the pages were cut into strips so that readers could mix and match the lines of the poems to create a nearly infinite number of new combinations. More of a thought experiment or conceptual work than a standard volume of poetry, Queneau’s Cent Mille is a quintessential work of potential literature, and as such, also characteristic of the postmodernist “open” text: it is a writing machine that generates a nearly infinite number of sonnets, a work that requires a reader’s active collaboration, and a “hulking iceberg” of a text, in which billions of sonnets lurk, waiting, within the original ten poems. The Oulipo’s vision of potential literature also underlies the group’s belief that literature’s ultimate purpose is to provide tools for the creation of more writing: according to Le Lionnais, “the goal of potential literature is to furnish future writers with new techniques which can dismiss inspiration from their affectivity” (Primer, 38). Thus, “the principal mission of the Oulipo” is “a question of opening new possibilities previously unknown to authors” (Primer, 38). Many of the tools Oulipians devise await anyone who would like to use them, further empowering the reader and providing new instruments to generate more writing. In addition to giving rise to a wide range of unusual experimental works, Oulipian principles and tactics also sparked the creation of two major novels of the postmodern period, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), a book quietly constructed according to elaborate submerged mathematical patterns and various unstated constraints, and Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual (1978). Perec’s remarkable magnum opus, which centers on the inhabitants of an apartment building in Paris, is constructed (like Calvino’s novel) according to hidden algorithms and combinatory systems; for example, Perec later revealed that he used the “Knight’s Tour” – the pattern of moves by which a knight can visit each square of a chessboard without landing on any square more than once – to structure his narrative’s movement through the apartment building that is its subject. For all its inventiveness and ludic spirit, and even though it embodies so many postmodernist motifs, the Oulipo differs from other modernist and postmodernist avant-garde movements, including Language poetry, in a

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number of ways. The Oulipo has always been more committed to practice than theory, more suspicious of dogma, and more wary of fetishizing the “new,” than many other avant-garde movements. As Paul Grimstad notes, “[F]ar from being a strident break with the past, Oulipian practice is preoccupied with tradition,” as it constantly searches out signs of “anticipatory plagiarism,” or proto-Oulipian language games, throughout the history of literature.16 The Oulipo has also been a largely apolitical movement, avoiding “adopting positions in political debates and [keeping] a skeptical distance from contemporary intellectual trends.”17 Nevertheless, the Oulipo certainly stands as one of the most unusual and important avant-garde literary movements of the past half-century. Its influence continues to be felt in various corners of more recent postmodernist literature, whether in the work of fiction writers ranging from Walter Abish and Gilbert Sorrentino to Jonathan Lethem, Padgett Powell, Lynne Tillman, Mark Z. Danielewski, Dave Eggers, and Michael Martone, or in the wordplay and constraint-based games of poets such as Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Alphabet), Kenneth Goldsmith (No. 111), and Christian Bök (Euonia), as well as in the recent ascension of conceptual writing more broadly.

Language poetry In the early 1970s, another exemplary postmodernist avant-garde movement emerged that was similarly driven by a fascination with the promise and possibility of procedural poetics. Although it began as an underground, fringe phenomenon, the controversial movement known as Language poetry has come to be seen as the most significant and influential avantgarde poetry movement of the past several decades. This once-marginal movement has had a tremendous impact on the course of contemporary American poetry, gradually altering the very “mainstream” it once opposed and fostering the development of what has been referred to as a “hybrid” poetic mode that is central to poetry today.18 With a core group of poets that included Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Barrett Watten, and fellow travelers Michael Palmer and Susan Howe, Language poetry first arose in the early to mid-1970s, when a number of young writers in San Francisco, and to a lesser extent New York, began congregating in lofts and bars to discuss radical poetry and its possible connections with radical, leftist politics. They shared a devotion to the more avant-garde side of American poetry – to the experimental poetics of Pound,

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Gertrude Stein, the early, more daring William Carlos Williams, and the neglected Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky – and saw themselves as extending and challenging the avant-garde New American Poetry of the 1950s and 1960s written by figures such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Ginsberg. They were also deeply influenced by the advent of literary and cultural theory that swiftly came to prominence during this period. Immersed in Derrida and Foucault, Barthes and Benjamin, in deconstruction, Marxist theory, feminism, and post-structuralist theory more broadly, the Language writers were intent on bringing new theoretical ideas about language, representation, subjectivity, gender, and capitalism to bear on the writing of poetry. Language poets were also united in their rejection of the brand of American poetry that seemed to reign in the 1970s. Poems in this mode, which they associated with the explosion of university creative-writing MFA workshops, were generally accessible, free-verse, first-person lyrics, prized for the authenticity of the poet’s voice and the transparency and naturalness of the language. The Language poets were deeply skeptical of what they viewed as naïve and conservative notions about language and self-underlying the prized products of what they derisively called “Official Verse Culture.” Rather than treating language as a transparent window on the world, Language poets, by contrast, were drawn to collage, fragmentation, artificial constraints, and other methods of drawing attention to the signifier and laying bare the workings of language. As Andrews and Bernstein have described it, Language writing “places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning.”19 It reminded the reader that no element of writing was natural and that our usual grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and subject matter were merely conventions that we tend to forget are conventions. Rather than present a coherent “I” or stable self, Language poets explored the fragmentation of identity and multiplicity of subjectivity. To that end, they composed texts that were radically disjunctive, nonlinear, and open-ended. Like the Oulipo, Language poetry envisioned the reader as an active participant in the creation of a text’s meanings – as Andrews put it, “READING: not the glazed gaze of the consumer, but the careful attention of a producer, or co-producer.”20 Shaped by Marxist cultural theory, and radicalized by the war in Vietnam, many Language poets also shared a conviction that disrupting and interrogating conventional language and poetic form in this manner could be a method of political critique and even resistance. Although the use of constraints and procedures is not as closely intertwined with the movement’s very definition as it is for the Oulipo, it has

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long been a key tool in the Language poetry toolkit. Suspicious of conventional lyric subjectivity and the fetishizing of personal expressivity, “voice,” and organic form, Language writers opt for a constructivist approach to textual production. This has often led them to experiment with various mechanical forms and mathematical patterns, especially the use of predetermined systems that involve the counting of sentences, repetition of units, and gradual expansion to structure poems. The work of Ron Silliman serves as one of the most extensive and powerful examples of this feature of Language poetics. As Silliman has acknowledged, a turn to procedural methods even served as the breakthrough moment in his development as a poet. He has recalled that although he “started out as a conventional writer of lyrical poems” in the mid-1960s, he “became quickly frustrated & bored” with “the forms I’d inherited”; even the “open” forms pioneered by Ginsberg, O’Hara, Creeley, and Olson “concealed their ‘made-ness,’” as they fetishized the supposedly “speech-imitating,” “natural,” and “organic” nature of their poetics.21 Silliman found a way out of this dead-end in 1974, when he hit upon a procedural constraint, based on repetition, expansion, and modification, that would guide and generate the writing of a very long prose poem he named Ketjak. To compose the poem, Silliman followed these rules: (1) each paragraph has double the number of sentences as the paragraph preceding it; (2) the new paragraph repeats each sentence from the previous paragraph in the exact same order, although sometimes those earlier sentences are altered or expanded; and (3) the new sentences in each new paragraph are sandwiched between the existing sentences. The predetermined formal mechanism results in a poem made of expanding blocks of prose that grow exponentially in size: the first paragraph has only one sentence, the second features that sentence plus one more, the third consists of four sentences, and the fourth paragraph has eight sentences. The last paragraph of the 100-page work, the twelfth, features 2,048 sentences and over 10,000 words. Silliman followed this ambitious poem by using a similar procedural method to create another massive book-length work. To generate the long prose poem Tjanting (1981) Silliman relied upon another, even more elaborate mathematical pattern, much like the members of the Oulipo – in this case, Silliman deployed the Fibonacci sequence (in which each number is found by adding together the two numbers before it – 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.) to dictate how many sentences would appear in each paragraph of the poem. Over the course of his long career, Silliman has experimented with many other constraints, including a long prose

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poem consisting entirely of questions (“Sunset Debris”), one lacking any and all verbs (“Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps”), another generated by writing one sentence per day for a year based on the poet’s looking down at the ground (“Jones”), and so on. Like members of the Oulipo, Silliman reminds us that all writing relies upon constraints; instead of pretending one might escape from form, he argues that experimental poets can self-consciously exploit new, arbitrary, and unusual structures and procedures to open up new ways of representing the world. “All poetry is formalist,” he insisted in a 1985 interview, “the intervention of forms into the real, the transformation of the real into forms. But the real is social, discontinuous, unstable and opaque. Against that, any fixed poetics (any valorized, codified set of procedures) is necessarily a falsification.”22 Like other writers attracted to formal constraints, Silliman became convinced that using this sort of device to generate a text had the potential to free a writer from unexamined habits and received conventions that delimit what is possible in both writing and consciousness. In Under Albany, he recalls that in Ketjak and the other procedural texts that followed it, he was experimenting with “structures that carried forward a formal concept as a mechanism for breaking up the habits of perception.”23 For Silliman, the use of arbitrary procedures and a rigid formal exoskeleton can actually be tools in the service a new and improved realism; he argues that such methods result in a picture of the “real” that more closely matches our experience of it – as a phenomenon that is “social, discontinuous, unstable and opaque.” One of the best-known works of Language poetry, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1980) is also a constraint-based work. Generally agreed to be one of the defining works of postmodernist poetry, Hejinian’s poem is an experimental book-length poem that plays with the conventions of autobiography both in its content and its form: in its first edition, the poem consisted of thirty-seven prose sections, each featuring thirty-seven sentences to correspond with Hejinian’s age when she wrote the book. Seven years later she expanded the work so that it consisted of forty-five sections, each one now forty-five sentences long, to correspond once more with her age. In an important early discussion of the book, Marjorie Perloff pointed out that “at one level, then, My Life is an elaborate, one might say Oulipean, number game, with its 37  37 (or 45  45) square, each number having the appropriate tempo or mood assigned to it.”24 Perloff and other critics have argued that Hejinian’s deliberate use of “such formal artifice” for “a genre as ‘natural’ as autobiography” serves to call into question the assumptions and conventions governing all forms of writing

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the self – memoir, autobiography, poems of the lyrical “I.” “Hers is autobiography that not only calls attention to the impossibility of charting the evolution of a coherent ‘self,’” but “one that playfully deconstructs the packaged model crowding the bookstore shelves today,” where “language is largely and intentionally transparent, a vehicle used to convey facts, detail events,” and so on.25 As Brian McHale argues, My Life’s “structural secret” means that even though the “experience is hers,” it is “mediated . . . by a procedure.”26 In this manner, Hejinian puts a postmodernist and feminist spin on an old and overly familiar genre, while still creating an innovative autobiographical mosaic in the process. Programmatic methods and constraint-based forms abound across the large and diverse body of Language poetry – from Charles Bernstein’s “Lift Off,” a poem that consists entirely of a transcription from the correction tape from a typewriter (first line: “HH/ ie,s obVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineocpcy I”), to Bob Perelman’s “China.” The latter poem became a well-known and much-discussed example of Language writing thanks to Jameson’s rather notorious discussion of it in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, where he views “China” as an example of the “schizophrenic fragmentation” he associates with postmodernism.27 “China,” too, is a piece of procedural poetry, as Perelman composed it according to a tacit procedure performed upon a found object: each sentence is an imaginary caption for an illustration in a Chinese schoolbook he could not read. The procedural poetics of Language writing has had several major consequences and effects that are important to its overall project. First, the use of constraints and procedures highlights the artifice and materiality of the literary work and compels attention to language as such. Second, it allows the poets to sidestep the conventions, clichés, and assumptions of normative poetic practices, while also critiquing the ideological and social forces that shape those conventions. In short, Language poets employ procedural methods to defamiliarize “official,” corporate, and consumerist discourses in late capitalist culture, lay bare the ideological underpinnings of language, and challenge myths about the individual subject and personal expression. Third, procedural poetry invites the reader to be more involved as a coproducer of a text’s meaning rather than a passive consumer. Fourth, many Language writers deploy programmatic methods and constraints as part of a fascination with the poetics of everyday life, arguing that such devices allow for a new and more capacious form of realism, a sharpened attentiveness to the complexities, contradictions, and political dynamics of contemporary quotidian experience.

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Aftermath The proceduralism explored so powerfully by the Oulipo and Language poetry during the moment of postmodernism’s peak continues to reverberate today, and has even proliferated and morphed in recent years. As Perloff observes in her recent book Unoriginal Genius, in the early twenty-first century, the promotion of “invention” as the primary literary virtue “is giving way to appropriation, elaborate constraint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on intertextuality. Thus we are witnessing a new poetry, more conceptual than directly expressive.”28 In fact, this proclivity seems only to have intensified as we plunge ever deeper into a culture defined by computers, electronic communication, and new media. The most prominent example of this tendency is “conceptual writing,” a self-styled avant-garde movement spearheaded by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith that also includes Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin, Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman, and Caroline Bergvall. “A poetics of the moment,” as Goldsmith describes it, “fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present,” conceptual writing has generated heated controversy and extensive discussion among poets and scholars of contemporary poetry over the past decade. According to Goldsmith, it “employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos.” 29 Since the mid-1990s, Goldsmith has undertaken a series of conceptual, constraint-based projects that have become touchstones and flashpoints for contemporary avant-garde writing. For example, to compose No. 111: 2.7.93-10.20.96, Goldsmith spent three years collecting an enormous number of phrases – many from the web – that ended in an “r” sound, and then arranged them alphabetically, in sections based on syllable count, beginning with a section of single syllable sounds and moving through collections of increasingly lengthy phrases, syllable by syllable. More recently, Goldsmith has completed his “American Trilogy”: The Weather (2005) (a transcription of New York City weather reports over the course of a year), Traffic (2007) (a day’s worth of traffic reports from the radio), and Sports (2008) (a verbatim rendering of the television commentary heard during a Red Sox–Yankees game). This trend extends far beyond Goldsmith and his fellow conceptual writers; new forms based on the appropriation and transcription of found

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texts, constraint-based methods, and digitally derived procedures have become pervasive. Timothy Donnelly composed a poem by mashing up words from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” with words from the Patriot Act; Harryette Mullen wrote her book-length sequence Urban Tumbleweed by writing one haiku per day generated by a daily walk; Noah Eli Gordon reproduced verbatim the contents of nearly every e-mail found in his inbox at a particular moment in time and stitched it together into a continuous piece of prose he called Inbox. One of the most celebrated young novelists of our moment, Jonathan Safran Foer recently published a procedural work, in which he took a novel by Bruno Schulz and literally removed chunks of the text (carving into the page and leaving spaces where the omissions are), creating his own narrative by process of erasure. These developments can be seen as contemporary extensions of methods inaugurated by the historical and postmodernist avant-garde, but from the other side of the digital revolution. In recent years, it seems as if procedural projects and tactics of appropriation have spread and even gone mainstream. However, to understand the genealogy of this contemporary phenomenon, it is important to recognize how it evolves directly from the postmodernist innovations of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers and artists associated with the Oulipo and Language poetry, along with related movements like the New York School, conceptual art, and postmodernist fiction ushered in a set of practices and ideas that have proven to be influential and prophetic. Skeptical of the “freedom” of free verse and organic form, distrustful of the “express-yourself ” mantra promoted by the culture at large, wary of platitudes about inspiration and creative genius, the Oulipo and Language poetry discovered that even the most constrained writing can result in beautiful, strange, disruptive, and unforeseen results. Attuned to the promise and peril of machines of reproduction, simulation, and information dissemination, and committed to the possibility that constraint and predetermined projects can liberate us from habits of perception and thought, these movements have given us important and lasting ways of thinking about language, aesthetic form, the self, and the world. Notes 1 Brian McHale, The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 251. 2 See Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice (University of Chicago Press, 1994). 3 Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), xv.

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4 Georges Perec, “History of the Lipogram,” in Warren F. Motte (ed. and trans.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 97–108 [98]. Hereafter referred to in the text as Primer. 5 Brian McHale, “Poetry as Prosthesis,” Poetics Today 21/1 (Spring 2000): 1–32. 6 David Huntsperger, Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 14, 165. 7 Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 20. 8 Quoted in Becker, Many Subtle Channels, 13. 9 Jan Baetens, “OuLiPo and Proceduralism,” in Bray, Gibbons, and McHale (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, 115–27, [116]. 10 Baetens, “OuLiPo and Proceduralism,” 121. 11 Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds.), Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas Press, 1998), 42. 12 Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 14. 13 Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 14. 14 Mathews and Brotchie, Oulipo Compendium, 208. 15 Mathews and Brotchie, Oulipo Compendium, 40, 3. 16 Paul Grimstad, “Anticipatory Plagiarism,” London Review of Books (December 6, 2012), 31–2. 17 Alison James, Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 108. 18 See, for example, Cole Swensen and David St. John (eds.), American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). 19 Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (eds.), The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), ix. 20 Andrews and Bernstein (eds.), The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 36. 21 Quoted in Michael Lally (ed.), None of the Above: New Poets of the USA (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1976), 62; Tom Beckett, “An Interview with Ron Silliman,” www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/about.htm, January 19, 2015. 22 Tom Beckett, “An Interview with Ron Silliman.” 23 Ron Silliman, Under Albany (Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2004), 22. 24 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 164. 25 Perloff, Radical Artifice, 169. 26 Brian McHale, “Postmodernism and Experiment,” in Bray, Gibbons, and McHale (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, 141–67 [150]. 27 Jameson, Postmodernism, 28–29. 28 Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 11. 29 Kenneth Goldsmith, “Conceptual Poetics” [www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/ 2008/06/conceptual-poetics-kenneth-goldsmith/.

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From punk rock to the politics of pop Barry Shank

In the second half of the sixties, rock began to think of itself as classically modernist, developing an aesthetic of progress and a politics of resistance. The subgenre of progressive rock exemplified this tendency, constructing extensive suites with complex arrangements that highlighted instrumental virtuosity. But the tendency to see rock as modern art always moving forward extended beyond the work of bands such as Yes and Pink Floyd. Rock’s modernist seriousness was confirmed when no less an authority than Leonard Bernstein extolled its virtues in his 1967 television program, Inside Pop, the Rock Revolution. Even mainstream musicians felt this pull. Graham Nash describes his 1968 move from the Hollies to Crosby, Stills and Nash as a shift from “bubblegum” to “writing meaningfully” and “exploring new musical forms” emphasizing his interest in aesthetic seriousness.1 This focus on aesthetic value was accompanied by rock’s self-image of rebellion and an ideology of resistance to its economic grounding in the commodifying practices of the music industry. The best rock musicians found it possible to sell millions of records while claiming to stand above and apart from market concerns. Over forty years later, popular music has shifted away from this modernist self-understanding to a more nuanced comprehension of its relationship to the music industry. The now dominant form of dance pop acknowledges its industrial grounding, and its aesthetics are more rooted in the musical capacities afforded by digital mixing and editing technologies. The old modernist authenticity, limited as it was by its assumptions of whiteness and maleness, has been replaced by a postmodern embrace of market logics open to all. The politics of pop now aim at welcoming diverse populations into the rapacious competition of contemporary life. In the early 1970s, rock music no longer had to borrow a narrative of legitimation from more traditional arts. It became aware of itself as a tradition with its own history, open to creative recombination. In the first half of the decade, critics writing for magazines such as Creem and 339

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Crawdaddy began to articulate a specific set of rock values. Lester Bangs countered the assumed aesthetic value of complexity claiming instead that bands like the Stooges and the Velvet Underground “were monotonous and simplistic on purpose.” This transvaluation found its initial deliberate audible expression in 1974, when a group of musicians began to play regularly at CBGBs, a small dive in the Bowery district of New York. Bands like the Patti Smith Group, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and others began to draw explicitly and directly from previous styles while divesting them of nostalgic overtones by focusing their efforts through a central organizing concept. Patti Smith merged the roles of Symbolist poet with critical historian of rock, constantly referencing Dylan, Hendrix, Jagger, and others in her verse(s). The Ramones took the styles of classic Brill Building songsmiths and highlighted their recycled quality with a costume of torn jeans and worn-out leather jackets. Blondie hypostasized the fascination with the girl singer in sixties pop by exaggerating to the edge of parody their lead singer’s pouty presence. Talking Heads chose not to hide the awkward stammer at the heart of much rock, revealing the nerdy core of the out-of-place adolescent in a great song’s hook of desire. Every one of these acts returned to classic song forms while elevating their content through an engagement with the critical debates conjured by their core concept. In his classic study of “popular music and the avant-garde,” Bernard Gendron identified an initial problem in the critical efforts to categorize the early CBGB’s scene: How could one stylistic rubric encompass the Ramones’ “dumbed-down” lyrics and speeded-up garage-band riffs, Patti Smith’s snarling streetwise poetry, the Talking Heads’ spastic sounds and faux preppy lyrics, Television’s meandering improvisations, and Blondie’s retro girl-group posturings? Yet almost without exception, rock writers, even when expressing confusion, acted as if there was an aesthetic homogeneity underlying these oppositions, or as if the CBGB scene constituted a united musical field.

Gendron correctly noted that in the place of a stylistic unity, a clear discursive unity held these bands, their fans, and critics together. “With discourse CBGB’s was constructed as a united musical field driven by the opposition of art and pop, a unity in opposition, in the manner of the Velvet Underground.”2 Each of the early CBGB’s bands forged their musical identity through a blend of opposites. In the clearest case, that of the Ramones, the deliberate foregrounding of “stoopidity” was recognized as the act of creative intelligence.

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This self-conscious rethinking of the relationship between musical form, content, and critical history was misnamed punk rock. When this bold awareness of the richness of rock’s musical limitations spiced with a grasp of its capacity for conceptual invention crossed the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, it merged with the English genius for pop marketing and the lingering hangover of the lost British empire to spark a short efflorescence of music, fashion, and political urgency. Inspired equally by Situationist slogans and the profit motive, Malcolm McLaren combined the bondage of three-note melodies with John Lydon’s (then known as Johnny Rotten) snarling demand for freedom, chopped equally at the clothes and hair of Glen Matlock, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook, and set them loose to wreak havoc on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Joe Strummer left his pub-rock band, the 101ers, and joined with art students Mick Jones and Paul Simonon to form the Clash. This band took seriously the political postures of their manager, Bernie Rhodes, producing rock anthems that combined demands for justice with musical power. In Manchester, where a taste for the pleasures found in limited possibilities was highly developed, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley formed the Buzzcocks, who created the first self-produced and self-released recording of the punk explosion. In Leeds, the fertile ground of three out-of-tune chords nurtured the heirloom seeds of Marxist criticism that T. J. Clark had planted in the minds of the Mekons. As it had been in the United States, this alloy of rich musical simplicity with sharp conceptual vision was fueled in part by a claque of critics, in this case writing for magazines such as Sounds and New Musical Express. In England, however, these writers insisted that that the urgency of feeling conjured by the music was not a pure outgrowth of stylistic change but rather an expression of the conflict generated by political stagnation. Thus, rock’s rich past became available for a rethinking of its relationship not only to itself but also to the persistence of critical imagination. Across the seventies, then, rock’s claim to cultural capital shifted ground from an ideology of musical progressivism to a postmodern ideology of self-awareness, from a somewhat insecure grasping for high-art legitimacy to a more stable recognition of the legitimacy of the popular. One of the clearest examples of this transition can be found in the discourse that surrounded Patti Smith’s early career. When her first album, Horses, appeared, Greil Marcus worried that the recording had so perfectly distilled her bohemian poetess-garage rock blend that her act would be quickly reduced to a “schtick.”3 Smith’s constant reference to well-known rock artists – Hendrix, Jagger, Dylan – helped to canonize her in turn. But

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it was her full-on drive, the evident way that her ambition exceeded her abilities and the way that drive focused the audience’s attention on her desire for greatness, that enflamed the schtick and brought it to life. Her performances assumed and helped to produce an audience familiar with the nascent canon of rock. By emphasizing the dance rhythms that characterized the scansion of her lines, her readings evoked a sexualized embodied poetics and consolidated rock’s claim to art status. Rock’s aspiration to be its own art form was dependent on its ability to differentiate itself from pop. In an interview first published in Mademoiselle in 1975, Smith made a point of distinguishing between her status as an artist and that of Helen Reddy, a mere entertainer. Smith insisted, “I was always into art, and you don’t have any rules and regulations in art . . . I’m working on it in popular forms, but the rules in my heart are the rules of art which are almost no rules at all, except to aspire for greatness, aspire to heavenly heights and all that stuff.” Clarifying the distinction, she continued, “The difference between me and entertainers, say like Helen Reddy, is that maybe they wanted to be entertainers their whole lives and so they fit what they did into the rules and regulations of the entertainment business.”4 For rock to be art, it not only had to develop its own specific aesthetic, it had to make a firm break between its rules and regulations and those of the music business. Music made within the rules of the industry was pop. Pop sought its audience through its reliance on generic conventions. In traditional rock ideology, pop was incapable of innovation or artistic significance. Prior to the development of the CBGB’s scene, rock seemed unaware of its conventions. It insisted that it had none and rested its claims to authenticity on an artistic seriousness that refused all convention. This was the seriousness proclaimed by Patti Smith even as she displayed her studied awareness of the rock canon. Pop succumbed to the demands of the industry; rock resisted those demands. It was only a small step further to argue that through its resistance to the industry rock was resisting the dominant order, while pop merely reproduced it. Or so the ideology went. As scholars such as Norma Coates and Keir Keightley have made clear, however, the rock/pop distinction was heavily gendered.5 Regardless of the genitals of the performer, rock’s claim to art status was a masculinized claim of self-determination. The denial of its economic base was a necessary step in its artistic legitimation. Thus, rock’s celebrated resistance was based on its supposed freedom from economic necessity. In its drive to reach the largest audience possible, pop threatened this founding illusion, and women performers were always suspect. To be allowed into the boys’

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club of rock, they had to go to great lengths to prove themselves. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press categorized Smith’s approach to rock as “female machisma,” a kind of tomboy appropriation of masculine values and subject positions. Sharing this category with Joan Jett and Chrissie Hynde (among others), Smith is said to have begun her work with this simple assimilation into rock’s assumed masculinist framework.6 It was particularly important for Smith to show that she was not like the other girls. Smith’s insistence on her artistic seriousness required her to belittle the more feminine field of pop. Blondie was one act among the CBGBs regulars who proudly defied the terms of the rock/pop distinction. Their merger of pop and art was so airtight that Lester Bangs devoted an entire book to a failed effort to pull it apart. In that book, Bangs quotes Deborah Harry disavowing punk and insisting that the band plays “power-pop,” while only a few short pages later he quotes Chris Stein and Brian Eno affirming the band’s “avantgarde” ambitions. Eventually Bangs is forced to confess, “It’s so hard to tell the avant-garde from Bloomingdale’s anymore that maybe it’s best just not even to ask.”7 Indeed, Blondie’s art status came from their self-conscious embrace of the spectacle of the feminine and the sonic framework of pop. “Heart of Glass,” their immensely successful hit that began life as “The Disco Song,” captures perfectly the band’s sensibility. Harry’s dry vocals, emptied of almost all feeling, float inside a bubble of synthesizers, bass, and Clem Burke’s too-perfect iteration of the classic disco hi-hat. That much attention to form and convention necessarily carries with it the scare quotes that successfully distinguish this record from Abba’s “Dancing Queen.” Rock’s status as a political art was transformed by the rise of punk. But as countless commentators have pointed out, the politics of punk were chiefly a politics of style. The standard theoretical discussion of this is Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). But the importance of punk’s visual style is confirmed in the opening pages of Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (1992). Savage begins his saga with a description of a series of clothing stores that occupied an address on the King’s Road in World’s End from the midsixties into the punk era. By late 1971 Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were operating their store, Let it Rock, in that spot, simultaneously rejecting hippie fashion and rock pretensions while reviving Ted-style linkages between more basic rock and roll and leather clothing. In the midsixties, Teds had fought with Mods for music/fashion dominance. Where Mods favored narrow lapel suits and American soul, Teds wore motorcycle

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jackets and listened to fifties-era rock and roll. Let it Rock’s revival of Ted fashions suggested a taste for rougher music. For the next few years, McLaren and Westwood explored the overlap between music and fashion in a rapidly evolving range of styles. Among the more notorious of their efforts was a version of the store called Sex that sold such items as rubber shirts, tit clamps, and bondage trousers.8 Despite the outrage provoked by their clothing, all of this focus on fashion and style was simply another iteration of the English fascination with male display and pop stardom. As Nick Kent detailed in his 1974 piece for New Musical Express, “The Politics of Flash,” McLaren and Westwood’s store was only another shop patronized by the stars of rock and pop, from Ron Wood to Elton John, even if it would soon become notorious as the hangout of the Sex Pistols.9 Malcolm McLaren had attended numerous art schools, and in one interview he stated, “I learned all my politics and understanding of the world through history of art.”10 McLaren’s interest in the spectacle of politics formed the meeting ground for his merger of fashion and the music business. Before he met Westwood, McLaren had collaborated with Jamie Reid, planning a college sit-in together in the late sixties. In the early seventies, Reid worked for a community press where his “job, graphically, was to simplify political jargon, particularly that used by the Situationists.”11 Reid’s graphics transformed Situationist political slogans into quickly assimilated visuals, rendering them fit for printing on flyers, T-shirts, and other commonly available surfaces. McLaren reconnected with Reid when he briefly hooked up with King Mob, a collective that published a small magazine called Echo. Echo published writings and illustrations by T. J. Clark, Jamie Reid, and others who also mined the rich ore of Situationist slogans. In one of his masterful fantasies of historical connection, Greil Marcus rooted the politics of punk in their ambiguous critique of the spectacle.12 Doubly rooted in Marxist thought and post-Surrealist art practice, the Situationists developed a mode of cultural critique that exploited the apparent contradictions that derived from the commodification of all aspects of everyday life. But McLaren’s interest in the visual impact of that critique was more ironic. The combination of ransom-note printing styles with an image of a safety-pinned Queen created an iconic symbol of the Sex Pistols’ simultaneous immersion in and distance from their Englishness, even as it functioned as a marketing come-on. The politics that emerged from this ironic take on marketing-as-critique was fully complicit with the operations of pop. That was the chief point of Dave Rimmer’s look at the New Pop, Like Punk Never Happened (1985). In Rimmer’s view, punk’s most immediate

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effect on British music was not musical but entrepreneurial. Acts like Adam and the Ants, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, and Culture Club learned from the Pistols and McLaren the importance of controlling as much of their career as possible. The object of this control was not to ensure ideological consistency. Rather it was to guard the flow of cash. Here’s the irony: to those who cling on to the spirit of punk, everything about the New Pop is utterly abhorrent and devoid of their precious “credibility.” The New Pop isn’t rebellious. It embraces the star system. It conflates art, business and entertainment. It cares more about sales and royalties and the strength of the dollar than anything else and to make matters worse, it isn’t the least bit guilty about it . . . But if the spark that set the New Pop smouldering came from anywhere, it came from punk.13

After the New Pop, it became easier to see the powerful tradition of pop production that punk did not break from fully as it highlighted pop’s contradictions. Hebdige’s analysis highlighted the ambiguity of punk’s relationship with the culture industries, noting “It is therefore difficult . . . to maintain any absolute distinction between commercial exploitation on the one hand and creativity/originality on the other, even though these categories are emphatically opposed in the value systems of most subcultures.”14 Punk sought political resonance through the precision of its stylistic choices. The spectacular nature of that style enabled not only gestures of refusal but also a battle of wits, a classic struggle for cultural capital that, from time to time, cashed in with extraordinary effectiveness. When the New Pop adopted that strategy, cashing in was no longer opposed to creativity. Instead, it represented the popular public affirmation of their stylistic choices. Thus, a politics of pop emerged from punk’s conflagration. A public constituted by frills and lace was as viable as one constructed with bin wrappers and safety pins. The political force of popular music could no longer be contained within the old modernist frame of resistance. In 1981, a corporate partnership between American Express and Warner Brothers created a cable television channel whose sole content would consist of video commercials for recorded music. Initially, this channel reached into suburban and rural neighborhoods of the United States, where the new cable industry could afford to lay their lines and where cable television provided a distinct advantage over the options available via traditional broadcasting. It quickly advanced into the media capitals, however, spread by one brilliant simple slogan that captured everything

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important about it: “I want my MTV.” Individualist. Immediate. Demanding. And successful. MTV did not invent the concept of music videos. But it was the most effective reinforcement of the fundamental linkage between sound and vision in popular music from 1981 until 1992. In their oral history of the channel, Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks make it clear that the concept of the music video developed first in England where the commercial significance of television programs such as Top of the Pops and Old Grey Whistle Test established the demand for viewable pop. They quote John Taylor, the bassist for Duran Duran making the point. “[M]ost of the long-running number one songs in the late 70s had some form of filmic presentation, because bands didn’t want to keep showing up to play the song on Top of the Pops.”15 As the Beatles had made clear in the late sixties, it was easier to send a short film to these programs (and predecessors like The Ed Sullivan Show) than to interrupt other activities to return to London or fly to New York every week. Infamously, the inaugural video shown on MTV was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a song and video from 1979 that practically declared war on the old ways of music industry promotion. Even among the first crop of videos, when they simply showed bands standing around strumming guitars, the powerful flow of jump-cut images emphasized moving bodies and the rhythmic changes those movements visualized. It did not take long before standing and strumming gave way to choreographed storylines. Early academic discussions of MTV were quick to emphasize its postmodern qualities. In 1987, E. Ann Kaplan identified three aspects of MTV’s programming and organization that she argued lent it a postmodern cast. First, the early videos were all ads and therefore engaged the viewer through the frame of endlessly deferred desire. The constant flow of commercials, however, drew from avant-garde visual techniques, blurring the modernist aesthetic opposition between commerce and art. Finally, these videos mixed up past and present and so erased history as an effective mode of critique. According to Kaplan, among other initial academic commentators, this foregrounding of desire, melding of aesthetic oppositions, and erasure of history created a flattened world where resistance to the dominant culture could not gain traction.16 But in his classic analysis of music television, Dancing in the Distraction Factory (1992), Andrew Goodwin reminds us that pop music was always “a multidiscursive cultural form.” 17 There was not a lot that was distinctly postmodern about MTV’s blurring of commerce and art or mixing of high style and low content. Artists including Ben Shahn and Andy Warhol had designed album covers

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in the 1950s. Such covers, as well as fan club posters, magazine stories, and more had contributed to the listening experience before Elvis Presley ever appeared on television. Nevertheless, something was different about MTV. Early rock music clips such as the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” did not change the way popular music was understood in the way that videos produced for MTV featuring such acts as Duran Duran, Culture Club, and most importantly, Michael Jackson and Madonna did. MTV’s privileging of the visual was exploited most effectively by non-rock performers. These acts took full advantage of the opportunities for visual storytelling, adding elements of costuming, setting, and character as well as extensive choreography to the standard musical performance. Rather than classifying these changes as a consequence of a broad historical shift to postmodernity, Goodwin argues that the impact of music television was caused equally by specific changes in pop ideology, in technological issues of recording, the spread of cable television, and a recession in the traditional recording business. These shifts enabled selected acts, particularly those featuring musicians, singers, and dancers who had not fit into rock’s tightly constrained limits on performing style, whiteness, and gender conformity to foreground alternative images of musical mastery18. Rock’s ideology of authenticity had even trapped many of its most commercially oriented acts in pantomimes of performance. Van Halen, a rock band with no residual anticommercialism, still found it unnecessary to do more than pose with their guitars and occasionally flounce about in the video for “Jump.” But the days of the performance-based video were short lived. What soon caught the eye of suburban teens was the opportunity that videos offered for extended fantasies of desire and belonging. Among the early successful narratives of white male desire were videos like Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which pulled out almost all the standard colonial tropes of dark mystery. The band members did not pretend to perform. Instead, they chased each other through the street markets, riverbeds, and rain forests of Sri Lanka until Simon Le Bon found an exotic woman with whom he could roll and tumble on the floor of the jungle. Appalling as it seems now, the video drove the song to the top five in Billboard in 1983 and won the first Grammy for short-form video in 1984. It also confirmed an explosion of video creativity that was accompanied by an emphasis on dance music, a genre whose most significant performers would topple rock from its place atop the pop pyramid. The first important dance videos to air on MTV were issued by Michael Jackson in 1983. First came “Billie Jean,” the initial single from the album Thriller.

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MTV’s delay in airing this video is a notorious moment in the evolution of pop, capturing the struggle among forces that were changing the social significance of popular music. The network had been sent a tape of the video when the single was released in early 1983. But they sat on it for weeks. When pressed by Walter Yetnikov, head of CBS records at the time, MTV’s executives insisted that their reluctance to air the video was because the channel’s programming focused on rock. At this point, Michael Jackson was understood by the mainstream (i.e., white) recording industry to be a soul singer not far removed from his role as lead singer for the Jackson 5. MTV executives assumed, therefore, that his music would not appeal to the channel’s regular viewers – rock fans. In the long run, this dubious effort to hide MTV’s racialized concept of its audience behind a genre label served more to break down the link between music genres and a recording industry’s assumption that the key to major chart success was to cater to white tastes. But a considerable amount of pressure was required before the video for this major hit released by one of the largest record companies on the planet and featuring one of the world’s biggest pop stars would be aired. By the time MTV did begin to show it, “Billie Jean” was starting to move down the charts and “Beat It,” the second single from the album Thriller, featuring a rock guitar solo from Eddie Van Halen, was moving up. MTV quickly put that video in rotation.19 Before the year was over, it was airing the video for Jackson’s song “Thriller,” a 13-minute tightly choreographed narrative dance spectacle directed by John Landis, and the world of music videos and pop music in general had completely changed. Videos featuring black singers dancing with grace and power could now be watched on America’s most widely viewed national promotional outlet. A second important pair of videos featured Madonna and was directed by one of the most important female directors, Mary Lambert. First aired in 1985, the video for Madonna’s “Material Girl” captures the selfreferential quality that soon characterized music video narratives. Based on a scene from the Marilyn Monroe film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the “materialism” of the main section of the video is undercut by the antimaterialism enacted in the framing narrative. Madonna plays the part of an actress playing the part in the central dance section of the video. The central section shows Madonna made up as Marilyn lip-synching and dancing down a staircase while refusing the appeals of a line of identically dressed men because they did not give her “proper presents.” In the frame, however, she rejects the diamonds offered by one suitor only to admire the rusty pickup truck and the wilted flowers presented by the director of the

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dance sequence (played by Keith Carradine). The distinction between the two Madonnas maps onto the distinction between Carradine and the director of the video, Mary Lambert, such that the much-proclaimed postmodern play with the referential is undercut. Madonna’s authenticity is not erased but simply displaced. We know who directed the video, and we know better than to identify Madonna with the roles she is playing. What comes through this play on roles is the intelligence evident in the style and the elaboration of female address in the video’s narrative. Female authorship and control of the video is affirmed and, according to Lisa Lewis, “what is at issue is not the existence of a complete opposition between the girl’s image and her identity but the narrow, literal interpretation of the girl’s textual address by male critics and male audience members.” As Lewis argues, this video establishes the specificity of female address in music videos, sending a message to a tuned-in female audience.20 The same emphasis on style and authorship is central to a second collaboration between Lambert and Madonna. The video for “Like a Prayer” (1989) narrates a link between Madonna’s religious background, black gospel, and her ability to articulate a coherent synthesis of these influences recognizable to the communities from which these signs, symbols, rhythms, and practices had been borrowed. In the narrative, Madonna witnesses a rape or a lynching at the hands of a gang of white thugs and escapes their threatening gaze by entering a small church. The church is imagined as a place of safety and community, and the particular church Madonna enters blends Catholic iconography with a living statue of a black Jesus and a black gospel choir. When the choir begins to sing, sway and dance, it embodies an imagined community of safety both physically and musically, supporting Madonna’s solo voice and offering her the strength needed to survive a world of white male dominance. This video generated much criticism from conservative factions as well as those questioning its fantasy of white appropriation of black culture. bell hooks stated forthrightly, “It is a sign of white privilege to be able to ‘see’ blackness and black culture from a standpoint where only the rich culture of opposition black people have created in resistance marks and defines us.”21 Madonna’s work clearly drew on black culture from a position of racial privilege in order to borrow this stance of resistance and critique white male dominance. The debate that ensued codified the terms by which the political significance of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized narratives of popular music would go forward. The politics of pop had taken on a new force. In the post-MTV era, we can see the full range of effects that came in the wake of Michael Jackson’s and Madonna’s abilities to use the sounds of

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dance music to anchor performances of identity and difference. Jackson’s dominance of the commercial landscape, to be followed by Madonna’s mastery of the video format and the subsequent ascendancy of rhythm and blues (R&B), dance music, and rap ensured that from that point on, any serious discussion of popular music and politics would have to go beyond the limits of rock and its past. A new politics of pop emerged from the commercial evacuation of rock. The evaluation of intelligence displayed through style remained the central pop aesthetic. Small stylistic details continued to hold the key to understanding the larger social gestures in videos and in popular music more generally. Parsing these gestures for their political significance has become the central critical move in discussions of work by Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and every other major popular musical act working in the twenty-first century. Popular musical production now mimics the production of independent film. In the politics of pop, the image of the collective is no longer the band, bound almost permanently together, but the team, brought together to work on a project then disbanding, scattering, and casting about for another project. Labor is dispersed, not disorganized but organized only momentarily for the purpose of creating the new product. Top line producers such as Max Martin, Pharrell, Diplo, and Timbaland are like film directors who assemble the project team, working with selected craftworkers who contract individually for their services. The singer is the star, necessary for attracting the attention of the public, functioning as the voice, the face, and the body linking the music to its momentarily activated social meanings. This new politics is not the resistant politics of modernism. It is a politics working within the strict limits of a harsh global capitalism. In his introduction to Farewell to an Idea (1999), T. J. Clark wrote, “We know we are living a new form of life, in which all previous notions of belief and sociability have been scrambled. And the true terror of this new order has to do with its being ruled – and obscurely felt to be ruled – by sheer concatenation of profit and loss, bids and bargains: that is, by a system without any focusing purpose to it, or any compelling image or ritualization of that purpose.”22 On top of that terror has grown a raw ethic of individual responsibility – advance or die. The parameters of that ethic articulate the limits of identity groups, what peoples are allowed into the race, what peoples must scramble for remainders left behind. This is the world within which the politics of pop now operate. Social gestures, signaled by the intelligent use of sound and style, now welcome audiences who pay not for the music but for the right to be recognized as participants in the flow of capital, as fully fledged targets for marketing campaigns.

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Notes 1 Graham Nash, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013), 118. 2 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 250, 251. 3 Greil Marcus, “Horses: Patti Smith Exposes Herself,” Village Voice, November 24, 1975; online: www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=665. 4 Amy Gross, “I’m Doing a Revenge for Bad Skin: Introducing Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Lady Raunch, Patti Smith,” Mademoiselle, September 1975; online www.ocean star.com/patti/intervus/7509made.htm. 5 Norma Coates, “(R)evolution Now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender,” in Sheila Whitely (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1997), 50–64; Keir Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock,” in William Straw, Simon Frith, and John Street (eds.),The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109–42. 6 Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 236–8. 7 Lester Bangs, Blondie (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 8, 11, 58. 8 John Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 3–12. 9 Nick Kent, “The Politics of Flash,” New Musical Express, April 6, 1974; retrieved from Rock’s Back Pages www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ fashion-the-politics-of-flash September 5, 2014. 10 Quoted in Paul Taylor, “The Impresario of Do-It-Yourself,” in Paul Taylor (ed.), Impresario: Malcolm McLaren & the British New Wave (New York and Cambridge, MA: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1985), 12. 11 Jamie Reid quoted in Jamie Reid and Jon Savage, Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 38 12 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 13 Dave Rimmer, Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985), 13. 14 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Methuen, 1979), 95. 15 Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (New York: Plume Books, 2012), 8. 16 E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), 145–8. Kaplan cites Lawrence Grossberg and Fredric Jameson in support of her argument. 17 Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 18 For discussions of rock’s musical conventions and their links to racialized and gendered discourses see Coates and Keightley cited earlier as well as Greg Tate,

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Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (Chicago Review Press, 2003). Tannenbaum and Marks, I Want My MTV, 143–9. Lisa Lewis, Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 131. bell hooks, “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 158. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 8.

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The cyberworld is (not) flat: cyberpunk and globalization Elana Gomel

The end of the end Postmodernism is dead. This is a tacit critical consensus, expressed, among other places, in the introduction to this volume. Cyberpunk is also dead. The foundational collection of critical essays that defined the genre was published in 1992 and titled Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative.1 The year 2000 had come and gone and “the future of narrative” has become the past of criticism. Thus, it seems, the best this essay can hope to accomplish is to conduct a forensic inquiry into the collusion between two dead cultural entities. But while I will not claim that the news of either postmodernism’s or cyberpunk’s death have been exaggerated, I will argue that revisiting their golden years is a worthwhile endeavor. The importance of postmodernism and cyberpunk goes beyond a mere historical interest. Postmodernism, memorably dubbed by Jameson “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” was only one symptom of the profound and ongoing social, economic, and cultural shift that we may call, for want of a better term, globalization. Beyond its obvious political connotations, globalization also involves a new articulation of the fundamental structures of human existence: space and time. And the narrative strategies of postmodernism and particularly of its science-fictional spin-off, cyberpunk, offer us a glimpse into what this articulation may mean for the changing forms of literary representation. Cyberpunk may be “the future of narrative,” after all. The revolution of space and time is gathering speed, transforming collective action and individual perception alike. It is powered by an unstable coalition of forces, from the new discoveries in physics and cosmology to the impact of the social media and the Internet. But its most important engine may, in fact, be the political changes of the last twenty years or so, starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent redrawing of the economic map of the world. No single essay 353

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can do justice to the magnitude of this change. Nevertheless, just as the initial emergence of the “landscape of the postmodern” was regarded by the critics of the 1970s and 1980s as an opportunity to link the aesthetic and the political, the epistemological and the social, a map of globalization can be drawn from any vantage point, including that of cyberpunk.2

The logic of cultural capital Cyberpunk was a movement within the larger generic field of science fiction (SF) associated with such names as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and several others. It was characterized by infatuation with early computer technology, a hip sensibility, a dystopian vision of the near future, and a jazzy style. None of these elements was unique, but blended together they seduced a number of critics into believing that literature was finally entering the information age. George Slusser breathlessly praised the genre’s ambitions: In the cyberpunk world, to write SF is to make physical, even visceral contact with the mechanical and biological extensions of our personal infosphere (cyborgs, grafts, prostheses, clones) and beyond that, with the image surrogates themselves (simulations, “constructs,” holograms) that now crowd and share our traditional fictional living space.3

Perhaps the greatest achievement of cyberpunk was precisely its ability to break out of the generic “ghetto” of SF by embodying salient features of the postmodernism poetics in general. McHale defined cyberpunk as the “SF which derives certain of its elements from postmodernist mainstream fiction which itself has, in its turn, already been ‘science-fictionalized.’”4 Jameson referred to one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk, William Gibson, as the creator of “an exceptional literary realization” of the postmodernist paradigm.5 Andrew Butler, among others, explored the link “between cyberpunk . . . and postmodernism.”6 Postmodernism’s embrace of cyberpunk, however, rested on a rather narrow view of its parent genre, SF. As long as literary sophistication was reduced to stylistic complexity, it was easy to regard cyberpunk as intrinsically superior to SF at large. This critical claim was helped by the self-promotion of some cyberpunk writers, such as Bruce Sterling, who basked in the role of a brash young revolutionary. Until the 1970s and 1980s, so the critical story went, SF had been a low-brow geek entertainment. With the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984, SF came of age, adopting an experimental style and metafictional techniques and thus becoming Literature.

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The story was wrong on two accounts. First, the notion of precyberpunk SF as a pop-culture preserve of teenaged nerds was inherently parochial. The “ghettoization” of SF was not the case in the United Kingdom where the philosophical tradition of H. G. Wells’s scientific romances was strong, or in the Soviet bloc where SF was imbued with the regime’s utopian aspirations, or in Japan where it played a central role in the country’s search for a postwar identity. If cyberpunk achieved anything genuinely novel, it was rather in incorporating these non-American SF traditions – a point I will return later. The second issue concerns the very nature of the poetics of SF. As many critics from Darko Suvin to Adam Roberts and Damien Broderick have cogently argued, SF is an ontological genre, in which the elaboration and complexity of the fictional world takes precedence over stylistic experimentation and/or psychological depth.7 The evolution of SF through the 1970s and 1980s created progressively more complex fictional worlds, as evidenced by the fiction of Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, David Brin, and others, and broadened its thematic scope to interrogate issues of gender, colonialism, and political power with such writers as Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Sheri Tepper, and others. Cyberpunk was part of this general maturation of the genre and its particular set of stylistic techniques hardly justified separating it from the SF mainstream. In fact, many writers and critics associated with the Movement, as cyberpunk grandiosely called itself in its heyday, were quite clear that they regarded themselves as an avant-garde within SF. In Fiction 2000, Lewis Shiner, a writer and critic, expressed reservations about the very label of cyberpunk, asking whether it was not merely a commercial ploy to shed the low-market connotations of “sci-fi.” George Slusser, in his introduction, agreed and bluntly stated: “In terms of the SF tradition, then, cyberpunk may not be as ‘new’ as it wishes to be.”8 In its early days the Movement was simply known as Radical Hard SF, echoing the critical distinction within the genre between “hard” (technologically and scientifically oriented) and “soft” (more character- and plot-focused) texts. This distinction, first proposed by P. Schuyler Miller in 1957, has been subsequently used by just about every new development within SF, from cyberpunk to space opera, in order to claim continuity with the scientific roots of the genre. 9 This is not to say, however, that cyberpunk was all hype and no substance. It may be seen as a distillation of the salient narrative and thematic features of SF in a form that was accessible to the postmodern culture at large. If SF as a whole was increasingly concerned with issues of

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space and the topology of power, cyberpunk articulated these concerns through the new technology of digital simulation. Computers had been a central topos of SF since the 1930s. Cyberpunk, however, focused not on the individual machine but on the information network and the new forms of spatiality generated by the digital revolution. William Gibson coined the term cyberspace, and his novel Neuromancer (1984) was one of the first to describe the experience of immersion in a virtual world. Case, the novel’s protagonist, does not merely use computers, as his predecessors in the novels of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein had already done. He lives inside a computer-simulated reality, which is more important to him than the physical world inhabited by his body, which he contemptuously calls “meat.” Gibson’s description of cyberspace was prescient not in its technological details but in its emphasis on the collective and social nature of online experience. Instead of a solitary Plato’s cave, the Internet is an electronic Agora. And so is Gibson’s virtual world: Case “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.”10 There is a clear connection between Gibson’s “consensual hallucination” and the postmodern ontology of the eponymous Matrix, the 1999 Wachowski siblings’ film depicting virtual-reality existence. But, in fact, Gibson’s novel is less interested in the philosophical implications of virtual reality than might be supposed. Instead it focuses on the psychological and political implications of living in cyberspace. Armed with our smartphones, we might regard Case as merely a case of prophecy fulfilled. But the complicated topology of Gibson’s matrix goes beyond the selection of apps on the personal screen. It is rather a representation of the hidden structure of the global space that shapes our subjectivities and interactions both on- and offline.

The topology of the real The matrix in Neuromancer is constructed by “bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void.” But it also is a virtual approximation of the giant urban Sprawl where Case and other cyberspace cowboys live. The online world and the global city are different ontologically but identical topologically: [I]t was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set

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apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.

City, body, and cyberspace share the same underlying structure, which may be incarnated in buildings, proteins, or information bits but remains invariant across ontological levels. The meat and the matrix are topologically the same. Whether fighting his enemies on the mean streets of Chiba City or in the nooks of cyberspace, Case is caught up in the complex grid of power, assimilated “to the machine, the system, the parent organism.”11 The topological identity of virtual and urban spaces undermines Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra as endlessly proliferating copies that supplant the original and put an end to the traditional notions or truth and authenticity. For Baudrillard this is a tragic development, plunging him into mourning for what he calls the “desert of the real.”12 But Neuromancer takes the disappearance of the real in its stride: the difference between the original and the simulacrum is simply not important. Both virtual and physical realms are ruled by the same networks of criminals and politicians; both are constructed as complex labyrinths of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal domains; both involve manipulations of power structures by individuals and the backlash of the matrix, whether electronic or social, against the rebel. Case’s heist unfolds in both realms simultaneously and its results, in the shape of the creation of the godlike AI, are consequential for both. The only thing that cyberspace does is to reveal the geometry of power that has been there all along. The “bright lattices” of data spring up in “the desert of the real” and make it bloom. The narrative poetics of cyberpunk rests on the notion of space as topology rather than the more familiar space as place. I discuss this “topological turn” of postmodernity elsewhere.13 Here I want to point out how cyberpunk’s emphasis on topology challenges the presumed “ahistoricity” of postmodernism. As Jameson famously argued, the spatial turn of postmodernism came at the expense of modernism’s concern with time and history: We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time.14

These “categories of space” are seen by Jameson as inferior and ideologically suspect substitutes for the grand modernist narratives of History. According to him, we have been so traumatized by the loss of a compelling vision of the future that we cling to the Google maps of the present: tourism as a consolation prize for utopia!

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However, space simply does not exist without time. Neither physically nor culturally can the two be separated. Since Einstein and Minkowski physics has regarded space and time as the two aspects of a single continuum: spacetime. Influenced by the theory of relativity, Bakhtin introduced his notion of chronotope as the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” in narrative.15 The “synchronic” in postmodernism can more productively be seen as a new form of the diachronic that no longer obeys the linear logic of modernism. Instead of the arrow of modernist time, postmodernist temporality has acquired a number of shapes, corresponding to the multiple articulations of the cultural chronotope. Cyberpunk, with its focus on the near future, its hit-or-miss technological and political predictions, its concern with individual action in the context of global processes, exemplifies the inextricable connection between space and history. This connection can be best articulated through the notion of narrative topology: the underlying structure of the textual spacetime. The topology of cyberpunk is different from other subgenres of SF. It is fractal, based on recursion and self-similarity. It is this fractal geometry of cyberspace that reveals its alignment with the global structures of power.

The world in Google glasses Mirrorshades were an iconic image of cyberpunk, the title of its first definitive anthology.16 It may not be an exaggeration to see in this not just a nod to the street cool of the 1980s and 1990s but also a sly recognition of the fractal and self-recursive nature of cyberpunk’s own spatial poetics. Mathematically, recursion is an algorithm that calls upon itself. An example of a recursive narrative space is the structure of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). The action of the novel unfolds in parallel in the physical world of the near future and in the virtual Metaverse. The latter is traversed by the infinitely long street that contains versions of the cities in the physical world, including a cyber-Hong Kong, New York, and Paris. The Metaverse is a recursive reflection of the physical space, containing the latter, while it is also contained by it. The relationship between the two is encapsulated in the mirrorshades worn by the protagonist that reflect their own reflection: the cyberspace “Broadway and the Champs Elysees . . . can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles.”17 Another notable feature of cyberspace is self-similarity. In fractal geometry self-similarity means the repetition of the same pattern on every scale.

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Cyberpunk narrative space is fractal. No matter the ontological level – whether the physical universe, a computer simulation, or the character’s inner world – the same pattern of action and obstacle holds, embodied in the actual or virtual topography of the setting. In a late-cyberpunk novel Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge (2002), for example, the heroine named Jackal is unjustly accused of a crime she has not committed and imprisoned in a virtual-reality copy of Ko Island, her corporate home. After her release she suffers repeated flashbacks of her cyber-jail, which may or may not be externally imposed. The three ontological levels of the fictional world – Jackal’s physical environment, its virtual simulation, and her own psyche – all have the same structure: that of the Panopticon, in which she is confined, manipulated, and observed. Her breakthrough to freedom has to be replicated on each level for her to achieve vindication and closure.18 The fractal and recursive spatiality of cyberpunk has been noted by several critics. N. Katherine Hayles, for example, points out that fractal geometry is “one way of conceptualizing and understanding postmodern space” but also “a source of this space,” in the sense that science-savvy cyberpunk and “slipstream” writers such as Bruce Sterling, Jeff Noon, and others consciously appropriate mathematical concepts to shape their narrative poetics.19 (Slipstream refers to cross-genre fiction incorporating elements of SF, fantasy, and magic realism.) In his discussion of fractals in Jeff Noon’s cyberpunk novel Vurt (1993), Andrew Wenaus develops Hayles’s insight to argue for the self-similarity as the underlying structural device of postmodernism in general: “Vurt represents an interesting type of narrative related nonhierarchically at various levels, from the fractal quality of the story’s structure down to the strange loop of the protagonist’s own consciousness at the moment of consolation; the relationship between the structure and content of the novel is, therefore, metonymic.” In other words, the topology of the novel’s space and the psyches of its characters are homologous – “the quality of self-similarity in the structure of the book dictates that the characters must operate in accord with determined narrative patterns.”20 However, Wenhaus’s analysis takes for granted the distinction between physical and virtual and conceptualizes the novel’s fractal topology in the traditional terms of reality-estrangement and “destabilization.” Thus, he assimilates the spatial poetics of cyberpunk to his vision of postmodernism as the “total acceptance of . . . ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and the chaotic.” 21 But fractal geometry is anything but “chaotic”: it is, to the contrary, mathematically rigorous and precise. Similarly, the ontological shifts of Vurt or Snow Crash are neither random nor “destabilizing.”

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The fractal topology of cyberpunk is a mimetic representation of the spatiality of the Internet itself. The digital universe is ontologically different but topologically identical to distribution of power in the “real” world. The social media map out the flows of interpersonal connections and influences; the political divisions of the blogosphere correspond to the fractured political divisions within and without the nation-state; players in the World of Warcraft or any other MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) engage in familiar economic and emotional interactions, albeit surrounded by orcs and elves. Stephenson’s recent techno-thriller Reamde (2011) is a perfect embodiment of this mutual imbrication of virtual and physical spaces, with a host of multinational characters gunning each other down all over the world as a result of virusinduced glitches in an online fantasy game.22 Ontological shifting is no longer an abstract concept: most of us engage in it daily as we integrate diverse sensory inputs from, say, GPS data and actual driving, or Facebook updates and face-to-face conversations. But while the space of the smartphone screen is physically not the same as the space of the city street, the social and cognitive skills required to navigate both are very similar. Cyberpunk reveals the rigorous order in the seeming chaos of postmodernity and challenges the notion of postmodernism as the celebration of “fragmentation and discontinuity.” One of the consequences of viewing postmodernism as the poetics of chaos has been the tendency to see the postmodern subject as a bundle of unrelated affects, plagued by “a fragmented sense of the self.”23 Cyberpunk’s representation of subjectivity contests this notion as well. Cyberpunk characters are not incoherent. Rather, both their psychic complexity and their self-coherence reside outside themselves, in the complex but rigorous topology of the spaces they inhabit.

Character degree zero The most common complaint against SF is that it is populated by flat, psychologically uninteresting characters. While cyberpunk departs from the previous SF tradition in allowing for more stylistic experimentation, its characters are not particularly complex either, in the sense in which psychological depth is understood in the realistic novel. The characters’ very names often indicate their emblematic function. The protagonist of Snow Crash is appropriately named Hiro Protagonist. A female mercenary in Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981) and the Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, 1984; Count Zero, 1986; Mona Lisa Overdive, 1988) is called Molly

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Millions. In “Burning Chrome” (1982), Gibson’s most celebrated short story and the title of his signature collection (1986), Chrome is the name of the Mob-connected female programmer who builds “castles of ice” representing data protection in the matrix.24 “Burning” is hacking; and as her ice (Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics) is melted, so is she. Such allegorical names, reducing a character of the personification of an abstraction (in the style of medieval morality plays, such as the fifteenthcentury Everyman), are more than just a sly wink at the reader. They are the result of the overall narrative strategy whereby characters become so firmly embedded in the structure of the fictional world that they are no more important than technological props or geographical locations. The narrator of “Burning Chrome” describes this strategy when he refers to his fellow hacker’s attitude to women: “I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler’s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon.”25 It is not only female characters but everybody in the cyberpunk fictional universe who are turned into “sigils on [its] map.” The “flattening” of character is cyberpunk serves to integrate subjectivity with narrative space. With regard to characterization, narrative theory is still bound by a century-old distinction between “flat” and “round” characters, the latter being valorized as psychologically complex and humanly engaging.26 But cyberpunk characters are not meant to be humanly engaging for the simple reason that most of them are no longer human. It has been recognized that cyberpunk subjects are “cyborgs,” in Haraway’s sense of the term.27 But all too often, this recognition went no further than a discussion of corporeal modifications, such as Molly’s implanted claws and mirrorshades or Case’s matrix interface. But characters’ real posthumanity lies not in such cosmetic changes but rather in the way they are topologically embedded in the complex spaces they inhabit. Their “flatness” is a necessary corollary of the “roundness” of their setting. They have little interiority of their own but inhabit a space that is topologically complex, active, and psychologically charged, verging on autonomous agency. The process that generates cyberpunk subjects might be called character eversion (in the dictionary meaning of eversion as the state of being turned inside out). As opposed to the pathetic fallacy, in which the landscape echoes the character’s inner state, in the eversion of subjectivity the character’s inner state becomes an echo of the landscape. Space and subject exchange places. Character eversion in cyberpunk can be conceptualized using Roland Barthes’s notion of “writing degree zero.” Defined in his 1953 book of the

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same title, writing degree zero is a flat, neutral, transparent style whose aim is to expunge the writer’s subjectivity, to be “delivered of history,” and to “find again the freshness of a pristine state of language.”28 Case, Hiro Protagonist, and other flat inhabitants of the multidimensional cyberspace are “characters degree zero.” Their lack of agency and affect plunges them into an unmediated unity with the topologically complex space. They are “delivered from history” into the spatial chronotope, devoid of personal past and future. The rich descriptions of their environments, both virtual and urban, reach for a “pristine state of language” by striving for the effect of visual immediacy. In “Burning Chrome” the two hackers literally become assimilated into the complex landscape of the matrix: “Bodiless, we swerve into Chrome’s castle of ice. And we’re fast, fast. It feels like we’re surfing the crest of the invading program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate. We’re sentient patches of oil swept along, down corridors of shadow.”29 Character degree zero may be the most enduring artistic legacy of cyberpunk. In such contemporary SF as Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014), which is not cyberpunk either stylistically or thematically, the “eversion” of characters is the most prominent narrative strategy. The trilogy describes a mysterious alien incursion that has created a topologically distorted space – Area X – located somewhere in the south of the United States. The area is only accessible through a single portal, and those who venture inside either do not come back or come back psychologically and physically changed, mutated in unpredictable and horrifying ways. Each book of the trilogy chronicles the literal assimilation of several characters into the “terroir” or landscape configuration of Area X, which is both achingly beautiful and monstrous, both pristine and distorted. As the nameless narrator of the first book, Annihilation, says, “Desolation tries to colonize you,” inverting the familiar space-opera trope of subduing a strange space.30 Here space colonizes humanity, filling the characters’ psychological flatness with its own topological complexity. In Barthes’s view, “writing degree zero” was a political act, meant to cleanse discourse of the accumulated traces of ideological falsehood. Character degree zero is a political figure. Scholars often deplored the “schizophrenic” nature of the postmodern subject, expressed in psychological fragmentation.31 Flat cyberpunk and SF characters represent a new form of integration that goes beyond humanism. Fading into the alien landscape, whether of the electronic matrix or enigmatic Area X, they offer a revolutionary, if unsettling, view of the possibilities of interaction between humans and their environment in the Anthropocene age.

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Fractal politics The Anthropocene is the name given to the age of technology, to describe humanity’s increasing power over nonhuman nature. The term identifying humanity’s increasing power over its own social and political domain is globalization. “Globalization” is a contested term with many (mostly negative) connotations. In the simplest sense it refers to “an evolution of closer economic integration” via trade, investment, immigration, and supra-national governing frameworks. 32 But globalization is also a powerful metaphor, generating a whole slew of imaginary spaces, from Thomas Friedman’s famous “the world is flat” to Naomi Klein’s “fences and windows.”33 Friedman’s optimistic mapping of the global world represents it as a level playing field, in which the magic of economic expansion will keep pace with the increasing number of players; Klein’s far darker topology envisions a convoluted political space crisscrossed by barriers of exclusion and inequality and wormholed by windows of resistance. This very proliferation indicates that the world of globalization is, in fact, not flat. Instead of the two-dimensional continuum, traversed by the harmonious flows of people and capital, the global world is more like the Metaverse of Snow Crash. It is simultaneously integrated and highly segregated, chopped up into political and cultural enclaves yet obeying no logic of traditional state borders, fractally mirroring the cyberspace that is both its necessary underpinning (no international economic activity today is possible without the Internet) and its most potent simulacrum. Cyberpunk preceded full-blown globalization and the Internet. Yet its vision of both physical and virtual space foreshadows many of the salient features of the world today. It is not so much a prophecy as an enactment of the spatial logic of postmodernity, which has reached its full-blown embodiment in the world today. I discussed the cyberpunk representation of virtual and imaginary spaces earlier; here let me consider cyberpunk’s internationalism, which sharply distinguishes it from the previous generations of SF. Just as the actual Internet has not abolished political borders but rather intensified and redrawn them, the imaginary cyberspace has absorbed multiple national and cultural traditions. The greatest innovation of cyberpunk in relation to traditional SF was the broadening of its cultural milieu. Until the 1980s, American SF was surprisingly parochial, drawing upon its own tradition of the “Golden Age” pulps and ignoring even the British heritage of the “scientific romances” of H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. It

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was basically closed to influences emanating from other national literatures, despite the existence of Russian, French, German, and Japanese SF. Neuromancer and other first-wave cyberpunk novels by Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, and others reached toward these separate traditions. Neuromancer was the first SF novel to introduce contemporary Japanese culture to the American reader. Other cyberpunk texts followed suit by being set in Asia, incorporating elements of anime and manga, or utilizing the visual aesthetics of Asian global cities (as in the cyberpunkinformed setting of the 1982 film Blade Runner). In fact, the pervasiveness of “Japanese futurism” in contemporary American culture has often been attributed to Neuromancer; and while it is clearly an oversimplification, Gibson’s introduction of the Japanese cool definitely paved the way for the current tsunami of anime and manga (see Chapter 24, this volume).34 The luster of Japan has dimmed after more than a decade of economic decline and political sluggishness. More recent cyberpunk faithfully reflects the changing map of globalization by shifting to China. In Eskridge’s Solitaire, Hong Kong functions in the same way that Chiba City does in Neuromancer: as a space of the imagination, simultaneously dark and alluring, fraught with dangers and yet forward-looking; an alternative to the worn-out space-opera clichés of American SF. Since then, we have seen the rise in popularity of quasi-Chinese settings in Western SF and the growing awareness of China’s own indigenous tradition of SF and fantasy. 35 But a more interesting aspect of globalization is the impact of SF representation on actual spaces, including especially Asian cities. This was the argument of Wong Kin Yuen’s 2000 article, “On the Edge of Spaces,” in which he pointed out that Hong Kong’s “spatial practice” parallels the narrative chronotope of cyberpunk, based on fragmentation, multiplicity, sensory overload, and cultural hybridity.36 Hong Kong uses its own Blade Runner image both in tourism promotion and in the aesthetics of its highly popular – and profitable – movie industry. Other Chinese cities, particularly Shanghai, have joined the race for the future. In his History of Future Cities (2012), Daniel Brook argues that the “Asian century” is the century of a particular organization of urban space exemplified by Shanghai and Hong Kong.37 In a recent article he goes further in equating history and architecture: “But the fast-forward timescale of Pudong is the same one on which Chinese Communism has reinvented itself – a reinvention written into the cityscape itself.”38 The underlying discursive paradigm here is of the conflation of time and space, history and the city. It is the same paradigm that informs cyberpunk’s fractal poetics of mirroring and recursion, in which history is assimilated to

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the topology of the global spacetime. But in relation to the politics of globalization whose very real conflicts cannot be simply resolved by displacement into cyberspace, cyberpunk’s fractal topology creates a peculiar double bind. On the one hand, it can be regarded as the spatial poetics of global capitalism, reflecting in its narrative strategies the economic, technological, and social trends that create an interconnected network of wealth, power, and information in place of a mosaic of independent nation-states. Thus, it supports the utopian vision of the “flat” world, in which the differences between China and the United States are incorporated into a potentially infinite web of cultural and economic diversity, much like the infinite street of Snow Crash. On the other hand, however, the increasingly complex topology of this world belies its utopian gloss. Just the opposite: through its growing complexity, the spacetime of cyberpunk reflects the omnipresence of power. History does not stop in cyberspace, but it runs in too many different directions simultaneously to be squeezed into the linearity of a conventional plot. What Brian Richardson calls the “nonmimetic” time of postmodernism is, in fact, an accurate representation of the inner dynamics of the distributed and decentralized power-relations of globalization.39 Ursula Heise describes the “unnatural” temporality of postmodernism in terms of “time dividing and subdividing, bifurcating and branching off continuously into multiple possibilities and alternatives.”40 This description applies equally well to cyberspace; and both the narrative space and time of cyberpunk mirror the political reality of globalization, which is no longer amenable to the neo-Marxist or neo-liberal calculus of simple interests and defined goals. Bruce Sterling’s story “Taklamakan” (1998) transcends the narrow definition of cyberpunk by merging back into the mainstream of SF. But by the same token, it is one of the best examples of the way in which the spatial poetics of the genre traces the lines of power crisscrossing the global world. Taking place in the near future and featuring two augmented secret agents, Spider Pete and Katrinko (the latter a sexual neuter), it describes a heist similar to that of Neuromancer or “Burning Chrome.” But instead of hacking a virtual space, the two hack a physical one – or at least as physical as anything can be in a world in which “the Internet of things” is on the rise. Breaking into a set of abandoned hangars set inside the cavity left after an illegal thermonuclear test, they discover a complex of mini-worlds where the relics of past experiments, both human and machine, breed and evolve in self-contained bubbles. The entire complex, “secretly built in the desert . . . by Chinese spooks and Japanese engineers,” is a

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multidimensional palimpsest of past political and economic maneuvering by multiple powers. The strange semi-organic machines evolving in the cave are a by-product of a search for “instant cheap consumer goods”; the isolated human communities inside the hangars are a forgotten detritus of a Chinese space project; and the entire techno-biological ecology is set inside the Cold War–generated cavity. On top of this, various governments are now using these “forgotten holes” of past politics to dump their unwanted tribal populations, leaving them to fester in “the deadly trash of a long-derailed Armageddon.” The whole recursive, fractal topology (augmented and modified by the virtual “splexes” of the two agents) is a perfect mapping of the politics of the globalized world: politics so complex, so interconnected, so wired and networked that the “system could no longer bother with the limits of human intent.”41 The poetics of cyberpunk transcend the narrow boundaries of its historical significance. Its importance lies in the creation of a narrative vocabulary for the globalized, multinational, interconnected, “wired” world. Even though it no longer exists as a distinct subgenre, its defeat is paradoxically its victory. The space it imagined is the one we inhabit today. Notes 1 George Edgar Slusser and T. A. Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 2 Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” in Charles Jencks (ed.), The Post-Modern Reader (London: Academy Editions, 1992), 69. 3 Slusser and Shippey, Fiction 2000, 2. 4 McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, 229 5 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 38. 6 Andrew Butler, “Science Fiction as Postmodernism: The Case of Philip K. Dock,” in Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell (eds.), Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity-Extrapolation-Speculation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 54. 7 See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000); Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1995). 8 Slusser and Shippey, Fiction 2000, 6. 9 David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (eds.), The Hard SF Renaissance (New York: Tom Doherty, 2002), 13, 17, 338. 10 William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984; London: Grafton Books, 1990), 12. 11 Gibson, Neuromancer 11, 12, 26, 243. 12 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2–3. 13 Elana Gomel. Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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14 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 16. 15 M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” in Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), 15. Emphasis mine. 16 Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Arbor House, 1986). 17 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Dell, 1992), 24. 18 Kelley Eskridge, Solitaire (2002; Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2010). 19 Katherine N. Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 289. 20 Andrew Wenaus, “Fractal Narrative, Paraspace, and Strange Loops: The Paradox of Escape in Jeff Noon’s Vurt,” Science Fiction Studies 38/1 (March 2011); www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/113/wenaus.html. 21 David Harvey, “The Condition of Postmodernity,” in Charles Jenks (ed.), The Post-Modern Reader (London: Academy Editions, 1992), 303. 22 Neal Stephenson, Reamde (New York: William Morrow, 2011). 23 Harvey, “The Condition of Postmodernity,” 310. 24 William Gibson, “Burning Chrome,” http://mith.umd.edu/digitalstorytell ing/wp-content/uploads/GibsonW_Burning_Chrome.pdf. 25 Gibson, “Burning Chrome.” 26 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927; London: E. Arnold, 1953). 27 See Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. 28 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953; New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 74 29 Gibson, “Burning Chrome.” 30 Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014). E-Book. 31 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 26, 154. 32 Michael M. Weinstein (ed.), Globalization: What’s New (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 2. 33 See Andrew Jones, Globalization: Key Thinkers (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 34 See chapter 24 in this volume for an extended treatment; Charles Paulk, “Post-National Cool: William Gibson’s Japan,” Science Fiction Studies 38/3 (November 2011), 478–500. 35 See Yan Wu, “‘Great Wall Planet’: Introducing Chinese Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 40/1 (March 2013), 1–14 36 Wong Kin Yuen, “On the Edge of Spaces: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and Hong Kong’s Cityscape,” Science Fiction Studies 27/1 (March 2000); www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/80/wong80art.htm. For the notion of “spatial practice” see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974; Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998). 37 See Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). 38 Daniel Brook, “The Head of the Dragon: The Rise of New Shanghai,” in Places: Public Scholarship on Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism; https:// placesjournal.org/article/head-of-the-dragon-the-rise-of-new-shanghai/.

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39 Brian Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction,” in Brian Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 47–64. 40 Ursual Heise, Chronochisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 55. 41 Bruce Sterling, “Taklamakan,” in David Hartman and Kathryn Cramer (eds.), The Hard SF Renaissance (New York: Tome Doherty, 2002), 865, 869.

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The art market and the revival of painting in the 1990s Frazer Ward

The art market we have today did not pop up overnight . . . The big project of the art market over the last 25 years has been to convince everyone that works of art, though they don’t bear interest, offer such dramatic and consistent capital gains along with the intangible pleasures of ownership – what Berenson might have called “untactile values” – that they are worth investing large sums of money in. This creation of confidence, I sometimes think, is the cultural artifact of the last half of the twentieth century, far more striking than any given painting or sculpture.

Robert Hughes, “On Art and Money,” New York Review of Books (1984)

During the 1980s – which for the sake of argument ran from the late 1970s until the early 1990s – the art world (or factions therein) asked postmodernism to contain neo-expressionist paintings by Francesco Clemente and Anselm Kiefer, and “surrogate” paintings by Allan McCollum; institutionally critical works that are only residually paintings, by Daniel Buren, and performances exposing colonial imaginings of the Caribbean and its peoples by Coco Fusco; the photographs of Cindy Sherman exploring gender and genre, and Sherrie Levine’s interrogation of originality via photographic copies of historical photographs, as well as Richard Prince’s “rephotography” of Marlboro advertisements.1 Postmodernism has been used to label Jeff Koons’s appropriations of commercial goods and icons – and any appropriations at all – and Carrie Mae Weems’s redeployments of racist domestic objects. Artworks that deal with data, with the discursive constructions of social categories, with new media, which mix painting and photography, installations, the imagistic architecture of Michael Graves and the “deconstructionist” swirls and blobs of Frank Gehry have all been called postmodernist. Clearly at this point it is difficult to conceive of postmodernism as a style, any more than an early and influential political distinction articulated by Hal Foster is sustainable. “In cultural politics today,” Foster wrote in 1983, 369

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frazer ward a basic opposition exists between a postmodernism which seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo and a postmodernism which repudiates the former to celebrate the latter: a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction.2

Whether postmodernism was a period, or the mode of cultural production integral to a new mode of postindustrial capitalism, it expressed contested sets of relations to modernism.3 The “postmodernism of reaction,” represented in the aesthetic sphere by neo-expressionist and/or historicist painting which appropriated styles and motifs from historical sources as though styles and motifs were all that history had to offer (Julian Schnabel, David Salle), separated culture from society in a way entirely congruent with the Thatcherite and Reaganite neoconservatism that brought with it the notion that “there is no such thing” as society: “Neoconservatism shifts onto cultural modernism the uncomfortable burden of a more or less successful capitalist modernization of the economy and society.”4 This is a postmodernism that is apocalyptic either in the sense that it ultimately desires a return to premodernity, as in the call for a religious revival, or in the sense that it sees an end to history in that successful capitalist modernization – the universalization of Western neoliberalism.5 The “postmodernism of resistance,” exemplified in McCollum’s play with notions of authorship and originality, or Sherman’s investigations of the regimes of representation in which women were captured, was more closely bound to aspects of modernist practice (the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, for instance). But under the influence of poststructuralist philosophy (a.k.a. “theory”), this version of postmodernism was much more anti- or posthumanist, and much more inclined to see social and cultural categories as constructed in discourse, which is to say, bound to history. In this context, the universalization of Western liberalism could not be a good thing. The distinction between these versions of postmodernism would to some extent give way to market forces, via the commodification of critique, and their respective relations to modernism would necessarily come to be seen as more intertwined and complex: by the mid-1990s Foster would argue for a view of modernism and postmodernism in parallax, that is, dependent on the angle of vision provided by our own position in the present.6 Nonetheless, the contours of the art-historical modernism that postmodernism responded to, one way or another, map the derivations of avant-gardism in the post-1945 period. A well-established argument holds that after World War II, with much of Europe in ruins and Paris’s authority as a cultural center compromised by the Vichy regime, New York

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emerged as the center of the global artworld. The “unprecedented national and international success” of the new American avant-garde was due “not solely to aesthetic and stylistic considerations,” but “to the movement’s ideological resonance.”7 The shift from Paris to New York required a kind of art that could be seen at once as modern, American, and international, and that arrived in the form of the primarily abstract painting that came to be known as abstract expressionism, which drew on European avant-garde models, as well as a primitivist interest in Native American cultural forms. Hence the importance of Barnett Newman’s championing of Native American art: [T]o understand modern art, one must have an appreciation of the primitive arts, for just as modern art stands as an island of revolt in the stream of western European aesthetics, the many primitive art traditions stand apart as authentic aesthetic accomplishments that flourished without benefit of European history.8

Abstract expressionism was supported by a nascent local market for local modern art,9 and a range of art-critical voices that positioned it as the most advanced art of the moment. There were the formalist terms articulated by Clement Greenberg, for whom modernism’s task was to exhibit and make explicit “what was irreducible not only in art in general, but in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself.”10 And there were the existentialist terms of Harold Rosenberg, for whom “at a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”11 With the codification of American liberalism by the end of the 1940s, exemplified in the publication of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center in 1949, abstract expressionism was able to be mobilized by US government agencies in the service of an American ideology of individualism. Tracking the involvement of a major institutional supporter of abstract expressionism, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in foreign policy/cultural imperialism, Eve Cockcroft has argued that [l]inks between cultural cold war politics and the success of Abstract Expressionism are by no means coincidental, or unnoticeable. They were consciously forged at the time by some of the most influential figures controlling museum policies and advocating enlightened cold war tactics designed to woo European intellectuals.12

If abstract expressionism is primarily associated with the gestural paint handling of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning, in

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Europe in the immediate postwar period there emerged an abstract painting of clotted, abject surfaces, under the sign of art brut (Jean Dubuffet) or art informel (Jean Fautrier, Wols), soon expanded on in the work of, for instance, the Cobra group (named for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), via further avant-gardist primitivism and an interest in monstrous creatures, neither human nor animal (Karel Appel). These European artists were not programmatically committed to abstraction: Asger Jorn would soon add gestural markings to reused figurative paintings, undercutting any priority for either. In Latin America, interpretations of geometric abstract painting persisted, for instance concrete art in Brazil, and in Japan, by 1950 Jiro Yoshihara had translated a traditional calligraphic gesture into the language of abstraction, before presiding over the dynamic, performative activities of the Gutai group (including Kazuo Shiraga’s full-body painting processes). Modernist painting as it developed in the first decade after the war represents a complex field, responsive to the horrors and privations of the war, looking back to the prewar avant-gardes and/or conceiving of a tabula rasa or other new beginning. In a retrospective view informed by feminism and postmodernism, the category of abstract expressionism itself is expanded beyond the half dozen or so white men with whom it has traditionally been most closely associated, to include artists of color (Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff ) and to emphasize the contributions of women artists (Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler). The various strategies employed to promote abstract expressionism, which succeeded in “affirming values that supported an aesthetic elite of white heterosexual males,” at the same time “distorted the potential of those same strategies and themes to empower work that affirmed other identities, other experiences, and other relations to power.”13 More broadly, the dominance of abstract expressionism in art-historical accounts of the 1940s and 1950s has tended until recently to suppress more complex, global understandings of modernism.14 Yet the modernism from which postmodernism departs has often been a reductive art-historical category, that Greenbergian, medium-specific, American modernism in which each medium advances and its quality is evaluated in terms of its reflection upon its own essential characteristics. Painting, in this view, is understood as the application of pigment to a flat surface, and it depends for its autonomy – its ability to separate itself from other mediums and extra-artistic forms of culture, and to provide an experience that only it can provide – on the rigor with which it investigates and refines these parameters.15 But this narrow version of modernism became the enemy of postmodernism after the fact, which is to say, well

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after the delayed reception of the implications of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades began to manifest in the mid-1950s.16 Duchamp’s readymades, commodity items purchased and recontextualized as art objects, had appeared earlier in the twentieth century, but for all that Duchamp can be understood as a kind of pre-postmodernist, his reception, insofar as it informed postmodernism, began in the fifties. The work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg filtered Duchamp through the influence of the avant-garde composer John Cage.17 Johns’ “readymade” subject matter (flags, targets, alphabets, numbers, etc.), and Rauschenberg’s “combines,” which combined elements of painting and sculpture, and his two-dimensional works incorporating painting and collaged mass-media materials, were arguably central to a series of developments that significantly reordered the discourse of painting. In “Other Criteria,” his essay of 1970 that marked an important early instance of the use of “postmodernism,” Leo Steinberg interpreted Rauschenberg’s additive compositional method on the model of the flatbed printing press (this is a very different mode of horizontality than the “arena” that Rosenberg had seen in Pollock painting on a canvas spread out on the studio floor). For Steinberg, Rauschenberg’s “flatbed picture plane” fundamentally reordered the visual field of art, and in shifting painting – or art-making altogether – away from a vertical orientation aligned with the human figure and its vision, ushered in postmodernism and displaced painting from its centrality to art-historical narrative.18 “Something happened” in painting around 1950, wrote Steinberg, citing Rauschenberg and Dubuffet: [T]hese pictures no longer simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards – any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed – whether coherently or in confusion.19

Simultaneous and subsequent developments continued this decentering process. In Japan, Yoshihara read Pollock’s work as an engagement with the material of life, and exhorted Gutai artists (Gutai meaning “concreteness”) to “do what no one has done before,” in response to which they produced a wide range of performative and environmental works.20 In the United States, Allan Kaprow developed participatory environments and happenings on the back of a strong misreading of Pollock’s work, arguing on the basis of the all-over composition of his paintings that Pollock

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“ignored the confines of the rectangular field in favor of a continuum going in all directions simultaneously, beyond the literal dimension of any work.”21 For Kaprow, this opened painting up to the world: Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists . . . they will disclose entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents.22

In Brazil, neo-concrete art saw artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica move from abstract painting to relational and immersive works. Fluxus and Pop Artists addressed themselves, in different ways, to the culture of commodification and consumption. Fluxus, putatively under the leadership of George Maciunas, was a loose and geographically widespread network that was more self-consciously avant-gardist, with a stronger neo-Dadaist, “anti-art” bent than Pop, and included artists with a more developed interest in emerging video technologies – Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, for example.23 Pop, of course, in the work of its most influential practitioners (Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol), traded in images drawn from mass culture, arguably effacing distinctions between everyday goods (Campbell’s soup) and celebrity icons (Marilyn Monroe). Pop serves as a precursory sign for later debates as to whether the postmodernism of the 1980s was critical of or complicit with consumer capitalism. Thomas Crow has argued for a critical valence in Pop Art, seeing Warhol’s early “disasters” as engaged with truths beneath the superficiality of life under capital, while Jean Baudrillard sees Pop as marking the integration of the artwork into the political economy of the sign under capitalism.24 Hal Foster observed that “both camps make the Warhol they need, or get the Warhol they deserve; no doubt we all do,” while asking whether Pop could be both “critical and complacent.”25 Around the globe, there developed forms of performance and other time-based media, and further ramifications of the Duchampian legacy after Pop, which in various ways undercut the primacy of the purely visual object of painting. Conceptual art frequently substituted linguistic data for visual, and posed the question of whether there needed to be any object at all, in order for there to be an artwork. Lawrence Weiner’s “Statements” include the proposition, “The work need not to be built.”26 In the realm of sculpture, minimalism’s affectless, modular geometries, banishing internal, part-to-part compositional relationships, sought to emphasize spatial

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relations, and reflexively embodied durational experiences of static artworks.27 This opened onto the site-specificity of Earthworks produced by the likes of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and in turn the “expanded field” of postmodernism. In an influential structuralist account of site-based practices derived from sculpture, Rosalind Krauss argues that, the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.28

The new forms that emerged between the mid-fifties and the end of the seventies virtually all represented processes of “deskilling,” relative to traditional and modern modes of artistic virtuosity.29 Deskilling, and the post-medium qualities of postmodernism, required a rethinking of traditional and modern notions of authorship and originality. Symptomatic of this was the dual influence during the 1980s of Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” from 1967.30 Benjamin’s essay, a proleptic account of the effects of mass media on art, saw the end of the auratic artwork in its circulation as photographic reproduction, while Barthes’s provided a posthumanist critique of the notion of an author as standing intentionally behind a text, substituting instead a subject produced in and by language: “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination,” and the birth of this reader “must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”31 It is not a coincidence that photography’s ties to the artworld, and to the art market, had been strengthened during the mid-1970s, especially via attention paid to it in the pages of art magazines including Artforum.32 The primacy of traditional mediums had been progressively undermined since the 1950s, with the incorporation of mass-cultural materials, frequently photographic, into a range of art practices. There had been, that is, a trend toward breaking down traditional cultural hierarchies (high vs. low, elite vs. popular) within the production of art, if without affecting the ability of the market to recuperate rupture for tradition. As much as there was activist cultural production that accompanied the social movements that spanned the period, from civil rights in the United States through postcolonial independence movements to antiwar movements to the waves of feminism to gay rights, that was not easily integrated into the permanent collections of institutions that conferred certain kinds of value. Even if performance art, for instance, was in significant ways shaped by the protest culture of the 1960s and 1970s, that

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did not mean that it escaped the logic of the market: avant-garde work could serve as window dressing for the business of selling paintings. Vito Acconci acknowledged this in a retrospective reflection on his early performance work. Performance artists “saw the gallery (we wanted to see the gallery) as an analog of the street,” the space of politics. However, “the building-full-of-galleries should have been seen, more sharply, as the analog or representation of the convention center or the shopping mall.”33 Despite such caveats, shifts in art practice since the 1950s could by 1981 be taken altogether by Douglas Crimp to signal the “end” of painting, where painting was understood to be coterminous with a canonical Western narrative of masterpieces and genius, “from Altamira to Pollock.”34 Painting, however, has proven remarkably difficult to kill off.35 Just as Crimp was looking to the site-specific “paintings” of Daniel Buren (passing sets of stripes through multiple distribution formats) to illuminate the exhaustion of painting, elsewhere claims were being made for a “New Spirit in Painting.”36 Here we begin to see two aspects of postmodernism converge. For Crimp, painting’s status as the leading commodity form of art was rendered historical in the face of post-medium (and in Buren’s case, poststudio) practices, and this provided a counter to formalist art history. At the same time, to posit the end of painting against a progressivist historical arc, “from Altamira to Pollock,” that swept up every shift in artistic practice on behalf of what was ultimately a Eurocentric tradition, was also to engage with a broader strain in postmodern thought, concerned with “the end of master narratives,” an idea most closely associated with the work of the philosopher and social theorist Jean-François Lyotard.37 For Lyotard, the postmodern condition was characterized by skepticism toward totalizing and especially teleological narratives, whether of progress or freedom, or ones that sought to understand history from a particular vantage point (the West, the winners, white men, the proletariat, etc.). If art history had its own grand narrative – which of course it did, one that traded in masterpieces, genius, and tradition – then that needed to be reexamined. Of course, artists did not stop painting. The end of the master narratives coincided with a boom in the market for contemporary art, which favored painting and was fueled by new money from Wall Street, the strong Japanese yen, aggressive hype on the part of auction houses, and a significant increase in corporate collecting.38 All of this while art was, as it continues to be, a poor investment in conventional economic terms.39 So postmodernism was necessarily unstable discursive ground. The “return” of painting under the banner of figuration flown by the German and Italian neo-expressionists such as Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorf,

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A. R. Penck, Clemente, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi, was accompanied, especially in New York – still, in the eighties, the center of world art – by stock market and real estate money. If much of the art of the previous two decades had involved the critique of the object and commodity status of the artwork, postmodernism, at one level, was used to justify the reinvigoration of traditional means within painting. This did not go uncontested, of course, as Crimp’s intervention makes clear. Benjamin Buchloh saw this return on the model of the “return to order” in European art of the mid1920s, and the artists’ work as retardataire or at best historicist.40 Thomas Lawson argued, to the contrary, for the “idea of tackling the problem” – the collapse of critical distance in the context of the near-total commodification of art – “with what appears to be the least suitable vehicle available, painting.” For Lawson, “the appropriation of painting as a subversive method allows one to place critical aesthetic activity at the center of the marketplace, where it can cause the most trouble.”41 Whether or not Lawson’s argument was quixotic, the larger point is that this was a debate that needed to have been situated more precisely in relation to local contexts, for how painting operated in relation to specific postcolonial circumstances or sets of politically repressive conditions need not have been reduced to avant-gardist terms. Eugenio Dittborn’s paintings addressing political conditions under the Pinochet regime (albeit paintings using photo-screenprinting and other mixed-media elements), folded and airmailed out of Chile in the 1980s, might have suggested this. So might the emergence of contemporary paintings by Australian Aboriginal artists, although the market success of artists such as Clifford Possum, which tended to be attached to neoprimitivist rhetoric, might have obscured its importance. As Ian McLean has subsequently argued, while the artworld embraced Aboriginal art, most commentators were too “nervous” to call Papunya painting modernist or postmodernist: It was a bridge too far. Critics wanted to acknowledge the difference of Papunya painting but not reduce the difference to the exclusionary politics of primitivism. The solution – or compromise – was to call it contemporary as distinct from modern or postmodern art. Papunya painting was the first art movement that demanded this distinction.42

Not all critics wanted to do so, perhaps. But the role of contemporary Aboriginal painting points to the ways in which the postmodernism of the collapse of the master narratives (and poststructuralist theory more generally) exceeded its own elitism and helped to open art up to those voices historically excluded from art-historical narratives.

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Postmodernism would intersect productively with postcolonial discourses, even to the extent that postmodernism had to give way to the globalization of contemporary art. The contemporary moment is seen to have emerged with the exhibition “Magicians of the Earth,” curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou Center, Paris, in 1989, an exhibition that brought work by tribal artists together with work by artists until then more conventionally considered “contemporary.” The thoroughgoing globalization of art that has subsequently developed, accompanied by a shift in chronological sense away from European models (as in, from-modernism-to-postmodernism), was arguably implicit in or enabled by postmodernism aligned with poststructuralist thought, but could not emerge in a context so dependent on a relation, however critical, to modernism.43 The example of Aboriginal painting is relevant here, because, as Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynn wrote in 1993, “[Aboriginal] traditions are contemporary, and Aboriginal art’s contemporaneity challenges Western ways of seeing art history in a chronological and divisional manner.”44 As Helen Molesworth has argued, two other “events . . . shaped the contours of the 1980s:” feminism and the AIDS crisis.45 Molesworth quotes Craig Owens from 1983: Among the most significant developments of the past decade – it may well turn out to have been the most significant – has been the emergence, in nearly every area of cultural practice, of a specifically feminist practice

Feminism has necessarily been engaged with difference, both experientially and theoretically (to the extent that women have often been made to stand in for the category of difference, regardless of the specific operations of power and exclusion that have structured other forms of otherness). Feminists have long understood, both experientially and theoretically, as Owens observes, “that no one narrative can possibly account for all aspects of human experience,” any more than any one theoretical discourse can.46 In these aspects, at least, feminism is interwoven with postmodernism (though of course there are postmodern and antipostmodern feminists, and feminist and antifeminist postmodernists). What feminism tended to insist upon – even in its most rigorously psychoanalytic, theoretical reaches (as in the work of the postconceptual artist, Mary Kelly) – was the inextricability of experience and theory. While the art market was booming, the artworld was being decimated by HIV/AIDS. In retrospect, it is difficult to consider postmodernism aside from the more significant historical event of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For all that neoconservatives cast postmodernism in an apocalyptic

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light, the AIDS crisis threatened a real apocalypse. HIV/AIDS-devastated bodies brought mortality into the artworld with terrifying immediacy, requiring postmodernism to engage with experience and bypassing it when it didn’t.47 In a dire sense, the AIDS crisis clarified divisions within postmodernism. A debate about the status of painting or any other medium could be seen to invoke exclusive traditions, in the face of the necessity of bringing formerly excluded voices into public discourse, as in the work of David Wojnarowicz, Group Material, and Felix GonzalezTorres, as well as the “die-ins” organized by ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). On the one hand, some of the theoretical tools of postmodernism proved useful in delineating the ways in which the epidemic was mobilized in discourse (serving to shore up normative heterosexuality against homosexuality, for example); on the other, the AIDS crisis demanded urgency from postmodernism’s investments in the body, desire, and identity, that disallowed the distinction between theory and experience (“mourning and militancy,” as Douglas Crimp would have it).48 After the death of the author, this portended the rise of the artworld identity politics that would fuel the “culture wars” of the 1990s. By the time of the Gulf War of 1990, another mortal crisis, the art market boom had become a bubble, and duly collapsed, along with the confidence that had driven it – though that would soon enough be reanimated, as the art market boomed again after the global financial crisis of 2008. Notes 1 One of the first major exhibitions to address the 1980s included works made between 1979 and 1992. See Helen Molesworth, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s,” in Molesworth (ed.), This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press/ Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2012), 15. 2 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), xi–xii. 3 See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic. See also Jameson’s full account, in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 4 Margaret Thatcher quoted in Douglas Keay, “AIDS, Education and the Year 2000!” Women’s Own, October 31, 1987, 8–10 – and see www.margaret thatcher.org/document/106689; Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic, 7. 5 For capitalism and religious revivalism see Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976); for the “end of history” see Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989).

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6 Hal Foster, “Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?” The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 207. 7 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism. Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 2. 8 Barnett Newman, “Northwest Coast Indian Painting,” Betty Parsons Gallery, 1946, quoted in Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 120. 9 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 67–77. 10 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” (1965) in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, (eds.), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 5. 11 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” (1952) in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 589. 12 Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” (1974) in Francis Frascina, (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 126. 13 Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), xx. 14 See, for instance, Okwui Enwezor (ed.), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994 (Munich: Prestel, 2001); Alexandra Munroe (ed.), Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Art after 1945 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994); Mari Carmen Ramirez and Héctor Olea (eds.), Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004); Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 15 This is the view articulated by Greenberg, and subsequently championed by Michael Fried, in, for instance, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965), and developed in relation to sculpture in “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, June 1967. 16 For the complex temporality of the neo-avant-garde reception of the “historical” avant-garde of the 1920s, see Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 17 See Branden Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 18 See Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 19 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 84. In “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art” (1962), Steinberg described works by Johns as writing a “new role for the picture plane,” as “a surface observed during impregnation observed as it receives a message or imprint from real space.” Other Criteria, 51. 20 Alexandra Munroe, “All the Landscapes: Gutai’s World,” in Munroe and Ming Tiampo (eds.), Gutai: Splendid Playground (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2013), 22.

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21 Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” (1958) in Jeff Kelley (ed.), Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 5. 22 Kelley (ed.), Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life, 7–9. 23 Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 24 Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Serge Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jean Baudrillard, “Pop—An Art of Consumption,” in Paul Taylor (ed.), Post-Pop (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 25 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, 130. (Foster goes on to bring the apparently opposed terms together in a category of “traumatic realism.”) 26 Lawrence Weiner, “Statements,” (1968) in Ursula Meyer (ed.), Conceptual Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 217–8. 27 See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1875 (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975); Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968). 28 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” (1979) reprinted in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 289. 29 Ian Burn, “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath,” (1981) in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, (eds.), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 395. See also John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007). 30 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). Benjamin’s essay these days appears in a new translation as “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” but Illuminations was what circulated in English in the 1980s. 31 Barthes, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 148. 32 Martha Rosler. “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience,” (1979) in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum/David R. Godine, 1984). 33 Vito Acconci, “Performance After the Fact,” New Observations 95 (May–June 1993), 28. 34 Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981). The phrase, “from Altamira to Pollock” was used by Barbara Rose in the catalog for the exhibition American Painting: The Eighties (Buffalo: Thorney-Sidney Press, 1979), described by Crimp as a “dazzling compendium of received ideas about the art of painting,” 74. 35 Frazer Ward, “Undead Painting: Life After Life in the 1980s,” in Molesworth (ed.), This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s.

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36 Christos Joachimedes (ed.), New Spirit in Painting: The Catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition (London: Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1981). 37 See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 38 For accounts of factors playing into the boom, see, for instance, Meg Cox, “Boom in Art Market lifts Prices Sharply, Stirs Fears of a Bust,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 1986; Grace Glueck, “Tastemakers,” New York Times, April 30, 1987; John Russell, “Clapping for Money at Auctions: The Sour Smell of Success,” New York Times, May 21, 1989; Peter Elsworth, “The Art Boom: Is It Over, or Is This Just a Correction?” New York Times, December 16, 1990. 39 Ben Davis, “On Art and Investment,” Art Agenda, March 25, 2014, www.artagenda.com/reviews/on-art-and-investment/. 40 See Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” in Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism. 41 Thomas Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting,” in Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism, 163–4. 42 Ian McLean, “How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art,” in McLean, (ed.), How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Contemporary Art (Sydney: Institute of Modern Art/Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, 2011), 333–4. 43 Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 44 Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynn, “Blak Artists, Cultural Activist,” Australian Perspecta 1993 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales), xi. Quoted in McLean, How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art, 340. 45 Molesworth, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s,” 16. 46 Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminist and Postmodernism,” in Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic, 61, 64. 47 See, for example, Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October, 51 (Winter 1989). 48 See Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” October 43 (Winter 1987).

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Hip-hop is (not) postmodern James Braxton Peterson

Emerging in the mid-1970s across several neighborhoods of inner-city New York, hip-hop culture can be considered both a contributing factor to the postmodernist artistic movement even as it might also be seen as one of the postmodernist movement’s most glorious and ostensibly recognizable products. Hip-hop is at once a progenitor of and the progeny of postmodern sensibilities – most especially of the movement’s penchant for heterogeneity, its complex engagements with structuralism and modernism (proper), and its playful deformation of the mastery of semiotics and linguistic representation. The fundamental elements of hip-hop culture – breaking/break dancing, graffiti art, rapping/MC-ing, and DJ-ing/ “turntablism” – each has its own distinct and interlocking historical narrative of emergence within the loosely formed artistic and cultural movement readily recognized as hip-hop culture. Each element, as well as the culture taken as a whole, is inextricably bound to a range of categories, aesthetic choices, and socioeconomic realities that are also fundamental to our best understanding of the various iterations and interpretations of postmodernism. In short, hip-hop’s explosion into popular culture and its international proliferation over the course of the eighties is one of the most distinctive phenomena of postmodernism’s major phase. Although definitions and redefinitions of postmodernism abound in this volume, I will follow Mike Featherstone’s discussion of the complex relationships between postmodernism and the arts in the following reflections on the extent to which hip-hop culture might (or might not) be considered postmodern. Amongst the central features associated with postmodernism in the arts are: the effacement of the boundary between art and everyday life; the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between high and mass/popular culture; a stylistic promiscuity favoring eclecticism and the mixing of codes; parody, pastiche, irony, playfulness and the celebration of the surface

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james braxton peterson “depthlessness” of culture; the decline of the originality/genius of the artistic producer and the assumption that art can only be repetitious.1

Featherstone adeptly captures many of the governing principles of hiphop art: (1) that it be appropriative and that it is also appropriated; (2) that it is repetitious and in fact relies on repetition as a fundamental figure of the culture itself, through practices such as sampling, remixing, and remaking; and (3) that it flouts the boundaries of art and everyday life – a phenomenon that I will consider briefly later as hip-hop’s ongoing engagement with both materialism and mortality.

Grandmaster narratives Each fundamental element of hip-hop culture has produced its own “grandmaster” narratives. Such narratives inform a particular element’s development within the culture. A grandmaster narrative makes a case for a particular element’s viability within the discourses of the culture. This development unfolds historically with the element in question and occasionally through various anecdotal narratives of the elements of the culture. If postmodern theory “rejects modern assumptions of social coherence and notions of causality in favor of multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy” then hip-hop is postmodern in spirit.2 The definitional discourses on hip-hop culture embrace multiplicity and fragmentation as the means through which hip-hop is critically framed. Moreover, the elemental discussions and definitions of hip-hop – that is, thinking of hip-hop as being comprised of the four elements mentioned earlier – inherently represent plurality, multiplicity, and fragmentation. These attributes are hallmarks of what most scholars/cultural critics associate with postmodern aesthetics. Thus certain “grandmaster” narratives of the culture speak to its penchant for indeterminacy and a certain kind of historical storytelling that often implies the culture’s complex interface with traditional conceptualizations of postmodern theory. If postmodernism seeks to complicate (if not undermine) our abiding sense of the master narratives of modernity, then consider the formulation of “grandmaster” narratives in hip-hop as amalgamating the impulse to undermine accepted, conventional modes of defining cultural moments (and movements) with an aesthetic affinity for postmodernism reflected through the figure of the Grandmaster within hip-hop culture. The moniker Grandmaster is a postmodern modifier in some ways meaning master of appropriation. This appropriation takes shape in at least two ways: (1) by appropriating texts, histories, and other tokens of a

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bygone modernist Black musical era or eras and (2) by becoming the actual subject of appropriation and/or through appropriating one’s artistry/artistic production. At issue here are the (postmodern) cultural narratives that inform the artistic legacies of, for example, figures such as Grandmaster Caz and/or Grandmaster Flash. Caz (né Curtis Fisher) hails from the (sometimes contested) birthplace of hip hop culture – the South Bronx. His attendance at hip-hop’s first party, organized by the legendary DJ Kool Herc and his claim to being the first simultaneous MC/DJ in hip-hop history provide some sense of his place amongst the (postmodern) narratives of origin with which hip-hop discourses continue to be obsessed. Caz earned or appropriated the title of Grandmaster based upon his artistic work as one of the earliest rappers in hip-hop’s brief history, but the hip-hop narrative most often associated with Grandmaster Caz is the story about his rhymes being “borrowed” by Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson, a member of the Sugar Hill Gang, a rap trio credited with projecting rap music into the mainstream with the immensely popular single, “Rapper’s Delight,” released in 1979. Grandmaster Caz received no formal or official credit for his most popular, best-known lyrics. He has received no royalties for one of the most-played commercial rap singles, and his backgrounded subjectivity in the postmodern narratives of hip-hop origins suggests certain postmodern frames for hip-hop culture, especially rap music. First, the questions of authorship, copyrights, copying or in “old school” hip-hop parlance “biting” – the theft of another artist’s style or artistry – all come into play at the onset of rap music’s introduction to the popular market place. This is to say nothing of the fact that the musical track that accompanies “Rapper’s Delight” is a near complete “sampling” or full-on interpolation of Chic’s “Good Times,” a popular disco single released in the same year. Authorship and authenticity were both overdetermined by postmodernist frames at the onset of rap music’s popular introduction to the world. Scholar and cultural critic Jeff Chang argues that for “the Bronx [hip-hop] heads,” the popular emergence of “Rapper’s Delight” was a “sham.”3 Second, hip-hop’s first popular single was a “sham” in at least two ways: the pilfering or borrowing of the lyrics of a Grandmaster without giving him official credit and the fact that none of the three rappers on “Rapper’s Delight” was considered to be an authentic/ credible progenitor of the culture. It’s almost as if rap music’s introduction to the mainstream was a triumph of appropriation: appropriation of both music and lyrics, obscuring both authorship and cultural origins and signaling the ways in which the cultural logic of late capitalism appropriates culture and positions it as a dominant force in the postmodern era.4

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“Rap proved to be the ideal form to commodify Hip Hop culture. It was endlessly novel, reproducible, malleable, perfectible.”5 Popular hip-hop music would, of course, go on to become one of the most dominant forms of (sub)culture in the first phases of postmodernism, but the subjugation of one of the culture’s original Grandmasters also works to empty this titular appropriation of any of the stable meanings ascribed to it in other, more mainstream cultural spheres (e.g., chess or martial arts, both of which feature Grandmasters). Caz then, is a Grandmaster who is not “grand” in the sense of being acknowledged or well-known. Nor is he a “master,” even of his own lyrics and legacy within the culture of hip-hop or its emergence as a dominant popular form. That said, the story of Grandmaster Caz is nevertheless a significant postmodern narrative within hip-hop culture. It reflects the skepticism inherent in postmodernism’s critique of master narratives. “Sceptical of such ‘grand narratives,’ postmodernism instead values the self-legitimating ‘little’ narratives of local groups, limited institutions, and subcultural enclaves.”6 Caz’s Grandmaster title is a function of early hip-hop artists’ self-legitimating efforts, even in the face of (and in concert with) the withering forces of late capitalistic appropriation. But the Grandmaster title in hip-hop also relies heavily on the “little narratives of local groups,” in this case those artisans, aficionados, and fans in the Bronx who knew of Caz’s lyrical genius and were able to (and continue to) tell the story of how the recording and mainstream release of one of rap music’s most popular early singles was a “sham.” The place of Grandmaster Flash (a.k.a. Joseph Sadler) in the postmodern origin narratives of hip-hop culture is more generally acknowledged than Grandmaster Caz’s place in those narratives. He has had a more successful career in terms of mainstream recognition as well as economic and artistic access. Flash takes his name from that kitsch postmodern cult icon, Flash Gordon, but it is his scientific praxis that most reflects the sui generis postmodern ethos within hip-hop culture. Again, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop adeptly captures the postmodern narratives of the culture through the words and stories of the artisans themselves. Sadler tells Chang: “I was a scientist looking for something. Going inside hair dryers, and going inside washing machines and stereos and radios, whatever you plugged into the wall.”7 This open search for “something” transformed the ways that hip-hop DJs manipulated modern technology in order to rupture, sample, cut, scratch, and cross-fade records on/between two turntables. If we credit hip-hop culture with transforming the turntable from a modern machine that simply plays music into a postmodern instrument that produces both prerecorded and original sounds, then the

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scientific ingenuity of Joseph Sadler should be considered fundamental to that transformative process. A case could be made for foregrounding hip-hop DJs in any discussions of hip-hop culture as an exemplary extension/reflection of postmodernism. The DJ isolated break beats through the manual manipulation of modernist technology, forever altering how we listen to and play music – and this was accomplished well before digital transmission of music and the advent of the iPod. DJs harvest the musical sounds of bygone eras and repurpose them for new generations of listeners and kinesthetic artisans who continue to revel in the mash-up-ability of the aural tokens that constitute hiphop music. DJs have been musicologists and historians and they have become musical producers, directly contributing to the democratization of musical production even as they have forced the musical production industry to adjust to their postmodern ways of creating, manipulating, and recording music. This is to say nothing of the adjustments that copyright law and intellectual property rules have had to make to accommodate these new ways of reusing, remixing, and revising previously recorded music. The traditional disc jockey played music on the radio or in a particular venue. Hip-hop DJs mixed, cut, and otherwise manipulated music to appeal to the aesthetic inclinations of a largely socially invisible population of inner-city young people. The fact that the audience expanded to incorporate popular culture itself along with the mall crowd of mainstream (read: “white”) America, and then the rest of the world beyond, only further underscores the postmodern force of the musical production of rap music.

The writing on the wall(s) If DJs can be foregrounded in the postmodern discourses around hip-hop culture then graffiti art and its artisans might be considered to occupy the background of the culture even as it serves as the ubiquitous backdrop to the scenes and environs within which hip-hop culture was born. Rage is Back (2013), a novel by Adam Mansbach, captures the postmodern ethos of graffiti art and its integral relevance to the other elements of hip-hop culture. By about the third time that Adam Mansbach’s narrator in Rage is Back refers to himself as “your boy here,” Kilroy Dondi Vance will have utterly endeared himself to even the most uninitiated reader. Dondi’s narration anchors a novel that both deconstructs and deepens the mythos in and around hip-hop culture’s lost element – graffiti art or “writing” as it is often referred to by those who (are in the) know in the storyworld of

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novel. Hip-hop cultural knowledge and history are at the forefront of Mansbach’s foray into the collective conscious of the hip-hop generations.8 Knowledge is power for hip-hop heads and, in Rage is Back, Dondi drives the narrative through the artistic archives of graf art, DJ-ing, underground hip-hop and the literal underground itself. Mansbach achieves these feats by showcasing the breadth and depth of his own experience(s) within hip-hop culture, coupled with an encyclopedic, liberal deployment of relevant literary allusions to everything from alternative drug use to Homer’s Odyssey. Mansbach’s reverent insight into the little-known world of authentic graffiti artists is both the most compelling aspect of the novel’s multilayered narrative and a postmodern achievement unto itself: “If you don’t know – now you know.” And this sensibility seeps into each and every sentence about rival graffiti crews, train bombing (the occasionally dangerous practice of spray-painting trains), and selling out in Soho, where the high-art world was on the lookout for graffiti art that could be co-opted. The fictional graffiti crew around which the narrative of Rage is Back centers, The Immortal Five, a “name long smudged with irony,” consists of Dondi’s dad, RAGE; his murdered friend, AMUSE; Dondi’s blind friend and mentor, Ambassador “FEVER” Dengue; SABOR, who commits suicide soon after AMUSE’s murder; and the resident hustler of the crew, CLOUD NINE. What’s left of the crew in 2005 – a discombobulated RAGE, a nearly blind FEVER, and CLOUD fresh out of jail – work together with Dondi and his mother Karen, also a former graffiti artist, to avenge the cover-up of AMUSE’s murder in the most spectacular fashion possible for a washed-up crew of old school graf artists. If Mansbach’s schooling of the reader in the world of graffiti writers isn’t enough, Rage is Back also features shorter but nonetheless intense courses on DJ-ing – via an ode to Kid Capri’s masterful record selection skills – and on MC-ing or rapping through the novel’s dizzying array of allusions, metaphors, analogies, and similes. Dondi’s skillful narration features more similes than the oeuvre of a rapper who’s been in the game for over a decade. Some of them – when, for example, someone falls “like the first guy who jumped from the North Tower” – will haunt the reader well beyond the experience of reading the novel itself, but others serve in the aggregate to imbue Dondi’s storytelling skills with “greatest-of-all-time” status in the who’s-your-favorite-rapper discourses that continue to drive much of the talk about hip-hop culture. Rage is Back also explores the underbelly of the city. In addition to situating the lived realities of riskembracing graffiti artists within the context of lost New York City subway

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tunnels, and the near mythic homeless underground dwellers popularly known as the “Mole People,” Dondi’s self-reflexive and intermittently selfconscious narration produces meticulous imagery of the world beneath the surface of New York City. In a simultaneous direct shout-out to the “silent oppressed” of the hip-hop world and to the annals of Black literary history, the underground passages of Rage is Back construct the substance of graffiti lore in the form of a postmodern novel. Graffiti art’s underground-ness (i.e., background-ness) is also underscored in the opening essay of hip-hop poet Saul Williams’s Dead Emcee Scrolls (2006). The title of the text, which features creative essays and poetry, signifies on the Dead Sea Scrolls.9 For Williams, the (still) unsolved murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G./Biggie Smalls/Christopher Wallace point to a metaphysical death of the culture itself. This death manifests itself in the emergence of a certain aesthetic engagement with hip-hop music. Williams laments the first time he “ever heard people overtly appreciating beats and flow over content.” And although he casts this fictional discussion about his emergence as a hip-hop poet within the discourse of an aesthetic shift away from lyrical content in hip-hop music, the underpinnings of this lament reflect the market forces making a powerful intervention into hip-hop culture. The music is becoming more formulaic in its focus on themes of violence, misogyny, and materialism, which help sustain its appeal in the mainstream. For Williams, returning to the mythos that informs graffiti art praxis is one way of recovering the authentic, humble beginnings of hip-hop culture. According to him, “graff writers knew that every aspect of their writing had to be original. They would transform their letters into highly stylistic, barely legible testaments to ghetto inventiveness.” “Writing” here refers directly to the encoded nature of graffiti artistry within hip-hop culture, a theme that Williams deploys to craft his own grandmaster narrative. After moving to New York City for graduate school, Williams journeys underground into the subway tunnels to find some “legendary” graffiti. “[W]e descended the platform and ventured into the darkness . . . I was having flashbacks of Beat Street and Wild Style . . . I remembered the word ‘Spit’ popping up over detailed graffiti. The ultimate dis, defacement of defacement.”10 The allusions to what we can only now refer to as classic hip-hop films establishes the historic-fictional sensibility with which Williams wants to imbue his grandmaster narrative. “Spit” was the tag that became infamous within the storyworld of Beat Street as it was used to ruin more elaborate graffiti pieces in the film. Williams’s description of it as the “defacement of defacement” underscores

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the irony inherent in terms such as “graffiti art” and the complex layering of a postmodern thematic in the practice of exploiting the city as a canvas that in turn can also be written over and/or revised: vandalism of vandalism. Williams ultimately locates a strange graffiti spray can, but there is no spray-paint in the container. Instead he discovers ancient scrolls with indecipherable language written on them. Over time he is able to decipher the code that essentially serves as the foundation for his poetic lyrics at the onset of his career. Although there are many ways of framing and interpreting the poetry of Saul Williams, the postmodern frame established in The Dead Emcee Scrolls is suggestive for his entire oeuvre.

Game theory Historiographers and sociologists who study hip-hop often attribute the emergence of hip-hop culture to postindustrial economic conditions.11 The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs in America’s major cities in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with urban planning decisions and (eventually) fiscal cuts directed at artistic and extracurricular education programs created a perfect socioeconomic storm. Postindustrialism is a consequence of the rise of consumer capitalism, and the latter emerges at the expense of industrialism. The globalization of capitalism that facilitated the outsourcing of American manufacturing disproportionately affected the urban communities that became the aesthetic grounds upon which hip-hop culture took root. Out of the perfect storm of the postindustrial economy, innovation, ingenuity, and material lack created communal situations where young people from a range of ethnic, racial, and regional backgrounds found collective artistic solace in the fundamental elements of the culture: b-boying, DJ-ing, spray-painting, and rapping. Many artists have taken on consumer capitalism’s effects on the hip-hop generation and in inner-city America. Rappers regularly and loosely refer to the effects of globalization, ruthless individualism, the underground economies of drug trafficking, and other aspects/consequences of late capitalism as the game. Lupe Fiasco’s “Put You on Game” (2007) captures hip-hop’s critical engagement with consumer capitalism and its withering effects on inner-city America and the hip-hop generation(s).12 It is a singular achievement in the sense that, through its personification of “the Game” as an ominous amorphous evil entity, it captures the range of approaches that hip-hop artists take to critically engage the consequences on urban environs of the latter stages of globalized capitalism. “Put You on Game” is a postmodern narrative in McHale’s sense, reflecting an ontological dominant. Granted, McHale’s description of ontological

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narrative poetics applies mainly to the novel, and hip-hop songs do not generally function in the same ways that novels do. While some albums might meet the structural criteria for a modern novel, most hip-hop albums do not. Nevertheless, rap music often plays with a range of ontological devices. For McHale “[p]ostmodern narratives probe ontological issues by deploying a repertoire of characteristic devices and strategies,” including “pluralizing the fictional world;” exposing “the ways in which fictional worlds are made or . . . fail to be made;” and “subject[ing] figurative language to . . . intense scrutiny and pressure, laying bare the unsettled relationship between the figurative and the literal,” among others.13 Much of Lupe Fiasco’s early work – Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor (2006) and Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool (2007) – deploys the personification of pathological social institutions/environments such as the Streets or the Game to animate the ontological precariousness of Black life in the postmodern era. His protagonist (or antihero) across these projects is named Michael Young, signifying on the homophonic phrase “my cool young history,” a history rooted in the underground economies of latecapitalist urban America, the consequential violence that attaches to these economies and the seductive nature of conspicuous consumption and materialism at the intersection of lack and desire. In “Put You on Game,” Lupe’s personified figure of “the Game” narrates his pervasiveness throughout all of human culture and existence. Having only recently arrived in inner-city Black America, he claims that “[t]hey love my darkness/I made them heartless/And in return they have become my martyrs/ I’ve been in the poem of many a poet/And I reside in the art of many an artist.”14 In addition to establishing the dominance of “the Game,” these lines also capture the compelling appeal of materialistic consumption among the impoverished would-be martyrs living and dying in the late capitalist stages of the twenty-first century – those urban denizens with limited options and opportunity who are all too willing to risk life and limb for material gain. That postmodern music, poetry, and rap music particularly promote the seductive materialistic trappings of “the Game” further underscores Jameson’s articulation of the cultural logic of late capitalism and the spectacular malaise that postmodern narratives are capable of exposing in certain cultural and socioeconomic conditions. The Game claims responsibility for slavery and colonialism (i.e., “the rape of Africa”) as well as a range of contemporary cultural and socioeconomic maladies: school shootings, the pharmaceutical industries’ price gouging, and the failure of political leadership. Deployment of figurative language, like the personification of the Game itself or oxymoronic turns of phrase

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such as “the trusted misleader,” presents listeners (and cultural critics) with opportunities to join Lupe Fiasco in an “intense scrutiny” of figurative language that ultimately destroys rational boundaries between our world and the dark fictional world that the Game inhabits, dominates, and controls. Specific allusions to other fictional worlds, such as those of the gangster film genre – Scarface and the Corleone family – pluralize the fictional worlds of the song and expose the ways in which the construction of certain fictional worlds lionize the actions of those who engage in the most brutal pursuits of materialistic gain, in turn serving as promotional tools for the martyrs to which the Game refers in “Put You on Game.” The question of the Game’s existence (in our reality) as a personified ontological phenomenon is less significant than the lyrics’ challenge to listeners to confront the human interactions that follow from the automatic imperatives of late-stage capitalist impulses left unchecked in the communities out of which hip-hop culture emerged. In other words, the Game does not have to exist as a person or being for the social, economic, and cultural consequences articulated in “Put You on Game” to be a truth with which underserved, underprivileged, urban folks must contend on a daily basis.

Keeping it real Defining hip-hop exclusively via the socioeconomic deficit models of postindustrialism or the postmodern analytics of late-global capitalism risks obscuring the artistic energy generated by and through the early developments of hip-hop culture.15 One constructive confrontation to consider within hiphop culture’s relationship with postmodernism is how each wrestles with the “crisis of representation.” Hip-hop culture inherits aspects of the African American oral and folk expressive cultural histories – call and response, the sermonic tradition, the blues, spirituals, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). It regularly samples, features, and signifies on these aspects and through the trajectories of these inheritances, hip-hop constructs an overwhelming sense of language’s inherent ability and Black English Vernacular’s (AAVE’s) primacy in terms of communicative capabilities. Add to these attributes the significant fact that rap music cannily exploits AAVE’s capacity to render the semiotics of reality. Hip-hop’s response to the “crisis of representation” is to obsess over authenticity, almost exclusively measured in words/language and in the lyrics of rappers/MCs, some of whom have lived realities quite distant from the narrators in their music or in their films. Not all of them have been so distant from those realities, however: West Coast rapper Snoop Dogg, for instance, was tried early in his career for

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murder, and released a song and EP entitled “Murder was the Case (that they gave me).” He was ultimately exonerated. Eighties Philadelphia rap sensations Steady B and Cool C, who rhymed about the pursuit of a “Glamorous Life,” were both convicted and are currently serving time for bank robbery and murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson launched his first studio album Get Rich or Die Tryin’, having just survived being shot nine times in an apparent murder attempt related to the underground drug economy of Queens, New York. The blurring of distinctions between violent lived realities and lyrics on rap records has been a persistent feature of hip-hop culture and music. For all of the rappers/artists whose poetic subjectivity is considered distinct from his or her existence in reality, there are several examples of artists for whom this kind of distinction is far less easy to make. The postmodern confusion about the authentic subjectivity of hip-hop artists has had several unfortunate consequences. For emerging artists, the pressure to “keep it real” or subscribe to a limited set of experiential representations of Blackness or urban living – that is, the purported experiences of engaging in the most pathological behaviors (misogyny, materialism, violence, etc.) associated with underground economies – has been intense. This pressure has consequently reduced much of the mainstream offerings of the music, and of the culture as it is represented in cinematic/ televisual media, to flat celebrations of Black pathology. In addition, the American criminal justice system has continued to take its cues from the kinds of institutional biases that certain hip-hop stereotypes continue to inform. The recent spate of federal prosecutions targeting alleged criminals who also happen to be aspiring rappers find government lawyers using rap lyrics in all phases of evidentiary proceedings. Rappers can now find themselves defending their artistic subjectivity in federal courtrooms. Hip-hop has so effectively (and publicly) argued for its own authenticity – its real reflection/representation of the world in which its artisans live – that the government considers the lyrics of alleged criminals as themselves evidence of criminality and pathological behavior. The “crisis of representation” here favors a music industry selling reality to middle American youth, but subjects the (aspiring) hip-hop artist to an explicit level of scrutiny that within the criminal justice system strikes at the heart of the right to free speech as it is articulated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Rap music strikes an especially postmodern chord in those instances when it congratulates our society on the erosion of its own “grand narratives,” especially if and when those narratives are represented by and/or reflected in certain institutions such as public education, the

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criminal justice system, corporate America, and/or the American political system. In many cases, these celebrations of the disappearing grand American narratives literally take the forms of standard and sometimes even high artistic culture to make the point that hip-hop’s celebration of the postmodern condition of American society is also always already irreverently sampling high culture. It does so to make the point that the distinctions between, say, eighteenth-century poetry and rap music are not only arbitrary and inauthentic, but also of no cultural utility whatsoever. Graffiti artist turned Soho art-scene superstar Jean Michel Basquiat was a master at the deployment and manipulation of high art to suggest the erosion of grand American narratives. Several of the artists mentioned earlier here also subscribe to this approach to producing hip-hop artistry. Too many hip-hop producers to name here have sampled classical music, jazz (American classical music), Broadway plays, and/or the themes of high art in order to deconstruct them via the very presence of these tokens in rap music. However, certain rappers also opt to directly highlight the erosion of certain grand narratives. In “The Grand Illusion,” rapper Pharoahe Monch (featuring Citizen Cope) offers a somber commemoration of the loss of privacy and agency in the digital information age. “The Grand Illusion” is less of a celebration of the erosion of the grand narratives of American agency and freedom and more of an oblique distillation of the consequences of our unchecked celebration of technological advancement in the age of neoliberalism. Finally, postmodernism, in both content and form (or subject matter and style) is self-consciously concerned with and aware of gender, racial, regional, and ethnic diversity. Sometimes postmodernism’s engagement with identity politics and the emergent diversity of the world’s populations has been less than satisfactory. Within the world of hip-hop, the ongoing (and very public) debates – mostly on social media – regarding issues of cultural appropriation, authenticity, and white privilege within hip-hop artistry have exposed the limitations of challenging the authenticity of white artists who are more readily acknowledged and awarded by the mainstream industry and the largely white fan base of rap music. In the twenty-first century, there are now white artists who are young enough to have grown up with rap music. Aside from the irony of authenticity debates that have dogged hip-hop from its inception, more vexing to the contemporary discourses of who can and who cannot do hip-hop is the fact that hip-hop music and culture is written, recorded, and performed by Asian youth, Palestinian youth, Ghanaian youth, Indian youth, Russian youth, Dutch youth, French youth, Japanese youth, and so on. Any racial litmus test for access to hip-hop artistry is unsustainable in the twenty-first century.

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Hip-hop culture was created by groups of racially and culturally diverse youth in inner-city America; it absorbed and deployed a variety of African American oral, folk, and musical forms in order to provide a powerful artistic platform for socially invisible youth in American cities – and it did so unintentionally at the center of the postmodern era. One advantage of considering hip-hop culture’s postmodern valence in this vein is the fact that hip-hop’s “diversity” (for lack of a better term) is structurally inherent. In this respect, hip-hop neither warrants nor requires any special consideration or understanding in relationship to some previous movement, epoch, or ethos, along the lines of postmodernism’s ongoing affair with modernism itself. It is here that the hint of an important possibility emerges: Hip-hop may in some ways be more postmodern than postmodernism itself. Notes 1 Mike Featherstone, “In Pursuit of the Postmodern: An Introduction,” Theory Culture & Society 5/2–3 (1988), 203. 2 See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogation (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), 1–33. 3 Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 127–39. 4 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 5 Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, 228. 6 Brian McHale, “Postmodern Narrative,” in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (New York: Routledge, 2005), 456. 7 Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, 112. 8 See Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture (New York: Basic Civitas, 2002). 9 See James Braxton Peterson, The Hip Hop Underground and African American Culture: Beneath the Surface. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2014). 10 Saul Williams, Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings Hip-Hop (New York: MTV Books, 2006), xiv–xv. 11 See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 12 See Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation. 13 McHale, “Postmodern Narrative,” 457, 458. 14 Lupe Fiasco, “Put You on Game” on Lupe Fiasco’s the Cool (December 18, 2007), Atlantic Records (compact disc). 15 See Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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part iv

Interregnum, 1989–2001

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Introduction: after the fall, 1989 Brian McHale and Len Platt

Postmodernism “changed tense” from present to past, Raymond Federman once wrote, on the same date that Samuel Beckett did – December 22, 1989, the day of Beckett’s death.1 That year, while proposed in a spirit of serious play, nevertheless has multiple resonances, often construed in geopolitical terms. The breaching of the Berlin Wall one month before Beckett died marked the symbolic, if not actual, end of the Cold War. As Christian Moraru writing in this volume puts it, the fall of the Wall became “shorthand” for a “world-event,” one that set “in train a radical, epoch-making Wende (‘change’ or ‘turn’).” The dissolution of the Soviet Union and its empire, the bloody suppression of the democracy movement at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the release of Nelson Mandela and the beginning of the end of apartheid – collectively such events certainly seemed to herald the end of one thing and the onset of something else. The US administration of George Bush the elder thought 1989 marked the beginning of a New World Order in which America, as the sole remaining superpower, would inevitably take the global lead, as it did in the First Gulf War (or “Operation Desert Storm”) in 1991. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama put himself notionally on side when he dramatically associated 1989 with the Hegelian (or Kojèvian) “end of history.”2 But American triumphalism, like Fukuyama’s place in the media spotlight, did not last long. Political liberalization in places such as Taiwan, Chile, South Africa, and Indonesia, and market reform in such countries as China and Vietnam carried with it “difficult” and often “unexpected” outcomes. The millenarianist culmination of “reform” also shared uncomfortable synchronicity with terrible geopolitical crises and genocides – the Yugoslav civil war of 1991–5, the first intifada in Palestine and the Rwandan civil war – which the New World Order seemed quite incapable of “managing.” A serious economic slump, in Japan and South East Asia, for example, in the later 1990s, also rained on the parade, undermining emerging “neoliberalism” in pretty well all respects. Indeed, from the perspective of 2015, the 399

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abrupt disappearance of the polarized world of the Cold War in 1989–91 now appears to be less of a decisive break and more of a hiatus – a political interregnum broken by the equally abrupt emergence of the newly polarized (or repolarized) world of the post 9/11 War on Terror. From such perspectives it becomes clear that history did not end in 1989 as Fukuyama imagined it would and neither did postmodernism. On the contrary, from some perspectives this period was where postmodernism appeared to come into its own – to become mainstream. It almost seemed as though what postmodernism had been anticipating and preparing for all along became the state of things in the 1990s, especially in relation to new technologies. Here the year 1989 appears to mark certain kinds of acceleration rather than decisive endings. In 1989 the first of twenty-four satellites that would eventually form the Global Positioning System was placed in orbit; also in 1989 the 486 series of microprocessor was launched by Microsoft Corporation. Along with spreadsheet, word processor, database, and presentation software, this innovation took personal computing out of science fiction and seriously into the homeliness of everyday commodification. In Japan Nintendo made the first Game Boy machine in 1989 – the sales figures for Game Boy, combined with those of its successor Game Boy Color, amounted to nothing short of 118.69 million units, the new platform supporting one of the most recognizable avatars of the 1980s and 1990s – Mario. In the same year, and perhaps even more suggestively, Tim BernersLee made the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client via the Internet. Access to computer technology and networked connectivity, still severely limited at the end of the eighties, exploded in the nineties with the World Wide Web in particular undergoing a utopian and communitarian phase before succumbing to the frenzy of commodification and monetization that was the dot-com boom. The transformative effects of the new digital media were so radical and pervasive that by the turn of the millennium speculation was rife about the approaching end of the codex book and the culture it sustained. All that was solid seemed to be melting into air (or pixels), with cascading cultural side effects, including the emergence of new media of entertainment, new art forms, and (arguably) new models of “cyborg” or “posthuman” subjectivity which in turn produced new “writing” – the subject of Dave Ciccoricco’s chapter in this volume, “Digital Culture and Posthumanism.” The sense of acceleration characterizing the period between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the War on Terror, found clear expression in the cultural production of the nineties interregnum – and not only in

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relation to technology. The nineties were the years of multiculturalism’s flowering, amplified and diversified by the arrival of new waves of immigration from the global South and East, but those same years were also characterized by the backlash against multiculturalism in the so-called culture wars. Ellen G. Friedmann’s contribution to this volume maps these territories, where subcultural and paracultural alternatives – grunge, gangsta rap, indie films, New Age spirituality, Internet culture – proliferated, each enjoying its brief heyday before being swept up into the market economy and becoming “mainstreamed” and made subservient to a mainstream cultural optimism. Here “an awareness of borderland identity and of fluidity in subject positions” led to the hope of a sense of “weness, not in the sense of unified community but in the sense of acceptance of difference or fluidity between the subject positions people occupy in a pluralistic democracy.” Riding the wave of economic globalization and new digital technologies, postmodernism achieved planetary reach in the nineties. A sense of solidarity with the planetary ecosystem and concern for its preservation had already emerged by the end of the sixties, but the succession of environmental disasters over the course of subsequent decades (Three Mile Island, 1979; Chernobyl, 1986; Fukushima, 2011) and a growing awareness of the threat of long-term climate change heightened the urgency of environmentalist and eco-critical discourses by the nineties. The same technological prowess that jeopardized ecosystems also gave environmentalists powerful new tools for imagining, representing and communicating their “sense of the planet.” This planetary imagination increasingly found itself at odds with economic globalization and its competing vision of the planet as resource and market. Also symptomatic of the nineties interregnum were science-fiction thought experiments involving a world order without America. American triumphalism was hardly the only imaginative response to end of Cold War bipolarization; another alternative was to try to imagine a world in which American global leadership, rendered redundant by the disappearance of its Cold War adversary, simply disappeared along with its opposite number. What, or who, might fill the gap? Japan, first of all – the subject of the chapter that opens this section. An economic powerhouse at the beginning of the interregnum phase, Japan appeared to some observers to be the epicenter of global postmodernism. A world dominated by Japan and its allies had already been imagined by Philip K. Dick as early as 1962 in his novel of alternative history, The Man in the High Castle, but a preoccupation with the future cultural dominance

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of Japan only comes fully into its own in the cyberpunk fiction of the eighties. Glimpsed in Ridley Scott’s highly influential science-fiction film Blade Runner (1982), the model of a “Japanized” future emerges definitively in William Gibson’s two trilogies of the eighties and nineties. Takayuki Tatsumi’s contribution in this volume charts the complex multidirectional dynamics behind cultural transfer and exchange as it operated in the real world, one focused across contemporary aesthetics, Japanese tradition, new technologies, and the rise of a “global visual culture.” Speculation about a “Japan-centric” world cooled after the Japanese realestate bubble burst in 1991 and Japan’s economy lapsed into its Lost Decade. What took its place in futuristic fiction was China. Among the most ambitious and provocative of the “China-centric” speculative fictions was the British science-fiction novelist David Wingrove’s cycle of eight immense novels appearing under the collective title of Chung Kuo (1990–7). Wingrove imagines a future planet Earth entirely covered by seven continent-spanning megacities, each governed by one of seven ethnically Han co-emperors. Han civilization dominates everywhere, having submerged or eradicated all other world civilizations, including the European and American cultures. Though traces of paranoid fantasies of Asian domination and a certain amount of exoticizing Orientalism linger in Wingrove’s fiction, his sympathies are very evenly divided between the Han overlords, who struggle to maintain order in a world on the verge of chaotic breakdown, and the submerged populations, some of whom are beginning to resist the Han world order. Again, in the real world, one of the great transformations of the nineties was the reemergence of China on the global stage, not only as an economic and geopolitical powerhouse but also as a cultural presence, the subject of Wang Ning’s chapter in this volume. China underwent “postmodernization” only belatedly, during the New Period of 1978–89. An important catalyzing role in this process was played by Fredric Jameson, whose lectures in the mid-eighties introduced Chinese academics and intellectuals to the concept of postmodernism. By the later nineties, as Wang Ning shows, the process had advanced to the point where China was reexporting postmodernism to the West, especially in the form of visual art, which enjoyed an international vogue. A kind of capstone of the decade’s imagination of the interregnum was Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel of alternative history, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). Here Robinson imagines an alternative past in which the fourteenth-century pandemic of bubonic plague destroyed, not a third of the population of Europe (as it did in real-world history), but 90 percent of it. World history, in this alternative reality, develops without the

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Europeans or the Euro-Americans. Thus, it falls to the Chinese to discover the New World; Renaissance science emerges first in the cities of the Silk Road, between the Islamic and Chinese cultural spheres; the nineteenthcentury Industrial Revolution begins in South India instead of Great Britain; the Great War of the early twentieth century is fought not among the European powers, but between China and Islam; and so on. Robinson’s speculation about a world without Europe reflects the interregnum sensibility, but arrives belatedly in 2002. By then, the depolarized world of the post–Cold War interregnum had already been repolarized – to the manifest relief of some, who welcomed a return to the Manichaean certainties of a new (or renewed) “clash of civilizations,” albeit one differently oriented than the old one. The Years of Rice and Salt stands as a monument to the monstrous and sublime experience of alternativity and multidirectionality of the in-between years, foreclosed by the War on Terror. Does this return to business-as-usual in the imagination (and practice) of geopolitics coincide with another mutation in postmodernism, or mark its true end? A number of chapters in this final section of The Cambridge History of Postmodernism – Stephen Burn’s “Second-Generation Postmoderns,” Christian Moraru’s “Postmodernism, Cosmodernism, Planetarism” and Andrew Hoberek’s “Epilogue – : 2001, 2008 and After” explicitly grapple with mapping the territory of what comes after the postmodern. By the beginning of the nineties, the very term postmodernism was becoming debased coinage, applied so indiscriminately that serious cultural producers no longer wanted to be associated with it. As Burn explains, a younger generation of postmoderns – including William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Colson Whitehead, theoretically astute and sometimes impatient with their elders’ lingering influence – started making their presence felt on the cultural stage, and some observers began to speculate about the emergence of a “post-postmodernism” and to pose the question, “What was postmodernism?” To some the claim that nineties culture had somehow already passed beyond postmodernism to some kind of “post-postmodernism” seemed problematic. Impatience with postmodernism, and eagerness to get “beyond” it, pervasive in the early nineties, was not the same thing as actually breaking through to the “post-post,” as the novelist David Foster Wallace’s career seemed poignantly to demonstrate. Indeed, some mounted the argument that the very resistance to postmodernism in the nineties could be seen as one of the late forms that postmodernism itself takes.3 Burns himself, however, takes a more nuanced line, noting

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that “the generational divide at issue is not the clean split implied by some explanatory labels, nor the fluid continuum implied by others.” Andrew Hoberek writes directly about 9/11, recognizing that for many it registered as a decisive break, marking among other things “the end of the twentieth century.” At the same he doubts that this event in “world history maps easily onto the history of literary and cultural production, and in particular onto the emergence of what observers increasingly describe as post-postmodernism.” Moraru would go further in the direction of imagined continuities, arguing forcefully for an assimilation of postmodernism and globalization – the “dissonant landscape of accelerated globalization,” he claims, gave postmodernism “a chance to globalize itself.” Here Moraru sees the “cosmodern imaginary” as the extension of the ethical and relational impetus in much recent philosophy, theory, and imaginative literature across cultures, globally. Cosmodernism, as the “cultural logic of late globalization,” comprises in Moroaru’s controversial account all the forms of dialogue and interaction among cultures, all the varieties of call-and-response, that the hyper-networked condition of the turn of the millennium makes possible. In these ways all three chapters attempt the task of reconstructing forward, as it were, from the nineties, but they inevitably look backward too, toward an interregnum which defines the contemporaneities of a new millennium. From this double perspective, does 1989–2001 constitute a break, signaling the onset of a new period – perhaps the long-awaited postpostmodernism, its hour come round at last – or does it constitute a period in itself? The answer of course is both and neither. Notes 1 See Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 2 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 3 See Andrew Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 211–21.

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Postmodern Japan and global visual culture Takayuki Tatsumi

From ideology to representation – what to make of Starship Troopers? Whenever any kind of huge disaster occurs, we are likely to witness a paradigm shift of artistic style. For instance, as Anglo-American modernism became visible during and after World War I (1914–18) by transgressing the limit of Victorianism, Japanese modernism came into being after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. Likewise, the Second World War could well be considered as partly responsible for the rise of postmodernism. However, it is still difficult to determine exactly what gave rise to the postmodern spirit. Thus, let me start here by reinterpreting not so much the singular cause as one of the effects we cannot help but call postmodern. Despite the insights provided by a few prophets of postmodernism such as Irving Howe, who published an essay “Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction” as early as 1959, I am tempted to locate the origin of the postmodern spirit roughly in the period between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, a year after the end of direct US military involvement in the Vietnam War. As Raymond Federman once acutely pointed out, Kennedy’s presidency enabled the entire nation to envision the mirror stage in which the American people identified themselves with the image of the young and handsome president representing the American Dream, while his assassination had such a nightmarish and traumatic impact on the American consciousness. Suddenly the American people were doubting the very reality of the events they were witnessing, especially on television. It took certain blunders of the Johnson administration, and subsequently the manipulations and lies of the Nixon administration, and of course the Vietnam War, and the Watergate debacle to awaken America from its mass-media state of illusion and optimism.1 405

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Indeed, President Kennedy symbolized Pax Americana. His assassination marked the advent of a postmodernism that privileged the sense of entropy and disintegration, that is, differentiation from an ideal totality. Thus, this decade between the early 1960s and the early 1970s saw such major postmodern works as Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle ( 1963), Barth’s Giles the Goat Boy (1966), Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967), Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection (1967), Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968), Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and others. It is no accident that this decade produced the bibles of deconstructive criticism taking the place of New Criticism: Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) and Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1971). At first glance, it seems difficult to consider this formula applicable to other national literatures. Yet there are parallels with Japan’s “High Growth Period,” roughly coinciding with the decade that started with the dream of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, which superbly renovated the megalopolis and peaked with the nightmare of the Lockheed Scandal in 1976 involving the prime minister himself; while the former made possible not only futuristic stadiums as modernist masterpieces but also a bullet train nicknamed “Shinkansen,” the latter made the whole nation skeptical about their government. To put it simply, as the United States was forced to leave the Imaginary of the Kennedy presidency for the Symbolic of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, Japan also went through its national dream and nightmare in the very same period, which similarly inspired major works by a number of avant-garde artists and science fiction writers, including Kobo Abe, Shuji Terayama, Juro Kara, Hiroshi Teshigawara, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono, Toru Takemitsu, Shin’Ichi Hoshi, Sakyo Komatsu, Yasutaka Tsutsui, and others. As is the case with the post-JFK decade in the United States, it was the impact of a counterculture radically questioning any kind of authority in the 1960s that gave rise to a number of cutting-edge and pre-postmodernist works of art and literature. Imbibing the Pop Art or underground spirit of Andy Warhol, Japanese avant-gardists all questioned the distinction between the literary and the visual. Apart from Kobo Abe, a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, many of whose novels were made into films by director Hiroshi Teshigawara, Sakyo Komatsu became a professional science-fiction writer after cultivating and abandoning his career of cartoonist, while Yasutaka Tsutsui, a guru of Japanese metafiction whose works paid tribute to

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Nietzsche, Freud, and the Marx Brothers, first gained fame by describing the media-saturated reality with his “pseudo-event” approach, influenced by Daniel Boorstin. Without such avant-garde fictionists as Abe, Komatsu, and Tsutui, Japanese literature could not have developed the heritage of speculative fiction ranging from Koichi Yamano, Yoshio Aramaki, Yuko Yamao, Gen’Ichiro Takahashi, and Yoriko Shono down to Toh Enjoe. The blueprint for postmodern spectacle in the 1960s was the fake funeral for the boxer Toru Rikiishi, produced on March 24, 1970, by Shuji Terayama, a distinguished poet, novelist, playwright, and film director. Toru Rikiishi was the nemesis of another charismatic boxer, Joe Yabuki, the hero of Ikki Kajiwara and Tetsuya Chiba’s manga masterpiece Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow’s Joe, 1968–73). Whereas realist fiction imitated reality, postwar postmodern hyperreality started imitating fiction, redefining even fictional characters as alive and real. Of course, fictional characters are only cardboard masks behind which we find nothing, so existentialist critics regarded Terayama’s fake funeral as simply absurd. Nonetheless, Terayama’s experimental dramaturgy explored the ambiguous distinction between reality and fiction. Only one week after Terayama’s fake funeral for Rikiishi, the Japanese Red Army hijacked the “Yodo,” Japan Airlines Flight 351, declaring “We are Tomorrow’s Joe.” The visual image of Joe’s rebel spirit had already attracted a number of youngsters involved with the student movement in the 1960s. It is ironic that those who wanted to demolish their own reality had already been controlled by and even addicted to a visual narrative of fictional heroes. To put it simply, the fake funeral might have foregrounded the free play of signifiers, but in the late capitalist era it is actually hard to determine whether we real human beings are existential entities or semiotic ghosts. Without appreciating the hegemony of visual images in the postcountercultural era it is impossible to discuss the advent of postmodernism. Let me illustrate this point through the heated controversy that arose in Japan over Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers in 1967, and its aftermath in 1977. When Tetsu Yano’s Japanese translation of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) was published in 1967 by Hayakawa Publishers, distinguished science-fiction critic Takashi Ishikawa, in the May 1967 issue of Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine, accused the author of being a dangerous fascist who approved the necessity of violence as the best strategy for resolving a number of political problems: “I candidly repudiate the novel. However, this is undoubtedly a masterpiece I would recommend to the young readers.” Ishikawa’s review ended up by receiving a number of responses from the readers. In the following issue (June 1967) Akira Taji, a self-claimed ultra-rightist who despised Heinlein’s ideology as merely

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pseudo-fascism, pointed out Ishikawa’s contradiction: while he had long advocated for the idiosyncratic imagination of science fiction liberated from all the existing ideologies and authorities, here Ishikawa appeared to be recommending as a “masterpiece” a novel that he also thought embodied fascist evil. However, as Takayuki Sugiyama in turn pointed out, Heinlein was writing from within versions of patriotic culture that impinged directly – John W. Campbell, editor-in-chief of Analog magazine, which regularly published Heinlein, strongly supported the political cause of the Vietnam War. What is at issue here is not limited to Heinlein’s Nietzschean philosophy of power. This Starship Troopers controversy raised the question of whether or not Japanese readers would accept American ideology in the heyday of the Vietnam War.2 Of course, this is an aporia, for without American ideology we could not have witnessed the rise of science fiction as a literary genre in the first place. Nonetheless, we could well regard this controversy as testifying to a postwar turbulence where people were still operating in conventionally ideological ways. The reception of Starship Troopers in the 1960s would be revolutionized by the updated impression of the novel in the 1970s. Let me recall here another legacy of the novel Starship Troopers: its introduction of the concept of the “powered suit.” In 1977, precisely a decade after the first publication of the Japanese edition of the novel, Hayakawa publishers issued its new paperback edition with a cover illustration of the powered suit beautifully drawn by Naoyuki Kato of Studio Nue, and this image would go on to have a profound impact on the design of “mobile suits” in Japanese robot anime, starting with Gundam. Heinlein describes the suit as making its wearer look like “a big steel gorilla.” Although it weighs 2,000 pounds, the suit’s advanced feedback and amplification technology do not require special training to use; it can sense what the wearer’s body is trying to do and magnify it. The suit is compact enough to fit inside a small space capsule, but powerful enough for a single soldier to wipe out a tank division with its armory. “Controlled force . . . force controlled without your having to think about it . . . that is the beauty of a powered suit: you don’t have to think about it.”3 This idea of force without conscious thought surely had great appeal after the turmoil of the 1960s, during a new decade in which visual philosophy gradually replaced political ideology, and the postwar emphasis on a politics of perseverance (manifested particularly in “Supokon Manga,” (“fighting spirit in sport” manga) gave way to an interest in cutting-edge aesthetics. Tired of agonizing over abstract problems with no solution or conclusion, people were entranced by a technology that symbolized such

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stylish agility – the mobility to outflank any opponent. The paradigm shift between the late 1960s ideological debate on Starship Troopers and the late 1970s visual representation of the same novel is symptomatic of the postmodern deconstruction of hierarchical relations between entity and function, ontology and aesthetic, existentialism and structuralism, symbol and allegory, that is to say, signified and signifier. However, the early 1980s also saw another ideological debate on military science fiction, occasioned in 1982 by the mini-film, Aikoku Sentai Dainippon (“Patriotic Troop ‘Imperialist Japan’”), produced by Daicon Film, the precursor of Gainax, which was to become well-known for distinguished anime director Hideaki Anno’s post-Gundam anime masterpiece the Evangelion series (1995).4 Although the Daicon Film producers Yasuhiro Takeda and Toshio Okada defended themselves by revealing that with “Aikoku Sentai Dainippon” they really wanted to parody the formula of the trooper narrative very popular in Japan’s TV programs, quite a few ser-con (serious and constructive) fans and critics attacked the film as colored by fascist ideology. To the science-fiction readers who already witnessed the 1967 Starship Troopers debate, this 1982 “Aikoku Sentai Dainippon” controversy must have seemed to revive the age of ideology.5 However, there is a critical difference between Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, despised as a novel of pseudo-fascism, and Daicon Film’s “Aikoku Sentai Dainippon” replicating one of the most popular formulas of science-fiction TV programs. While Heinlein wanted to construct an ironic version of hard-core fascism as represented by Nazi Germany, Daicon Film just pastiched the seemingly patriotic visual framework of the trooper narrative, without any sense of irony. In Jameson’s terms, this is a typically postmodern example of “blank parody.” Thus, it represents the paradigm shift between modernist ontological irony and postmodernist blank parody that made possible not only the 1997 film version of Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven (who himself experienced the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands firsthand) but also a recent Japanese exhibition of Gundam-inspired contemporary art titled Gundam Generating Futures: Kitarubeki mirai no tame ni, which traveled to several Japanese museums between 2005 and 2007.

From Dada/surrealism to postmodernism: the age of Seiji Tsutsumi Nineteen eighty-four, George Orwell’s year, saw the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which ignited the cyberpunk movement and aroused the postmodern dream of cyberspace. A close friend at Cornell

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University, where I studied American literature and critical theory between 1984 and 1987, told me that Gibson’s Neuromancer immediately reminded him of Yasuo Takana’s Somehow, Crystal (1981), a precursor of Japan’s postmodernism, for both of them are filled with fashionable brand names. Neuromancer certainly belongs to science fiction, while Somehow, Crystal is the winner of mainstream literary prizes. Despite the literary generic difference, however, they have several elements in common. First, insofar as narrative structure is concerned, both of them merely retrofitted traditional plots almost used up by their forerunners; Somehow, Crystal restructures the pattern of “sentimental fiction,” while Neuromancer reengineers the legend of the quest for the Holy Grail. Both authors, though male themselves, skillfully characterize heroines: the fashion model Yuri in the Somehow, Crystal, the cyborg warrior Molly in Neuromancer. Second, both of them boast encyclopedic knowledge of cutting-edge culture and subcultures around 1980; Somehow, Crystal vividly describes 1980s Japanese hyper-consumerist youth culture by closely and critically footnoting every brand name especially relevant to the apparel and music industries, while Neuromancer foregrounds Pax Japonica as the symptom of technotopia, recreating Chiba City (which the author himself had never visited) as the center of street culture haunted by cyberspace cowboys. Third, both novels showcase brand names; Somehow, Crystal footnotes every brand name, for its characters are not consuming superficial signs but the living narratives behind each sign, while Neuromancer enumerates a number of brand names such as Hitachi or Ono Sendai, some real, some fictional, to project a complex image mingling cyberspace and junkyard, inviting us into a world somewhere between utopia and dystopia. Defining the explosion of brand names in Yoshimoto’s novel as a rebaptism, Norma Field writes, Baudrillard calls the brand name “not a proper name, but a sort of generic Christian name.” Whether this loving attention to graphic representation achieves the transcendence suggested by [Takaaki] Yoshimoto whereby the images of television commercials acquire the status of use value, the characters of Somehow, Crystal at any rate seek their identities in the consumption of brand-name goods.6

Her analysis of Somehow, Crystal is completely applicable to Neuromancer, where the antihero Case consumes and uses himself up, literally and figuratively, within cyberspace, another name for the matrix of high-tech brand names, ending up with self-realization. Remarkably, Gibson’s Neuromancer coincided in 1984 with Chiaki Kawamata’s meta-speculative fiction Death Sentences, winner of the fifth

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Japan SF Grand Prize, which featured the mysterious life of a Chinese American poet Who May, whose magic poems captivated not only the original surrealists but also speculative fictionist Philip K. Dick himself, author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Analogies abound between Kawamata’s version of inner space and Gibson’s cyberspace. Moreover, in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi meltdown of March 2011, Who May’s magic poems inevitably conjure up the menace not only of fatal drugs but also of nuclear disasters, for the original term in Japanese for the “magic poem” (幻詩 pronounced genshi) has the same pronunciation as the term for “atom” (原子, also genshi) and thereby revives the image of the atomic bomb (原子爆弾 pronounced genshi bakudan). Just as the post-3.11 Japanese government attempts to seal nuclear leaks, this novel’s agents try to defend against magic poetic leaks. Death Sentences vividly describes the atmosphere of the early years of Pax Japonica, another name for the rise of Japan’s postmodernism. As Ezra Vogel predicted in his bestseller Japan as Number One (1979), Japan achieved huge economic success in the 1980s, and ended up by expanding and then, in 1993, exploding its bubble economy. In the novel Who May’s magic poems are imported into Japan when a small press called Kirin Publishing gets involved with the Seito Department Store’s huge exhibition, Undiscovered Century: A National Exhibition on the Age of Surrealism. The exhibition is based upon materials recovered from a newly discovered trunk of Andre Breton’s, a trunk also containing Who May’s manuscripts. The whole exhibition is organized by “Hakuden,” one of the largest advertising agencies in Japan. All the editors at Kirin Publishing have to do is edit the exhibition catalog. Most important is the novel’s characterization of Tsujimi Yûzô, general owner of the Seito Group and connoisseur of fine arts and literature, who proposes the idea of holding this surrealist exhibition. Kawamata claims that this businessman and his department store are imaginary, if inspired by the author’s involvement with the art exhibitions sponsored by Mitsukoshi, the oldest department store in Japan, during his time at Hakukhodo, a major Japanese advertising agency. But the location of the Seito department store in Ikebukuro recalls the Seibu department store – then in the avant-garde of Japanese department store chains – and its former owner Tsutsumi Seiji (1927–2013), a mainstream author who wrote under the pen name Takashi Tsujii and whose poems and novels won numerous literary prizes, including major awards such as the Tanizaki Prize and the Yomiuri Prize. When the novel’s character Tsujimi Yûzô introduces himself as a big fan of Kirin Publishers and explains why he puts “so much effort into cultural ventures,” he

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cannot help but recall Tsutsumi Seiji, who wanted to foster the cultural independence of Japanese consumers by selling them not only everyday goods but also cultural artifacts – not only visible and tangible items but also an invisible intellectual atmosphere. His strategy coincided both with Yasuo Tanaka’s highly consumer-capitalist romance Somehow, Crystal as well as Akira Asada’s and Shinichi Nakazawa’s theoretical books on French structuralist and post-structuralist philosophers (1983), all of which became popular with Japanese consumers. It is at this point that Japan’s postmodernism becomes a cultural phenomenon. What makes Japan truly postmodern is not so much access to the actual texts of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, but rather the way that the excellent books about them, written by young Japanese intellectuals, were consumed. Critiques of capitalism, based on the work of structuralists and post-structuralists who started their careers by reexamining Marxism, end up being consumed by hypercapitalist Japan. In this sense, just as Yasuo Tanaka’s Somehow, Crystal sold a million copies as a consumer’s guide to leading a comfortable life, so Akira Asada’s Structure and Power, despite its highly philosophical chapters, sold several hundred thousand copies as a reader’s guide to leading an intellectual life. As Marilyn Ivy acutely pointed out, the early 1980s saw Japan become a postmodern nation capable of consuming even knowledge, or “new knowledge,” which is very close to what is termed theory in American literary critical circles: “Japan presents the spectacle of a thoroughly commodified world of knowledge.”7 What is more, Ivy recognizes a parallel between the new academics who turned theory into a commodity and who mediate between the university and the masses, and figures such as Itoi Shigesato, the star copywriter who became famous working for PARCO, one of the department stores run by Tsutsumi Seiji’s Seibu group, and who “mediates between the capitalist and the masses.”8 Of course, given that the bursting of the bubble economy brought about Japan’s decline in the mid-1990s, the early 1980s postmodernism fostered by Tsutsumi Seiji and his celebrated fellows might be regarded as a shameful episode in contemporary history. Nevertheless, it is within this historical context that Death Sentences was written and acclaimed, skillfully capturing and even keenly criticizing the essence of Japan’s late capitalist and postmodernist imagination. Here it is not my intent to recuperate the zeitgeist of early 1980s Japan but to put stress on the performative aspect of Death Sentences as a text. Although I have considered the magic spell or speech act of Who May’s poems, it is Kawamata’s own novel that really demonstrated the

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performative aspect of language by prophesying and even creating the later history of Japan’s postmodernism. Tsutsumi Seiji’s Seibu department store aroused consumers’ interest in the visual artworks of Dadaism and Surrealism with an exhibition of Arshile Gorky’s work in July and August 1963 and a Marcel Duchamp exhibition in September 1981. Therefore, it is highly plausible that Kawamata noted the popularity of Duchamp caused by this exhibition and for that reason incorporated this genius into his new novel. Nonetheless, while Seibu Group as led by Tsutsumi enjoyed its heyday between 1975 and 1982, the fatal bursting of the bubble economy in 1991 required him to retire and to pay Seibu’s debts amounting to ¥10 billion ($100 million). Thus, contemporary cultural historians tend to assume that it is Tsutsumi’s post-leftist progressive ideology that functioned as the engine for accelerating Japan’s High Growth Economy and eventually exploding its late capitalism, which ironically passed the death sentence on Japan’s postmodernism. However, we should not forget that Tsutsumi wanted to surpass the limit of Japan’s capitalism, promoting the free play of the visual signifier over the hegemony of leftist and existentialist ideology. Death Sentences not only describes an alternate literary history caused by Who May’s magic poem but also performs and produces Japan’s real contemporary history, much earlier, and much more vividly than Haruki Murakami, one of whose recent mega-novels, 1Q84 (2009–10), represents another take on 1984 by locating the origins of what would overwhelm Japan in the 1990s, especially the collapse of bubble economy and the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s terrorist attacks on the megalopolis in 1995 and their aftermath. What matters here is that even the apocalyptic philosophy of this terrorist cult had been deeply affected by the visual representation of Sakyo Komatsu’s hard-core science-fiction Virus (1964; film version directed by Kinji Fukasaku in 1980), Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato (1974–75), and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The advent of multimedia science-fiction narrative in the 1970s made possible the postmodern paradigm shift from ideology to visuality, which was to bring about the dream and nightmare of postmodernism in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Haruki Murakami and visual narratology9 The turn of the century saw a fascinating coincidence between the talented director Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious film Magnolia (1999) and one of Haruki Murakami’s omnibus collections of short stories, After the

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Quake (1999). Thematizing coincidences and unwitting intersections among human beings in their day-to-day lives, Anderson’s film features the life of Frank T. J. Mack (played by Tom Cruise), the charismatic guru of a sex cult whose book Seduce and Destroy advocates a macho self-help system for men to “tame” women. His problem with women appears to have something to do with his family. Frank’s failure to reconcile with his father, with whom he has a rocky emotional relationship, forms an important storyline in the film. Experiencing along with the characters this long movie’s beautifully entangled plots, depicting the deeply problematic lives of so many characters, including Frank and his dying father, we are shocked at what it takes to bring this sad film to an end: the mindboggling spectacle of frogs raining down from the sky. This tragic-comic apocalyptic interruption is an instance of a phenomenon sometimes nicknamed “Fafrotskies” (“falls from the skies”), involving animals, stones, angel hair, strange organisms, and strange metallic objects supposedly from outer space. Among animals that fall from the sky, by far the most common are the humble frogs and fishes. Anderson shares his apocalyptic imagination of frogs and other raining animals with the major Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, whose short story collection After the Quake was clearly inspired by the catastrophic Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult’s terrorist attacks in 1995. Murakami’s collection has several frog-related stories. One story, “All God’s Children Can Dance,” features a self-proclaimed son of God named Yoshiya, who looks like a frog: “His girlfriend had asked him to marry her when they graduated from college. “I want to be married to you, SuperFrog. I want to live with you and have your child – a boy, with a big thing just like yours.”10 Another story, entitled “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” involves a huge monster frog capable of speaking: Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five-foot-three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog’s imposing bulk. “Call me ‘Frog,”’ said the frog in a clear, strong voice.11

Murakami’s representation of Super-Frog undoubtedly conjures up the hope of resurrection by means of an apocalyptic moment. The former story, “All God’s Children Can Dance” was first published in the October 1999 issue of the Shincho magazine, while the latter, “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” appeared in the December 1999 issue of the same magazine. Having read Murakami’s short stories featuring a frog-like man and a

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giant frog in the fall of 1999 and having seen Anderson’s film Magnolia, with its spectacle of raining frogs around the same time, in December 1999, I pointed out the metaphorical coincidence in a comparative literary essay, “Haruki Murakami as a Ubiquitous and Even Planetary Writer,” published in a special issue of AERA magazine devoted to Murakami in December 2001. Then, as now, I had no idea whether Murakami or Anderson had ever read or had in mind a 1992 New York Times Magazine essay, “The Silence of the Frogs”;12 we will come back to this essay and its relationship to Murakami’s and Anderson’s shared thematic concerns. For now, we might consider the obvious correspondences that exist on the surface of these two works. For instance, just as Murakami characterized the fatherless protagonist Yoshiya as a child of God in making him aware of the rise and fall of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, so too does Anderson begin his movie with a cult and a father-worship problem, that is, the sensational characterization of the sex cult guru Frank and his hopelessly complicated Oedipal relationship with his father. Moreover, while Murakami conceived his short story collection as a series of tales loosely bound by coincidences, Anderson skillfully weaves different stories into a polyphonic narrative controlled by chance, keenly conscious of Robert Altman’s technique of producing deep but unwitting interrelationships among different characters. While Murakami depicts the mother of Yoshiya, the one nicknamed “Super-Frog,” as a somewhat uncanny woman who finds herself constantly pregnant despite using contraception, Anderson describes the loss and return of the gun belonging to the bumbling police officer, Jim Kurring, as the uncanny side effect of the raining animals when the gun falls from the sky to land right in front of its clueless owner. Finally, both Murakami and Anderson devised for their apocalyptic metaphor the image of raining frogs as the one best able to powerfully unite and comingle a variety of human destinies. Both men are artists obsessed with the effect of coincidence in fiction, and we cannot help but be intrigued ourselves by the fact that Murakami’s fiction miraculously coincided with Anderson’s film in the year 1999. Murakami’s 2002 novel, Kafka on the Shore, which features fish raining from the sky, appears rather obviously to mock the extremely visual climax of Magnolia. This disposes me to think that other such unrecognized rhetorical transactions must exist among contemporary artists on the planet. It is hard to say if Murakami was simply influenced by viewing Anderson’s Magnolia, or just how their imaginations met. However, what matters here is that both artists chose raining animals as the apocalyptic metaphor in their respective works for their respective reasons, no matter

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how aware or otherwise they were of each other’s work. In the case of Magnolia, on the one hand, the director may have been aware of symptoms of global warming in 1998, a year when temperatures were unusually warm because of what was at the time the strongest El Niño of the previous century. Because global warming is responsible for increasing numbers of tornadoes and hurricanes, we might redefine the strange phenomenon of animal raining as one of the effects of temperature changes since 1979, natural changes chiefly accelerated by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, in his long novel Kafka on the Shore Murakami critically reconstructs the frog motif from his earlier After the Quake, ambitiously creating his own apocalyptic version of Japan in the wake of the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attacks in the spring of 1995. Anderson and Murakami could have selected other catastrophic spectacles such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or forest fires. However, rather than repeating conventional motifs of imaginable disasters that hard science can explain away, both artists produced the literary effect of unimaginable disasters more apt for our post-disaster and post-global-warming age, thereby deconstructing the traditional distinction between the natural and the unnatural, or between hard science and pseudo-science. Kafka on the Shore is driven by a pair of plots, one featuring the fifteenyear-old boy Kafuka Tamura, whose father’s death induces him to leave Tokyo for Takamatsu City in Shikoku. The other features an old man, Satoru Nakata, called “Nakata-san” throughout the text, who has been afflicted with amnesia and is also illiterate but capable of talking with cats. Nakata-san also flees Tokyo to Shikoku but for mysterious reasons. What makes this novel so original is that the strange and preternatural phenomena are not necessarily caused by the laws of nature, but by the intentions of the strange old man Nakata-san. Nakata-san first kills his nemesis, Johnny Walker, a cat killer in Nakano Ward. But it turns out Johnny Walker was really the splendid artist Koichi Tamura, the father of the boy, Kafuka Tamura. Chapter 18 portrays the strange capability of Nakata-san, who predicts the raining of fish from the sky, expecting sardines and mackerels. Considering the old man to be insane, a policeman refuses to believe Nakata-san’s story. However, he “turned white as a sheet” when, the next day, a number of “sardines and mackerel rained down on a section of Nakano Ward.” Chapter 20 shows us Nakata-san discouraging the young men of the speed tribes from lynching one of their members at the Fujigawa rest area. Here again, he exhibits the strange power of bringing about disasters such as animals raining from the sky.

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We live in times when the unimaginable comes true, whether unimaginable natural phenomena or human-made ones. The twenty-first century started with the unimaginable 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US East Coast, which stunned the whole world, and the first decade of this same century closed with the multiple 3/11 disasters on Japan’s East Coast, unimaginable in a different way because triggered not simply by the natural disasters of tsunami and earthquakes but also by the coincidences and interactions between the natural and human-made phenomena – the apparently unimaginable force of natural disaster coupled with the meltdown of nuclear power plants. What is at stake now is not exactly the distinction between nature and civilization, I would argue, but rather that between the imaginable and the unimaginable. While some of us may want only to try and imagine what should be done after disasters, perhaps it is as important to speculate deeply about the nature of the unimaginable already embedded in works of the imagination – art and fiction, past and present. We might ask how this strange phenomenon of raining frogs might afford us an opportunity to reconsider the distinctions between the natural and the unnatural, and between the imaginable and the unimaginable. The panic inspired by uncanny “Fafrotskies” used to be regarded as absurd, incoherent, and thoroughly unscientific – on a par perhaps with seeing UFOs – even though this kind of spectacle has historically been witnessed and documented in numerous places. What interests me is the reason why contemporary artists such as Anderson and Murakami, knowingly or unknowingly, have chosen this phenomenon to represent the sense of wonder that subverts our sense of order. Of course, Fafrotskies inevitably disrupt the traditional distinction between the natural and the unnatural, but when the Fafrotskies phenomenon is limited to a particular species of animals, we may also wonder whether the phenomenon might be controlled by a supernatural being, finding the very distinction between the supernatural and the merely uncanny to be at stake. If we bring to bear here the New York Times Magazine essay mentioned earlier, we might say that the diminishing number of frogs on the earth necessitates the apocalyptic metaphorics of Anderson and Murakami. It is from this perspective that I would like to speculate on “Fafrotskies,” strange and uncanny spectacles, as not only a sort of narrative gimmick but also as the objective correlative for our planet in a time of crisis – a time when the natural and the scientific and the imaginable can only be resurrected and reconciled through a single unimaginable apocalyptic moment in human history. Back in the 1970s we could witness a symptom of the paradigm shift between ideological narrative and visual presentation.

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Now living in the media-saturated postmodern reality of the twenty-first century, threatened by the possibility of terrorist attacks on a global scale, it is the visual imagination that makes possible a close reading of literary texts and ideological archives, reviving the fear of world wars. Notes 1 Raymond Federman, “Self-Reflexive Fiction,” in Emory Elliott (ed.), The Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1148–9. 2 Takashi Ishikawa, “The Starship Troopers Controversy,” rept. in Takayuki Tatsumi (ed.), Science Fiction Controversies in Japan: 1957–1997 (1967; Tokyo: Keiso Publishers, 2000), 128–37. 3 Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959; New York: Ace, 2010), 129. 4 See Ian Condry, The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 5 See “Chronology” in Tatsumi (ed.), Science Fiction Controversies, 30–1. 6 Norma Field, “Somehow: The Postmodern As Atmosphere,” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds.), Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 173. 7 Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” in Miyoshi and Harootunian (eds.), Postmodernism and Japan, 25–6. 8 Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts,” 33. 9 This section borrows from and reworks material originally incorporated in Takayuki Tatsumi, “Planet of the Frogs: Thoreau, Anderson, and Murakami,” Narrative 21/3 (October 2013), 346–56. 10 Haruki Murakami, After the Quake, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Vintage, 2003), 67. 11 Murakami, After the Quake, 91. 12 Emily Yoffe, “Silence of the Frogs,” The New York Times Magazine, December 13, 1992; www.nytimes.com/1992/12/13/magazine/silence-of-thefrogs.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

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Digital culture and posthumanism David Ciccoricco

It might seem that the digital revolution and the posthumanism that it enables and accelerates are an intuitive or even inevitable extension of postmodernism – that our postmodern condition goes hand in hand with a posthuman reality. The art and literature of the digital age and its attendant theory would lend some support to this sense of symmetry. In both ideological and material form, the network is privileged over and against the hierarchy; multiple lines and multiple worlds are celebrated over and against an oppressive monolithic linearity; and digital narratives that assume a nodal or modular form appear to recapitulate the anti- or micro-narrativity of Jean-François Lyotard’s petit récit.1 A profound sense of the posthuman is further reflected in the cyborg textuality that sees “generative” texts spring forth from the algorithmic creativity of authors, and the couplings of humans with so-called intelligent machines. A closer consideration of the (aesthetic) record, however, suggests that the literary art of the digital age stands in problematic relation to its postmodernist predecessor. From its inception, some authors of what would come to be known as digital and electronic literature rejected the conceptualization of their writing as somehow postmodernist by default.2 Michael Joyce, best known for what is commonly regarded as the original work of digital fiction in afternoon (1987), found literary hypertext’s association with postmodernist fiction “unfortunate”: whereas much of his fiction in digital environments was intent to plumb the depths of the all too human condition, postmodernism, for him, had come to suggest “flatness, lackluster bubbles from day-old champagne.”3 Conversely, some of the most iconic postmodernist writers harbored deep suspicions about the place of digital media in literary experimentation from the start, most prominently expressed in John Barth’s decades-long derision of “intermedia” gimmicks and, later, hypertextual writing.4 Despite their kindred spirit and prefix in proposing a newly dominant cultural-historical movement, postmodernism and posthumanism are also 419

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in some ways incongruous. As scholars of digital culture point out, screenbased and multi-mediated art of the twenty-first century, in its interrogation of depth, difficulty, and movement in all its varied modes, often prompts a more intimate dialogue with the features and techniques of literary modernism.5 Furthermore, the strong alliance forged between the ontological poetics of postmodernism and the genre of science fiction notwithstanding, theoretical and philosophical conceptualizations of postmodernism have tended to locate digital technology firmly within the realm of technoscience (as does Lyotard), which is also to say outside of and in opposition to the realm of cultural production. Or they simply elide the aesthetic implications of cyberculture altogether (as does Fredric Jameson).6 The notion of “postmodernity” as a discrete historical period that supersedes modernity is problematic at the very least, and the notion of a discrete literary or cultural epoch called “postmodernism” that supersedes modernism somewhat less so. At the same time, and perhaps unsurprisingly for a literary theorist, I find the notion of postmodernism extremely productive when it refers to a range of literary techniques, mechanisms, devices, or strategies that flourished in pockets across the globe and most prominently in the United States between the 1960s and the 1990s, yet can be found in literary works both before and after this period. As its point of departure, this chapter focuses on one of those signature strategies, that of reflexivity (or self-referentiality), as it plays out in specific digital-literary texts. The first is Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991), a classic work of early hypertext fiction; the second is Martyn Bedford and Andy Campbell’s The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam (2000), a Web-based digital fiction that makes use of Flash animation software. Though we might point to a shared ethos of intense and unrelenting reflexivity in both postmodernist and digital-literary practice, these examples will highlight a significant difference. While postmodernist fiction foregrounds the artifice of language, and aims to defamiliarize a medium whose conventions have long been internalized by print culture, the reflexivity of literary art in digital environments starts with an already defamiliarized medium and materiality. The inescapable self-consciousness of a newfound medium and an attendant cyborg textuality shapes and colors not only the interfaces of digital art but also its thematic and philosophical orientation. The chapter moves from its more modest claims about specific texts to a comparably broader and more speculative historicizing gesture that marks a shift, if not a break, in the movement from late postmodernism to the rise of digital and posthumanist culture. After a detour through contemporary philosophy that juxtaposes two theorists (Lyotard, writing before

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the Web, and Pierre Lévy, writing with and because of it), I suggest that such a shift is further justified in terms of subjectivity – that is, how we see ourselves in light of digital culture and posthumanist discourse. Contrary to the prevailing notion of the postmodernist self as an emptying out, or an always already discursive multiple construction, it is arguably a form of surplus selfhood that takes hold in digital culture. If postmodernism’s subjectivity is constructed foremost in and in relation to language, then the digital self – in this age of the “selfie” – is constructed foremost in and in relation to the machine, rushing to (over)fill the spaces of the network, and there proliferating.

In the black box When dealing with works of digital literature it is worth stating the obvious: that these literary artifacts instantiate, in their form, the shift from older industrial modes of literary production to newer ones of informational culture. They are databases that execute their texts via code in a way that is incommensurate with any theory of code underlying the words we read in a print novel. Many are also, by definition, non-totalizable artifacts. Whether they contain contradictory events or plotlines; are programmed to change somehow as we read (or upon each reading); or are simply so densely networked that traversing all of the possible permutations of their linked pathways is an unlikely prospect, it may not be possible to complete some works of digital fiction in any conventional sense. Nevertheless, it is necessary to debunk two (interrelated) fallacies with regard to the aesthetic implications of their form. First, if “postmodernism” is to index techniques or strategies, then the computer medium – or any medium for that matter – cannot yield postmodernist writing by default. Though it is common to associate all manner of “multimedia” with literary experimentation, this does not make digital art and literature postmodernist by default either. We can simply look across fictional and nonfictional domains to see that the majority of our most ordinary and conventional writing today occurs in digital environments; from a tweet that barely meets the minimal conditions of narrativity to the most mundane and interminable blog post, digital narratives are now the norm for sharing stories. The idea that computer-mediated fiction is postmodernist arises in large part from its popular association with not only multimedial experimentation but also the puzzle-like quality of branching, pick-a-path fiction in print more specifically. The same association speaks to a second fallacy, which equates digital narratives to machines for

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generating mutually exclusive story outcomes or endless permutations thereof. Although such texts may have garnered much attention in our collective computational imaginary, texts that aspire to such ends make up only a small portion of the emergent corpus of digital literature.7 The kind of narrative fiction that makes special use of the computer medium is extremely varied. For example, even limiting ourselves to a typology of hypertext linking structures reveals a range of forms (that in turn feed discrete genres): we can move from primarily linear structures that employ links as digressions from a main axis but have a single starting point and end point (such as The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam), to fullblown multilinear networks that contain no clear starting point or end point in their structure (such as Victory Garden). Under this typology, branching (or “arborescent”) texts, with a singular starting point and multiple end points, can be located at an intermediary place between “axial” and “networked” texts, and share a formal affinity with the textadventure games that evolved into the domain known as Interactive Fiction (IF).8 It is important to note, however, that a hypertextual structure does not determine the movement of the narrative discourse; we still need to map one to the other and, no different to a print novel, this discourse may or may not contain temporal distortions, ontological ruptures, or mutually exclusive paths. In this respect, branching structures lend themselves most readily to the ontological uncertainty arising from mutually exclusive outcomes. Forks in the interface, at the level of materiality, nonetheless, do not necessarily imply mutually exclusive or contradictory forks in the narrative discourse. One of the most accomplished, enduring, and now “classic” works of early digital-literary production, Moulthrop’s Victory Garden offers a compelling and curious case for historicizing. Its publication locates it simultaneously at what might be postmodernism’s most diffuse deltas as well as the headwaters of digital literature; however, the text has become more polarizing for its putative modernist streak. Written and published following Operation Desert Storm (1991), the United States’ first war in Iraq, Victory Garden follows the intersecting lives of a number of characters at a southern university town, one of whom, Emily, has gone to serve in the war. The implication that the text is simply an old novel in a new container was put forth from different quarters. Robert Coover noted that its subject matter reflects that of a “typical academic novel,” and the same arguably anachronistic quality fed early Web artist Mark Amerika’s claims that “most of the early practitioners of hypertext employ a more Modernistic writing style that attempts to use [it] as a technology that creates

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stories whose top priority is to make us feel whole again (a priority not too dissimilar from the conventional novels of the past).”9 By contrast, nudging the text toward postmodernism is the fact that its narrative puts forth both contradictory ideologies (regarding American military exploits) and contradictory events (regarding the fate of Emily), and thus arguably auto-deconstructs on both counts.10 But despite the various ways Moulthrop’s text might exhibit symptoms of a postmodernist condition, what is more striking is the fact that postmodernism is being critiqued at least as much as it is being practiced. In terms of its thematic framework, this critique suggests something more than postmodernism recursively entangling itself in a self-referential gesture par excellence. For example, in one passage, the graduate seminar students of Professor Boris Urquhart, who is absent and his whereabouts unknown, are complaining to their stand-in instructor about the professor’s reading list, which features Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths.” One student, Victor Gardner (the obliquely titular character who otherwise plays a notably ironic minor role) describes the short story as “garbage” and “drivel”: “The Garden of Forking Bullshit . . . I think Urquhart is afraid to show up because he might have to hear how stupid his reading list is.”11 The acute aversion of the students here aside, it is clear that postmodernist literature has become institutionalized – it has gone from being “postmodern,” in Lyotard’s counterintuitive aesthetics, to merely “modern.”12 In another instance, Urquhart’s friend Harley recounts to him an unsettling and seemingly interminable dream in which he examines his own body – “every follicle” – in microscopic detail. Urquhart responds with a shrug: “Sounds like one of those postmodern moments to me. I am not I. Being as paradox. Sign in stranger, sous rature.”13 We might read Urquhart’s dismissal not only as the familiar lack of interest one might have in another’s dream, but also as a gesture treating postmodernist theory itself (with a flippant nod to Derrida) as an afterthought. The act signifies a broader shrugging off of the postmodernist moment in turn. Nevertheless, if reflexivity functions as a kind of postmodernist master trope, then it functions with a difference in digital environments. In Victory Garden, there is a device built by Urquhart and his colleague Tate that is designed to serve as a direct interface to the unconscious, allowing external (textual) input to enter into the mind of a dreaming subject, thereby altering the dream on the fly. It is called the SuperChaotic Analog Matrix Device, or – if the concept did not seem dubious enough already – “SCAMD.” The experiment reflects a self-conscious engagement with the hopes and fears that pervade posthumanist discourse, including some of

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the most savory topics of technoculture with regard to so-called natural interfaces or even mind control. After Tate proudly introduces the machine, the narrative switches abruptly to direct address: It sits there paradoxically, the ultimate black box. You see a metal enclosure approximately fifteen centimeters by ten by three. There are no visible power leads. There are no connection points, junctions, sockets, or terminals. The casing shows no vents or openings of any kind. It doesn’t even appear to have seams. There are no lights, no switches, no keyboards, monitors or cables.14

In the “next” node we open (some are strung together in predetermined paths and we advance by pressing the Enter/Return key), the proverbial black box sits before us in the form of a black, rectangular image, reminiscent of the “machine” that makes several cryptic appearances in Donald Barthelme’s short fiction “The Explanation” and once in “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,” the story that follows it in his City Life collection.15 Like the addressee of the narrative, we remain confounded by questions of input or output, quite literally, as we click on and outside the black box in a vain attempt to advance the hypertext. But we do know that the dimensions described in the narration in fact match the height and width of the image on our screen (with depth the unknown variable), in effect completing a metaleptic leap from the fictional field into our own field of vision. Or, perhaps, the realization marks our own leap, via the same device, into the collective mind experiment of the storyworld. Clearly, when it comes to the play of reflexivity, the materiality of the medium matters. Whenever digital text refers to itself, it generates connotations meaningful in an expressly digital context. Furthermore, this distinctly digital reflexivity shifts its focus, undermining the logic not of language but rather that of the machine.

Then I woke up Another work of digital fiction that similarly operationalizes a meaningful, media-specific reflexivity, and also takes its own parody of postmodernism to a different level is Martyn Bedford and Andy Campbell’s The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam: an interactive short story in four parts. Published nearly a decade after Moulthrop’s work, The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam bears all the immediate indications of a twenty-first-century work of Web-based digital narrative, including a graceful interface featuring highquality animations, looping audio tracks, and kinetic, oscillating, and even volatile textual effects.16 The darkly comical story is told by Luther, who

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conveys his attempt to find his missing girlfriend in a kind of real-time present tense: “I wake to find that the space beside me is just that, a space. Cold, inert, unimpressed. By unimpressed, I don’t mean that her half of the bed is passing judgement on me, but that it contains no impression to show she slept there last night. Which, now that I think about it, comes to pretty much the same thing.”17 Bedford and Campbell offer an illuminating counterpoint to Moulthrop’s text. Formally, their text is much more conventional in its structure, which is primarily axial, taking readers along one linear and predominantly chronological path, and using links only as digressions or glosses that move away from but then back to the main axis of progression. In terms of its discourse, however, it is much less conventional, destabilizing the storyworld in a number of ways. The reliability of Luther’s narration, for instance, is undermined from the start. We learn, from one of the earliest links anchored on “some things that you may or may not care to know about me,” that Luther spends up to seven hours a day on the computer for “non-work related” purposes (most of which we glean is spent on video games). We learn that he partakes in recreational drug use; and we learn that he has attempted suicide four times, once with a hammer, and each time following a particularly painful relationship breakup. We learn all this, at least, if we are patient enough to reopen this link several times, with the text rapidly scrolling up through its frame at just the speed of legibility each time. In most of the work as a whole, the text is presented in static – albeit stylized – form: for example, in the opening scene there is an image of a bed with text running down only one side of it, presumably leaving Miriam’s “unimpressed” side empty. But in the example of his personal background, the text’s special effects reflect Luther’s conflicted desire to both disclose and conceal (another link from the word sex in reference to his relationship with Miriam calls up the flashing text: “Information temporarily unavailable. Please try again later”) (VDM, Part 1). It is significant, moreover, that at this early stage Luther appears in control of such computer-mediated manipulations. From the start of the second part, however, that sense of control is lost, and in spectacular fashion. The narrative takes Luther into a series of liminal worlds in which he, first, engages in a video game–style combat confrontation with one of Miriam’s friends (VDM, Part 2); next, he somehow enters into and assumes the starring role in a film script that is the story of his own life directed by his idol Quentin Tarantino (VDM, Part 3); and, ultimately, he confronts Miriam in her twelfth-story office, where she somehow gains the power to dispose of him, or at least an “icon-ified” stick-figure version

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thereof, by dragging him into her computer desktop trash (VDM, Part 4). The reader, in turn, is dragged from epistemological questions of Luther’s reliability to questions concerning the ontological status of his experience. We do not know if we are in some kind of hallucination brought on by a gaming or drug addiction or perhaps only a deeply troubled state of mind – and neither does Luther. The stage is set for a descent into ontological doubt at the close of the first part, when Luther receives a cryptic email alert that he assumes must be from Miriam. To open it, he must clear a system message that warns him that the attachment may contain a virus or otherwise be harmful to his computer. The message sounds familiar to the reader, but even more unsettling is the fact that it looks and acts familiar too, as the message appears in a Windows-style dialog box that presents us with the allimportant choice: “Ok” or “Cancel.” There is only one choice actually, as we must assent via the only functional button on the image. In doing so, we experience another instance of digital reflexivity that, arguably, moves away from a more recognizably postmodernist referentiality focused on language – that is, writing about writing – and toward a media-specific self-consciousness that, if nothing else, speaks to the kind of creative energy generated through the new materials and technologies at hand. The final movement of the narrative, furthermore, operationalizes a direct comment on postmodernism through its structure. After the penultimate scene in which Miriam drags a Luther icon toward her desktop trash, while the presumably embodied Luther is somehow simultaneously dragged “by an unseen force” toward an open twelfth-story office window, the text presents us with three possible endings, marking an abrupt break in the axial structure with a seemingly blunt set of branching choices: the “happy ending,” the “sad ending,” or the “postmodernist ending.” The narration changes abruptly as well in the first two endings away from Luther’s first-person voice to a detached third-person narrator, subjectively anchored by Miriam in the “happy ending” and then by a lorry driver in the “sad ending.” In what is probably the story’s blackest bit of humor, Miriam is happy in the “happy ending” only because, with Luther now gone, “She hasn’t felt this good in months.” In the “sad ending,” the lorry driver who discovers Luther’s body looks up and thinks he sees a “pretty” woman crying at an open twelfth-story window. The postmodernist ending returns the narration to Luther, and he returns to his opening line, with just a slight variation: “I wake to find that the space beside me is just that, a space. As usual” (VDM, Part 4). It is quite possible, and quite ironic, that the “postmodernist” ending is most likely to be the one that actually happened in the storyworld, at least

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given what we know of his screen time and the fact that he himself was never completely sure that he ever left his computer after he clicked on that potentially infectious file (he felt “like he was in two places at once,” VDM, Part 2).18 As the third and final ending presented – the final word – the narrative effectively punctuates postmodernism itself arguably as a kind of truth, or cliché, or both. Clearly, The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam both practices and parodies postmodernism. Postmodernism has accumulated enough critical mass (and enough of a foundation – if we allow for the paradox) to be a target of a parody rather than just a vehicle for a foundationless pastiche. Or, as in Jameson’s “high modernist” postmodernism in which modernism itself becomes the object of the postmodernist pastiche, we have reached a moment in literary history in which postmodernism can become the object of digital culture’s critique.19

In a puddle of universality In observing some subtle yet significant shifts in postmodernism’s signature devices as we move from page to screen, we can note that the movement of reflexivity is never directed merely back on to the text itself, in a kind of closed system of linguistic play. Rather, it always in some way invokes the reader – which is also to say the observer of the system. We can also suggest that reflexivity in digital environments inevitably reflects back on the reader/viewer/player in digital environments with a difference, in light of the recursive feedback loops formed by human input and machinic output. The same suggestion in turn encourages further reflection on the changing notion of subjectivity. Although Lyotard’s postmodern condition does not stand for or encompass the diverse conceptualizations of postmodernism writ large, it does offer a solid reference point. His work would certainly support the way in which postmodernist theory grounded its characterizations in language. That is, the way in which Lyotard theorizes language games and a “pragmatics of language particles” in describing forms of local determinism, or even the fact that he saw such exchanges and events as “phrases,” all point to a philosophy subject to the full centrifugal force of the linguistic turn.20 It is possible, moreover, to note the several ways in which Lyotard’s thought may have anticipated key tenets of digital and posthumanist culture. His outright challenge to humanism and later conception of the “inhuman” are some of the most obvious foreshadowings of a posthumanist subjectivity, one that was determined to provide for a system of ethical relations despite its profound decentering.21 Nevertheless, with recourse to

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The Postmodern Condition as a historical and philosophical marker, it remains fair to say that Lyotard’s main concern lies with the dehumanizing effects of technoscience; ultimately, science and culture are in competition when it comes to narratives that explain our world. For him, it is the “hegemony of computers” that threatens to translate everything into its own terms and its own logic, altogether abandoning whatever else is left.22 Lyotard’s now famous answer was to “wage war on totality.”23 But before we recast the rules of engagement with this enemy, we should remember that the machinic “hegemony” Lyotard describes in 1979 effectively predates the age of widespread personal home computers and computing in the 1980s, and indeed falls over a decade before we could connect to a World Wide Web in the early years of the 1990s. We do not need to espouse a vision of technological utopia in order to acknowledge the pronounced effects of life online for communitarian empowerment and social activism today. What gets taken up as “technology” – often in the same monolithic, unmodified form – in much of postmodernist theory is something external and antithetical to the human subject. For digital culture, (digital) technology is by definition no longer antithetical, and for posthumanists it is often something quite literally internal to or at least comfortably augmenting that subject. Furthermore, the notion of the “posthuman” in the popular consciousness that indulges – in close allegiance to the science-fiction imaginary – technophiliac fantasies of transcendence, of both mind and body, has now run its course, or at least is no longer external and antithetical to contemporary critical inquiry.24 More specifically, it has expired in the capacity to serve as a merely descriptive apparatus for the threat of the cyborg, one that prompts a reactionary and alarmist response from humanists. And it has expired in its capacity to serve as a merely analytical category, indexing the latest technological developments for the benefit of the next consumer in the queue, and prompting a celebratory response from the corporate and military-industrial complex. Although research programs in Artificial Intelligence, robotics, or even genetics pursue the kind of work, often under a cloud of controversy, that has huge implications for what we regard as categorically “human,” the ideology that underwrites the pursuit of transcendence – of one day leaving all of that flesh behind – has splintered into what, in the philosophical cartography, has come to be called “transhumanism.” Meanwhile, a “critical posthumanism” has taken on the challenge of articulating a field of political and ethical relations not despite – as it may be postmodernist theory – but because of our decentered subjectivity. As Rosi Braidotti

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explains, “Far from being the nth variation in a sequence of prefixes that may appear both endless and somehow arbitrary, the posthuman condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to other inhabitants on this planet.”25 While the critical posthumanism conveyed by Braidotti (and, with the customary variations and exceptions, other posthumanist theorists more generally) entails an equally amenable set of relations between the environment and other nonhuman agents, the coupling of humans and machines is most relevant here in marking a departure from its treatment in postmodernist theory.26 As Braidotti puts it, “The metaphorical or analogue function that machinery fulfilled in modernity, as anthropocentric device that imitated embodied human capacities, is replaced today by a more complex political economy that connects bodies to machines more intimately, through simulation and mutual modification.”27 Thus, from the most sensuous touch screen to the most precise brain implant, such intimacy now predominates over postmodernism’s technocultural antagonism. If, for digital culture, a fixation on the machine – most visibly in the form of digitally networked computers – has become a new foundational discourse, it is one no longer on a relentless march, totalizing social, political, intellectual, and pedagogical relations along the way, at least according to the work of Pierre Lévy. Lévy’s Cyberculture (2001) uncoupled “totality” from “universality.” Observing that, as the Web grows, “it becomes more ‘universal’ and the world of information less totalizable,” he sought a way to better account for a distinctive and revolutionary (cyber)culture and the “mutation in the physics of communication” that it provokes.28 He encouraged a wholesale reappraisal of the concept of the “universal,” which had undoubtedly developed a bad reputation at the hand of poststructuralist “difference” and theories of social constructivism more broadly.29 For him, “totality” marks the imposition of a “stabilized unity of meaning” and represents claims for some kind of absolute truth. The “universal,” by contrast, signifies “the virtual presence of humanity to itself ” – it implies accessibility and commonality and carries with it an expressly ethical dimension.30 Lévy’s model marks a clear departure from postmodernist philosophy, which “has confused the universal with totalization” and “made the mistake of throwing out the baby of the universal with the bathwater of totality.”31 Unlike the antihumanism running through some contemporary accounts of posthumanism, in the process of turning away from the postmodernist subject, Lévy turns back toward a new kind of humanism: “[A]ssuming

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we were ever modern, cyberculture wouldn’t be postmodern but firmly situated in the tradition of revolutionary and republican ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.”32 Nevertheless, what these forays into the philosophy of posthuman and digital culture both reveal is a deep concern with materiality, a concern that traces the postmodernist linguistic turn full circle back to a more dominant intellectual project much more concerned with the material embodiment of humans and texts.33 The same general observations about critical theory’s material turn can illuminate my more specific claims concerning both literary practice and subjectivity. With regard to literary theory, if literary scholars in the postmodernist era (from Roland Barthes to Wolfgang Iser) dematerialized the text, then literary scholars of digital media (from the “media-specific analysis” advocated by N. Katherine Hayles to Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “forensic” bibliography of digital-born texts) have done much to rematerialize it.34 With regard to theories of subjectivity, we see a marked divergence from the antifoundationalist relativism of the socially/linguistically constructed subject evident in digital and posthumanist conceptions, albeit each on different grounds. For example, posthumanism (and, for that matter, many active strands of the cognitive sciences) speaks of a “constrained constructivism” in our subjective encounters with the world – constrained, that is, by the environment and our cognitive/perceptual endowment.35 In the digitalcultural conception, furthermore, our media – to borrow Lévy’s preferred term – condition rather than (after Marshall McLuhan or Friedrich Kittler) determine human agency and social relations.36 These are generalizations arising from a particular path through postmodernist philosophy that negotiates some of the most dominant elements of digital culture and posthumanism. The hope is that a closer look through the lens of literary culture has revealed a little of what has changed in the movement from late postmodernism to the rise of digital and posthumanist culture, what we have left behind, and where we find ourselves now. If finding a satisfying sense of self amid the forces of fragmentation is a uniquely postmodernist predicament, then attempting to lose it might be more aptly a posthumanist one, from innumerable search engine hits that locate us in nanoseconds, to the unknown and unknowable number of databases in which our personal details appear, to our ubiquitous profiles cutting across time and space on social networking software du jour. With all of the conspicuous reconfigurations of human bodies and minds in light of machines, any model of selfhood we embrace in the digital age would have to account for the unprecedented ability to control, configure, and distribute – indeed, self-publish – our own modes and models of subjectivity.

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Notes 1 See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 2 Digital fiction can be defined as “fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium.” See Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, David Ciccoricco, Jess Laccetti, Jessica Pressman, and Hans Rustad, “A [S]creed for Digital Fiction,” electronic book review (March 2010); www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/DFINative. 3 Michael Joyce, Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 127. 4 See John Barth’s trio of essays: “The Literature of Exhaustion,” (Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1967/1982); “The Literature of Replenishment,” (Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1982); and “The State of the Art,” Wilson Quarterly 20/2 (Spring 1996), 36–46. 5 See Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Andrew Michael Roberts, “Why Digital Literature Has Always Been ‘Beyond the Screen,’” in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces, and Genres, Jorgen Schafer and Peter Gendolla, eds. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010), 153–78. 6 See Jameson, Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Conditions of Postmodernism. 7 See David Ciccoricco, Reading Network Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 108; Marie-Laure Ryan, “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of Narrative in Digital Media,” Game Studies 1/1 (July 2001); www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan. 8 The common early examples of IF are Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Adventure (1975–6) and Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Bruce Daniels, Zork (1977–9). Notable contemporary authors, especially those invested in exploiting literary conventions in relation to IF, would include Adam Cadre, Nick Montfort, and Emily Short. See Reading Network Fiction, 5–7, for more on the general typology discussed here, and see Montfort, Twisty Little Passages (Cambridge University Press, 2003) for more on IF. 9 Robert Coover, “Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer,” New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1993); Mark America, “Triptych: Hypertext, Surfiction, Storyworlds,” Amerika Online, 2006; www.altx.com/amerika.online/amerika .online.5.1.html. 10 As I have suggested elsewhere, the comparably small number of interlinked scenes or “nodes” (fewer than twenty) that contain mutually exclusive details regarding whether or not Emily, who is stationed in an American military mailroom in Riyadh, has been killed by an errant Scud missile or has returned safely home from war, compared to the overall number of nodes in the network (over 900), would at least indicate that this is a fairly well-contained experiment in ontological discord (Reading Network Fiction, 108–10). Either way, the characterization of Victory Garden as a narrative with innumerable

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possible reading orders yet a predominantly coherent and singular storyworld is an accurate one. But I grant that even two scenes that spell out irreconcilable endings for a character that elicits perhaps our highest emotional expenditure is certainly enough to feel the full force of colliding worlds. 11 I have cited passages from this source with the title that appears on each node. See Stuart Moulthrop, “The Text, ” in Victory Garden (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1991). 12 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 79–80. 13 Moulthrop, Victory Garden, “Mo Pomo.” 14 Moulthrop, Victory Garden, “The LaST Machine.” 15 Donald Barthelme, City Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). 16 Martyn Bedford and Andy Campbell, The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam: An Interactive Short Story in Four Parts (Dreaming Methods, 2000); http://drea mingmethods.com/miriam/. Bedford is credited with the writing and concept; Campbell is credited with the Flash programming and animation design. 17 The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam, Part 1. Hereafter referred to in the text as VDM. 18 For the idea that the “postmodernist” ending is also arguably the most realistic one, I am indebted to a superb close analysis undertaken by student Elise Hawthorne and posted on her course blog for Professor Jamie Skye Bianco’s “Digital Storytelling” course at New York University. See “Hacking and The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam,” (April 11, 2010); http://postprintfictions.word press.com/2010/04/11/hacking-and-the-virtual-disappearance-of-miriam/. 19 Jameson, Foreword to Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xviii. 20 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv. 21 See Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 22 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 4. 23 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 82. 24 For a concrete example, we can recall the 1992 science-fiction horror film The Lawnmower Man. A grab bag of posthumanist concerns (psychotropic mind enhancement, cybersex, militarized animals, and virtual violence in video games among them), the film shows us what happens when a rogue scientist decides to conduct mind experiments on the intellectually challenged neighborhood gardener, Jobe, using the top secret and developmental “virtual reality technology.” Consider the text from the film’s opening title card: “By the turn of the millennium a technology known as virtual reality will be in widespread use. It will allow you to enter computer generated artificial worlds as unlimited as the imagination itself. Its creators foresee millions of positive uses – while others fear it as a new form of mind control.” The film speaks to a certain kind of Virtual Reality zeitgeist that is a spent force (though there is some talk of a revival in the form of the comparably more affordable and accessible Oculus Rift headset due to be available to consumers from 2015). For the critical posthumanist, the film moreover would be an expression of what Stefan Herbrechter calls our most “narcissistic humanist baggage” (Jobe wants to be

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nothing less than Cyber God of the Internet), one that is best cordoned off with our “most radical and transhumanist vision[s] of transcendence” (Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis [London: Bloomsbury, 2013], 130). 25 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 1. 26 See, for instance, Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 27 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 89. 28 Pierre Lévy, Cyberculture, trans. Michael Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 91, 107. 29 That reappraisal of “universality” has occurred in a number of other intellectual fields. From cognitive and evolutionary approaches to literary studies to sundry postcolonial philosophies that theorize commonality and cosmopolitanism, the constructivist pendulum appears to be swinging the other way. 30 Levy, Cyberculture, 233–4. 31 Levy, Cyberculture, 101. 32 Levy, Cyberculture, 230. 33 N. Katherine Hayles followed a highly influential book on human embodiment in the information age with another influential book on textual embodiment in the context of digital-literary practice. See How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). We should also acknowledge here that Marxist scholars theorizing the postmodern, such as Jameson and Terry Eagleton, certainly had material conditions, in a socio-political sense, firmly in their sights all along. 34 Although my focus has been on works of digital literature, we can certainly accommodate the notion of an emergent posthumanist literature in print. Granted, many of the governing themes are as old as the oldest science-fiction novels, but contemporary novels that might reflect a distinctly twenty-first century posthuman subjectivity might include Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000), J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) (a list that represents those texts assembled for a dissertation in progress by Damien Gibson at the University of Otago, “The Posthuman in Contemporary Fiction”). 35 See N. Katherine Hayles, “Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation,” in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, George Levine (ed.), (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 27–43. See also the enactivist theory put forth in the landmark text by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 36 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford University Press, 1999).

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Culture wars at the turn of the millennium Ellen G. Friedman

The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (1991)

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

Multiculturalism, the movement to include a plurality of cultures and identities in textbooks and course curricula, dominated academic, editorial, and talk radio chatter in the 1990s. Prompted by an egalitarian ethic of direct representation, it aimed to correct cultural hegemony. Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn may speak for white male ambitions to escape restraints on individual freedom, the reasoning went, but you also need Kate Chopin to give a voice to white women, Richard Wright to black men, Leslie Marmon Silko to Native Americans, and Gloria Naylor to black women. The most common strategy was to replace traditional with nontraditional texts. Other strategies were directed at renaming and contextualizing the traditional canon. A Georgetown University assistant professor of English, Valerie Babb, offered a course entitled “White Male Writers.” For Babb, the creation of this category deflected the normativity of white male writers in curricula and would be listed alongside, say Native American or African American literature.1 Literary canons were suspect and as Annette Kolodny suggested, could be dropped altogether.2 All texts should be read in their historical and social contexts. James Fenimore Cooper could be read for the information he provides about dominant nineteenth-century attitudes toward Native Americans rather than as articulating a universal US narrative, say about the nation’s “manifest destiny” to stretch to the Pacific. 434

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Although across the US “multicultural” courses made their way into college general education requirements, multiculturalism itself was contested even by the left. Despite good intentions, Michael Lind argued in The Next American Nation (1995), it could lead to another form of ghettoization or as Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture (1994) proposed, it “essentialized” cultures, reducing them to a fixed set of features that masked their hybrid and changing character. Moreover the clashes over canons and books exposed the epistemological anxiety characterizing postmodernism. Knowledge acquired a new instability. For instance, what did it mean that “Columbus discovered America” in light of the prior presence of Native Americans? What used to be knowledge now expressed bias. Postmodern surrender of metanarratives produced multiple indeterminacies, indeterminacies that pundits considered as either liberating or producing chaos, or both at the same time. Analyses of the culture wars varied in intensity from outrage to regret and nostalgia. Andrew Delbanco’s The Death of Satan (1995) mourned the loss of a sense of evil. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts (1994) implied that a cure involved reinstatement of Victorian values. Postmodernists complained as well: Jean Baudrillard’s America (1989) proposed that Western culture was held hostage by media and Jean François Lyotard wrote that nostalgia has replaced the metanarratives of morality, history, and science.3 Political correctness, the culture wars, and multiculturalism were debated from multiple positions – as part of the era’s postmodern turn – that were themselves unstable and shifting. Alliances could not be divided into liberal and conservative, left and right, but were often temporarily formed around particular issues. For instance, they could both advocate that Huckleberry Finn was a good addition to the curriculum, but for different reasons. In this chapter I attempt to follow how these postmodern threads are woven into literary texts and other media.

Culture wars Oleanna (1992), a play by David Mamet, depicts a war between the sexes on the political correctness battlefield. The two characters, a college student named Carol and her professor, John, face off in his office in each of the play’s three acts. The New York opening in fall 1992 found audiences divided on who won and whose side the playwright favored. Even feminists disagreed: Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, found the play “exhilarating” while Deborah Tannen, who wrote You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,

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said the play encouraged people to “feel good about a man beating a woman.”4 In the first act Carol, a student failing John’s course, speaks haltingly and self-deprecatingly, as she confesses she doesn’t know what he’s talking about in class. John, in turn, mouths patronizing assurances with half his attention while the other half is on his tenure battle and purchase of a house. Mamet structures the dialogue so that the meanings float deliriously. The identities of the two characters metamorphose and worry one another. While Carol appears as self-doubting co-ed, oppressed female, and feminist bitch, John appears as condescending patriarch, misogynist brute, and desperate victim. Refusing his argument that grades are unimportant, Carol seems to be speaking of women’s dismal history under patriarchy when she says, “I did what you told me. I did, I did everything that, I read your book, you told me to buy your book and read it. Everything you say I . . . I do.” 5 In Act II, they meet at John’s request after Carol, on the advice of a “group,” has submitted a detailed report to his tenure committee describing John as a sexist, racist, and elitist. Particularly damning is her assertion that he offered to allow her to retake the exam if she came “oftener” to his office. The audience heard this offer presented in Act I as John’s ostensibly earnest, though condescending, effort to help Carol with her studies. In this way, Act II reinterprets many of John’s Act I words. So to his incredulity, Carol responds, “if you possess one ounce of that inner honesty you describe in your book, you can look in yourself and see those things that I see.”6 Mamet’s dialogue rides such ambiguity to the play’s end and thus takes us to an improbable border where sexual harassment meets male bashing. In Act III Carol reveals that beyond the damning report, which has endangered his tenure, she is taking him to court for attempted rape, a charge not warranted by the events on stage. However, after John says, “You vicious little bitch. You think you can come in here with your political correctness and destroy my life? . . . You little cunt” and raises a chair against her while she cowers on the floor, his innocence shades into guilt.7 His act invokes the history of power inequality between men and women, and thus, Carol’s charge against him begins to make some historical sense. By shifting the argument onto ideological ground, Mamet keeps the questions in play. Carol has destroyed John’s career and jeopardized his family’s future, but how else does Carol escape her role as female victim; how else to revise John’s alien language; how else to escape his incomprehensible book? Yet does John deserve to be punished for a hierarchy he inherited and of which he is not quite conscious? How should

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such impasses play out in individual lives? How does one weigh individual injustice against historical injustice; how, indeed, does one separate them? In the nineties, political correctness gathered many issues under its capacious umbrella. Grabbing headlines in the spring of 1990 were two City College, CUNY, professors, both accused of racism, both of them claiming their First Amendment rights. Michael Levin, a philosophy professor who espoused the theory that blacks are innately less intelligent than whites, was picketed by students and censured by the college’s faculty senate. The City College Dean of Humanities sent a letter to students informing them of Levin’s controversial views on race, gender, and homosexuality, and gave them the option of switching to another instructor. A federal court case resulted in which the judge ruled that civil rights had been violated: Dr. Levin’s case “raises serious constitutional questions that go to the heart of the current national debate on what has come to be denominated as ‘political correctness’ in speech and thought on the campuses of the nation’s colleges and universities.”8 Riding on the coattails of this judgment, City College officials stalled in the even more widely publicized case of Leonard Jeffries, chair of the Black Studies Department. Jeffries created controversy with his argument for the racial superiority of Africans over Europeans, of “sun” people over “ice” people, and with his accusation that a Jewish cabal deliberately excluded and denigrated blacks in Hollywood. Complicating the free speech issue in these cases was the growing issue of what constitutes evidence in academia. Should professors, like Levin and Jeffries, be held to a single standard? Given postmodern doubt over whether rational argument leads to truth and whether objectivity is even possible, how can such standards be formulated? Basic democratic vocabulary such as “equality” acquired a new uncertainty. When President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the executive order for Affirmative Action in 1965, he wrote, “We seek . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”9 In a climate of intense millennial doubt, conservatives and liberals continued to wrestle with the value and meaning of affirmative action. What exactly does equality as a value require? Should we judge job or admissions applications differentially to achieve it? Should affirmative action be based on race and gender or should it be based on class? If we can’t agree on what “equality as a fact and as a result” means, how do we move toward it? Once metanarratives are surrendered, judgments may issue from specific identity positions, which are themselves fluid and unstable, just as are notions of nationhood. Thus floating in the p.c. debates – on sexual harassment, free

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speech, the literary canon and multiculturalism, and affirmative action – were multiple indeterminacies. Moreover, what some called hate speech was free speech to others. The US Congress’s siege on the National Endowment for the Arts, the major public funding agency for the arts, demonstrated how easily intuition took over p.c. issues. In 1989, congressional conservatives launched a campaign against postmodern, transgressive art. Performance artist Karen Finley, who was denied funding by the NEA, pointed out that by the standards used by US Senators such as Alphonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms, who dominated the antifunding efforts, there would be numerous “empty frames” of confiscated art: Jasper Johns for desecrating the flag, Mary Cassatt for painting nude children, Picasso for urinating with the help of his children on his sculptures in order to achieve a certain patina.10 Traditional art, after all, makes quite liberal use of female nudes, and rape and dismemberment are familiar themes. As D’Amato tore up a likeness of Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and attacked the NEA on May 18, 1989, during a Senate session, he was banking on unanalyzed intuitive moral judgments about the unacceptable conjunction of body fluids and a sacred subject. The fact that the art of Serrano could easily pass the Miller obscenity standard, the operating legal standard, did not lessen the expression of moral outrage that ensued. The Guerrilla Girls, a radical feminist art collective, published a poster in 1989 that cautioned “Relax Senator Helms, the art world is your kind of place!” It was intended as a reminder that art is owned and negotiated mainly by white, heterosexual males. This anonymous group of feminist art protestors also argued that the number of homoerotic representations of the penis, such as in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, are very few: “The majority of exposed penises in major museums belong to the Baby Jesus.”11 Jesse Helms was explicit about what subject positions he excluded in art. In a 1991 letter to the notorious evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell soliciting his participation in a campaign to regulate more severely the National Endowment for the Arts, he itemized them: “The homosexual ‘community,’ the feminists, the civil libertarians, the pro-abortionists, the flag burners . . . ”12 The swamps, snarls, elisions, muddles, and competing claims around p.c. issues exhibited the uncertainties inherent in postmodernism. In the interstices of these disagreements, there was room for both Mapplethorpe and Senator Helms – for those who speak and are heard, which does not include everyone, but does include many. Contests within feminism, for instance, dislodged the complacency of the position that early,

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second-wave feminists assumed. The nature of the challenges to feminism has varied. While the first challenges came from those not included in the white, middle-class feminist agenda of the 1970s, later challenges had less to do with inclusiveness than with the entire notion of gender. A series of antifeminist feminists attacked previous premises. Katie Roiphe targeted the “women-as-victims” discourse, especially around rape, while Christina Hoff Sommers saw the feminist idea of an all-encompassing “patriarchy” as simply paranoia.13 So too, woman, the very category of feminist analysis, became elusive. In view of sex-change operations, transvestism, and other biological and cultural variables, locating the precise border between masculine and feminine began to lose its relevance. At any rate, argued Judith Butler, all gender is drag, related to imitation or performance and not in any sense “real.”14 Such disagreements were more than academic. They complicated ideas of gender and the social and political agendas undertaken on its behalf. Although they may, via Roiphe, decrease the measures taken against rape at a college campus or fuel, via Sommers, an administrator’s inclination to cut Women’s Studies, feminist discourse expanded and more positions were introduced and heard.

Identity politics Operating out of a fixed idea of one’s or another’s identity can lead to moral impasse, as it does in Oleanna. Indeed, the trend to define oneself as allied with a particular race, gender, ethnic group, or sexual preference, was challenged by a competing trend to define oneself as occupying multiple identities. One fear was that one’s identity could seem so fragmented that one would be left, if not in pieces, in a state of radical individuality, unclear how to proceed or where one belongs. One feminist surveying this situation quipped, “From mass movements to support groups to self-help.”15 While the focus on difference asserted subject positions with definitive borders, thus fetishizing difference, multiple or shifting subject positions implied a sense of moral responsibility for identities one did not currently occupy. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was often invoked with his argument of extending sympathy toward those subjectivities one had never occupied.16 In the language proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa, it means moving toward the consciousness of la mestiza, a consciousness of the “borderlands” where one resides in the ambivalence of a number of identities, estranged and not estranged from them, knowing them all at least partially, and embracing pluralism.17 The era explored what hate speech would be in such a borderland where subject positions are so

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intermingled and hybrid that isolating them would be superfluous or irrelevant. Such fluidity led to unusual appropriations of particular subject positions, such as when the white rap group 3rd Base attacked black rapper MC Hammer for being too melodic, that is, not black enough.18 “Black” is separated from skin color and associated with desirable musical qualities that some white musicians may have more of than some black musicians. Such moves, of course, may have been the other face of Fanon-like cultural imperialism or they may make a bland stew of cultural traditions. But they also went some distance in making “difference” seem not so foreign, therefore not wrong or immoral. An awareness of borderland identity and of fluidity in subject positions, the hope was, would foster a sense of “we-ness,” not in the sense of unified community but in the sense of acceptance of difference or fluidity between the subject positions people occupy in a pluralistic democracy.

Nation Multiculturalism also reframed the discourse of nation. The most developed one-nation millennial arguments came out of the war over academic curricula. The dumbing of America, its moral disintegration, the danger that should current trends continue, “being itself ” may “vanish” beyond the “dissolving horizon” – one or another version of Armageddon is risked, it was said, when an affirmative action policy was applied to the choice of texts. The extravagant “dissolving horizon” metaphor is from Allan Bloom’s wildly popular and universally discussed book The Closing of the American Mind (1986). Bloom and others shared the notion that a collective memory, contained in a repository of sacred texts, sustained national cohesion. Should collective memory fade, they worried, the nation would fall into moral anarchy, and, according to Bloom, face extinction. Following on the heels of The Closing of the American Mind, E. D. Hirsch published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), described by Hirsch himself as a set of “quick pragmatic fixes.” The book was endorsed by William Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, who himself published the more ideologically prescriptive Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (1993), as well as a sequel and a children’s book. In the widely discussed appendix to his book, Hirsch offered a national vocabulary that if mastered by the US citizenry would provide a common body of knowledge that Hirsch sees as the path to a shared national ethics. The nostalgic, one-nation portrait appeared even among traditional liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Dissenting from the New York

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Board of Regents’ decision to make the curriculum more diverse, Schlesinger argued that what holds US democracy together is its “common ideals, common political institutions, common language, common culture, common fate.”19 Conservative columnist George F. Will echoed these thoughts in a Newsweek article when he defended the academy against what he calls “Marxist academics”: “The real Constitution, which truly constitutes America, is the national mind as shaped by the intellectual legacy that gave rise to the Constitution and all the habits, mores, customs and ideas that sustain it.” For Will, all that is sacred in US culture is threatened by p.c. courses in which Shakespeare’s The Tempest is described as reflecting the “imperialist rape of the Third World” and “Emily Dickinson’s poetic references to peas and flower buds are viewed as encoded messages of feminist rage, exulting in clitoral masturbation to protest the prison of patriarchal sex roles.” Such courses, complains Will, cause “collective amnesia and deculturation.”20 Yet the set of Great Words advocated by Hirsch and Bloom were culled from a tradition that less and less expressed the US in the nineties when one out of every three schoolchildren in the US was not white. In addition, Arnold Rampersad traced a “continuum” of attacks on US culture by antiestablishment writers – William James, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost – the very ones that Schlesinger and Will may have had in mind. Rampersad quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson: “[W]e have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” Emerson, like the curricular multiculturalists, objected to a universal required reading list. He wrote, “the only objection to Hamlet is that it exists.” Rather than conveying a unified culture, argues Rampersad, US literature is distinguished by antiestablishment, antihierarchical positions.21 Even if one conceded that the relationship between the national literature and the sense of nationhood could be separated, this relationship seemed complicated beyond easy distinction. As Michael Berubé wrote: [Y]ou can’t imagine an American literature that isn’t grounded in some US narrative of self-definition, whether you rely on stories about “self-reliance” or on the multicultural “salad bowl” into which more and more foreign ingredients get tossed. And yet I wonder. Perhaps an American literature that exceeds the boundaries of the American nation-state, temporally and conceptually, can be thought – and brought into the classroom.22

The nostalgia of those who cling to an Edenic, unified notion of America, already served up to a wildly receptive public as satire in the Stephen Sondheim lyrics of “America” (“Everything free in America, For a small

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fee in America”) in the 1950s musical West Side Story (1957), could only be maintained with vigilance. Despite this difficulty, “America” persisted as an ever-seductive idea, partially because its status was endangered and nothing appeared on the horizon to replace it. Corporations, for instance, could assert “America” effectively. Headline-grabbing chairman of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca urged US consumers to “Buy American,” despite the fact that many Chrysler Corporation products relied on Japanese design and Japanese parts. When a single corporate enterprise required multinational participation, the question of what constituted an “American” product became more and more difficult to answer. In fact, the Japanese workers at the Mitsubishi plant in Nagoya, Japan, expressed confusion at Iacocca’s “Buy American” campaign as they were producing the Dodge Stealth on their own assembly line.23 At the same time that the unity of nation was idealized, then, nation became an undependable narrative, a moral tale that was repeatedly shored up but that seemed to defy these efforts. Benedict Anderson’s argument that the nation is only an imagined entity, a mythical community where most people are strangers, seemed more and more apt. The now porous border around “nation” and the increasingly fluctuating and shifting narrative of the past, provided artists with opportunities. In the 1993 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial exhibition Pat Ward Williams effectively manipulated these instabilities. His “What You Lookn At?” a 96  192 dot screen mural dominated the Madison Avenue museum window as passersby looked in from the outside. It pictures five young men of color sitting on a bench against a brick wall. Their faces register defiance, anger, and coolness, emotional qualities reiterated in the spray painted legend, “What you lookn at?” scrawled across the mural. The mostly white, well-heeled Madison Avenue pedestrians outside the museum were faced with a ghetto scene inside a mainstream institution, the Whitney. In so positioning the mural, the exhibit curator bolstered Williams’ ironic play with race relations in the United States – who is outside and who is inside being looked at with desire. The mural marked a sly negotiation between identities of color and US culture, the artist of color and the mostly white art establishment. A similar, though more historically freighted negotiation appears in the work of Chinese American artist Hung Liu, who was prominently featured in women’s and multicultural exhibits. “Trademarks” is a lithograph based on an old photograph of Chinese child prostitutes offered to Americans and other foreigners around the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth century. Such photographs in which Chinese prostitutes were pictured in European settings and in some cases wore European clothes

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were fairly common. In “Trademarks,” the motif of a row of girls seated on a bench is repeated in a row of mahjong pieces, placed beneath them, from the Chinese board game also popular in white middle-class American homes. Glued on each mahjong piece is an identical photograph of an attractive Chinese woman in native dress. A complaint about the bitter and trivial legacies (“trademarks”) of encounters between Hung Liu’s native and adopted culture, this lithograph, in somewhat similar terms to “What you lookn at?” negotiates between her Chinese heritage and her status as a naturalized US citizen. Both of these artworks expose different, conflicting claims on the individual artist. These claims result in what Bhabha calls cultural hybridity, a condition in which one is poised at several borders of identity and nation at the same time.24

Hybridity As Williams and Hung Liu demonstrated, sometimes one bristles at border conflicts and sometimes one wonders what you owe at each border or how each border is endangered by the others, but at other times, as in Williams’s work, one revels in the possibilities such choices and mixtures afford. Hybridity thus became an alternative to multiculturalism as a way of honoring diversity. It may be a less limiting way to view individual identity within the context of nation.25 The interactive, interdependent nature of identity and nation found expression in Serrano’s 1990 exhibition Nomads, Cibrachrome portraits of homeless people and Klansmen, juxtaposed. A Latino and a successful artist, Serrano self-consciously chose these subjects because, he says, of “Being who I am racially and culturally.”26 The portraits reflect and define his subject position within the United States. As a Latino he is in a sense “homeless” in the United States, the object of KKK scorn. But by making the homeless and Klansmen objects of his art, he puts both of them in his power. With these photographs Serrano both surrendered to and exploited his position as successful Latino artist. At the same time as he demonstrated his and others’ strangeness in the nation, their status as foreigners, as different, he also used this strangeness, this abjection to make himself and others a little less abject, negotiating away some of this strangeness through public art. The hybrid is always several and never coalesces. Each identity not only makes bargains with the others but also with the culture. In John Sayles’s 1996 film Lone Star, it is toward this sense of hybridity that the moral narrative moves. Set in Frontera, Texas, a fictional border town, the film

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juxtaposes several stories, each revolving around identity: a black owner of the only bar in Darktown, who operates just this side of the law, must confront the son whom he abandoned now returned as an Army colonel. A Mexican American woman who owns a restaurant ideologically renews her US citizenship each time she yells at her help to “speak English” and each time she calls the border patrol to report the “wetbacks” sneaking through her yard from just having survived crossing the Rio Grande. But when a young, pregnant woman emerges from the river and appears at her house, she is forced to recall her own illegal entry into the United States. Even the film’s humor is about how mutable values attached to identity are. When a character is told that the family of his friend’s black fiancé will be so relieved to learn she is not a lesbian that they won’t care he is white, he says, “It’s always heart warming to see one prejudice supplanted by a deeper prejudice.” None of these identities – white, black, Native American, Mexican, Mexican American – is stable, even within an identity group. When Colonel Payne, the barkeeper’s son, asks Private Johnson, a black woman, what she’s doing in the army, he expects to hear about patriotism, but is made to rethink his status as a black man in a white institution when she says, “It’s their country. It’s the best deal they offer . . . They got people to fight – Arabs, yellow people. Why not use us?” These stories about identity also detail conflicts between fathers and sons, here a trope for the conflict between history and the present. The film’s protagonist, Sheriff Deeds, wants to prove that his dead father, revered in Frontera, was evil, but instead he discovers that he was complicated: his father did not separate him from his high school sweetheart because she was Mexican, but because she was his half sister. Kristeva said that to achieve “heterogeneity is to disidentify our identities.”27 Almost every major character in the movie disidentifies in this way in order to live in this borderland, this Frontera. The film’s last words are “Forget the Alamo.” Thus, the final disidentification in the film is with history that in this Southern border town is powerfully associated with racism. Of course, such disidentifications are never complete, but they do invite hybridity and heterogeneity. The significance of this ethics of identification and disidentification is a gift of postmodernist tolerance of ambiguity. The ambiguity seems Derridian: “The same duty dictates respecting differences, idioms, minorities, singularities, but also the universality of formal law, the desire for translation, agreement and univocity, the law of the majority, opposition to racism, nationalism and xenophobia.”28 For others, though, the loss of dependable connections between past moral scripts and the present appeared as a postmodern moment,

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reminiscent of what Jurgen Habermas describes as the world after the horrors of the Holocaust: that is, the moment we are living feels transitional and creates a sense of disequilibrium for the future as well.29 This disequilibrium translated into existential uncertainty and an abiding sense of strangeness. In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, traditional notions of morality are dissipated in the postmodern “noise” of media networks, computerized information, the deluge of ads, the blitz of products in supermarkets and malls, and in redefined households in which “mother,” “father,” and “child” may refer to disparate people, not linked by blood and who because of divorces and remarriages may live in separate houses. Jack Gladney, the protagonist, is a “postmodern” man, adrift in a realm without convincing authorities or certainties. Although he yearns for a fixed perspective, none seems tenable. Meditating on a “picture of Kennedy and the Pope in heaven” in a Catholic hospital, he asks Sister Hermann Marie, “Is it still the old heaven, like that, in the sky?” She replies, “Do you think we are stupid?” The most she can offer him is the rationale that the church sustains the pretense of such beliefs: “Our pretense is a dedication . . . As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe.” Even when he plans to kill his wife’s lover, Gladney cannot sustain an idea of the lover as evil and deserving death. Confronted with the actual man, bleeding from the gunshot wounds Gladney inflicted, he is unable to maintain the narrative of wronged husband seeking revenge. In the end, he switches moral scripts and saves the man’s life.30

Family Millennial postmodern uneasiness seemed particularly entrenched in images of the US family. The family as metaphor for such uneasiness appeared as decentered or aberrant. The Sally Mann photography exhibit “Immediate Family” (1992) and the New York Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort” (1991) are two examples. In family photographs Mann evoked the disturbing undercurrents that are now part of the discourse of family relationships. She repeatedly sexualized her prepubescent children, thus gathering contemporary anxieties about physical and sexual abuse in traditional families into the frame of her compositions. She tracked the ambiguities in viewers’ fears and assumptions concerning family life. Where a viewer first sees radical exploitation and perversion of emotional and economic dependencies within the traditional family, as in the photo “The Terrible Picture,

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1989” – a nude shot of Mann’s younger daughter at four with her eyes closed and body covered with suspicious marks – the child has in reality been playing in the dirt. Although it turns out that this photo does not depict child abuse, the suggestion has been made. The child may, in fact, be abused in other ways, emotionally perhaps. Or she may be thought to represent other abused children who themselves are not easily identified. By such subversion of viewers’ expectations, Mann explored the surfacing multiple uncertainties that haunted family relationships. Tina Barney used a more subtle photographic lexicon to depict the isolation experienced in family life. “Sunday New York Times” (1982), in Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, features members of Barney’s family assembled in a dining room. The photographic composition, as well as the title, leads the viewer to expect a traditional family Sunday morning scene. But Barney captures a moment in which mother, father, grandmother, husband, wife and who goes with whom cannot be discerned, as with the unstable family portrayed in DeLillo’s novel. The family’s interest is focused mainly on various sections of the New York Times rather than on one another. Eleven people, no more than two talking to one another – most in postures of isolation or contemplation – comprise a portrait that questions the nuclearity of the contemporary family, and pointed, as did Mann’s photographs, to the moral unease and alienation that attached itself to membership in the family group.

Nostalgia and beyond The past had an almost ubiquitous presence in nineties’ representations. Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1991) juxtaposed a scene in which the film’s protagonist and his mistress argue over his wish to end their relationship with a clip of a similar subject from Hitchcock’s 1941 film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Compared with the confusions of contemporary morality, the clip evokes an era when moral postures were fairly certain, when everyone seemed to know and agree upon what good and bad meant, their fixity assumed. In Hitchcock’s screwball comedy, the misunderstanding concerns the legitimacy of a marriage certificate and is resolved when the couple is reunited. In Allen’s black comedy, the quarrel is resolved with a murder. The past, or at least the nostalgic view of it represented by the Hitchcock clip, is offered as a measure of the muddled present. So many of the representations across genres in this era were preoccupied with ambiguity. Although unsettling, they offered a wide range of judgments – from a conviction that contemporary culture offers no moral

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limits, as in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991), to a preacherly insistence on bolstering traditional institutions to stem the tide of moral decay, as in John Singleton’s film Boyz ’N the Hood (1991), which argues that proper fathering is critical for saving inner-city black youth from death and jail. More often, though, a movie or novel explored moral uncertainty without recommending action. Woody Allen moved toward such stalemate in Crimes and Misdemeanors by setting contemporary scenes of today’s muddled morality next to clips from old movies. Juxtapositions with forties’ films are meant to demonstrate a discrepancy in moral attitude between the earlier era and the present. The moral positions in old films are neither equivocal nor equivocated as they are in the contemporary scene. Allen, unlike the social reformer Singleton, is fascinated by the turn to uncertainty and makes it his object to put it before the public. In contrast, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), dedicated to Yusef Hawkins, a l6-year-old black youth who was shot in 1989 during a racial incident in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, took on clashing moralities in order to point beyond them. The plot turns on an affair between a married black architect from Harlem and his working-class Italian secretary from Bensonhurst. This situation gives Lee the opportunity to juxtapose stereotypes of race and class in various degrees of malignancy. Whites are racist but sexually curious about blacks; educated blacks disdain working-class Italian Americans but are also sexually curious about them; black women curse the self-hatred that drives their best men into the arms of white females; and an elderly black preacher uses the Old Testament as armor against the moral chaos that is outside the “good book.” These perspectives, though stereotypic, are emotionally powerful. Yet the contending perspectives lose definition as several of the characters reach beyond bigotry and received ideas. Unlike the earlier Spike Lee movie, Do the Right Thing (1989), the competing discourses of race and class are eventually negotiated by some characters into a discourse of the future that counters racism and classism with simple, sure gestures: the Italian American secretary moves out of Bensonhurst, away from an obligation to conform to racist ethics. The buppie (black upwardly mobile professional) returns to his wife, knowing that he is not just following his preacher father’s Old Testament script for the moral life. No longer do his actions seem to him morally neutral, “complex” as he put it earlier in the film. In the optimism of this ending lies the conviction that flexibility inhabits even the most obstinate conflicts around race. Indeed, in this film, it is the move toward uncertainty that makes for optimism. Jay McInerney’s 1996 novel The Last of the Savages offered Kristevan encounters with otherness as yet another way to negotiate the postmodern

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turn. Grimly determined to sever ties with his corrupt racist southern aristocratic father, Will Savage, the only remaining Savage son, moves west to California, land of America’s manifest destiny. Here he tentatively reframes that destiny: a rich, white heterosexual entrepreneur with a low sperm count, Savage marries a southern black woman and asks his white, homosexual, Catholic northern friend to provide the sperm so he can have a baby. The child of this miscegenation carries the name of his Savage father, but on him the meaning of that name has become productively uncertain, detached at least from bigotry, corruption, and unearned privilege. The narrator, who is also the sperm donor, asks, “Will he combine our strengths, this mulatto boy, or be divided against himself? . . . I wondered whether a child of two races might redeem the original sin of our heritage. Or whether, at least, he might be happier with who he is than we were.”31 Like some of the other representations discussed here, The Last of the Savages is a tribute to postmodern uncertainty. Moral certainty is associated with racism, sexism, and a crippling nostalgia. Moral uncertainty and ambiguity can accommodate negotiation between various moral discourses that looks beyond such certainties. McInerney questions the ease of taking such “twelve steps into a brave new life . . . If we log on to the Internet, eat the right foods and exercise religiously, surely we will forget our differences and begin to love one another. But then the riots break out again in the City of Angels.”32 Such representations, even when they are heavy-handed or skeptical, helped the era to imagine what the benefits might be of surrendering authoritarian moral frames for a plurality of competing and uncertain moves toward contingent, revisable, negotiated solutions. Notes This essay is adapted from Chapters 3 and 5 of Morality USA by Ellen G. Friedman and Corinne Squire. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 1 New York Times, March 4. 1991. 2 See Annette Kolodny, “The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States,” American Literature, May 1985, 291–307. 3 See Jean François Lyotard, Moralités Postmoderne (Paris: Galilee, 1993). 4 New York Times, November 15, 1992. 5 David Mamet, Oleanna (New York: Random, 1992), 9. 6 Mamet, Oleanna, 52. 7 Mamet, Oleanna, 79. 8 The Student Advocate, April 23, 1990, the City University of New York, 1.

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9 Quoted in Nicholas Lemann, “Taking Affirmative Action Apart,” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1995, 36–44. 10 See Karen Finley, “It’s Only Art,” Village Voice Literary Supplement, October 1990, reprinted in Richard Bolton (ed.), Culture Wars: Documents From the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: The New Press, 1992). 282–4. 11 Quoted in Bolton (ed.), Culture Wars, 313. 12 Bolton (ed.), Culture Wars, 306. 13 See Kate Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (New York: Little, Brown, 1993); Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 14 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13–31. 15 Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, “Sexualities,” National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Saratoga Springs, NY, June 16, 1996. 16 See Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 71. 17 See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 18 See Houston A. Baker Jr., “Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s,” in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds.), Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 197–210. 19 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (Knoxville, TN: Whittle Direct Books, 1991), 138. 20 George F. Will, “Literary Politics,” Newsweek, April 22, 1992, 72. 21 Arnold Rampersad, “Values Old and New,” Profession’91 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1991), 14. 22 Michael Berubé, Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (London: Verso, 1994), 220. 23 New York Times, February 27, 1992. 24 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. 25 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 3. 26 Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusions in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 84. 27 Julia Kristeva, “Proust: Issues of Identity,” Gauss Lectures, October 10–12, 1995. Princeton University. 28 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 78. 29 See Nick Smith, “The Spirit of Modernity and Its Fate: Jürgen Habermas,” Radical Philosophy 60 (Spring 1992), 23–9. 30 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985), 317, 319. 31 Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages (New York: Knopf, 1996), 270. 32 McInerney, The Last of the Savages, 271.

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Second-generation postmoderns Stephen J. Burn

After seventy disorienting pages of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), a character named David Wallace interrupts whatever narrative momentum the book has established to offer the reader an author’s foreword. While plaintively insisting that the book is “substantially true,” Wallace scrambles the details of the real author’s life, getting dates and places wrong. But amidst the calculated misdirection, Wallace’s commentary on the author’s past shades into a suggestive account of the novel’s literary ancestors. “Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time,” he confesses, “I dreamed of becoming an ‘artist,’ . . . My specific dream was of becoming an immortally great fiction writer à la Gaddis or Anderson, Balzac or Perec, & c.”1 If, as many commentators have suggested, David Foster Wallace is particularly representative of his generation’s struggle to forge a new fiction in the wake of postmodernism,2 and if, as has been claimed equally often, The Pale King marks the threshold that Wallace could not get beyond in that struggle,3 then this passage, in which Wallace’s autobiographical persona traces his genealogy may be a richer entry point than it first seems in determining what distinguishes Wallace’s generation from the first-generation postmodern novelists who mostly came to prominence in the 1960s. Mapping the contours that divide postmodernism from whatever comes after it has been a key critical concern around the millennium, though the story of the end of postmodernism as a literary aesthetic starts somewhere further back. As early as 1976, in fact, Alan Wilde – hardly an enemy of postmodern fiction – could argue that Donald Barthelme’s work was moving into new (“possibly, post-postmodern”) territory that would recuperate a “humanism of sorts.”4 It’s tempting to dismiss such early claims as “sheer sloganeering,” a premature impatience with a project yet to run its course.5 But while many attempts to define writing after postmodernism retain (in different ways) Wilde’s emphasis on a “humanism of sorts” – from Wallace’s over-quoted claim that fiction has to be “about what it is to 450

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be a fucking human being” to Mary K. Holland’s survey of “a new humanism” in contemporary fiction – the real beginning of a formal response to postmodernism might be dated at the start of the 1990s.6 Despite other early outliers, Malcolm Bradbury’s argument (in a paper on “neorealism” given in May 1991) that a combination of new conservatism, economic realism, a lack of readerly appetite for “complex imaginative exploration,” and the self-doubt afflicting the best writers, had put us “post the postmodern” stands at the head of an accelerated effort to periodize the present.7 In the ensuing decade, elegies for postmodernism proliferated with such titles as The End of Postmodernism and In Memoriam to Postmodernism, and such studies laid the foundations for the varied ways that twenty-first century criticism – notably in special issues of the American Book Review and Twentieth-Century Literature – grappled with postmodernism and its legacy. A small critical industry has now formed around such claims, and its scale of analysis is often remarkably varied. On one level, it proposes new vocabularies and new objects of attention, by narrowing focus to the boutique distinctions of digimodernism or altermodernism. On another level it radically expands the scale of analysis to encompass most of the twentieth century and beyond: Amy Hungerford’s critique of “ever more divided accounts of the post-1945 period” and promotion of the term long modernism springs to mind; as does Marshall Boswell’s characterization of Wallace’s work at the crest of “some still-unnamed . . . third wave of modernism.”8 The danger of the first impulse is that it risks bifurcating the literary field into smaller and smaller particles. The second impulse has the considerable merit of stressing lines of continuity across the century, yet it risks effacing the period distinctions that are often as important to writers in their creative self-definitions as they are to critics. The problem for nearly all accounts, however, is that postmodernism – as defined and produced by first-generation postmodernists – clearly did not end in either the nineties or the early twenty-first century. The sequence of writers most closely associated with its rise, in fact, published some of their most important works across this period – in America alone we have William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own (1994), Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (2002), and Barth’s Once Upon a Time (1994). While a second generation formulated their movement away from their ancestor works, the first generation stubbornly and productively persisted, even as they lost favor with mainstream publishers, and their works found homes at Counterpoint, Dalkey, Dzanc, and so on. The generational divide at issue is not the clean split implied by some

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explanatory labels, nor the fluid continuum implied by others; rather, as Ben Lerner reflects in Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), “a ‘post’ was being formed, and the air was alive less with the excitement of a period than with the excitement of periodization.”9 Put another way, there is a tangible difference between first- and second-generation postmoderns, but one way to think about that difference is in terms of the way the second generation is alive “with the excitement of periodization,” of dramatizing (if not always enacting) a coherent generation’s movement away from their ancestors. Wallace himself often betrayed a millennial “excitement of periodization,” which manifested in his attempts to chart the development of the post-postmodern, and – more generally – in his obsession with the idea of a generational cusp.10 His nonfiction repeatedly sets up generational binaries, marking off the previous generation of writers from a cohort that he variously imagined as the “conspicuously young” or “the next real literary ‘rebels.’”11 A similar urge punctuates his interviews, which imagine his contemporaries as “orphans” abandoned by their literary parents.12 These writers are, Wallace notes with grand emphasis, “A Generation,” and his fiction underscores this concern by organizing itself around generational divides that set (in his early books) three generations of a family next to each other to explore not just how “fathers impact sons” but the larger arena of generational psychodynamics.13 Since both generational succession and the term post-postmodernism are relative concepts, taking their coloring from a simultaneous expression of allegiance with and differentiation from some antecedent term, it makes sense that a similar dual movement is palpable when Wallace’s fiction navigates its literary-historical location. In The Pale King’s account of its own textual origins, for example, Wallace rehearses the standard metaleptic intrusion that’s familiar from much postmodern fiction, yet this invocation of past practice nestles alongside its repudiation, as the same section distances his meta-commentary from “cute, self-referential paradoxes.”14 By the time of The Pale King, Wallace had already worked such ambivalent routines in several earlier works – “Westward” juggles “really blatant and intrusive interruption[s]” alongside reassurances that it’s “NOT” a piece of “metafiction”; “Octet” offers “intranarrative acknowledgements” next to reflections that such “self-reference might come off lame and tired and facile” – and the coupled invocation and disavowal strategy arguably accounts for much of the critical brow furrowing that has accompanied efforts to periodize Wallace’s work.15 On one level, the half-French, halfAmerican genealogy outlined in The Pale King serves that function.

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The triangulation effected among Gaddis, Balzac, and Perec, while clearly not an accurate or exhaustive account of Wallace’s heritage (no DeLillo? Pynchon? Puig?), nevertheless neatly condenses a hybrid aesthetic both based in first-generation postmodernism, and blended with more alien traditions. Wallace secures a primary affiliation with postmodernism as an avant-garde enterprise by the inclusion of Gaddis at the head of the list. Yet while Wallace’s contemporary, Jonathan Franzen, had characterized Gaddis as “Mr. Difficult,” and lamented the demise of the “social novel” that would “Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream,” Wallace’s genealogy (perhaps with one eye on Franzen) juxtaposes Gaddis with the social novelist par excellence, Balzac, whose totalizing project was to “portray all aspects of society.”16 Postmodernism’s demesne is implicitly stretched, then, to encompass the supposed golden age of the novel’s social authority. Such contradictory responses to postmodernism’s first generation are not an idiosyncrasy particular to Wallace, but in fact extend across his generation. When Franzen, for instance, bestows the email address “exprof@gaddisfly.com” on his failed writer in The Corrections (2001), he similarly combines allusion and distancing mechanism: fly implies that we’re in some way escaping Gaddis’s postmodernism.17 The final two names on the list, however, may seem to have less farreaching significance to the shape of second-generation postmodernism. The inclusion of French OuLiPian Georges Perec, with his fondness for building works around flowcharts – The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department . . . (1968) – or graph theory – (Life A User’s Manual (1978) – presses this genealogy toward mathematical structures in a fashion that makes sense in terms of Wallace’s background in math and logic, but that may seem less obviously relevant to, say, Jennifer Egan or Colson Whitehead. The fourth name on The Pale King’s shortlist of literary genius is, however, arguably the most difficult to plot on a road map that leads toward twenty-first century fiction. Sherwood Anderson barely figures in accounts of postmodernism’s revolt against the electronic village, while recent studies ascribe only the faintest of half-lives to the style of his most famous book, with Mark McGurl arguing that in the immediate postwar period “‘Midwestern’ soon weakened as a meaningful contemporary regionalism in American culture.”18 Winesburg, Ohio certainly survives in mummified form on syllabi and in paperback reprints, yet the first clues to its contemporary relevance lie less in documentary evidence of its longevity, and more in the reasons for Anderson’s early loss of status. Although Anderson was heralded as a pioneer of the “New Realism” by Alfred Kazin, his contemporary eminence was short-lived. By 1941, Lionel

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Trilling had influentially dismissed Anderson, and was leveling a catalog of complaints against his fiction: Anderson felt the “problem of the artist was defined wholly by the struggle between sincerity . . . and commercialism”; “there was an odd, quirky, undisciplined religious strain in him”; and even “old slang persists” in his prose “so that people are constantly having the ‘fantods.’”19 Whether Wallace knew Trilling’s essay or not, the supposed failures map seamlessly onto Infinite Jest’s (1996) attacks on commercialized irony, sometimes unusual religious allusions (such as to St. Dymphna), and motif-like use of the phrase “the howling fantods.” Building on such links, there are moments where Winesburg, Ohio seems to lie behind The Pale King like a watermark. After its meta-frametale, for instance, Winesburg proper starts with a deceptively simple scene: Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the field.20

Anderson’s opening is profoundly visual not just in the detail it picks out, but also in the multiple perspectives it condenses: in the first sentence, we are carried by a neutral camera eye that roves across the landscape to see the man; in the second sentence, we share the man’s eyeballs as he looks back across the landscape. The optical structure of the passage introduces, the idea of reciprocity, or pairing, that’s extended by repeated words (near), rhyming pairs (seed/ weed), opposites (halves, up and down), and cyclical actions (a crop’s seeding and growth, the implied voyage and reported return of the berry pickers). Endless cyclical rhythms are conveyed by the opening’s sonic qualities, where a relentless rhythmic pulse is established by the assonant string of a-sounds, only to be interrupted by the dissonant vowel sequence – “fat little old” – that introduces the incongruous human figure. Finally the passage’s restless feel is underscored by a palette of spatial word choices (upon, across, near, and so on). Almost moving in parallel, The Pale King begins with a variation on Anderson’s themes: Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly . . . insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no

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shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and Chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.21

While both passages address a rural Midwestern setting mostly bereft of people, their deeper overlaps stem from shared stylistic signatures and conceptual underpinnings. Like Anderson’s symphonic opening, Wallace’s sketch is a rich sensory experience: his paratactic first sentence also begins with a string of a-sounds, and relies heavily on an accumulation of visual details from a perspective that seems to be constantly in motion. Similarly, Wallace creates a cyclical feel out of paired units (repeated words – past – and alliterative pairs), while one of the stronger links is the opening paragraph’s final sentence – “we are all of us brothers” – which echoes George Willard’s vision as he stands in a vacant lot and looks at the houses of Winesburg: “he felt that all of the people in the little street must be brothers . . . and he wished he had the courage to call out to them.”22 Yet even as Wallace invokes and echoes Anderson’s passage, he also elaborates upon and diverges from the earlier book. While the perspectival shifts in Anderson introduced reciprocity between viewer and viewed, Wallace’s lens depends upon vertiginous shifts in scale, zooming in and out from the microscopic level of mineral grains in stone to “whorls of cirrus.” While the cyclic rhythms of nature shadow Anderson’s workers, in Wallace’s passage, human work lies like a fine film net on top of his natural scene: the flannel plains is the book’s first allusion to Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), the sunlight is quantifiable as coins, the insects are “all business.” These minor recalibrations subtly shift the essential weight of the passage away from Anderson’s naturalist vision of humanity’s grounding in evolutionary rhythms (the “warm unthinking little animal” within), toward Wallace’s conception of our entombment in the institutional age, where economics ground everything.23 As such, the guiding principle at work here seems a cognate extension of Wallace’s tendency to invoke and reject postmodernism, and, in fact – as Marshall Boswell has shown in relation to Updike, and Charles B. Harris in relation to Barth – this is a revisionary approach that Wallace used to address his key influences across his fiction.24 Few second-generation postmoderns betray affinities with Anderson as flagrantly as Wallace, yet regardless of direct lines of influence, a notable continuity is palpable between the larger territory of (particularly American) millennial fiction and Wallace’s practice as outlined here. Wallace’s preoccupation with sincerity and irony, as derived, in part, from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (1983), has often been overplayed and crudely simplified in

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accounts linking his work to those of his contemporaries, but if, for instance, ghosts are taken as synechdochic expressions of the “queer religious strain” in such fiction, it’s surely significant that the trope of communication from beyond the grave recurs in second-generation works either through the use of dead narrators – Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” (2004), Egan’s The Keep (2006), George Saunders’s “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (1996), and “Commcomm” (2006) and so on – or, however explained, through literal or figurative ghosts – the list here would include Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance (1985) and The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999).25 The prevalence of such overlaps across a generation are, of course, unlikely to stem solely from Anderson’s slim volume; nevertheless, this consistency of concerns might sponsor a more extended reflection on Anderson’s relevance because one way to think through the links between Winesburg and the second-generation postmoderns is in terms of a map of postmodernism’s shifting formal concerns.26 The signature forms of the first generation are the binary poles of minimalism and maximalism: the short fiction (Borges, Coover, and Barth) and the encyclopedic novel (the Mexican novelists Fernando del Paso and Carlos Fuentes, Gaddis, Pynchon, Rushdie, and – again – Barth). In the long sixties, neither option was solely a value-neutral question of aesthetics. The short form had commercial possibilities – sales to magazines (Barthelme’s long-term relationship with the New Yorker springs to mind), or inclusion in classroom anthologies (“novels,” as Barth observed, “being hard to excerpt coherently” for the growing number of MFA workshops).27 The encyclopedic narrative, by contrast, was less reader-friendly, but had gained cultural capital as the exemplary form of High Modernism, and in 1957 Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism lauded writers who built their creative lives around such “supreme effort[s].”28 Paralleling Frye’s thinking, many firstgeneration postmoderns drew on the maximalist form to structure their careers, planning a long capstone novel that would take them decades to complete: Gaddis’s Agapë Agape (2003), begun in the 1950s and only “completed” on Gaddis’s deathbed in the late 1990s; Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), which was underway at least as early as the start of the 1970s; and Coover’s Lucky Pierre, which was started in 1969. That the encyclopedic novel extends into the second generation – Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (1995), and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) attests to the continued strength of the cultural hierarchy handed

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down by institutionalized modernism, and codified into postmodernism.29 That the short story continues to thrive (Sherman Alexie, Ben Marcus, Wells Tower, Karen Russell), attests to the longevity of the material conditions that underwrite much contemporary fiction: the creative writing programs that continue to see the workshop-friendly short story as narrative’s fundamental building block, and the magazines that pay to publish them. These forms lead less active lives within the second generation, whose defining works arguably have more in common with the story cycle that provides the architecture for Anderson’s volume. The apparently hybrid cycle form has vexed scholarly definition, and the plethora of terms that it has attracted – “short story cycle,” “short story sequence,” “composite novel,” “short story composite” – speaks to its problematic status somewhere in the hinterlands between the atomized form of the mere short story collection and the organic unity of the novel proper.30 While academic work has elongated its origins beyond the novel’s prehistory – to ancient Eastern oral narratives – anecdotal evidence of books marketed as novels but described at various compositional stages by their authors as volumes of short stories – such as Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) or Mitchell’s Ghostwritten indicates the conflicted form’s continued currency. I would like to suggest, in fact, that Egan and Mitchell’s works are not aberrations, and that cyclic form is one of the key structural concepts that helps differentiate a conflicted secondgeneration postmodernism from its ancestors. Few postmodern fictions bear much resemblance to story cycles – Kennedy does identify Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Coover’s Pricksongs (1969) as important exceptions. But a number of second-generation works – Franzen’s The Corrections, Wallace’s Infinite Jest and The Pale King, Vollmann’s The Atlas (1996), Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (2009), Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010), among them – betray such similarities to story cycles that their signature qualities might come into sharper focus if they are momentarily moved from under the novel’s definitional lens.31 Even as terminology varies, one common strand across the assorted definitions is the contention that the story cycle occupies a midpoint between novelistic unity and the atomized story collection, and these two poles are typically employed to define the cycle by a series of contrasts. Susan Garland Mann, for instance, articulates the cycle’s networked focus by observing that a cycle places much less emphasis on a single, unifying “protagonist . . . than is generally the case” in the novel.32 Thus whatever nonlinearity characterizes such key postmodern novels as The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), White Noise (1985), or The

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Tunnel, is offset by the centralizing presence of Ebenezer Cooke, Oedipa Maas, Jack Gladney, or William Kohler. In a cycle, by contrast, while a central character may act as a kind of narrative anchor (as George Willard does in Winesburg), the same character may drop from view for much longer stretches of the narrative. Certainly Wyatt Gwyon and Tyrone Slothrop vanish (in different senses) at the respective climaxes of The Recognitions (1955) and Gravity’s Rainbow, but they remain much stronger and more consistent narrative presences than does Sasha in A Visit from the Goon Squad (present in less than half of the book’s thirteen parts), Chip in The Corrections (appearing in three of the book’s seven segments), Hal in Infinite Jest, or David Wallace in The Pale King, and so on. It follows from this that the sequence of narrative units in a cycle is less continuous than in a novel. While, as Nagel notes, “the subordinate units of a novel, its episodes or chapters, are incomplete in themselves,” the cycle’s component parts “must stand alone (with a beginning, middle, and end) yet be enriched in the context of the interrelated stories,” a compositional principle that tends toward starker interstitial divisions.33 While it’s quite clear that many episodes in The Corrections, Infinite Jest, Ghostwritten, and The Pale King can be thought of as distinct set-pieces (a tendency that’s often marked by episodic modulation in viewpoint and technique, not to mention each writer’s preference for story-like titles – Franzen’s “The Failure,” Egan’s “The Gold Cure”– rather than numbered components), the relative independence of their narrative units is underscored by each text’s publication history. It is surely not a coincidence that excerpts of the major postmodern novels have very rarely appeared in magazines or periodicals, not least because their subordinate units – say the mosaic of short takes (often trailing into ellipses) that make up Gravity’s Rainbow, or, in more extreme terms, Gaddis’s relentless cascade of dialogue in J R (1975) – form less obviously excisable discrete narrative segments. The publication of Egan, Franzen, and Wallace’s texts, by contrast, were preceded by selfcontained excerpts in Harper’s, the New Yorker, and Granta, while Wallace’s tendency toward cyclic composition is confirmed by the fact that several works originally written as part of The Pale King appeared as self-contained stories in his collection, Oblivion (2004). The second half of the cyclic equation requires that these self-enclosed units nevertheless garner amplified resonance from their place in a larger structure by displaying what Ingram calls “the dynamic pattern of recurrent development.”34 In place of traditional causal plot links, then, Ghostwritten is initially designed around a throng of repeated phrases and references, some of which are closely tied to the book’s thematic interest

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in transnational market forces; others create insistent imagistic patterns, such as the book’s obsession with comets and vertical movements. Egan’s Visit, similarly, organizes itself around suggestive recurrences – such as key scenes set by windows, variations on names beginning with a and s (thus, when taken together, spelling out a two-letter adverb for simultaneity) – while the arrangement of episodes with varying styles charts media technologies’ increasing interpenetration of the private sphere as the book progresses. Comparable arguments could be made in terms of the narrative gains created by setting, say, the various chronologies (tailored to each character’s experience of time) in each of The Corrections’ subdivisions next to each other, or the many different iterations of addiction and freewill in Infinite Jest’s narrative particles. Whatever interpretive weight is assigned to the balance between “recurrent development” and self-containment in any given work, the prevalence of such a balance across second-generation works speaks to both the younger writer’s continued belief in the relevance of interconnection (variously conceived) to our contemporary networked existences, and a comparatively greater belief in the value of narrative coherence at smaller scales. Patterns of recurrent development tend to dominate modern cycles, while another cyclic unifying technique – the use of an external frame tale – has been (as Ingram notes) rarely employed in later story cycles.35 Yet, however outmoded such techniques may seem, it is striking how many second-generation cycles rely heavily on openings that act as frames. In some cases (The Corrections, A Visit), these frames act as storehouses for a book’s themes, providing a symphonic condensation of the melodies traced by later sections. In other cases, the opening frame is formally isolated from the sequence that follows, and closes with a key phrase – almost an invocation – that ushers in the successive narrative fragments. Wallace, again, provides the most explicit example: Infinite Jest begins with a framing sketch that’s pitched one year in advance of the many sections that follow, sections whose primary narrative purpose, on one level, is to “explain” the frame, rather than extend a plot beyond it. The Pale King similarly opens with a sketch whose narrative independence is formally marked by its descriptive style and absence of human figures. The first book’s frame concludes as if to a modern Scheherazade, with the interrogative “So yo then man what’s your story?”; the second, with the more straightforward instruction to “Read these.”36 Beyond formal devices, a cycle distinguishes itself by its temporal and spatial coordinates. While there is a peripatetic quality to many key postmodern novels – The Recognitions, The Sot-Weed Factor, Gravity’s

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Rainbow, Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge (1974), DeLillo’s Mao II (1991), and so on – the stories within the frame of second-generation works are often structured around loaded spatial nodes: St. Jude in The Corrections; the Peoria examination center in The Pale King; the twin points of Infinite Jest’s halfway house and tennis academy; northwest London in Zadie Smith’s NW; and post 9-11 New York in Egan’s novel. It’s certainly true that postmodernism is often framed in spatial terms, especially with reference to Jameson’s famous claim that postmodern life is “dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time.”37 Yet while secondgeneration space is arguably more obviously tied to chains of affect than its postmodern counterpart, cyclic form typically serves to reintroduce time into these emotively freighted settings. Time in the cycle can be considered in two ways. The first temporal form that prevails in the second-generation cycle is generational time. Using their self-contained narrative units to genealogical ends, second-generation cycles are often divided into sections that focus on (typically) three generations of a family to such an extent that a strong case can be made for the multigenerational family novel as the dominant post-postmodern genre, especially when contemporary works that are not cycles – Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Dave Egger’s Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Smith’s White Teeth (2000) – are factored into the equation. Alongside these much longer temporal arcs, the second temporal form is what Nagel identifies as a unique cyclic device, duplicative time – that is, the tendency of different units “to cover again, from a contrasting visage point, events already related by someone else.”38 Ghostwritten’s first two episodes foreground this technique with first “Okinawa” and then “Tokyo” dramatizing different ends of the same phone call, but it’s also prominently used several times in The Pale King (such as when Nugent’s sister’s Exorcist impression is relayed from different perspectives in consecutive sections), and Egan’s Visit (such as the two accounts of an African train ride).39 Time is not simply elongated, then, in the second-generation cycle; it is folded into layers, so that different layers cover the same point. Time in the cycle is also pertinent to one of the most common arguments raised in mainstream accounts of postmodernism’s passing, that is, the sometimes oversimplified claim that the first-generation “postmodern de-emphasis of character” is reversed in the movement toward what Rachel Greenwald Smith has called “greater tonal warmth.”40 Because – in Egan and Franzen, in particular – the individual segments of a cycle are explicitly anchored to distinct personalities, it would seem obvious that the

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second-generation attempts to reintroduce character at the heart of contemporary fiction’s concerns. Yet the punctuated timelines that underpin cyclic time preclude the fluid continuum of the Bildungsroman, and so any return to character in such fictions is qualified by the strategic gaps that shift narrative focus from one segment to the next. Typically secondgeneration cyclic form conceives of character not as strict continuum, but rather in terms of staccato jumps across time, often pairing childhood with incipient adulthood: in Egan’s Visit, we see Sasha as a five-year-old, being carried across the too-hot Lake Michigan sand immediately after a section in which we see her as a troubled college student; Hal’s college interview in Infinite Jest is interrupted by a fragment of him aged five, and insisting that he ate mold; the story of Chip’s adult struggle to make money in The Corrections is set against an episode in which he struggles to eat rutabaga as a seven-year-old. Attempting to write a history of the present carries with it many dangers, one of which is the risk of oversimplifying a complex literary field through appealing binaries. While the cycle seems to flourish in the hands of second-generation postmoderns, it’s important not to overlook its cognate use as the first generation has reached its twilight years. Robert Coover’s John’s Wife (1996), for instance, is perhaps comparable, while cyclic form dominates John Barth’s late phase – On with the Story (1996), The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004), and The Development (2008). It is equally true that many major second-generation works rely on a fairly traditional single narrative line – Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed (2010) or braid together two or three linear narratives that routinely alternate across the text (most of Richard Powers’s important work would fit here, as would novels by Nicole Krauss, Colson Whitehead, and Anthony Marra). What is at stake here is neither a rigid demarcation between generations, nor the documentation of a wholesale rejection of postmodernism. Second-generation postmodernism is characterized by the search for hybrid solutions to the previous generation’s asymmetries, and, as such, the story cycle seems to represent a convergence of genres that internalizes the binary poles of postmodernism’s signature genres. No literary genre uniformly dominates any significant movement, but what we do see in current works is a palpable shift in generational energy toward the cyclic form that’s localizable in some of the best and most influential second-generation works. Such energies are also evident in works that are routinely classified as story collections. George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation (2006), for instance, is rarely examined as a coherent cycle, even though its four-part

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structure clearly provides a generative grammar for the book’s twelve stories: beginning with a story about a baby who is yet to learn language, the first cluster deals with children; the second group moves into the adult realm of personal politics, sometimes through direct reference (“My Amendment”), sometimes through more playful allusions (the political freight of the retaliation tale, “Adams,” is alluded to through the title’s near anagram of Saddam); the third group sets adults into conflict with various commercial forces (from modern science to television sitcoms); while the final section deals with aging and, finally, the passage into death. While the arc – from infancy to death – suggests a unifying life cycle, the book is also drawn together by a clever mirrored architecture that pairs each story with its counterpart from the other end of the book. In this scheme, the first story’s account of a baby whose speech is preempted by commercial energies finds its structural parallel in the final story (“Commcomm”) in which the title’s “community communication” is similarly muted by bureaucratic evasions, until it is finally released after death. In more straightforward terms, the second story – “My Flamboyant Grandson” – is paired with the book’s penultimate story – “Bohemians” – because the first deals with youth viewed from the perspective of old age, while the latter reverses the mirror to see old age from the perspective of youth. Such patterning continues across the book – “The Red Bow” is about a human killed by animals; “93990” is about an animal killed by humans – with correspondences drawing closer and closer as the stories converge. Nevertheless, while the twenty-first century story collection may be drawing nearer to the cycle, its movement is arguably more readily recognized and less critically significant than the contemporary novel’s contrary loosening. Because genres carry with them their own conventions and normative expectations, the way that we classify and approach a given text alters the way we read it. Thus, when Mark McGurl describes Infinite Jest’s structure as one whose “gaps in coherence” have “been generously received as entirely intentional,” a critical move that places “the novel beyond reproach,” it might be argued that it is his classification of the text as a conventional “novel” that produces an erroneous standard against which the book is measured.41 No serious critic chastises Sherwood Anderson for the gaps between stories in Winesburg, and while the remarkable achievements of the second-generation postmoderns attest to the continued vitality of key postmodern techniques, the generic shift toward cyclic form in its landmark works has tended to qualify and question the notion of overarching coherence at novel-length, even as it instantiates greater coherence at the level of the individual narrative unit.

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Notes 1 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Little, 2011), 73. 2 In Jonathan Franzen’s words, Wallace tried “to produce a new and more mature kind of writing” beyond postmodern trickery, Farther Away (New York: Farrar, 2012), 167. 3 “Wallace was trying to write differently,” D. T. Max argues, “but the path was not evident to him,” “The Unfinished,” New Yorker, March 9, 2009, 50. 4 Alan Wilde, “Barthelme Unfair to Kierkegaard,” Boundary 2 (1976), 68. 5 Brian McHale, “The White Visitation,” in Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (ed.), A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 193. 6 David Foster Wallace, Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn ( Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2012), 26; Mary K. Holland, Succeeding Postmodernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3. 7 Malcolm Bradbury, “Writing Fiction in the 90s,” in Kristiaan Versluys (ed.), Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 14. 8 Amy Hungerford, “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” American Literary History 20 (2008), 412; Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 1. 9 Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis, MN: Coffeehouse, 2011), 140. 10 See “Westward,” Infinite Jest, and “E Unibus Pluram.” 11 David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not (New York: Little, 2012), 41; A Supposedly Fun Thing (Boston: Little, 1997), 81. 12 Wallace, Conversations, 52. 13 Wallace, Both Flesh and Not, 41; David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, 1996), 32. 14 Wallace, The Pale King, 67. 15 David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair (New York: Norton, 1989), 264. David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews (Boston: Little, 1999), 124. 16 Franzen, How to Be Alone (New York: Farrar, 2003), 95; Balzac qtd. in V. S. Pritchett, Balzac (London: Chatto, 1973), 161. 17 Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (New York: Farrar, 2002), 428. 18 Mark McGurl, The Program Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 151. 19 Lionel Trilling, “Sherwood Anderson,” Kenyon Review 3/3 (1941), 293–302. 20 Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin, 1976), 27. 21 Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 3. 22 Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 185. 23 Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 240. 24 For Boswell on Wallace reading Updike, see Understanding David Foster Wallace; Harris’s definitive account of Wallace and Barth appears in “The Anxiety of Influence,” Critique 55 (2014), 103–26. 25 While this essay concentrates on prose fiction, a similar urge might be located in Sarah Ruhl’s catabatic play Eurydice (2003); an investigation into millennial

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drama and poetry might start with the angels in works by Tony Kushner, Mark Doty, Reginald Shepherd, and Jorie Graham. 26 Even Wallace surely gained a sense of the form’s scope from his often-stated admiration for Louise Erdrich, and her major contribution to the genre, Love Medicine, while he likely also learned from Barth’s On with the Story, Updike’s Olinger Stories, and Cortazar’s Hopscotch. Similarly, Franzen’s cyclic form may stem from his late fascination with John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. 27 John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse: Foreword,” Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Anchor, 1988), vi. I return to the question of excerpting novels later in the essay. 28 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957), 322. 29 In its postmodern form, the encyclopedic novel was variously categorized as a “Mega Novel” (by Frederick Karl), or as a systems novel whose scale was deformed by an art of excess (by Tom LeClair). 30 These terms are, respectively, proposed in Forrest Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); J. Gerald Kennedy (ed.), Modern American Short Story Sequences (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, The Composite Novel (New York: Twayne, 1995); Rolf Lundén, The United Stories of America (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). 31 Kennedy (ed.), Modern American Short Story Sequences, viii. 32 Susan Garland Mann, The Short Story Cycle (New York: Greenwood, 1989), xii 33 Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 15 34 Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles, 21. 35 Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles, 19. 36 Wallace, Infinite Jest, 17; Foster, The Pale King, 4. In terms of the emphasis I place on The Pale King’s opening section, it should be noted that while the novel’s arrangement was selected by editor Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s drafts indicated which section might open the novel. 37 Jameson, Postmodernism, 16. 38 Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, 249–50. 39 Foster, Pale King, 373, 381; Foster, Visit, 50, 75. 40 Andrew Hoberek, “Postmodernism and Modernization,” Twentieth-Century Literature 57/3–4 (2011), 341; Rachel Greenwald Smith, “Postmodernism and the Affective Turn,” Twentieth-Century Literature 57/3–4 (2011), 424. 41 Mark McGurl, “The Institution of Nothing,” Boundary 2 (2014), 29.

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Postmodern China Wang Ning

Postmodernism was once the most heatedly discussed and debated theoretical issue in contemporary Chinese academia, mainly in literature and literary criticism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although the practice of and critical debate about the issue in China occurred later than in the West, it was anticipated in the works of certain modern Chinese writers, such as Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu, before 1949. It was anticipated, too, in a different sense, by the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, which might be seen as a Chinese version of the postmodern practice of deconstructing received hierarchies. However, the official entry of postmodernism as a literary and art movement or a critical fashion in mainland China dates from a 1985 lecture tour by Fredric Jameson, whose series of lectures in Beijing and Shenzhen introduced Chinese academics to the concept of postmodernism. From the literary and cultural perspective, Chinese postmodernism has undergone five stages: (1) a “prehistoric” phase of postmodern literature before 1949, represented by Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu, whose fictions, characterized by a mixture of romanticism, realism, and modernism, had some of the “glocal” (global/local) features of postmodernism; (2) the debate on modernism in literary criticism after 1980, which touched upon postmodern issues, and involved the introduction and translation of contemporary literary works, including postmodernist works by such Western authors as Barthelme, Barth, Calvino, Pynchon, Borges, Eco, and others; (3) the deliberate practice of postmodernism in literature and criticism after 1985, when such eminent novelists as Ma Yuan, Mo Yan, Can Xue, Wang Shuo, Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Su Tong experimented with postmodern narrative techniques, and critics such as Wang Ning, Chen Xiaoming, Zhang Yiwu, and Wang Yichuan produced critical works referring to Western postmodernist or poststructuralist theorists (including Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Lacan, Kristeva); (4) the rise of consumer culture and “new realist fiction” in the mid-1990s and earlier, 465

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which changed the cultural dominant from avant-garde experimentation to writing for the market and aiming for popular appeal, bringing postmodernism gradually to an end; (5) the onset of the age of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when interest in modernity revived, and postmodernism reappeared in theoretical discourse in a new, “constructive” guise. Scholars have increasingly come to realize that postmodernity in China, as in the West, has become fragmentary and dispersed, permeating all the aspects of contemporary life and culture and influencing people’s worldview and way of thinking.1

Postmodern literature before the postmodern condition The term postmodernism or postmodern did not appear in Chinese until John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction” was published in the Chinese journal Waiguowenxue baodao (Report on Foreign Literature) in late 1980. The English original had only been published in Atlantic Quarterly earlier that same year, which suggests how enthusiastically postmodernism was initially received in China, although it was sharply criticized by certain orthodox Marxist literary theorists.2 Just as postmodernism underwent a latent or underground phase before its emergence in the Western context in the late 1950s and early 1960s, chiefly in the debate on contemporary literature and culture in North America, so also were there certain modern Chinese writers who, dissatisfied with the writing styles of their contemporaries, had a visionary perspective on literary creation. Their writing practice is somewhat similar to Chinese postmodernist literature, or even anticipates its subsequent emergence. Speaking of the essence of Chinese modernism, Eric Hayot pertinently points out that If we want to think of modernism globally, we must face the fact that any attempt to get past the Eurocentric story about what modernism is and does must encounter, first, the history of that Eurocentric story as it has been incorporated into national systems of literature (including European ones) and into the world literary system as a whole . . . what has been recognized as “modern” or “modernism” in China is at least partially an effect of European modernism.3

As Hayot hints, this “recognition” obscures the fact that Chinese modernity and modernism have their own unique characteristics, as is also true of Chinese postmodernism, even though both terms were imported or translated into Chinese from the Western languages. Because of China’s long-standing

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isolation from the outside world and its conservative attitude to foreign influences, classical Chinese literature developed almost cut off from Western influence. In contrast, the unique tradition of modern Chinese literature was forged directly under Western influence. Modern Chinese culture and literature are deeply influenced by Western culture and literature, but in receiving Western influence they also attempt to engage in a dialogue with mainstream world culture and literature. That is why Lu Xun, who always stood at the forefront of China’s cultural and literary modernity, called for a sort of “grabbism” (nalaizhuyi). That is, to Lu Xun, it was necessary to take or “grab” everything from abroad useful to the reconstruction of a new modern Chinese culture and literature. The result would be neither classical Chinese literature and culture or Western literature and culture but a dialogue across both. During the years at the beginning of the twentieth century, a large-scale literary and cultural translation was launched, as a result of which almost all the important Western writers and theorists and their representative works were introduced in China. Lu Xun (pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) is largely regarded as a realist writer, although some overseas Chinese scholars view him as a representative of the romantic generation.4 In recent years, however, certain scholars have found that Lu Xun’s writing also anticipated Chinese modernist literature. As Xudong Zhang sums up, after a close reading of Lu Xun’s Ah Q – The Real Story (1921–2), It is from the allegorical radicality of the “real story” of the nameless ghost of China, seeking in vain its return and reinvention, that the origin of Chinese modernism surges into being and acquires its formal-aesthetic as well as its political properties and intensities – as a radical, nihilistic phenomenology of decay, void, dispersal, and, dialectically, as renewal, rebirth, and hope.”5

According to Jameson, “All third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly Western machineries of representation, such as the novel.”6 He draws this conclusion on the basis of his reading of Latin American and Chinese literary works including Lun Xun’s stories, in which the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society (emphasis original).7 In his novelette Ah Q Zheng Zhuan (Ah Q – The Real Story), Lu Xun tries to write just such a national allegory, and his writing technique is already close to the one that would be used over forty years later by Gabriel García Márquez in his One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moreover, a careful reading

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of Lu Xun’s earlier story “Kuangren riji” (“Diary of a Madman”) reveals further postmodern elements, anticipating certain contemporary writers’ practice. Qian Zhongshu (1910–98) is a unique phenomenon in modern Chinese literary and intellectual history, not only because of his wide knowledge of many humanities disciplines but also because of his creative work, highlighted by his only novel Weicheng (Fortress Besieged, 1947). His novel could be analyzed from a psychoanalytic perspective, as I once undertook to do, as a sort of modern Chinese literary version of Freudianism, but it could also be interpreted as a Chinese modernist novel permeated by postmodern narrative techniques.8 Thus, if we read Fortress Besieged from a psychoanalytic perspective, we might interpret the “fortress besieged” itself as a symbolic womb, and the hero’s falling in love with the heroine, their flirtation, marriage, and so on as a return to that “originary” womb. At the same time, the “fortress besieged” is also an obvious symbol of the old China in which traditional feudalism is as deep-rooted as a closed fortress, stubbornly sticking to the old ways. In this large and solid “fortress” besieged by the forces of modernity, Chinese intellectuals who long for civilization and progress feel stifled and repressed, but they can do nothing but resign themselves to cruel reality. Their response is simply to vent their repressed emotions through endless quarrels and amusing behavior. The implicitly postmodern characteristics of this novel do not only lie in its psychoanalytic elements or its revelation of the unconscious mind, but rather in the organic combination of the almost exaggerated wit, irony, and human sympathy anticipating a sort of postmodern “black humor.” The symbolic “fortress besieged” also implies the author’s deliberate deconstruction of binary oppositions surrounding the institution of “feudal” or reluctant marriage: it is just like a fortress besieged, with those outside of it trying to get in and those inside striving to get out. As a human being, you have no other options. The question arises, given Chinese culture’s stable traditions and its hierarchical social order, how could it accept a Western cultural trend such as postmodernism? The way was paved not only by the practice of writers such as Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu, but above all by the political and cultural impact of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), which originally aimed to revolutionize all the old cultural traditions but actually turned into a social–political movement. This political revolution had a strong impact on the world at large, including the May 1968 événements in France and the birth of Marxism on American university

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campuses. During the Cultural Revolution, all the established orders were broken, and all the hierarchies were reversed. Even the figurehead leader Liu Shaoqi, president of the PRC, was dragged from his post without due process.9 After such an upheaval, the cultural atmosphere was more open to Western culture and ideologies, including postmodernism.

The reception of postmodernism and the formation of Chinese postmodernism According to Paul Bové, postmodernism as an international cultural and intellectual movement emerges first in architecture and then quickly sweeps through literature and other branches of art and culture, “[c]ulminating in the magisterial work of Fredric Jameson” who has “provided us with carefully discriminated analyses of many schools of thought about postmodernism, linking these schools to various ideological attitudes and positions within postmodernism itself.”10 If Bové is right about Jameson’s seminal role in defining and describing postmodernism in the Western context, this is even truer in the case of the rise of postmodernism in contemporary China. To many Chinese critics and scholars, including myself, the postmodern, from a contemporary point of view, means nothing but a spirit always encouraging and sometimes even stimulating us to explore something new and unknown. In this way, we could say that Jameson’s effort has raised the level of the postmodernism debate which, originally confined to American cultural and literary criticism, merged with the European philosophical debate about postmodernism and then affected cultural and literary trends in a number of Asian and Third World countries, including China.11 In 1985, while many Chinese literary critics and scholars were still involved in the endless debate on whether China needed modernism or not, Jameson’s lecture tour informed them that in the contemporary West the debate had moved on to postmodernism, which had already displaced modernism. Inspired by Jameson’s dialectical methodology in regard to the status quo of Asian and Third World countries, quite a few Chinese scholars and critics, including myself, entered this debate by bringing the Chinese practice of postmodernism to the attention of the Englishspeaking world.12 Also, in 1985, there rose a group of young avant-garde novelists known as the so-called xinchao xiaoshuojia (new tide novelists) who were not only very interested in both Western modernist and postmodernist writing but also enthusiastically experimented with postmodernist techniques. These

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novelists include Ma Yuan, Mo Yan, Can Xue, Wang Shuo, Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Ye Zhaoyan, and Su Tong who pay more attention to how to tell a story well rather than what they should tell in their fiction writings. Their efforts were soon transcended by another group of writers known as the so-called xinxieshi pai (new realist novelists).13 Especially in the age of globalization, postmodernism must be redefined at different stages. While it first emerged as a cultural phenomenon in a highly developed Western post-industrial society, it could also appear in different forms in developing countries or regions, such as China and other East Asian countries or regions, where economy develops in an uneven way and where the powerful, globalized mass media could quickly bring you the most recent information about theoretical debates or academic research being carried on in the West.14 I have come to realize that postmodernism in China is also closely related to the decolonizing efforts of people in their struggle against neo-colonialist penetration both in politics and culture.15 In China, Western influence is always mixed up with domestic tradition and cultural convention. The long and stubborn tradition of Confucianism in Chinese culture has in recent years undergone a Neo-Confucianist revival in China and other Chinese-speaking areas, appearing as a new version of postcolonialist resistance against Western values and their domination of the rest of the world.16 In an age of globalization, it is natural for another force to arise in juxtaposition with the globalizing process, that is, the effort of localization, without which everything would be homogenized and national and local identity or identities would be lost. The rapid development of the world economy, the function of mass media and the storage and transmission of knowledge by computer have all promoted the advent of cultural globalization, characterized not only by the boundless expansion of the media but by shrinkage of the elite cultural market and of the production of canonical literature and art. The condition of knowledge in postindustrial society has laid a foundation for culture and knowledge to become global consumer goods. As JeanFrançois Lyotard pointed out decades ago, and one could “imagine flows of knowledge traveling along identical channels of identical nature, some of which would be reserved for the ‘decision makers,’ while the others would be used to repay each person’s perpetual debt with respect to the social bond.”17 We might agree that postmodernism actually takes three different forms in the global context: (1) the poststructuralist project of intellectual deconstruction; (2) the avant-garde revolt against the old-fashioned modernism; and (3) the challenge of contemporary popular and consumer culture.

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All three of these forms are more or less echoed in the Chinese context. Apart from the insights into the postmodern condition advanced by Jameson and other Western scholars, two other important factors need to be taken into account in the current Chinese context: the prevalence of popular culture and even consumer culture as a direct consequence of China’s practice of market economy since the beginning of the 1990s, and the indirect impact of the international postmodernist movement, paving the way for the undermining of any type of domestic social, political, and cultural hegemony. It is in this sense that a sort of postmodernity with Chinese characteristics can certainly be associated with the question of postcoloniality, although China has never been a totally colonized country. At present, global postmodernism in the current Chinese context is more and more related to the rise of consumer culture. Scholars of postmodernism in China typically examine the interrelations between postmodernism and Chinese avant-garde literature and art instead of addressing its closer relations with contemporary consumer society and consumer culture. To them, modernism, especially in the historical development of Western literature and art, seems more “advanced” than realism and romanticism, so postmodernism should undoubtedly be more “advanced” or avant-garde than modernism, which manifests itself particularly in experimental poems and novels produced by the earlier-mentioned avant-gardists in the late 1980s. The other approach, focusing on postmodernism’s relation to consumer culture, owes a debt to Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1980), where he proposed to come at the postmodern break “from the other side, and describe it in terms of periods of recent social life.” After World War II, he wrote, “a new kind of society began to emerge (variously described as postindustrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer society, media society and so forth),” marking “a radical break with that older prewar society in which high modernism was still an underground force.”18 Consumer culture was for a long time ignored by Chinese scholars of elite culture, first of all because the value of its products was not subject to the processes of history and cultural canonization and so could not be evaluated together with canonical works of art. Second, consumer culture belongs among the categories of popular culture, which has long been excluded from theoretical analysis by cultural studies scholars. This is hardly surprising in a country as highly hierarchical as China. Third, consumer culture, by subjecting the “aesthetic” to the demands of a commercial economy, risked losing the independent value of beauty.

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Since the advent of globalization in China, the Chinese economy has undergone rapid development and the country has to some degree become a consumer society. In postmodern consumer society, everything has a market value, but by the same token, everything is thereby of no value. Meaning could be arbitrarily constructed through one’s dynamic and creative interpretation, but any meaning constructed in this way could also itself be deconstructed. This is how Baudrillard, puts it: Simulation is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this sequencing of things as though they had a meaning, when they are governed only by artificial montage and non-meaning. Putting a price on the event up for auction by radical disinformation. Setting a price on the event, as against setting it in play, setting it in history.19

After Jameson, Baudrillard is the most important and influential postmodernist theorist in China, with all his major works translated into Chinese and discussed in the Chinese scholarly context. Influenced by Marxism, though he later broke with it and even critiqued it, Baudrillard views contemporary society as being based on consumption and display, by means of which individuals acquire fame, position, and power. In this system, the more conspicuous is one’s consumption of commodities such as house, car, and clothes, the higher one’s position in the sphere of symbolic value. One is increasingly controlled by commodities, and one’s daily life is dominated by consumption of commodities and exchange of information; these are symptoms of the postmodern condition. People in consumer society are not primarily concerned with how to obtain the basic daily necessities, but with how to comfortably or even “aesthetically” enjoy their cultural life. Contemporary people often spend less time dealing with each other than with the commodities that they manipulate. Postmodern society provides people with expanded choices, but as a result, instead of investing time and energy in reading a long literary masterpiece, they would rather spend two hours screening a world-famous film in their home entertainment center. Even literary scholars or students have changed their reading habits, accessing canonical literary works by means of film, TV, or DVD instead of spending time in the library. Today, along with the high technology of computer science and Internet, China has become the biggest country of computer and Internet users, with numerous people, young and old, reading various kinds of information and enjoying colorful pictures on their cell phones. In some metropolitan cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, even family members communicate with each other on cell phones or by means of Wechat. Contemporary

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students of literature are more interested in writing dissertations about films or TV shows than canonical literary works. Since China started its economic reform and opening to the outside in the latter part of the 1970s, the various phenomena Baudrillard described decades ago have appeared in contemporary China. That is why Baudrillard has been received in China above all as a social theorist of consumer society, and why Chinese scholars have taken theoretical inspiration from his work. From the very beginning Baudrillard argued that social homogenization, alienation, and exploitation have all contributed to the process of commodity reification, and that technology and materialism have gradually mastered people’s life and thinking and deprived them of quality and capacity. All of these ideas are widely quoted and discussed by Chinese scholars who address the postmodern condition in contemporary Chinese society. The phenomena he describes indeed hold true not only for Western postmodern society, but also to a greater or lesser degree for those Chinese cities in which postmodern elements are even more apparent than modern ones. In this sense, not only social scientists but also humanities scholars and literary critics could easily take theoretic inspiration from Baudrillard’s works. As I mentioned earlier, although postmodernism as a major literary and art movement in the 1990s’ Chinese context has now come to an end, it still permeates almost all the aspects of contemporary intellectual life. The rise of consumer culture has weakened the official master discourse, depoliticizing literary and cultural production and criticism. It has also deconstructed the dominant position of elite culture, paving the way for a genuinely pluralistic orientation of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. It has even more or less changed people’s habit or aesthetic standard with lots of originally “unpresentable” phenomena becoming popular. Under the influence of consumer culture, there have appeared various phenomena which exhibit postmodern elements. Popular culture appears in present-day China as a sort of postmodern challenge to high-cultural production and appreciation. For instance, the popularity among college students of Sister Lotus, whose real name is Shi Hengxia but who has a popular online following under the Internet name of Furong jiejie, has deconstructed traditional idol worship for today’s young people. Born in 1977 in a small county in Shaanxi Province in northwest China, she settled down about ten years ago in Beijing and now lives near the campuses of Peking and Tsinghua universities, where she especially attracts students from these two prestigious institutions as a female representative of the anti-idol. Similarly, the enthusiastic promotion of the “super-girl’s voice” (chaoji nüsheng) represented by Li Yuchun

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(Chris Lee, b. 1984), from Chengdu in southwest China, has undermined the traditional aesthetic of serious, high art and music, emancipating the musical and artistic imagination. Originating in a TV entertainment program on a Hunan TV station in 2004–6 as competition to select the most popular female singers from the whole country, the “super-girl’s voice” challenges traditional elite-musical aesthetic principles. While it at first provoked widespread controversy, it has by now come to occupy much of the space of contemporary Chinese popular music. Two other popular phenomena also deserve critical attention. The sudden rise of the “girlish” male TV star Xiao Shenyan, whose real name is Shen He (b. 1981) and who comes from northeast China, has attracted numerous “promising” young film or TV stars who view him as their new model and idol. His stardom has certainly deconstructed the authenticity of sex and gender, popularizing a form of androgyny. Finally, the popularization and wide influence of Han Han’s Internet literary writing has devalued both the realistic principle of writing for life’s sake and the modernist principle of writing for art’s sake. Born in 1982 in Shanghai, Han Han is undoubtedly a rare and versatile talent. Especially talented at Internet writing with broad appeal among young female readers, he is also known as a film and TV director as well as a professional race car driver. Largely due to his Internet writing, his photo even appeared on the cover of the American magazine Time in 2010, and until Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize he was the wealthiest Chinese writer. These popular-culture phenomena all demonstrate that the traditional principle of beauty has been challenged and that sexual identity is no longer regarded as naturally fixed but socially constructed.20 Thus even in its moribund state postmodernism continues to arouse the interest of the new generation of Chinese people. In describing Chinese postmodernist literature, Douwe Fokkema very pertinently points out that “modernism and postmodernism occur side by side in contemporary Western literature, with some preference among avant-garde writers for postmodernism. In China, too, modernism and postmodernism coexist, but the position of modernist writing is stronger than in the West.”21 This applies even more aptly to Chinese postmodernist visual art. As we know, in the West there is a solid foundation of modernist literature and art, so postmodernist literature and art are known for revolting against their “father,” modernism. But in China, there is no such solid foundation of modernist literature which, when it was at a much later date imported from the West, arrived already mixed up with the postmodernist elements. Similarly, as a number of Western scholars have

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noticed, contemporary Chinese art may be the genre most heavily influenced by postmodernism, as visual artists are most attuned to avant-garde artistic experimentation in the West. Apart from such important artists and art critics as Li Xianting, Fan Di’an, Zhu Qingsheng, and Wang Min’an, who produced largely for a domestic market, other visual artists such as Xu Bing and Ai Weiwei sought to take Chinese postmodern art abroad, thus realizing a two-way traffic in contemporary Chinese art. Just as the West sent postmodern ideas to China, China also sent postmodern art abroad, which finds particular embodiment in the enormous enjoyment of contemporary Chinese art in the West, both in art criticism as well as the art market. Chinese postmodernist art, like its cinema, is more easily received and appreciated by Westerners than contemporary Chinese literature. Apart from political Pop Art, influenced or inspired by Andy Warhol, the most prominent postmodern art in present-day China finds embodiment in the DAD, that is, the Dashanzi Art District, also known as the Beijing 798 Art District. Located in a complex of former military factories near the Beijing International Airport, this art district covers over 600,000 square meters. The establishment of this district has not only promoted the appreciation of Chinese art both domestically and internationally but also enabled art products to be consumed on the international market. The DAD could be compared with SoHo in New York or the Rive Gauche in Paris, but it is much more fully “artistic” than either of these Western districts. Here Bauhaus modernist architectural style encounters postmodernist avant-garde artists who not only experiment with high-artistic creation but also attract international consumers.

Toward the construction of a postmodern environmental ethics While China has become the world’s second-largest economy – as reflected by the many postmodern buildings appearing in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other coastal metropolises – and an important political and cultural power, its voice registering with increasing frequency and force in international forums, the country still has many problems, not least of all ecological and environmental ones. In this context, some scholars, influenced by ecocriticism and environmental studies, have attempted to (re) construct a sort of postmodern environmental ethics so that the country can develop in a sustainable way.22 Postmodernism itself has seen something of a revival, in a “reconstructive” rather than the “deconstructive” mode. In any event, the debate on postmodernism and its practice in

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China, one of the few countries that has benefited from the process of globalization, has accompanied China’s economic development, as well as its engagement with political democracy. Chinese postmodernism has not only deconstructed the authority of an official “master discourse” but has also demystified the canonical modernist works, paving the way for a narrowing of the gap between elite and popular literature and culture and the emergence of a distinctively Chinese integration of modernity and postmodernity. In today’s literary and critical circles, eco-writing and ecocriticism, though flourishing more in China than in the West, are still marginalized. As ecocriticism moves from periphery to center, its influence on the critical imagination will grow. Lawrence Buell once frankly put it this way: As their heterogeneity attests, to the extent that contemporary literatureand-environment studies can in fact be rightly called “a movement,” so far it looks less like, say, New Critical formalism, structuralism, deconstructionism, and New Historicism than like feminist and ethnic revisionism or Gay Studies; for it is on the whole more issue-driven than methodologydriven. Ecocriticism so far lacks the kind of field-defining statement that was supplied for more methodologically-focused insurgencies by, for example, Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature for New Critical formalism and Edward Said’s Orientalism for colonial discourse studies.23

Sixteen years have passed since Buell made this statement in a special issue of New Literary History, and in the interval ecocriticism has developed by leaps and bounds both in the West and elsewhere, especially in China. The books that Buell himself has written since then, together with those published by others, form the foundation for the further development of ecocriticism in the English-speaking world.24 In the Chinese context, scholars have not only introduced ecocriticism from the West but have also produced quite a few original works of their own based on nature and environmental writing in Chinese, which for lack of English translation are little known to the outside world.25 What can Chinese literary critics and scholars contribute to international eco-writing and ecocriticism? To practice ecocriticism in China, it is first necessary to place the man– nature relationship in an adequate perspective. Human beings have always sought to reshape nature to their own will, putting nature in the service of humankind and sacrificing it to realize their desires. The realization of the project of modernity has accelerated scientific and technological development, with corresponding achievements in material and cultural production. Rapid development has stimulated fantasies of “conquering nature,” which is certainly understandable when we are struggling to modernize our

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societies, but the cost is the development of an exclusively anthropocentric perspective. The birth of ecocriticism is a forceful response and reaction to this anthropocentric mode. Ecocritics have appropriated the tool of antilogocentrism from deconstruction and other postmodern theoretical doctrines, making it serve their purpose of anti-anthropocentrism. Their effort to construct a sort of environmental ethics coincides with aspects of Derrida’s late work.26 To the ecocritics, the anthropocentric view of development alienates humans from nature, viewed as something conquerable. As a result, the relationship between people and nature has been severed, and human society has replaced the entire ecological world, thereby producing an ecological crisis. Literary critics concerned with nature and the human environment must project their horizon of research to include the longneglected natural realm, restoring those alienated from nature back to the natural world. In this way, they could use the force of literary and critical writing to awaken people’s consciousness of nature and ecology. This attempt has already had the effect of constructing a sort of postmodern literary environmental ethics, characterized by a constructive postmodernism. Sooner or later the overuse and exhaustion of natural resources must recoil upon mankind. The impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) over twelve years ago in several countries already foreshadowed possible threats to human survival, while the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami all the more warned us of nature’s capacity to take revenge, as did the 2008 Wenchuan earthquakes in China. As humanities scholars and literary critics, the ecocritics have responded first in a critical and aesthetic way, deconstructing anthropocentric thinking. But ecocriticism’s final goal should not be merely deconstruction, but rather constructing a sort of new literary environmental ethics. Postmodern environmental ethics would be characterized by a both/and rather than a modernist-style either/or mode of thinking. This ethical view holds that human beings and nature should always be in a harmonious state, for humans were originally part of nature. Human beings need to develop themselves, but not at the expense of sacrificing nature and reshaping the natural environment. Guided by this new environmental ethics, humans should treat nature in an egalitarian way, viewing the natural environment as a partner and neighbor and respecting its rule of development. When human development is contradictory to natural law, humans should not always emphasize the people-oriented view and force nature to yield to our will. However, constructing a postmodern

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environmental ethics does not mean writing off the people-oriented ethical view, but rather aiming to bridge the gap between people and nature. This should be our fundamental attitude toward nature from the perspective of postmodern ecology. On the other hand, we should also be alert to the expansion of any ecocentric or environcentric consciousness, for going too far in the opposite direction might also threaten the harmonious relation between humans and nature, to our detriment. Notes 1 For a fuller discussion of relevant aspects of postmodernism in China, consult my previous English publications on the issue: Wang Ning, “Reception and Metamorphosis: Postmodernity in Contemporary Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction,” Social Sciences in China 14/1 (1993), 5–13; “Constructing Postmodernism: The Chinese Case and Its Different Versions,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 20/1, 2 (1993), 49–61; “The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity,” boundary 2/24, 3 (1997), 19–40; “The Reception of Postmodernism in China: The Case of Avant-Garde Fiction,” in Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema (eds.), International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Company, 1997), 499–510. 2 Selected articles dealing with the debate on modernism in China are included in He Wangxian (ed.), Xifang xiandaipai wenxue wenti lunzhengji (Issues on the Debate of Western Modernist Literature), 2 vols. (Beijing: People’s Literature Press, 1984). Some of the essays in these two volumes already touch on or criticize the phenomenon of postmodernism although the editor did not realize it at the time. 3 Eric Hayot, “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time,” in Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 152. 4 A typical and representative view can be seen in Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 5 Xudong Zhang, “The Will to Allegory and the Origin of Chinese Modernism: Reading Lu Xun’s Ah Q—The Real Story,” in Wollaeger and Eatough (eds.), Oxford Handbook, 201. 6 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986), 69. 7 Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 69. 8 Cf. Ning Wang, “Freudianism and Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature,” in Tao Jiang and Philip J. Ivanhoe (eds.), The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China. (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 3–23, especially 9–11, which addresses Qian’s critical and creative reception of Freudianism. 9 On China’s Cultural Revolution and its global impact, see my edited special issue for Comparative Literature Studies, 52/1(2015), especially my introductory essay, “Introduction: Global Maoism and Cultural Revolutions in the Global Context,” 1–11.

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10 Paul Bové, “Preface: Literary Postmodernism,” in Paul Bové (ed.), Early Postmodernism: Foundational Essays (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1. 11 Cf. Jameson’s foreword to Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, vii–xxi. 12 Cf. Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong (eds.), Postmodernism and China, a Special Issue in boundary 2, 24/3 (Fall 1997), in which essays written by both domestic and overseas Chinese scholars as well as Western sinologists deal extensively with Chinese postmodernity and its various practices. 13 For detailed discussions on postmodernist fiction in contemporary China, cf. Wang Ning, “Constructing Postmodernism” and “A Reflection on Postmodernist Fiction in China: Avant-Garde Narrative Experimentation,” Narrative 21/3 (2013), 326–38. 14 For a detailed discussion of postmodernism and its range of practices in China, see Wang Ning, “Mapping.” For an earlier description of postmodernism in Chinese literature, see Wang Ning, “Constructing Postmodernism.” 15 My most recent description of postmodernism in China with regard to postmodernist fiction appears in the two articles of the special issue of Narrative I coedited with Brian McHale. See Wang Ning and Brian McHale (eds.), “Introduction: Historicizing Postmodernist Fiction” and “A Reflection on Postmodernist Fiction in China: Avant-Garde Narrative Experimentation,” Narrative 21/3(2013), 293–300, 326–38. 16 Cf. Ning Wang, “Reconstructing (Neo)Confucianism in ‘Glocal’ Postmodern Culture Context,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37/1(2010), 48–62. 17 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 6. 18 Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 124–5. 19 Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14. 20 For detailed analysis of gender issues in contemporary China, cf. Ning Wang, “A Chinese Perspective on Gender Studies in the Post-Theoretical Era,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17/1 (March 2015), Article X. 21 Douwe Fokkema, “Chinese Postmodernist Fiction,” Modern Language Quarterly, 69/1 (2008), 164. 22 Cf. Ning Wang, “Toward a Literary Environmental Ethics: A Reflection on Ecocriticism,” Neohelicon 36/2 (2009), 289–98. 23 Lawrence Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” New Literary History 30/3 (1999), 700. 24 Buell’s books since 1999 include The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005) and Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). 25 On recent developments in ecocriticism in China, see my edited special issue Global in the Local: Ecocriticism in China in the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21/4 (2014). 26 For detailed discussion of the late Derrida and his works, see the essays in the special issue The Late Derrida, W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson (eds.), Critical Inquiry 33/2 (2007).

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Postmodernism, cosmodernism, planetarism Christian Moraru

As Fredric Jameson claims in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, “[a]ll thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such.”1 The question is why. The critic does not raise it in his 1992 book, probably because the answer would have garbled the teleology subtending the world-systems story spun implicitly here and explicitly in worldsystems theory’s foremost authority, Immanuel Wallerstein. But if one poses this question, then one should recognize, as I do here, that the end of the Cold War brings to the fore not only the world system but also a new stage in the system’s history. The 1989–91 developments for which the 1989 Berlin Wall collapse serves as a shorthand make for a world event, setting in train a radical, epoch-making Wende (“change” or “turn”) not just in former East Germany but all over the world. Not only did those developments mess up the genealogical narrative putatively leading up to “late capitalism” and beyond, but they also reshuffled the existing world system. The latter was reordered geopolitically, in terms of how the world qua world “is,” of how the worldly system’s ontology is encoded and distributed spatially, and of how effectively the nation-state provides the default aggregation unit for the earth’s territories, polities, and spiritual-aesthetic practices. Further, a new world system emerged geoculturally, in terms of a vastly unprecedented, geographically transgressive dynamic of place and culture bearing on discourse and on the individual and collective identity stemming from it. The system in question was also overhauled geoepistemologically, in terms of how the world driven by such rearrangements compels us to rethink thinking itself – to think this world or to think with it irrespective of topic. Within the frame of reference informed by these “geoproblematizing” terms, the Cold War era appears, when compared to the post–Cold War years, as less “systemic.” Less “webbed,” it was, in a sense, a world apart. Essentially, it consisted of meagerly interconnected, discrete or 480

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quasi-discrete entities known as nation-states or nation-state alliances. These did interact cross-regionally, but primarily according to a geo-logic of disjunction in which the core, “Free World” versus “Communist” divide was reproduced worldwide by all kinds of divisions, antagonisms, blocs, fault lines, and heavily policed borders. By contrast, what comes after die Wende speaks – again, comparatively – to a world logic of conjunction. The post-Wall period is, more than any other before, an era of “with”; we are “with.” As such, we are bound to think with the world, more exactly, with our world, because we are doing our thinking in a with-world whose axial nexus is a quasi-ubiquitous self-other relation or worldly relatedness. In this world, ever-thickening biotechnological networks make possible not only the faster and wider circulation of people, consumer goods, capital, ideas, and representations ranging from stock exchange charts and YouTube clips to aesthetic symbols. Such a “worlded” world also allows for the coalescing of human energy, affect, and expression into discursive aggregates that neither the traditional “umbilical cord” between location and cultural poiesis nor modern, nation-state endorsed epistemology adequately accounts for any longer. Relationally upgraded, the world of the last three decades or so affords, indeed calls for, an appositely fine-tuned approach, viz., for a world-relational thinking, all the more so when the issues at hand are contemporary. Postmodernism cannot not be given pride of place among such issues. To be sure, few subjects in the humanities have been in greater need of reevaluation after 1989. In fact, this may be the right time to write postmodernism’s history, now that, under the sway of broader historical changes, the sixty-year postmodern saga seems to have reached its final episode. For, loosely coextensive with the Cold War and viewed by more and more scholars as a Cold War epiphenomenon, the postmodern had to be and demonstrably was impacted, in the United States and elsewhere, by the Wall’s fall. In effect, a sober geoproblematization of postmodernism, to wit, a worlded reading of postmodern history that would put postmodernism in post-Wall world-historical context and show how the postmodern has been tested in it, is quite likely to bear out what has been portrayed, for almost a decade now and ever more insistently since September 11, 2001, as the “passing” of the postmodern paradigm. More plainly, according to this reading, the end of the Cold War occasions and for all intents and purposes equals the end of postmodernism. “Post–Cold War” and “postpostmodern” are thus roughly synonymous. If the Cold War phase in the centuries-old history of globalization is followed by “late,” “accelerated,” “strong,” or “thickly” networked globalization – by a qualitatively new

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chapter in the biography of global processes – then, as I have also proposed, the postmodern itself is being succeeded by another cultural paradigm, which bears, reflectively and reflexively, mimetically and critically, the imprint of post-1989 globalism. Still unfolding – note the present continuous in the previous sentence – the paradigm shift manifests a fairly coherent cultural-aesthetic symptomatology worldwide, even though, when I have focused on the United States, I have talked about a transition to “cosmodernism” – an “ism” of sorts itself transitional, as we shall observe momentarily – while, when I have expanded my analysis to other areas, my preferred concept has been “planetarism.”2 Later, I chart this transition – postmodernism’s “cosmodernization” and “planetarization,” respectively – by pinpointing a set of ten pivotal markers, parameters, and operations articulating this single most consequential development in recent cultural history.

Paradigm change and relational management I write transition advisedly. For I want us to envision the shift in question not as a radical hiatus that has already occurred but as an ongoing, nonlinear, uncoordinated, multifaceted, protracted, and contradictory mutation worldwide. This transformation brings into play a range of compatible as well as disparate spatialities, temporalities, and discursive procedures. These concomitantly exhaust and recycle postmodernism. As they do so, they do not sponsor its survival stricto sensu but its transhistorical sublation into something else still in search of a name and full-blown structure, not unlike the Cold War itself, which both ended and stoked new imperial designs, conflicts, and inequalities. Cosmodernism, the name I have assigned to this new cultural-historical formation, rests on a relational poetics. This is the place to repeat, though, that wider world relationality, of which cosmodern relatedness aspires to be, as I maintain, a “rogue” subset, worlded by not only the connections among societies, locales, economies, and cultures but also their troubles. From currency turbulence to epidemics, formerly national and regional problems are now, with growing frequency, world problems. Alongside other deterritorialization phenomena spawn by globalization, crises tend to overflow their birthplaces and play out as world crises. This goes to show how dicey a proposition relationality can be. Depending on its local management, it can bring about growth or hamper it. Being-in-relation can benefit or hurt people. It can compound the world’s problems – witness the quasiinstantaneous global ripple effect of the 2008 subprime crisis – or alleviate

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them. It can bolster individual voices, tunes, and flavors or drown them in standardized rhythms and “happy meals.” It can shore up our life-giving differences or work as a conduit for indiscriminate, homogenizing mimesis and toward a world culture of selfsameness. It can make for a connective predicament, a pseudo-relationality doing the bidding of uniformityinducing, top-down, centralizing, and self-repetitive globalist rationality, or it can, as an authentic relationality, carve out alternatives to this rationality, its workings, and upshots. In brief, the post–Cold War geo-logy to which relationality is so instrumental can be a self-serving, totalist egology or, quite the contrary, a cultural ecology to whose welfare the presence of others is absolutely seminal. It is in this dissonant landscape of accelerated globalization that postmodernism has been given a chance to globalize itself – if not to render globalization a postmodernization, then at least to spread itself farther and farther afield. To a certain extent, postmodernism has done just that, oversaturating whole countries and continents with its breezy-ironic albeit densely allusive code, with its popular culture and lifestyles in particular. However, as it has been disseminating its cross-stylistic architecture, its youth fashion, iconology, and tunes, it had to respond to new local histories, concerns, priorities, epistemological interpellations, and political queries. And, as its limited capacity to provide the answers has become obvious, so has its ability to make a realistic and flexibly ecumenical bid for network society’s common culture, hence its overall failure to pass the test of the stage in globalization history when its own globalization – postmodernism’s world tryout – could not be deferred any more. As it has turned out, despite their remarkable diffusion, postmodern literature, TV series, and video have not wound up postmodernizing world cultures. At the same time, at its own, Euroatlantic sources, postmodern discourse does appear to have reached a fairly conspicuous saturation level, at which “new” postmodern work basically derives its novelty from overdoing – doing again and blowing out of proportions – postmodern precedents, their hallmark themes, and recipes: The Family Guy’s quotational hysteria “exaggerates” The Simpsons’ lower-key (and more high-brow) intertextuality; Cédric Klapisch’s 2011 film Ma part du gateau (My Piece of the Pie) takes Pretty Woman to an anticlimactically populist extreme that makes a deliberate mess of the overtly invoked postmodern precursor and with it the Cinderella tradition poached by the Richard Gere–Julia Roberts movie; and Thomas Pynchon self-plagiarizes by warming up, rather disappointingly, The Crying of Lot 49 as post-9/11 paranoia fable – in Bleeding Edge (2013).

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Postmodernism, globalization, and critique Because, on the one hand, the postmodern does not make a clean break with the modern and, on the other, in “postmodernism,” “postmodernization,” and “postmodernity,” the postmodern is not engaged in effectively differentiating processes, it cannot offer a solution to the predicament of world relatedness under late globalization either. With Linda Hutcheon, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Paul Maltby, and others, I have argued for a critical, “dissenting,” and “resistant” postmodernism. But even a comprehensive survey of postmodern literatures and cultures such as Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema’s 1997 International Postmodernism, otherwise so careful to account for regional “postmodernisms,” deals with non-Western phenomena under the heading “The Reception and Processing of Postmodernism.”3 The title says it all: much as certain varieties of postmodernism do enable a critique of late globalization, this critique is undercut by postmodernism’s historical “hubris” – by postmodernism’s globalizing thrust or, more precisely, by what earlier I determine as globalization’s self-reproducing, inauthentic relationality. What the title implies and what I want to reinforce here is that Tokyo’s postmodern architecture or Bulgarian theory of the “post-paranoid condition” represents the outcome of the global “reception” and “processing” of a cultural model largely Western and especially American in its origin and expansionist in its history.4 Both traditional liberals like Ihab Hassan and leftists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ziauddin Sardar highlight the paradox that the fragment-, difference-, and indeterminacy-celebrating postmodern distrust of grand narratives has been behind a postmodernism that has spread worldwide not only as an epistemological-literary school of self-inquiring, antitotalist, and delegitimating suspicion but also as the all-embracing, cultural-economic, and hypertechnological postmodernity a.k.a. globalization.5

The postmodern, the postcolonial, and the egological I doubt postmodernity is globalization’s more befitting name, and I think lumping the two together, as Jameson does, is reductive.6 Nor do I believe that globalization and universalization – of the West, that is – are one and the same, much as I hesitate to seize on postmodernism as “the new imperialism of Western culture.”7 Nonetheless, despite recurrent references to otherness, marginality, and the like as principal categories of postmodern poetics and politics, there is something to be said about the

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“generalization” of postmodernism – the postmodernization of the nonWestern world – not only as textual terminology and methodology but also as “manipulation of geopolitical order.”8 Postcolonial critics in particular have been keen on the “classic irony” that has postmodernism ultimately universalize a certain stress on or approach to alterity and thus a whole philosophy of being, meaning, and culture, no matter how anti-universalist and emancipating this philosophy deems itself. That is, the critics say, a “positional” politics of postmodern interpretation is here in play: recentering this culturally historically circumscribed philosophy on the “other” means one thing in Paris and quite another in Beirut. In reality, “when generalized from one context to another, hybridity,” “otherness,” and “the subaltern” may not only “los[e] their political significance”;9 they may also be put through ratiocinations liable to render the postmodern “attemp[t] to preserve the infinity or unapproachability of the other” a continuation of the “modernist work [of ] reduc[ing] the other to a theme.”10 Declarations of intent notwithstanding, the postmoderns have repeatedly failed to heed this distinction. This is why their realization that “we need to cultivate a keener, livelier, more dialogical sense of ourselves in relation to diverse cultures, diverse natures, the whole universe itself ” has not yielded commensurate cultural work.11 Thus, what Hutcheon describes as the “internationalizing [of ] postmodernism” has led not so much to “postwesternization,” or at least to a “challenge” to the Western dominance . . . in the domains of both theory and practice,” as to the internationalization of “white” and North Atlantic postmodernism.12 Fairly or not, the prevailing perception of postmodernism’s efforts to globalize foregrounds the global, not the postmodern. In this light, postmodernism appears preponderantly as a globalization issue, an aspect of globalism’s tautological rationality rather than its corrective culturally, philosophically, or otherwise. Postmodernism is not an egology structurally, in its core principles. Its “original guilt” is not so much paradigmatic as it is historical. Unlike Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, postmodern universalism is not intrinsic but acquired. Yet, not unlike classical cosmopolitanism, postmodernism risks becoming, and some believe it has become, egological in its geopolitical unfolding insofar as it perpetuates the colonizing impetus of culturalaesthetic metropolitan modernism and of modernity broadly. There are two “conflicting and interdependent modernities,” as Matei Calinescu has observed. One is “rationalist, competitive, technological”; the other, “culturally critical and self-critical, bent on demystifying the basic values of the first.”13 Modernity number one lives on in the kind of standardizing globalization with which neither postmodernism as an aesthetics nor

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postmodernity as an epoch or Zeitgeist seeks to be linked, and yet, as we have seen, both have been. Modernity number two bleeds into a range of postmodern discourses of “otherness” from “heterological” epistemology to self-reflective metafiction to performance- and hybridity-grounded theories of subjectivity to sexual politics, all vehemently opposed to globalist projects of totalization and homogenization and yet viewed, once again, with a great deal of skepticism by those whose communities bear the brunt of globalizing developments.14 So, if globalization signifies, as it does in some quarters, the “globalising of modernity” and, further, if, along with Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Wallerstein, Charles Taylor, and others, we understand modernity itself as a “Western project,”15 then, as the argument goes, neither aesthetic-epistemic postmodernism nor historical postmodernity has thus far made a persuasive case that their “post” and postcolonialism’s are the same.16 Put differently: at loggerheads with its own philosophical and political agenda, postmodernism often carries on modernity’s utmost egological project, Western colonialism. Thus, postmodernism only opens another chapter in the narrative it sought to “deconstruct.” Or, worse, it designates, alongside postcolonialism, an “effec[t] that reflect[s] or trace[s] the expansion of the world market and the passage of the form of sovereignty,” hence “point[ing],” as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim, “toward Empire.”17 Either way, “postmodernization” is, to many, “modernization” by other means. Once more, this may not be what the postmodern is. Personally, I do not think this is what it represents ab ovo or sets out to become. But if this is something it nevertheless ends up doing, then, its proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding, the relational or, as Hassan says with a wink at Mikhail M. Bakhtin, the “dialogical” refounding of identity and culture worldwide cannot be the postmodern’s “spiritual project.” 18 Or, if it is – if it was – it is not at all certain that postmodernism can carry it out. Instead, the more reasonable thing to do at this point in cultural history would be to give the postmoderns credit for laying the groundwork, setting the basic agenda, and developing, in the interval between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, the overall framework for a task whose completion by and large lies beyond the postmodern’s purview.

Modernity, postmodernity, relationality If modernity, chiefly in its Euro-American form and, inside this form, in the leading aesthetic-philosophical embodiments, is and views itself as an expanding, abstract, and atemporal rationality, postmodernity and, within

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it, postmodern culture and “theory” trace an inchoate, historicizing shift toward relationality. Granted, modernity and modernism are far from monolithic; this relational shift goes back to works and incidents too well known to be rehearsed here. But what I want to punctuate is, first, modernity’s “hegemonic” logos and the cultural dominant reflecting it and, second, the postmodern as a challenge to this reigning modern strain. In US prose, it is late-moderns like Vladimir Nabokov and his immediate successors, the early metafictionists of John Barth’s and Ronald Sukenick’s generation, who flung down the gauntlet initially. Similarly defiant positions are taken up in theory and the humanities with poststructuralism, to gain momentum with “identity studies” a bit later. This is a time of wideranging transformations that promise to cure modernity of its genetic “allergy” – of its “reaction” against álloi (“others”) and of the dichotomies and exclusionary reflexes spurred by it. It is also a time of indecision and half-steps, however. Modern America opens up and falls back on itself and on an insular-exceptionalist perception of the American self, simultaneously discovering “the world of others” and pulling back from it. Comparable to the mutations affecting the scholarly imaginary around the same time, the relational shift underway in the US literary-theoretical postmodernism of the 1970s and early 1980s is partial and conflicted, held in check by the postmoderns’ ongoing, cultural-epistemological allegiance to the nation-state model and to its ethno-linguistic and geopolitical “supracategory,” the Western tradition. True, postmodernism is a burgeoning withworld, but, generally speaking, this world is still culturocentric and overall geopolitically segregated, fenced in by the Wall. The postmodern recycling of past stories and histories usually obtains intra-nationally and intraculturally. The scope of the thematic and intertextual “redistribution” of time as times and site for the recovery of history as histories and of those in them – “us” but also others unlike “us” – are mainly if not exclusively the nation and its immediate environs. Thus, echoing the Cold War’s disjunctive and antagonist externalization of others in a “not-us, not-here” alter-geography, postmodernism bears limited witness to the budding worlded world. Following Johannes Fabian, critics such as Rey Chow fault explicitly the poststructuralists and implicitly the postmoderns for their approach to differential temporalities (“allochronies”) that de facto suspends the “coevalness” in which “others” can coexist with “us.”19 While I may ultimately subscribe to this conclusion, I do not want to shortchange postmodern literature and art either. Where modernism’s ideal is, and often unfolds in, absolute synchronicity – the sole time in which the world can be timed and

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integrated as globe – postmodernism marks the allusive and jocular return to the diachronic as relation with other times and their cultural others. A cross section through the nation’s memory, this relation is vertical, connecting as it does with other moments, feelings, and representations mostly inside the same tradition and its tradition of sameness. If, as Charles Jencks has argued, postmodernism “fuses” the heterogeneous temporalities its self-advertised pluralistic eclecticism calls forth, one should perhaps ask about which fuses with what and where the center of the ensuing “time fusion” might lie.20 To the extent the postmoderns have not confronted such questions adequately, they still operate within the framework of modern egology.

The cosmodern turn and the worlding of intertextuality Beginning with the late 1980s, such fusions and juxtapositions pick up speed, expand, and combine with cognate developments in multiculturalism, ethnic and new immigrant literatures, and other sectors and discourses of American culture to set in train a more radical turn. I have called it cosmodern. Roughly, as suggested previously, this shift is to US and, in some cases, world culture what the Wall’s fall is to post–World War II history. The analogy goes only so far. As I have also underscored, the cosmodern paradigm to which this turn gives birth both participates in and critiques late globalization’s highly networked environment – this is cosmodernism’s “double-bind.” In keeping with post-1989 worldwide amplification and densification of human relations, cosmodernism projects postmodernism’s newly found historical relationality horizontally across traditions and their unsynchronized temporalities. Thus, cosmodernism starts replacing postmodernism’s conceptual unit, the nation-state, with an ever more networked world. Despite exceptions such as the “Oriental” forays of Barth’s “Dunyazadiad” or, in poetry, the Beats, American postmodern intertexts generally roam the room of the nation or of the Western family of nations. In essence, this room and the systems postmodernism plugs us into are coextensive; diachronically and synchronically, this is the postmodern space of Burkean immediacy. However, with cosmoderns such as Chang-rae Lee, the later Don DeLillo, Nicole Mones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Karen Tei Yamashita, or Jonathan Safran Foer, this horizon widens dramatically to incorporate the formerly less immediate and less contingent (“out there”) worldly “web of ideas and images.” This is a transnational rather than post-national process. It leaves the nation behind

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altogether neither physically nor analytically but works it into broader, “international” and “cosmic” assemblages. Along these lines – the lines of the cosmodern imaginary itself – cosmodernism articulates and in turn can be represented critically as a vision of cross-traditional and polycentric intertextuality and interculturality that builds on the largely theoretical, fantastical, or mystical-Kabbalistic idea of “The Library of Babel” in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges to project a more transidiomatic, transcultural, and geopolitical world library.21

The imaginary, the heterological, and the ethical The cosmodern vision declines to be another egological extrapolation of US/Western nuclei of values, ideologies, and intertextual repertoires. Mindful of the culturocentric risks historically involved in such macrosystemic undertakings and approaches thereto, cosmodernism is an imaginary of worlded aesthetic relations as much as it is one of ethical relatedness. The cosmodern problematic of otherness is more authentically – more heterologically – “other,” vaster, more capacious ethnically, racially, or religiously. Undoubtedly, such issues are more extensively explored than in postmodernism. But not only are “others” becoming the master theme of the American literature of the past twenty years. The “theme” is also ethically explored. This means that the other’s presence in cosmodern discourse is no longer just a matter of “theme,” and hence of thematization, of rational reduction. The other’s presence founds, organizes, and orients cosmodern representation rather than merely supplying it with the subject du jour. “Relational” writing and reading in postmodernism is writing “about” and reading “for” the otherness textualized or, better still, intertextualized through a range of formal devices from ironic allusiveness, bookishness, and bricolage to “ludic” self-referentiality and metalanguage.22 These “forms” are not exclusively postmodern but become mainstream and emblematic in postmodernism. A subcategory of postmodern relationality, intertextuality is the postmodern writing technique or form of thematizing other works and others generally, as well as a method of interpreting this writing. Cosmodernism does follow in postmodernism’s footsteps thematically and formally, as we have noticed throughout. Yet the cosmodern authors grow increasingly uncomfortable with an approach that, on an important level, reinforces an older worldview that conceptualizes and thus further “others” and externalizes alterity qua “theme” and “form.” Cosmodernism seeks to engage with otherness beyond the thematic, the exotic,

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and the formal, ethically. Now, if this is the cosmodern benchmark, then not all works billed as cosmodern may make the cut, while works that usually come under other rubrics may, depending, of course, on how one reads them. As with the epistemic reshufflings of the 1980s, so with the with-world canvassed by the American literary-cultural imaginary ever more markedly after 1989: this structure arises across a series of authors, not all of them cosmodern, and certainly not all at the same time. There is, for instance, a postmodern DeLillo (White Noise [1985]) as much as there is a cosmodern one, from Underworld (1997) on, whereas Lee’s or Suki Kim’s cosmodernism is consistent throughout their careers.

Cosmodernism, epochality, contemporaneousness This is one reason cosmodernism lacks some of the features of earlier, better demarcated “epochs” such as romanticism, modernism, and even postmodernism: cosmodernism is a “soft” cultural period. Because its onset entails a highly complex and deep-reaching reordering of the world as we know it, the paradigm will take a while to stabilize. While this process did begin in the late 1980s, for all intents and purposes, the 1989 late-global milestone marks decisively the turning point within, as I have said, an otherwise lengthier, contradictory, and multipronged turn. A cutoff year in the post–World War II history of globalization, the eventful 1989 is putting pressure not only on political scientists and historians but also on literary and cultural critics to rethink their timelines. Central to the debates around the periodization of the “contemporary” and, in particular, of postmodernism has been, of course, the modernistpostmodern sequence. Its main historical signposts have been placed around World War I – or a bit earlier, “on or about December 1910,” as Virginia Woolf famously if “arbitrarily” offers in her 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” – and then in the late 1950s or, according to Jencks, ten odd years thereafter.23 While modernity is surely centuries older, the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the advent of modernism in postimpressionist and avant-garde form or forms (the “isms”) succeeded by the high-modernism of the 1920s and 1930s; the interval between the last part of the sixth decade and the early 1970s – with the demise of “official” Stalinism and of its McCarthyite US version at one end and 1968 and the Civil Rights movements at the other – heralds modernism’s twilight. What happened “on or about the year 1989” will probably force future critics, though, to move the two aforementioned signposts so as to revise

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the modern-postmodern sequence – along with all the breaking points, periodizations, and controversies derived from it – as a modern-cosmodern narrative, with World War I and the late 1980s (rather than, say, the 1960s) as the main turning moments in recent cultural history. In the long run, the Wall’s crumbling may become more consequential geopolitically and culturally than the “collapses” of modernist buildings that between the 1960s and the early 1970s, Jencks argues, allegorized the general collapse of modernism. We would have, then, a “long modernism” followed by a “cosmodernism” that at present is too young to afford a satisfactory description. Let us also keep in mind that cosmodernism is not postmodernism’s sole successor. Nor is postmodernism completely “over.” The postmodern project too is “incomplete.” There have been, in fact, some attempts to retool the postmodern paradigm for our global era by setting up a “postcolonialized,” “diversified,” Third-World, even “worldist” postmodernism as this era’s “cultural logic” or, on a more combative note, “counterlogic.” These endeavors are not without merit. I agree, however, with critics who point instead to the overall superannuation of the postmodern paradigm in the age of worlded networks and thus to the need to move “beyond postmodernity.”24 Cosmodernism is that move itself, a transitional act in an unfolding drama that will end in a sea change eventually.

Style That change will, in all likelihood, bring about a revolution in style. However, while over the last quarter of a century the United States has been transitioning out of a cultural dominant and critical awareness thereof, our culture as a whole has not settled into another, formally configured constellation of emotions, representations, and discourses yet. Still relying copiously on postmodern techniques, cosmodernism is at present insufficiently “paradigmatic” stylistically. But its devotion to the concept that “the subject can no longer be conceived of as closed up in itself ” goes beyond the stylistic and the conceptual, and thus beyond the postmodern, into the ethical.25 For this reason, and for now, cosmodernism is best understood as an ethical rather than formal enterprise. Chang-Rse Lee and Zadie Smith are the perfect examples here, to the point that, in novels like Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) and Aloft (2004) or Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and The Autograph Man (2002), the systematic, explicit, and supremely ethical tackling of the problematics of alterity can be said to have become a matter of recognizable narrative style. Accordingly, the cosmodern project has considerable bearing on how we think not just about the subject but also

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about discourse, history, culture, community, patrimony, and tradition. The cosmoderns complicate all these issues by rewriting them as paragraphs in a worldly phenomenology of self-other mutuality.

Cosmodernism and planetarism Neither the only new thing to supersede postmodernism nor distinct enough as a movement or school so far, cosmodernism is, in sum: (1) an increasingly recognizable imaginary pattern, viz., a way of mapping “today”’s world as a cultural geography of relationality; (2) by the same token, a capacious scenario of discourse and subjectivity formation; (3) an ethical imperative pointing to the present as much as to the future; and (4) a critical algorithm for interpreting and assembling a range of post-1989 narrative and theoretical US imaginings into a coherent and, again, forward-looking model. It becomes apparent, however, at the dawn of the new millennium and especially after 9/11 that, inchoate, tentative, and still “soft” as it may be as a trend, cosmodernism constitutes, inside American and other Euroatlantic cultures, a harbinger of and sometimes a blueprint for a turn on a larger scale. Acknowledging the planetary scope of this turn as well as of an analogous shift to issues of “planetarity” in literary and cultural studies with critics like Spivak, Wai Chee Dimock, and Ursula Heise over the past ten years or so, I have sought to upgrade the cosmodern analysis of post–Cold War US literary culture to a planetary approach. My 2015 book posits that cosmodernism is that which planetarism is becoming for the entire world on the threshold of the twenty-first century. The North American “cosmodernization” of the postmodern is a worldfractal phenomenon, an isomorphic subset of a highly complex, discontinuous, and at times contradictory shift of vaster proportions and longer-lasting consequences. Cosmodernity and cosmodernization are to the US and the West generally what planetarity and planetarization are to the world, its present, and foreseeable future. Therefore, and most notably, while the cosmodern can be looked at as a planetary synecdoche, cosmodernism is not the Ur-paradigm the rest of the world replicates. Planetarism is scarcely cultural imperialism redivivus even though writers’ intimations of planetarity are not wholly immune to imperial lapses and neoimperialist, totalist-globalist rationalizations. It is the other way around, rather: socioaesthetic mutations in North America, Europe, and elsewhere cannot circumvent the ecumenical transformations affecting how artists, thinkers, and laypeople worldwide see themselves and

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the world. Thus, planetarily minded critics must refurbish the cosmodern algorithm of interpretation discriminately and comparatively (they must be comparatists whatever else they are), rehearse some of its tenets (e.g., the role of relationality), and revamp, repurpose, or cast aside others to work out a mechanism for coming to grips with the world’s reencoding as planet in early twenty-first century literary, cultural, and theoretical practices. Such inscriptions, I maintain, betoken a modality of being or ontology of planetarity. Embodying this condition is the planet. This is not so much the physical earth at this point as the geocultural matrix increasingly fashioning human expressivity and comprehension worldwide, the emerging “single unit” of cultural discourse and analysis, of world writing and world reading.26 Planetarity rests on a geocultural logic germane to cosmodernism’s. Characteristic to the planetary is the heterotopic copresence deployed by the greater elsewhere’s ever more aggressive bid for redefining topologically as well as typologically (anthropologically) nearness, locality, the “regionally specific,” the presumptively autochthonous, and other sites, marks, and embodiments of the cultural “here.”

Reading “planetarity” Both concomitant and homologous to the geopolitical adjustments and conflicts enumerated earlier, this geo-logy translates into the intensification of the process that, right after the Wende, was already showcasing a staggering upswing in interconnectedness and mobility around the world, in the instability and vulnerability of borders, in the fluidity of territorialinstitutional jurisdiction, in the “fuzziness” of location, and in the culturaldiscursive and socioeconomic unmooring of formerly dependable, “steadfast” categories such as place, origin, patrimony, and the like. There is little doubt that, under these circumstances, we are running into problems testing the effectiveness of our approaches, the boundaries of our discourses and of the “scholarly” more generally, the limitations of our epistemologies, and the germane limits of our academic setups and units. Such problems include, say, the risks taken by the reader of Yoko Tawada’s “Metamorphosen des Heidenrösleins,” whose “language games” put one on a “cultural collision” course with Goethe as much as with Japan’s history, literature, and national idiom, or the conundrum one faces in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), where the bigger world becomes legible in the “civility” spectacle of a Long Island cricket match.27 These critical quandaries are reactions to works that, in turn, register the world’s “condition” of planetarity. Authors including Tawada, O’Neill, Mohsin Hamid, Colum

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McCann, Teju Cole, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Orhan Pamuk, Roberto Bolaño, Mircea Cărtărescu, Dai Sijie, Christos Tsiolkas, Hari Kunzru, W. G. Sebald, Junot Díaz, and Antonio Muñoz Molina document this condition in that, no matter what they see in the places they explore, they also register the world within these places. Characteristically, their fiction reads for the planet’s footprint on the local or, better yet, on the apparently local, cloistered, autarchic, and insular. The job of planetary critics is, very basically, to read for these readings – for the planet’s footprint in the cultures’ fine print, so to speak. The “geomethodology” they would thus press into service would help make out the murmur of the bigger world in Cărtărescu’s forlorn Bucharest; the cheering of the Indian, Caribbean, and English fans in the makeshift stands of O’Neill’s cricket field and in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel; the “intercontinental cast of characters,” fantasies, and data “pas[sing]” through Chuck’s Cadillac also in Netherland and through Eric Packer’s stretch limo in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003); or, indeed, the “world” itself, “passing [. . .] through” the “fat worm” in the “lump of London clay” in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012).28 Amplifying cosmodern relationality planetarily, the imaginary of planetarism sets up culturalaesthetic discourse as a sui-generis geopositioning system that concurrently locates the human and its humble abode in the world and vice versa. Refereeing these world-locational games is probably the greatest challenge of “today”’s critics. Notes 1 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN; London: Indiana University Press; BFI Publishing, 1995), 4. 2 See my book, Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). This essay incorporates and expands on segments from its epilogue, 307–16. I am grateful to the volume’s publisher for permission to use this material. On “planetarism,” see especially my monograph Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015). 3 Bertens and Fokkema, (eds), International Postmodernism 297–515. 4 On the “post-paranoid condition” and its treatment in Bulgarian postmodern theory see Alexander Kiossev (ed.), Post-Theory, Games, and Discursive Resistance: The Bulgarian Case (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 105–77. For postmodernism as an American phenomenon see the discussion in Thomas Carmichael and Alison Lee’s introduction to Postmodern Times: A Critical

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Guide to the Contemporary (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 3–7. 5 Ihab Hassan, “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/ Global Context,” www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm; Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1998). 6 Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 65. 7 See the subtitle of Sardar’s Postmodernism and the Other. 8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 336. 9 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Introduction to ‘Critical Multiculturalism’” in David Theo Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 112. 10 Steven Connor, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, 15. 11 Hassan, “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity.” 12 Gerard Delanty, Modernity and Postmodernity: Knowledge, Power and the Self (London: Sage, 2007), 155; Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 172–3. 13 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 265. 14 On postmodernism, “heterology,” and the ethics of their interplay, see Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 118. 15 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 174–6. 16 K. Anthony Appiah, “Is the ‘Post-’ in ‘Postcolonial’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postmodern’?” in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds.), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 420–2. 17 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 138–9. 18 Hassan, “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity.” 19 Rey Chow, The Age of World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 65–9. 20 Charles Jencks, “Post-Modern Architecture and Time Fusion,” in Carmichael and Lee, Postmodern Times, 141–52. 21 On postmodernism, intertextuality, and culture as “library” and “arena” in postmodern, cosmopolitan, “geocritical,” and technocritical-global scholarship, I mention here only Jim Collins’s Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 60–4; Guy Scarpetta’s Éloge du cosmopolitisme (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1981), 299–300; Bertrand Westphal’s La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace (Paris: Minuit, 2007), 262–5; and Alain

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23

24 25 26 27

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Finkielkraut and Paul Soriano, Internet, l’inquiétante extase (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 34–5. On “relational reading” in postmodernism, see, among other titles, Laurie Edson’s Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Art (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 4; Charles Jencks, “Postmodern vs. Late-Modern,” in Ingeborg Hoesterey (ed.), Zeitgest in Babel: The PostModernist Controversy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 5. Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 77. Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London: Routledge, 1999), 27. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 143. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 136, 141–2; Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Vintage, 2009), 15. Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 161; Zadie Smith, NW (New York: Penguin, 2012), 85.

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Epilogue: 2001, 2008, and after Andrew Hoberek

The end of the twentieth century was signaled by two events, one much more serious than the other: the much vaunted but ultimately unspectacular failure of computer systems projected to occur when their two-digit internal calendars could not handle the transition to the year 2000, and the September 2011 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If the former tempts periodization by its coincidence with the beginning of a new century, the latter does so much more spectacularly as a traumatic event with long-reaching consequences, especially inside the United States but on the global stage as well. In his essay “Break, Period, Interregnum,” Brian McHale draws on Phillip Wegner’s account of “the long nineties” to propose that in 1989, its high phase of cultural production over, postmodernism enters into a liminal phase of uncertainty and testing that lasts until 2001 ushers in “a return to the manichaean certainties of a new (or renewed) ‘clash of civilizations,’” a renewal of “business-as-usual in the imagination (and practice) of geopolitics” that may or may not signal the “true end” of postmodernism.1 This return to black-and-white is the keynote of Don DeLillo’s frequently cited post-9/11 essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” in which terror is a backward-looking “narrative” counterposed to precisely the high-tech, information-driven world that we associate with postmodernity: “But whatever great skeins of technology lie ahead, ever more complex, connective, precise, micro-fractional, the future has yielded, for now, to medieval expedience, to the old slow furies of cutthroat religion.”2 Even Slavoj Žižek, in his essay “Welcome to the Desert of the Real!,” seems – despite the fact that his title no doubt invokes Jacques Lacan’s concept of the real as “what resists symbolisation absolutely” – to buy into this logic, suggesting that “one thing is sure: the United States, which, till now, perceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of thing only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved.”3 497

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Of course we might – bearing in mind McHale’s equivocation about whether 2001 actually serves as a break from postmodernism – note that Žižek’s essay begins by asserting that the events of 9/11 fulfilled a narrative of the often brutal overcoming of a mediated, virtual reality running from Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint to the Wachowski siblings’ 1999 movie The Matrix – that is to say, precisely the period that has been denominated, with more or less uncertainty at both ends of the span, as postmodern. This might perhaps remind us too that if, in DeLillo’s words, “Terror's response is a narrative that has been developing over years, only now becoming inescapable,” this development took place not least in DeLillo’s own novels, going back at least to The Names (1982), a book written in the wake of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. If, on the one hand, the very real and horrifying events of 9/11 offered a break from a postmodernism characterized, in Fredric Jameson’s classic formulation, by “a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the ‘real’ into so many pseudo-events,” in another they fulfilled a longstanding narrative expectation within postmodernism, one already visible in the overhyped (and, for companies promising a solution, profitable) discourse surrounding the Year 2000 problem.4 Of course, this is not to say that things did not change as a result of the 9/11 attacks. As Žižek asserted, the attacks presented Americans with a choice: “Will [they] decide to fortify further their ‘sphere,’ or will they risk stepping out of it?”5 We all know what choice was made, and the consequences that the world as well as the United States continues to live with. There are good reasons to doubt, however, that 9/11 as an event in world history maps easily onto the history of literary and cultural production, and in particular onto the emergence of what observers increasingly describe as post-postmodernism.6 This term has now become conventional enough to merit its own Wikipedia page, which proclaims that “a common positive theme of current attempts to define post-postmodernism is that faith, trust, dialogue, performance and sincerity can work to transcend postmodern irony.”7 But if this is the case then the origins of post-postmodernism clearly date back to the mid-1990’s publication of David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993) and his novel Infinite Jest (1996), foundational works in the development of what Paul Giles calls “sentimental posthumanism” and Adam Kelly refers to as the “new sincerity.”8 In what follows I’ll suggest that Wallace plays an anticipatory role in the developmental of a new fictional mode that in fact slightly predates 2001 but comes to dominate twenty-first century fiction, a role that has less to do with his promotion of sincerity than with his

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relationship to the question of literary genre. Here I will argue that the salient event in post-postmodern fiction is the rise (or rather, return) of popular genres to literary respectability. This phenomenon, distinct from postmodern fiction’s engagement with these genres, might be seen as coming into its own with the publication and reception of Jonathan Lethem’s crime novel Motherless Brooklyn (published in 1999 and awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year) and Michael Chabon’s tribute to the early days of comic books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (published in 2000 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001). Then, too, we are now far enough past 9/11 to see the periods before and after it as part of a continuous period rather than as radically distinct eras. Thomas Piketty’s surprise best-selling global economic history Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013; English translation, 2014), for instance, highlights a period of increasing financial inequality that “accelerated with the victories of Margaret Thatcher in England in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980,” was reinforced by “the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, followed by financial globalization and deregulation in the 1990s,” and subsequently led to “a growth of capital’s share” that was not slowed even by the financial crisis of 2007–8. This period coincides, that is to say, with precisely the ascendant neoliberalism central to Jeffrey Nealon’s account of post-postmodernism as “the cultural logic of justin-time capitalism.” Here it is interesting to note that the literary turn to popular genres that began with a kind of fanboy eclecticism and achieved its apotheosis in Junot DÍaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) mutated, sometime around the 2007–8 crash, into a somewhat more fixed focus on one genre, or perhaps subgenre, in particular: the postapocalypse. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2012), Edan Lepucki’s California (2014), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), and Laura van den Berg’s Find Me (2014) are all novels that share both an unquestioned literary status and a fascination with life after some event wipes out most of the human population and its attendant civilization. As this list suggests, 2014 marks not only a shift to female authorship but to a situation where the post-apocalyptic genre, no longer dependent on an established name to boost it to literary status, can now in fact make literary reputations. Indeed, it is tempting to say that if, as McHale has argued, detective fiction provides the generic template for modernism and science fiction for postmodernism, then post-apocalypse does so for post-postmodernism.9 Following the heyday of realistic trauma fiction which began

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in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s with authors such as Tim O’Brien and Toni Morrison, and whose last great wave responded to the events of 9/11, fiction has turned from its fascination with personal and historical traumas as discrete past events that must be worked through in the present to an understanding of everyday existence itself as a sort of slow, ongoing trauma – an effort to come to terms, I will argue, with the conditions of inequality and privatization central to a triumphant neoliberalism. Junot Díaz’s response to an interviewer’s question about the eleven years that passed between the publication of his short-story collection Drown (1997) and Oscar Wao brings together all these threads and provides yet another origin point for this story. Díaz explains that following the success of Drown he was “trying to write [a novel] about the destruction of New York City by a psychic terrorist (my very own Third World Akira),” but that “9/11 ended [this novel] real fast” because he found himself “too busy experiencing the transformations in-country to write about them in an interesting way.”10 In this account, Díaz was already in the late nineties meditating a work of genre fiction – he calls it his Third World or “Black Akira” in homage to Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated science-fiction film – but was sidelined by the real-life trauma of the 9/11 attacks.11 Yet insofar as Díaz’s suggestive use of the phrase “in country” might be seen as alluding to Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1985 novel about a Vietnam veteran unable to readjust to life back home in Kentucky, this brief anecdote also offers a submerged allegory about literary history. It does so by hinting at the way that Díaz’s career leapfrogs the trauma narratives that appeared around the same time as Oscar Wao and attempted to come to terms with 9/11 and its legacy: Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Jess Walter’s The Zero, and Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, all from 2006; DeLillo’s Falling Man, from the following year; and Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 Netherland. These novels are all broadly realistic, as can be seen among other places in the rather striking coincidence that, with the exception of Walter’s book, they all deal with threatened marriages. Domestic realism seems to function in these novels as a semi-nostalgic invocation of the everyday life ruptured by the attacks, and that may or may not be restorable in their wake: Messud’s adulterous husband returns to take refuge in his marriage immediately after the attacks; Kalfus’s estranged husband and wife witness the attacks and each experience a dark fantasy that the other is a victim; one of DeLillo’s characters survives the attacks and instead of returning home to his troubled marriage begins a relationship with another survivor;

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the wife of O’Neill’s protagonist returns to England after the attacks while he continues to live in New York City. The conceit of Walters’s novel – it focuses on an amnesiac police officer named Remy whose existence unfolds in a series of interludes between gaps in his memory of events – literalizes the traumatic disruption to everyday life figured by the other books’ marriage plots, making clear the 9/11 novel’s debt to the Vietnam novels of authors like O’Brien and Mason. Indeed, in one scene Remy’s therapist tries to convince him that what he believes are his experiences are in fact “textbook PTSD,” a fantastic elaboration of midlife problems exacerbated by the “severe trauma” of being on hand for the fall of the towers.12 In fact, the 9/11 novel constitutes not the dominant trend of twenty-first century fiction, as it not too long ago seemed tempting to say, but a relatively late, brief, and (in terms of style) backward-looking break in a larger continuity provided by what we might think of as the postpostmodern genre turn. This phenomenon, of course, has its roots in postmodernism’s own vaunted openness to mass cultural forms. In his 1970 account of the emerging body of postmodern fiction, Leslie Fielder famously asserted that young American writers “when they are most themselves, nearest to their central concerns, turn frankly to Pop forms” such as the Western, science fiction, and pornography – a reversal of the situation in place since “Henry James had justified himself as an artist against such self-declared ‘entertainers’ as Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.”13 And in the wake of Fiedler’s essay, such acknowledged high points of postmodern fiction as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Robert Coover’s Public Burning (1977) assimilated themes and motifs from popular fiction and other forms. Postmodernism’s incorporation of such forms into its fundamentally difficult, experimental (that is to say, modernist) project is, however, distinct from the way twenty-first century novelists have tended to work within popular genres in a manner similar to Dickens, Stevenson, and the James of The Turn of the Screw. In turning to popular genres as sources of creative energy these novelists have something in common with recent poets, such as Cathy Park Hong in Dance Dance Revolution (2007) and Michael Robbins in Alien vs. Predator (2012), who are deeply invested in contemporary mass culture – certainly more than they do with the conceptual poets who continue to pursue an avant-gardist project under the rubric of “uncreative writing.”14 But insofar as poets such as Hong and Robbins incorporate their mass cultural references within relatively traditional poetic forms, they still do something different from contemporary novelists who seek to inhabit rather than assimilate popular genres.

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Here Lethem and Chabon are founding figures because their work bridges the serious popular divide from opposite sides: Lethem the genre artist whose Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) was a finalist for the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America but who, following mainstream recognition for Motherless Brooklyn, transitioned into the series of (genre-inflected) realist novels running from The Fortress of Solitude (2003) to his most recent Dissident Gardens (2013); Chabon the realist writer who, after charting his dissatisfaction with the available terms for realism in Wonder Boys (1995) and incorporating stretches of comic-book narrative into Kavalier & Clay, produced the fullblown genre works The Final Solution (2004), The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), and Gentlemen of the Road (2007) before returning to what he now understands as “the genre of mainstream quote-unquote realistic fiction” with his Telegraph Avenue (2012).15 Post-postmodern fiction approaches its genre elements from a realistic rather than an experimental angle, although the idea that “quote-unquote realistic fiction” is itself a genre suggests a potentially even more radical reconfiguration of our understanding of fiction. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011) offers an extended treatment of this reconfiguration, insofar as it is not simply a realist novel about the fates of three people who meet as undergraduates at Brown University in the 1980s, but also an extended defense of realism against the theory-driven account of the literary that Eugenides’s characters encounter in Providence. While Eugenides certainly satirizes theory’s role in the classroom and its reception by undergraduates – that is, while he treats it as a social phenomenon as much as an account of the world – his defense of literature in this context ends up taking seriously (as its title makes clear) the deconstructive tenet that literature is a realm of constructed meaning continuous with, rather than separate from, life. Eugenides’s novel thus takes up its own generic status as one of its subjects, even as it self-evidently remains a work of realism – realism, we might say, following Chabon’s lead, in quotation marks. Here it is not coincidental that one of the novel’s three protagonists, Mitchell, is semi-autobiographical, while another, Leonard, is a clear representation of Eugenides’s late friend David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s Infinite Jest establishes its difference from postmodernism not only in its search for a counterpoint to what its author elsewhere described as the “institutionalized” and thereby defanged irony of postmodernism.16 Perhaps more importantly in the present context, it paradoxically does so by appearing in the form of a big postmodern novel at a point when this form had been eclipsed by, in Wallace’s terms, “the self-conscious

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catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes,” and was no longer the epitome of serious literary ambition.17 Infinite Jest constitutes, that is to say, postmodernism in question marks. In this respect, Wallace actually begins to look curiously similar to his contemporaries such as Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen, who have become known – after having passed through their own late postmodernist phases with Franzen’s DeLilloesque The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Eugenides’s narrative “of a single gene through time”18 Middlesex (2002) – as partisans of realism. In his book on Franzen Stephen Burn argues that what makes Franzen, Wallace, and Richard Powers exponents of “post-postmodernism” is the way in which their work “explicitly looks back to, or dramatizes its roots within, postmodernism,” “a development from postmodernism” in which “the balance between the importance of form and something closer to a conventional plot grounded in a recognizable world . . . is weighted toward plot to a greater degree than in the work of the postmodernists.”19 I would go further than Burn and contend that in thus putting realism and postmodernism into play as available genres or modes – rather than as, say, the essence of the literary, or its most-developed form – this line of writing opens up the possibility of embracing literary genres per se. This, in turn, gives us a slightly more capacious sense of the twenty-first century genre turn than does an account focused solely on the elevation of previously discredited popular genres. On the one hand we can understand the genre turn as both a gendered and generational phenomenon – Chabon, Lethem, Díaz, and Whitehead were all born between 1963 and 1969 – whose proponents turn to popular genres as a counter model for the proper realist style associated with creative-writing workshops and minimalist fiction. If Chabon explicitly thematizes this in Wonder Boys, we can also see it in the Díaz’s shift from the Carveresque prose style of Drown to Oscar Wao’s interpolation of at times baroque mass cultural diction and its distinctly Wallace-like use of footnotes,20 or Whitehead’s jibes at minimalism (“What isn’t said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories, the real action occurs in the silences. Try to keep all the good stuff off the page”) in his satirical pieces for the New York Times.21 These authors employ the tropes and motifs of the standard mass cultural canon for American men of a certain age: comic books, science fiction novels, J. R. R. Tolkien, zombie movies. This is the strain of contemporary fiction that Chimamanda Adichie critiques via Ifemelu, the protagonist of her 2013 novel Americanah. Ifemelu, a Nigerian expatriate then living in the United States, thinks back about how her former boyfriend Blaine had criticized Jean Toomer’s

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Cane (1923) “in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness.”22 But a broader optic lets us focus on the generic elements, of, for instance, Jennifer Egan’s inhabitation of the Stephen King–style gothic in her 2006 The Keep (a self-conscious rewriting of King’s 1977 The Shining) or her blend of realism and near-future science fiction in A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). It also, perhaps, suggests Adichie’s own debt to the popular Nigerian films, with their aspirational middle-class subject matter and romance plots, that Ifemelu sees in a Philadelphia hair-braiding salon staffed by Senegalese women. If, in this early scene, the novel notes that “Ifemulu thought little of Nollywood films, with their exaggerated histrionics and their improbable plots,” she will, after moving back to Nigeria near the end of the book, find herself defending them to a fellow former expatriate in a restaurant. “I like Nollywood,” she tells this man, “Nollywood may be melodramatic, but life in Nigeria is melodramatic” – a sentiment the novel affirms shortly thereafter when Ifemulu rekindles her romance with her youthful lover, Obinze, following their long separation and his unhappy marriage.23 Adichie, who grew up in Nigeria and continues to divide her time between that country and the United States, illustrates the genre turn’s compatibility with another important feature of contemporary fiction, the rise of what a number of observers have called the “global novel” that not only circulates internationally but in many cases has complicated affiliations with multiple countries.24 Pankaj Mishra has written that “[l]arge economic and demographic shifts since the 1980s” have brought about a worldwide “growth of such genres as mystery, science fiction and – in India, at least – ‘mythological thriller.’”25 If, as he suggests, much of that work has been directed toward local consumption, popular genres have also served as a sort of lingua franca for writers crossing national borders: think of the importance of science fiction in the work of Harumi Murakami (who’s also translated Ursula LeGuin for Japanese readers) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005); the spy thriller in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007); the detective story in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006); and so on.26 The influence of genre fiction on contemporary novels extends, moreover, beyond cases where writers explicitly work within genre forms.

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Consider, for instance, Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest (2008), about an Asian immigrant math professor at a Midwestern university who is suspected of sending a mail bomb to a colleague. Choi’s realist plot draws on two well-known events of the late 1990s: the Unabomber case and the accusations of espionage leveled against the Taiwanese American physicist Wen Ho Lee. And indeed Choi, who was Díaz’s classmate in the MFA program at Cornell, is rightly known as a realist’s realist, an author who employs a straightforward prose style in character-driven novels about more or less true-to-life events: American Woman (2003) tells the story of Jenny Shimada, a Japanese American radical loosely based on Symbionese Liberation Army member Wendy Yoshimura, while My Education (2014) focuses on a Cornell graduate student named Regina Gottlieb, who has an affair with a professor. A Person of Interest certainly fits this mold, although a careful reader might note that the spare, quotidian prose style Choi uses for most of the novel – “Lee spent spring break imitating serene solitude, mounting the stairs to his desk every morning and not going back down except for his meals, but finally accomplishing nothing, because his mind couldn’t stop pawing over the letter from Gaither” – shifts in the scenes where Lee, followed by the federal agents who have been watching him, tracks the real bomber to his Montana cabin:27 Lee felt one knee fail beneath him but was still thrashing forward, the sluiceway of rain blinding him, he had smacked into something— Arms seized and bundled him into a car, some kind of tall sport utility vehicle. He saw the eerie green glow of a dashboard display, varying concentrations of darkness, heard doors slam and felt the see-saw movements of a three-point reversal – 28

Here not only the plot but also the language of the spy thriller briefly takes over from that of the Midwestern campus novel. This is not too far removed from the way in which Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One (2012) for the most part reads like a novel of personal introspection set amidst a zombie apocalypse, only intermittently shifting into the kinds of plot-driven set pieces designed to satisfy the expectations of genre readers. If A Person of Interest is a straightforwardly realist novel that briefly acknowledges – at the level of style – the generic dimensions of its plot, Zone One is a prima facie genre exercise set up to provide an estranged version of realism. Choi’s subtle deployment of genre language in this way helps us to see the range of forms taken by fiction participating in the twenty-first century genre turn. Unlike Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, for instance, in which

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a homeless man gives the protagonist a ring that confers the powers of flight and invisibility, or Zone One, which takes place amidst a zombie apocalypse, Díaz’s Oscar Wao never deviates from strict realism in its plot. Yet this novel is a central work in the genre turn not simply for thematic reasons – the interest in “the Genres” shared by Díaz’s perennial narrator Yunior and the title character whose story he relates – but also, as I have suggested, because of its language.29 The novel supplements the streetwise Dominican Spanish-inflected language of Drown (“Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly-bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”) not only with references drawn from the nerdspeak of its title character (“Don’t misunderstand: our boy wasn’t no ringwraith, but he wasn’t no orc either”) but also with the melodramatic, pseudo-Victorian diction of the genre works that Oscar (and covertly Yunior) enjoy: “Life, it seemed, had struck the Gangster a dolorous blow, and he was uncertain as to how to respond.”30 Authors like Díaz turn to popular genres, we might argue, for the same reason that Wallace turns to the big postmodern novel: as a way of reviving the maximalist ambitions central to postmodernism but foreclosed in the American literary mainstream of the eighties and the nineties by the dominance of Carveresque minimalism. (Here I am thinking of Mark McGurl’s distinction between a minimalism characterized by “exclusion” [in the sense of rigorous editing], “privacy,” and “contemporaneity” and a maximalism marked by “inclusion,” “publicity,” and “historicity.”) 31 We can see this in the way Díaz turns to Tolkien and to comic books to describe the regime of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, or even more directly in Oscar Wao’s opening paragraphs, which in fact sound – in contradistinction to the resolutely realist tone of the post-9/11 novels appearing around the same time – like nothing so much as magical realism:32 They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has

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become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.33

This passage is determinedly maximalistic, not only at the level of the long sentences held together by semicolons and hyphens, but also in its approach to history, which – with only a brief allusion to the 9/11 attacks (but also to Hiroshima, the first use of the phrase “ground zero”) – casts the post-Columbian world per se in a post-apocalyptic light. In this way Oscar Wao indirectly fulfills, even as it expands upon, Díaz’s aborted late-1990s plan to write a post-apocalyptic novel. But even as it stands as a highpoint of the maximalist redeployment of genre models, Oscar Wao also gestures toward the way in which authors would, in the years following 2007, increasingly explore the post-apocalyptic subgenre as a site of renewed minimalism. The origin point of this revived subgenre is doubtless Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which appeared in 2006 and won the Pulitzer the following year. McCarthy’s novel highlights another aspect of the genre turn, its incorporation of writers from earlier generations. On one hand, authors including Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates, who had been working in popular genres for decades with varying degrees of literary respectability, saw their reputations rise as younger authors turned to them as honored forebears; all three of these authors, for instance, appeared in the 2007 McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, Michael Chabon’s follow-up to the 2003 collection McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. On the other hand, authors of such indisputable eminence as Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon produced new work consonant with the genre turn – Roth with his alternate history The Plot Against America (2004), Pynchon with novels such as Against the Day (2006) and Inherent Vice (2009) that embraced the genre elements long present in his work. McCarthy straddles this line: his All the Pretty Horses (1992) contains elements of both the Western and the popular romance, but his No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) are full-on, plot-driven genre novels (the former a crime thriller). But McCarthy is important for another reason. As I have argued elsewhere, his turn to genre marks a movement not toward maximalism but in fact in the other direction, from his earlier, Faulkner-inflected prose to a sparser and more minimalist style indebted to Hemingway.34 The Road is, moreover, minimalist in its effacement of history and its rigorous focus, noted by every commentator, on the basic dyad of father and son. The post-apocalyptic genre, with its erasure of society, naturally lends itself to minimalism, and the would-be maximalist author must work

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against this tendency: Whitehead’s Zone One, for instance, concerns itself with a (brief, as it turns out) interregnum in the zombie apocalypse in order to suggest the intransigence of the things like consumerism that Whitehead critiques in the pre-apocalyptic portions of the novel. The most recent crop of post-apocalyptic fiction has self-consciously exploited the minimalist potential of the genre. Edan Lepucki, for instance, has said in an interview that her book California sprang from a desire to write “a ‘post-apocalyptic domestic drama’” that would tell “an intimate story of a married couple against a high-stakes backdrop of a ruined world.”35 And indeed, much of California concerns the basic domestic relations of a husband and wife in the cabin to which they retreat following the breakdown of civilization, and of the small community to which the couple make their way in search of other survivors. Similarly, Mandel has explained that the starting point of her Station Eleven, about a troupe of itinerant actors and musicians who travel the communities surrounding Lake Erie after a disease has wiped out much of the human population, was her desire “to write about the life of an actor.”36 Accordingly, her narrative toggles back and forth between the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds, describing the lives of a Canadian actor and others whom he encounters before his death on the night that the disease takes hold; she gives the actor, moreover, an isolated upbringing on an island off the coast of British Columbia, which makes the parallels clear. Unlike McCarthy, who depicts almost every survivor except his heroic father and son as a cannibalistic predator living in a Hobbesian state of nature, Lepucki and Mandel offer a much more varied set of responses to the end of the world – in both books some people live by violence, but many more are concerned (like their creators) with the details of a life in which the taken-for-granted conveniences of modern civilization no longer exist. As this very formulation suggests, however, the post-apocalyptic genre still cuts against the grain of minimalism in its reliance on plot. If Chabon earlier in the century cast the return to genre as a response to the dominance of “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story,” Lepucki – for all the moments of quotidian plotlessness in California – still locates the turn to genre in the fact that “the literary novel is moving away from a ‘nothing happens’ model, and more toward one that revels in story.”37 And Mandel describes Station Eleven as “a love letter to the modern world,” an attempt to write about it by “consider[ing] its absence.”38 Reframed in this way, the contemporary rise of post-apocalypse as an early twenty-first century master genre might have everything to do with

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the present it seemingly rejects. Mandel in comments on her novel locates the modern world in technology – electric lights, airplanes, and cell phones – but in the acknowledgments to the novel she suggests a different context.39 There she cites a newspaper article that provides the book with a haunting (pre-apocalyptic) image, viewed by a shipping executive on assignment in Malaysia, of “container ships laid dormant by an economic collapse.”40 As this 2009 article makes clear, this collapse before the collapse is the 2008 banking crisis and the recession that followed it, with the ships serving (in language clearly resonant for Mandel’s story) as a “symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world's economies.”41 In the end, 2008 may prove a much more significant year for the history of the novel than 2001, with works of fiction grappling to represent not the discrete crisis of a terrorist attack but the seemingly interminable crisis of increased economic vulnerability that became clear – if seemingly no more susceptible to change – with the banking collapse. The world after the apocalypse, that is, might be the world of austerity, in which everyone is on their own and public institutions designed to mitigate inequality no longer work to do so. Fredric Jameson famously and controversially maintained a distinction between “the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” and the “postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperialism of the first world and above all of the United States.”42 With this in mind, one way to understand the postpostmodern is via the breakdown of this division that occurs when austerity, the primary technique of imperialism in the postmodern era, comes home to roost in the first world – in the United States and Great Britain no less than the poorer nations, such as Greece and Spain, of the European Union. Post-apocalyptic novels of very different stripes register the effects of austerity via the persistent theme of the collapse of public institutions. Ben Marcus’s experimental The Flame Alphabet (2012), for instance, contains scenes set at an old high school in upstate New York where people claiming to be scientists conduct arcane experiments related to a plague, while much of van den Berg’s more accessible Find Me contains similar scenes set in a former psychological hospital in Kansas. In both novels what goes on in these institutional spaces have no seeming effect on the diseases ravaging the books’ worlds, and in fact often seem like cruel, pointless jokes on the institutions’ inhabitants. Nor is this sense of what we might call the post-apocalyptic present of isolation and vulnerability limited to post-apocalyptic novels per se. In a recent reading of Chandra’s Sacred Games and Chabon’s Yiddish

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Policemen’s Union, for instance, Theodore Martin has argued that these literary detective novels are less concerned with the solution of their respective mysteries than with the temporality of waiting that precedes it: the “gap between expectation and event” that is, Martin contends, “the very nature of apocalyptic anxiety.”43 Martin sees in this temporality of “persistence without progression, ‘survival’ without change” a sort of philosophical and experiential engagement with the temporality of reading, but it also maps precisely onto what I have been describing as the feeling of austerity in contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction per se.44 This feeling is even more explicit in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), a novel whose author remains associated more with genre than with literary fiction, for reasons having to do with gender as well as with her books themselves. In fact, I would argue, Gone Girl offers one of the most compelling accounts of contemporary reality in recent fiction. It does so via the story of a married couple, Nick and Amy Dunne, who have lost their well-paying jobs as writers in New York and have moved back to the husband’s depressed hometown of Carthage, Missouri, to care for his mother who is dying of cancer. Described in this way, the novel is a strictly realistic treatment of economic life in the United States circa 2012, where jobs are disappearing and care for elderly parents devolves upon their children. The book, of course, takes a number of genre turns that one might say, without providing too much of a spoiler, are about the near sociopathic psychological states necessary to not only survive but thrive and take pleasure in such an environment. I want to conclude, however, not with character but with setting, particularly the abandoned mall that Nick visits when he is looking for his missing wife. Once the economic driver of New Carthage, then subject to a long decline, and finally “ended” by “the recession,” the mall is now home to squatters, drug users, and “Blue Book boys,” men laid off from a plant that makes college exam books with “No severance, nothing.” Walking into the abandoned mall, Nick as narrator describes it as “suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, posthumanity.”45 All of the devices that genre writers have in the past employed to bring about the apocalypse, this series suggests, have been fulfilled by much less dramatic (but all the more harmful) circumstances on the outskirts of a small town in Eastern Missouri. This is the story, which realism can’t quite adequately encompass, at the center of contemporary American fiction. In the post-apocalypse novel writers have adapted the tools of genre to the task of representing reality. It remains to be seen the extent to which they, and we, can also put to use genre fiction’s ability to imagine the world otherwise.

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Notes 1 McHale, “Break, Period, Interregnum,” 338, 334–8 passim; Phillip E. Wegner, Life between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 2 Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” The Guardian, December 21, 2001; www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/22/fiction.dondelillo. 3 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1991), 66; Slavoj Žižek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real!” South Atlantic Quarterly 101/2 (Spring 2002): 389. 4 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 56. 5 Žižek, “Welcome,” 389. 6 See, among other examples, the essays in the special issues of TwentiethCentury Literature on the topics “After Postmodernism,” 53/3, (Fall 2007) and “Postmodernism, Then,” 57/3 and 57/4 (Fall/Winter 2011); Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); and Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Palo Alto. CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). For a somewhat more skeptical contribution to the project of defining the post-postmodern, see Mary K. Holland, Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), esp. 11–17. 7 “Post-postmodernism,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpostmodernism. 8 Paul Giles, “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace,” Twentieth Century Literature 53/3 (Fall 2007): 327–44: Adam Kelly, “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace,” Post 45, 17 October 2014, http://post45.research.yale.edu/2014/10/dialectic-of-sincerity-lionel-trilling-anddavid-foster-wallace/. 9 See McHale, Postmodernist Fiction. 10 “An Interview with Junot Díaz,” BookBrowse, 2007; www.bookbrowse.com/ author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1496/junot-diaz?. 11 “An Interview with Junot Díaz.” 12 Jess Walter, The Zero (New York: Regan, 2006), 194–5. 13 Leslie Fiedler, “Cross the Border – Close the Gap,” A New Fiedler Reader (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1990), 276, 278. 14 See Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 15 Chris Talbott, “Chabon Ties It All Together in ‘Telegraph Avenue,’” The Seattle Times, December 13, 2012); http://seattletimes.com/html/entertain ment/2019895605_apusbooksmichaelchabon.html. 16 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13/2 (Summer 1993): 183–4. 17 Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” 181.

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18 Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (New York: Picador, 2002), 4. 19 Stephen J. Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (New York: Continuum, 2008), 19–20. 20 See Andrew Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Marshall Boswell (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 211–13. 21 See Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” 211–21; Colson Whitehead, “How to Write,” New York Times, July 26, 2012; www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/ books/review/colson-whiteheads-rules-for-writing.html?pagewanted=all. 22 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (New York: Knopf, 2013), 11–12. 23 Adichie, Americanah 13, 409. 24 See “World Lite,” n + 1 17 (Fall 2013); https://nplusonemag.com/issue-17/theintellectual-situation/world-lite/ and Pankaj Mishra, “Beyond the Global Novel,” Financial Times, September 27, 2013; www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ 6e00ad86-26a2-11e3-9dc0-00144feab7de.html#axzz3USrpsk7x. Caren Irr also addresses this development, from a U.S.-based starting point, in Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 25 Mishra, “Beyond the Global Novel.” 26 Murakami Haruki, SFE: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, January 3, 2015; www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/murakami_haruki. 27 Susan Choi, A Person of Interest (New York: Penguin, 2008), 69 28 Choi, A Person of Interest, 315. 29 Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2007), 20. 30 Diaz, Oscar Wao, 11, 119, 123. 31 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 377. 32 For an extended discussion of the interplay between genre models and magical realism in the novel, see Daniel Bautista, “Comic Book Realism: Form and Genre,” in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21/1 (March 2010), 41–53. 33 Diaz, Oscar Wao, 1. 34 Andrew Hoberek, “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion,” American Literary History 23/3 (2011), 483–99. 35 Charlie Jane Anders, “Why Are Many of Today’s Hottest Authors Writing Post-Apocalyptic Books?” October 21, 2014; http://io9.com/how-did-postapocalyptic-stories-become-the-hottest-boo-1649022270. 36 Anders, “Post-Apocalyptic Books.” 37 Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Writing and Reading along the Borderlands (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 18; Anders, “Post-Apocalyptic Books.” 38 Anders, “Post-Apocalyptic Books.” 39 Anders, “Post-Apocalyptic Books.” 40 Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2014), 28.

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41 Simon Parry, “Revealed: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession Anchored Just East of Singapore,” Daily Mail, September 8, 2009; www.dailymail.co.uk/home/ moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession-anchored-just-eastSingapore.html. 42 Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986), 88 n. 26, 65–88 passim. 43 Theodore Martin, “The Long Wait: Timely Secrets of the Contemporary Detective Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45/2 (Summer 2012), 173. 44 Martin, “The Long Wait.” 45 Martin, “The Long Wait”; Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Crown, 2012), 92, 108, 113.

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Index

AAVE. See African American Vernacular English Abe, Kobo, 406–7 Abish, Walter, 331 Aboriginal paintings, 377 abortion rights, 232–3, 235–6 Abramovic, Marina, 199, 204, 210, 212 Abstract Expressionism, 371–4 art brut, 371–2 art informel, 371–2 Fluxus artists and, 374 global expansion of, 372–3 Gutai artists, 373 Pop Art and, 374 Acconci, Vito, 199, 203–4, 206, 376 Achebe, Chinua, 59–60 Acker, Kathy, 182, 190, 311, 317–18, 324–5 Ackroyd, Peter, 293 Adams, Douglas, 1 Adams, Ian, 263 Adams, John, 315–16 Adichie, Chimamanda, 268–9, 503–4 Adorno, Theodor, 56–7, 134–5 The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (Coover), 320, 451, 456–7 African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 392 African fiction, 273–5 After 1945 (Gumbrecht), 42 After the Quake (Murakami), 413–15 afternoon (Joyce, M.), 419 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Brownmiller), 435–6 Against the Day (Pynchon), 507 Agapë Agape (Gaddis), 456–7 Ah Q - The Real Story (Lu Xun), 467–8 Ahmed, Aijaz, 269 Ai Weiwei, 475 Albee, Edward, 56–8 Albert Angelo (Johnson), 133–4 Albright, Madeline, 10

Aldiss, Brian, 131–2 The Alexandria Quartet (Durrell), 128 Alexie, Sherman, 456–7 Alien vs. Predator (Robbins, M.), 501 All About H. Hatterr (Desani), 61 All Souls’ Rising (Bell), 294–5 All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy, C.), 507 Allen, Paula Gunn, 241–2 Allen, Woody, 214–15, 446–7 Allende, Isabel, 154–5 Aloft (Lee, C-R.), 491–2 altermodernism, 451 Althusser, Louis, 55 Altman, Robert, 214–15, 224 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon), 499 America (Baudrillard), 435 “America” (Ginsberg), 73 American New Criticism, 164 American New Wave. See New Hollywood cinema American Psycho (Ellis), 319–21, 446–7 American Woman (Choi), 505 Americanah (Adichie), 503–4 Amerika, Mark, 311, 422–3 Amis, Kingsley, 133–4 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 456–7 Anderson, Laurie, 11, 195–6, 230, 316 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 413–15 Anderson, Perry, 18–19 Anderson, Sherwood, 453–6 Andre, Carl, 199, 203, 207, 213 Andrews, Bruce, 195, 317, 331–2 angel imagery, 11 Angels in America (Kushner), 11, 180–1, 190, 247, 258–60 Anger, Kenneth, 220–1, 227–8 Anno, Hideaki, 409 antimodernism, communal living and, 123–4 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 89–90, 214 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 241–2, 256–8, 439

515

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516

Index

Apocalypse Now (Coppola, F.), 216–17 circular image as metaphor in, 218 Direct Cinema methods in, 222–3 framing in, 219–20 French New Wave influences in, 217–18 musical drama elements in, 224 paranoid conspiracy thriller elements in, 225–6 perceptual realism in, 219 rock music documentary elements in, 224–5 Appadurai, Arjun, 9 Appel, Karel, 371–2 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 64, 181, 264 Apuleius, 146 Aramaki, Yoshio, 406–7 architecture, postmodern in 1966, 6–7, 89–90 deconstruction in, 192–6 double-coding in, 188–90 historicist model of, 187–8 as language, 187 literary aspects of, 186–7 New Brutalism, 89–90 New Critics against, 186–7 outside text and, 196–7 postmodern model of, 188–9 public perception of, 186 semiotic model of, 187–8 Architecture of the City (Rossi), 6–7, 90 Arendt, Hannah, 41 Arias, Ron, 152 Armajani, Siah, 199, 203 Armantrout, Rae, 331–2 The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department (Perec), 453 art brut. See Abstract Expressionism art informel. See Abstract Expressionism Artaud, Antonin, 18–19, 102, 117–18 Artificial Intelligence, 428–9 The Artist is Present (Abramovic), 204, 212 Asada, Akira, 411–12 Ashbery, John, 7, 195–6, 324–5, 331–2 Ashby, Hal, 216–17 Ashcroft, Bill, 59–60 Ashita no Joe (Chiba), 407 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 145, 150 At Swim-Two Birds (O’Brien, F.), 128–9, 136–7 The Atlas (Vollmann), 457 The Atrocity Exhibition (Ballard), 6–7, 318–19 Atwood, Margaret, 507 Auerbach, Erich, 115–16 Austen, Jane, 241–2 Auster, Paul, 190, 311, 320–1 Austin, J. L., 245 Autograph Man (Smith, Z.), 491–2 autopoiesis, 106

avant-garde movements, 5. See also Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle group conceptual writing, 336–7 Kuppner influenced by, 289 modularity in, 318–19 punk rock, 341 Avant-Pop, 190, 310–12, 319–21 “Las babas del diablo” (Cortazar), 89–90 Babb, Valerie, 434 Back to the Future (Zemeckis), 227 Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Faludi), 243 A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (Kuppner), 281, 289 The Bad Sister (Tennant), 282, 286 Badiou, Alain, 44 Baetens, Jan, 328–9 Baldessari, John, 199, 208 Baldwin, James, 241–2 Ballard, J. G., 6–7, 176, 318–19 Bandung Conference of 1955, 54 Banes, Sally, 91 Bangs, Lester, 339–40 Banham, Rayner, 89–90, 312–13 Banks, Iain M., 286 Baraka, Amiri. See Jones, LeRoi Barchas, Janine, 25–6 Barkan, Elazar, 21 Barney, Matthew, 195–6, 316 “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (Carpentier), 144–5 Baroque New Worlds (Kaup and Zamora), 150–1 Barry, Andre, 199 Barry, Robert, 199, 211 Barth, John, 7–9, 69–70, 86, 116, 138–9, 189, 194, 300, 406, 451, 457–8, 461, 464, 466, 487 on literature of replenishment, 177–8 on magical realism, 144 Barthelme, Donald, 11, 58, 116–17, 138–9, 182, 190, 311, 406, 424, 450–1 Barthes, Roland, 86–7, 132, 186–7, 298, 375, 430 Bartlett, Neil, 253–6 Baselitz, Georg, 179, 376–7 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 9, 315, 394 Bataille, Georges, 102 Baucom, Ian, 60–1 Baudrillard, Jean, 2–3, 18, 87, 102–5, 110, 186–7, 412, 435 on mass media, 101–5 on Pop Art, 374 on postmodern simulation models, 123–4 postmodernism in China and, 472–3 Bear, Greg, 355–6 Beat movement, 114

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Index The Beatles, 88–9, 314 Beautiful Losers (Cohen), 87–8, 139, 190 Beauvoir, Simone de, 230–1, 234–5 Beck, Julian, 80 Beck, Ulrich, 9 Beckett, Samuel, 18–19, 127–8, 131–4, 137–8, 140, 194 Bedford, Martyn, 420, 424–7 Beery, Gene, 199, 208 Behn, Aphra, 241–2 Beigbeder, Frédéric, 493–4 Bell, Madison Smartt, 294–5 The Bell Jar (Plath), 233 Bellamy, Dodie, 251 Bellamy, Edward, 122–3 Bellow, Saul, 56–7 Beloved (Morrison), 293 Benford, Greg, 355–6 Benger, Elizabeth, 34 Benjamin, Walter, 375 Bennett, William, 440 Bentley, Elizabeth, 69 Berger, Thomas, 58 Bergman, Ingmar, 6–7 Bergvall, Caroline, 336–7 Berkhofer, Robert, 2–3 Bernardoni, James, 217 Berners-Lee, Tim, 400 Bernhardt, Thomas, 58 Bernstein, Charles, 137, 192, 195, 317, 331–2, 335 Bernstein, Leonard, 339 Berrigan, Ted, 324–5 Berten, Hans, 303, 484 Berubé, Michael, 441 Beti, Mongo, 61–2 Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder), 226–7 Bhabha, Homi, 59–60, 62, 152, 267, 435 birth control pill, 232–3 Björk, 316 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 62 Blade Runner (Scott, R.), 401–2 Blake, William, 19–20 Blanchot, Maurice, 44 Blindness and Insight (de Man), 406 Blonde on Blonde (Dylan), 88 Bloom, Allan, 440 Bloom, Harold, 241–2 Blow-Up (Antonioni), 6–7, 89–90, 214 Blue Velvet (Lynch, D.), 227 Bogdanovich, Peter, 214–15 Bok, Christian, 331, 336–7 Bolaño, Roberto, 493–4 Bollinger, Bill, 199, 203 Bonanza, 78 The Bone People (Hulme), 266–7

517

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 214, 219–20 Bontempelli, Massimo, 150 The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (Barth), 461 Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (Bennett), 440 Boom, in Latin American fiction, 144–7. See also magical realism Boone, Bruce, 251 Boorstin, Daniel, 95–8, 406–7 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa), 256–8 Bordo, Susan, 242–3 Borges, Jorge Luis, 63–4, 89–90, 137, 189, 489 Boswell, Marshall, 455 Bové, Paul, 469 Bowers, Maggie, 153–4 Bowie, David, 88–9, 236–7, 314 Bradbury, Malcolm, 450–1 Braidotti, Rosi, 428–9 Brathwaite, (Edward) Kamau, 60–1 Braudel, Ferdinand, 206 Brautigan, Richard, 58, 117, 138–9, 406 The Break Up of Britain (Nairn), 286 Brecht, Bertolt, 118–19 The Bridge (Banks, I.), 278–80 The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Díaz, J.), 190, 499, 505–7 Brin, David, 355–6 Broderick, Damien, 355–6 Bromell, Nick, 116 Brontë, Emily, 166 Brook, Daniel, 364–5 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 86, 131–2 Brown, John, 82 Brownmiller, Susan, 435–6 Buchloh, Benjamin, 376–7 Budenz, Louis, 69 Buell, Lawrence, 476 The Buenos Aires Affair (Puig), 320–1 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (Altman), 223 Buren, Daniel, 369, 376 Burgess, Anthony, 57–8, 133–4, 294–5 Burin, Daniel, 199 Burnham, Jack, 201, 204 Burr (Vidal), 294 Burroughs, William S., 7, 56–7, 86, 117, 139, 182, 190, 309, 324 The Bus Conductor Hines (Kelman), 286 Bush, George H. W., 399 Butler, Judith, 245, 248–50, 439 Butler, Octavia E., 182–3, 355–6 Butor, Michel, 129, 131–2 Byatt, A. S., 294–5

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Index

Cadigan, Pat, 354, 363–4 Cage, John, 324–5, 373 California (Lepucki), 499, 508 Calinescu, Matei, 312, 485–6 Callinicos, Alex, 18–19 Calvino, Italo, 8–9, 182, 319–20, 327, 330 Camayd-Freixas, Erik, 145, 150 camp, 180–1, 248, 312–13 Campbell, Andy, 420, 424–7 Campbell, John W., 407–8 Campion, Jane, 315–16 Can Xue, 465, 469–70 Cane (Toomer), 503–4 Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Chang), 386 Cantú, Norma E., 257 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 499 capitalism. See money and capitalism Capote, Truman, 7 Carey, John, 163 Carey, Peter, 294–5 Carmichael, Stokely, 233–4 Carpentier, Alejo, 62–4, 144–5 Carrol, Lewis, 6–7 Cărtărescu, Mircea, 493–4 Carter, Angela, 182, 190 Casatt, Mary, 438 Cassady, Neal, 114 Cassandra (Wolf ), 293 Castillo, Ana, 152 Catch-22 (Heller), 138–9 Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut), 406 Celan, Paul, 48–9, 193–4 celebrity, in mass media, 96 The Cell of Knowledge (Hayton), 286 Celtic postmodernism, 283–90 Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes (Queneau), 329–30 Certeau, Michel de, 2–3 Cervantes, Miguel de, 63–4 Césaire, Aimé, 41, 61–2, 262 Chabon, Michael, 499, 502 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 55 Chambers, Whittaker, 69 Chanady, Amaryll, 148–9 A Chancer (Kelman), 286 Chandra, Vikram, 504 Chang, Jeff, 385–6 The Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill), 190 Chelsea Girls (Warhol and Morrissey), 6–7 Chen Xiaoming, 465 Chia, Sandro, 177–9, 310, 376–7 Chiang Kai-shek, 69 Chiba, Tetsuya, 407 China, postmodernism in, 402–3 Baudrillard and, 472–3 DAD and, 475

deliberate practice of, 475–8 ecocriticism and, 477–8 futurism and, 364–5 globalization of, 470–2 historical development of, 465–6 Jameson on, 469 new tide novelists, 469–70 in popular culture, 473–4 before postmodern era, 466–9 public debate over, 469–75 in visual arts, 474–5 Chodorov, Nancy, 240–1 Choi, Susan, 505 Chomsky, Noam, 108 Chopin, Kate, 241–2, 434 Chora L Works (Derrida and Eisenman), 195–6 Chow, Rey, 487–8 Chraïbi, Driss, 61–2 Christian, Barbara, 241–2 Chung Kuo (Wingrove), 402 Cimino, Michael, 216–17 cinema vérité movement, 221–2 Civil Rights Act, 232 “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (Saunders), 455–6 Cixous, Hélène, 87, 238–9 Clarissa (Richardson), 29 Clark, Fred, 82 Clark, Lygia, 374 Clark, T. J., 341, 350 Cleaver, Eldridge, 233–4 Clemente, Francesco, 179, 369 A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 133–4 The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom), 440 Cloud Atlas (Mitchell), 190, 320 Clover, Joshua, 7–9 Coates, Norma, 342 Cockroft, Eve, 371 Cocteau, Jean, 118–19 Coetzee, J. M., 266–7, 293, 433 Cohen, Leonard, 87–8, 139, 190 Cohn, Deborah, 154 Cold Mountain (Frazier), 294–5 Cold War, 54, 68 Cole, Teju, 493–4 collage, 317. See also mixing, in high and low culture; sampling, in high and low culture Collier, Jane, 20, 25, 28–32 colonialism, fascism as, 262. See also empires Colonizer and Colonized (Memmi), 62 Come Back, Dr. Caligari (Barthelme), 139 The Comforters (Spark), 128–9 Coming Home (Ashby), 216–17 “Commcomm” (Saunders), 455–6

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Index Commonwealth literature, 59–60 Commonwealth Migration Act, 61 communes, 123–4 Communism, 54, 68, 80–1 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Venturi), 6–7, 90, 186–7, 191, 309–10 computers, as literary medium, 421–4 concept albums, 88–9, 314 conceptual writing, 336–7 A Concussed History of Scotland (Kuppner), 289–90 A Confederate General from Big Sur (Brautigan), 139 The Connecting Door (Sarraute), 131–2 The Connection (Gelber), 80 Connor, Steven, 262 Conrad, Joseph, 216–17 Constructing Postmodernism (McHale, B.), 262 contemporaneousness, 490–1 continuity, postmodernism and. See postmodernism The Conversation (Coppola, F.), 214–15, 225–6 Cook, Paul, 341 Cooper, Brenda, 148–9, 273–4 Cooper, James Fenimore, 434 Coover, Robert, 8–9, 58, 86, 139, 182, 190, 194, 294, 319–20, 406, 422–3, 451, 456–7, 461, 501 Coppola, Eleanor, 221 Coppola, Francis Ford, 214–15. See also Apocalypse Now Corrected Perspective on Studio Wall (D, 123) (Dibbets), 208 The Corrections (Franzen), 452–3, 457–60 Cortázar, Julio, 89–90 cosmodernism, 4, 9 contemporaneousness and, 490–1 epochality and, 490–1 ethics and, 489–90 globalization and, 482–3 heterology of, 489–90 the imaginary and, 489–90 intertextuality and, 488–9 planetarism and, 492–3 style of, 491–2 as transition from postmodernism, 482–3 Counterculture Colophon (Glass), 117–19 countercultures African Americans in, 113–14 Beat movement and, 114 communal living and, 123–4 The Crying of Lot 49 and, 114–16 defined, 112 emergence of, 113–16 FSM, 115, 120

519

in Greenwich Village, 118–19 high culture influenced by, 119 international expressions of, 124 low culture influenced by, 119 Marxism and, 121–2 New Journalism and, 121 psychedelia and, 116–17 rejection of epistemology by, 120–1 rejection of master narratives by, 120–1 standpoint theory and, 125–6 subcultures and, 114 utopianism of, 121–4 VDC, 124 YAF, 124 Crash (Ballard), 6–7, 176 Crawford, Richard, 288 Creeley, Robert, 331–2 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 244–5 Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen, W.), 446–7 Crimp, Douglas, 376 Crosthwaite, Paul, 139–40 Crow, Thomas, 374 Crow Road (Banks), 286 Crumey, Andrew, 281 The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (Fielding, S., and Collier), 20, 25, 28–32 The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon), 7, 86–8, 114–16, 120, 165, 294 Cucchi, Enzo, 376–7 cultural capital, 341–2, 354–6 Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Hirsch), 440 cultural theory, second-wave feminism and, 234–5 culture of management, theory and, 170–1 culture wars, 435–9 equality arguments and, 437–8 feminism and, 439 political correctness and, 438–9 in popular culture, 434–5 in postmodern fiction, 295–6 postmodernism and, 10–11 Cunningham, Michael, 315–16 Curll, Edmund, 25–6 Cyberculture (Lévy), 429–30 cyberpunk science fiction, 317–18. See also Gibson, William; Neuromancer character degree zero and, 362 Chinese futurism and, 364–5 cultural capital of, 354–6 defined, 354 flat characters in, 360–2 globalization of, 363–6 Japanese futurism and, 363–4 mirrorshades imagery in, 358–60

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520

Index

cyberpunk science fiction (cont.) narrative space in, 358–9 as Radical Hard movement, 355 self-similarity in, 358–9 technology themes in, 356 topology of, 356–8 cyberspace, 356 cyborgs, 361 Da Silva Da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness (Harris, W.), 265–6 DAD. See Dashanzi Art District Dada Movement, 18–19 Dadié, Bernard, 61–2 Daitch, Susan, 300 D’Alessandro, Sam, 251 Damas, Léon, 61–2 D’Amato, Alphonse, 438 Dance Dance Revolution (Hong), 501 Dancing in the Distraction Factory (Goodwin), 346–7 Dangaremba, Tsitsi, 268–9 Danielewski, Mark Z., 182, 190, 311, 331, 456–7 Dans le labyrinthe (Robbe-Grillet), 130–2 Danticat, Edwidge, 294–5 Darío, Rubén, 55–6 The Dark Knight Returns (Miller, F.), 314–15 Dashanzi Art District (DAD), 475 Davidson, John, 281 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 240–1 de Kooning, Elaine, 233 de Lauretis, Teresa, 242–3 de Man, Paul, 242–3, 406 de Voogd, Peter, 26 Dead Emcee Scrolls (Williams, S.), 389–90 A Dead Man in Deptford (Burgess), 294–5 The Death of Satan (Delbanco), 435 Death Sentences (Kawamata), 410–13 Debord, Guy, 98, 222 Debray, Régis, 117–18 Debuffet, Jean, 371–2 de-centering of Europe. See Eurocentrism deconstruction, 165–7, 192–6. See also de Man, Paul; Deleuze, Gilles; Derrida, Jacques; Guattari, Félix The Deer Hunter (Cimino), 216–17 DeKooning, Willem, 371–2 DeKoven, Marianne, 5, 112 Delany, Samuel R., 8–9, 182–3, 355–6, 406 Delbanco, Andrew, 435 Deleuze, Gilles, 18–19, 87, 104–5, 298, 412 DeLillo, Don, 8–9, 58, 176, 190, 293, 311, 319–21, 445, 457–8, 488, 497–8 Deng Xiaoping, 7–8

Derrida, Jacques, 2–3, 21, 39–40, 48, 115–16, 195–6, 242–3, 271–4, 406, 412 Continental philosophy of, 298 “Force of Law,” 47 Holocaust as thematic influence for, 46–7 outside text for, 196–7 on postcolonialism, 271–3 on structuralism, 167 trace for, 48–9 Desai, Kiran, 268–9 Desani, G. V., 61 “Description of a Masque” (Ashbery), 195–6 The Development (Barth), 461 Devoto, Howard, 341 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 56–7, 134–5, 167–9 Díaz, Bernal, 145 Díaz, Junot, 190, 493–4, 499–500, 505–7 Dib, Mohammed, 61–2 Dibbets, Jan, 199, 208 Dick, Philip K., 6–7, 401–2, 406, 410–11, 498 Dickinson, Emily, 241–2, 441 Didion, Joan, 121 diegesis, 159–60 The Difference Engine (Gibson and Sterling), 317–18 The Differend (Lyotard), 42–3 digimodernism, 451 digital literature computer as medium, 421–4 defined, 431 posthumanism and, 419–21 reflexivity of, 427–30 totality of, 429–30 universality of, 427–30, 433 Dimock, Wai Chee, 492 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 239 Direct Cinema movement, 221–5 Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Kittler), 109 The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (Hassan), 58 A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Kalfus), 500 La disparition (Perec), 328–9 Dispatches (Herr), 216–17 Dissident Gardens (Lethem), 502 Dittborn, Eugenio, 377 Djebar, Assia, 61–2 DJs, in Hip-hop, 387 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Dick), 406, 410–11 Do the Right Thing (Lee, S.), 447 Docherty, Thomas, 134–5 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), 56–7 Doctorow, E. L., 58, 68, 116, 189, 294, 297–8

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Index Donleavy, J. P., 58 Donne, John, 163 Donnelly, Timothy, 336–7 Donovan, Josephine, 242–3 Dorn, Edward, 190 Doty, Mark, 463–4 double consciousness, 256 Double or Nothing (Federman), 86–7 double-coding, 177–8, 188–90, 303 Douglass, Ann, 65 “Drawings for Projection” (Kentridge), 10–11 Drown (Díaz, J.), 500 drug subcultures, 114 Du Bois, W. E. B., 256 Duchamp, Marcel, 327, 372–3 Durrell, Lawrence, 128 Dworkin, Andrea, 240 Dylan, Bob, 88, 92, 118–19, 314 “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (Wallace), 498–9 Eaglestone, Robert, 21, 266–7 Eagleton, Terry, 283 Easy Rider (Hopper), 214–15, 220 Eco, Umberto, 8–9, 19–20, 116, 177–8, 186–7, 189, 293, 310, 320–1 ecocriticism, 477–8 ecology, magical realism and, 154–5 educational institutions canon wars in, 240–1 multicultural courses in, 435 second-wave feminism and, 240–1 women writers in literary departments, 240–1 Egan, Jennifer, 453, 455–60 Eggers, Dave, 331, 458–60 egology, postmodernism as, 484–6 The Einstein Intersection (Delany), 406 Einstein on the Beach (Glass, P. and Wilson, R.), 315–16 Eisenman, Peter, 186–7, 192–3, 195–6 Elam, Diane, 305 Eliot, George, 241–2 Eliot, T. S., 72, 186–7 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee), 433 Ellis, Brett Easton, 319–21, 446–7 Ellison, Ralph, 67–8, 81 Ellmann, Richard, 19–20 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 441 The Emperor’s Children (Messud), 500 Empire of the Senseless (Acker), 317–18 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (Ashcroft et al.), 59–60 empires, European, 52–4, 59–62

521

England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (Savage), 343–4 The English Patient (Ondaatje), 294–5 Enigma of Arrival (Naipaul), 60–1 Enjoe, Toh, 406–7 Enlightenment ideals, 134–6, 167–9 Eno, Brian, 343 environmental ethics. See ecocriticism Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick), 245 epochality, 490–1 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 235 Erdrich, Louise, 152, 464 Ernst, Max, 18–19 Eskridge, Kelley, 358–9 ethnic cleansing. See genocides Eugenides, Jeffrey, 458–60, 502–3 Eurocentrism, 55, 60–1, 63 Eurydice (Ruhl), 463–4 Evans, Richard J., 2 Everything is Purged from This Painting but Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work (Baldessari), 208 Everything is Strange (Kuppner), 289 Executive Action (Miller, D.), 225–6 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer), 458–60 Fabian, Johannes, 487–8 Fafrotskies, 417–18 A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Murdoch), 137 Faludi, Susan, 243 Falwell, Jerry, 438 family imagery, postmodernism and, 445–6 The Famished Road (Okri), 145–6, 273–4 Fan Di’an, 475 Fanon, Frantz, 62, 65, 117–18 Farewell to an Idea (Clark, T. J.), 350 Faris, Wendy, 89–90 The Farming of Bones (Danticat), 294–5 fascism, as colonialism, 262 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 226–7 Fautrier, Jean, 371–2 Featherstone, Mike, 383–4 Federman, Raymond, 58, 86–7, 175, 190, 194, 311, 405 Feidelson, Charles, 19–20 Felman, Shoshana, 242–3 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 234 feminism, 231. See also second-wave feminism culture wars and, 439 early proponents of, 230–1 magical realism and, 154–5 painting influenced by, 378 third-wave, 244

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522

Index

feminist theory, 234–5 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 114 Ferris, Joshua, 461 Fiasco, Lupe, 390–2 fiction, postmodern. See also African fiction; cyberpunk science fiction; digital literature; historiographic metafiction; magical realism; nouveau roman; novels, fiction; science fiction allegorical form in, 297–8 Avant-Pop, 190 Beckett’s influence on, 140 culture wars and, 295–6 digital, 431 double-coding in, 190 Enlightenment ideals and, 134–6 the Holocaust as theme in, 42 Marxist influences on, 296–8 megafiction, 8–9 metafiction, 69–70, 78–9 psychedelia as influence on, 116–17 surfiction, 86–7 trauma theory and, 296 after World War II, 138 world-modeling in, 28 Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (Slusser and Shippey), 353, 355 Fiedler, Leslie, 57–8, 309 Field, Norma, 410 Fielding, Henry, 29 Fielding, Sarah, 20, 25, 28–32 film. See also New Hollywood cinema during 1973, 8 cinema vérité movement, 221–2 Direct Cinema movement, 221–2 feminist theory in, 239 postmodernism in, 6–7, 89–90 The Final Solution (Chabon), 502 Find Me (van den Berg), 499 Fink, Thomas, 194 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 281 Finley, Karen, 438 Finnegans Wake (Joyce, J.), 18–19, 127–9, 136–7, 324 First World, 54. See also Free World Fischl, Eric, 9, 177–8, 310 Fisher, Curtis (Grandmaster Caz), 385 Fitterman, Robert, 336–7 Flame Alphabet (Marcus, B.), 509 Flight to Canada (Reed, I.), 294 The Floating Opera (Barth), 69–70 Flores, Angel, 63 The Flounder (Grass), 294 Fluxus artists, 210, 213, 374 Flynn, Gillian, 510

Foe (Coetzee), 266–7, 293 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 194, 336–7, 458–60, 488 Fokkema, Douwe, 474, 484 Foley, Barbara, 81 Fonda, Peter, 214–15 “Force of Law” (Derrida), 47 Forester, C. S., 42 Forman, Milos, 225–6 Fortress Besieged (Qian Zhongshu), 468–9 Fortress of Solitude (Lethem), 502 Fosse, Bob, 224 Foster, Hal, 369–70, 374 Foucault, Michel, 2–3, 104–5, 242–3, 298, 412 foundationalism, 18–19 Fowles, John, 132, 137, 189, 293–4 France cinema vérité movement, 221–2 négritude movement in, 61–2 nouveau roman movement, 56–7, 129–32 postcolonialism in, 61–2 Frank, Anne, 42 Frankenthaler, Helen, 233, 372–3 Franzen, Jonathan, 403–4, 452–3, 458–60, 503 Frazier, Charles, 294–5 Free Speech Movement (FSM), 115, 120 Free World, 54–5 French, Karl, 226–7 French Feminists, 238–9 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles), 132, 294 Friedan, Betty, 234, 245–6 Friedman, Emily, 29 Friedman, Thomas, 363 Friedmann, Ellen G., 401 Frisby, David, 18–19 A Frolic of His Own (Gaddis), 451 Frost, Robert, 441 Frye, Northrop, 28–9, 456–7 FSM. See Free Speech Movement Fuentes, Carlos, 8–9, 294 Fukuyama, Francis, 9, 78, 399–400 Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick), 227 Fusco, Coco, 369 futurism, in Far East, 363–5. See also China; Japan Gaddis, William, 8–9, 58, 451, 456–7 Galassi, Peter, 445–6 Gallop, Jane, 242–3 Galloway, Janice, 281–2 García, Cristina, 152 Garcia, Jerry, 113 Gardner, Helen, 163 Garrison, John, 286

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Index Gass, William, 58, 86, 456–8 Il gattopardo (Lampedusa), 56–7 gay subcultures, 114. See also liberation movements camp aesthetic of, 180–1, 248 ethnic model of sexual identity and, 249 New Narrative movement, 251 queer theory and, 250–1 Gaye, Marvin, 88–9, 314 Ge Fei, 465, 469–70 Gehry, Frank, 177–8, 191, 310, 369–70 Geim, André, 163–4 Gelber, Jack, 80 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler), 245, 249–50 Gendron, Bernard, 340 Genet, Jean, 56–7, 117–18 Genette, Gérard, 164, 186–7 genocides, the Holocaust compared to, 41–2 Gentlemen of the Road (Chabon), 502 Geok-Lin, Shirley, 241–2 The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson), 480–1 geoproblematization, 480–2 The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, 78–9 Ghostwritten (Mitchell), 455–6, 458–60 Gibbons, Dave, 314–15 Gibson, William, 182–3, 314–15, 317–18, 354, 356–8, 363–4, 409–11 cyberpunk science fiction and, 116, 319–20, 354 cyberspace term, 356 Giddens, Anthony, 485–6 The Gift (Hyde), 455–6 Gilbert, Sandra, 241–2 Giles the Goat Boy (Barth), 86, 406 Gilligan, Carol, 240–1 Gimme Shelter (Maysles, A. and Maysles, D.), 224–5 Ginsberg, Allen, 7, 56–7, 72–3, 92, 114, 309 Girl Meets Boy (Smith, A.), 250 Glass, Loren, 117–19 Glass, Philip, 315–16 Glissant, Edouard, 61–2 globalization cosmodernism and, 482–3 of cyberpunk science fiction, 363–6 of magical realism, 152–3 postmodern China influenced by, 470–2 of postmodernism, 470–2, 484 Glück, Robert, 251–3 Godard, Jean-Luc, 6–7, 89 The Godfather (Coppola, F.), 214–15 The Godfather II (Coppola, F.), 214–15 Godwin’s Law, 42 The Gold Bug Variations (Powers), 455–6 Golden Age of Television, 75

523

The Golden Ass (Apuleius), 146 The Golden Notebook (Lessing), 128–9, 233 Golding, William, 40–2 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 331, 336–7 Les Gommes (Robbe-Grillet), 129, 131–2 Gone Girl (Flynn), 510 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 378–9 Goodwin, Andrew, 346–7 Gopnik, Adam, 308 Gordon, Noah Eli, 336–7 Gorky, Arshile, 413 Gorz, André, 169–70 The Graduate (Nichols), 214, 219 graffiti art in high and low culture, 315 Hip-hop music and, 387–90 Graham, Bill, 114–15 Graham, Jorie, 463–4 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 21, 406 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler), 109 Grandmaster Caz. See Fisher, Curtis Grandmaster Flash. See Sadler, Joseph grandmaster narratives, in Hip-hop, 384–7 graphic novels, 314–15 Grass, Günter, 267, 294 Graves, Michael, 177–8, 188–9, 310, 369–70 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 7–8, 87–8, 138–9, 176, 294, 321, 406, 501 Gray, Alisdair, 8–9, 182, 281–2, 285 Great Jones Street (DeLillo), 176 Green Grass, Running Water (King, T.), 147 Greenaway, Peter, 315–16 Greenberg, Clement, 312, 371 Greenwich Village, countercultures in, 118–19 Grierson, Herbert, 163 Griffiths, Gareth, 59–60 Grimstad, Paul, 331 Grogan, Claire, 33 Grooms, Red, 118–19 The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Rushdie), 271 Group Material, 378–9 Grove Press, 117–18 Gruppe ’47, 56–7 Guattari, Félix, 87, 298 Gubar, Susan, 241–2 Les Guérillières (Wittig), 234 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 42 Gun, with Occasional Music (Lethem), 502 Gunslinger (Dorn), 190 Gutai artists, 373 gynocriticism, 241–2 Habermas, Jürgen, 55, 105–6, 444–5, 485–6 Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie), 268–9 Hamid, Mohsin, 493–4, 504

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524 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 20, 25, 32–7 Hamilton, Richard, 312–13 Han Han, 474 Hani, Chris, 271–2 Haraway, Donna, 245–6 Harding, Sandra, 240–1 Hardt, Michael, 486 Haring, Keith, 315 Harris, Charles B., 455 Harris, Wilson, 60–1, 265–6 Harry, Debbie, 343 Hart, Patricia, 154 Hartman, Geoffrey, 42–3 Hartog, François, 299 Harvey, David, 7–9, 134–5 Hassan, Ihab, 22, 58–9, 484 “Having a Coke with You” (O’Hara), 74 Hawkes, John, 58 Hawksmoor: A Novel (Ackroyd), 293 Hayles, N. Katherine, 359, 430, 433 Hayot, Eric, 466–7 Hays, Mary, 37 Hayton, Sian, 286 Haywood, Eliza, 25–6 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 216–17 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers), 458–60 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse (Coppola, E.), 221 Hebdige, Dick, 343–4 Hegerfeldt, Anne, 148–9, 155–6 Heidegger, Martin, 18–19 Heinlein, Robert A., 407–9 Heise, Ursula, 365, 492 Heizer, Michael, 374–5 Hejinian, Lyn, 331–2, 334–5 Heller, Joseph, 58, 138–9 Helms, Jesse, 438 Hemingway, Ernest, 241–2 Heppenstall, Rayner, 131–2 Herbrechter, Stefan, 432–3 Herman, Edward S., 108 Herr, Michael, 216–17 Higgins, Dick, 5, 91 high and low culture, 119 during 1980s, 314–15 Avant-Pop and, 190, 310–12 camp in, 312–13 cyberpunk science fiction, 317–18 genre crossovers between, 313–16 graffiti art, 315 graphic novels, 314–15 kitsch in, 312–13 in minimalist music, 315–16 in popular music, 314

Index product placement and, 319–21 sampling and mixing in, 316–19 High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, 308–9 Hilberg, Raul, 42–3 Hill, Anita, 243–4 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 435 Hip-hop music and culture, 317 AAVE and, 392 authenticity of identity and, 392–5 commodification of, 386 crisis of representation in, 392–5 DJs in, 387 economic conditions and, 390–2 “the game” in, 390–2 graffiti art and, 387–90 grandmaster narratives in, 384–7 historical development of, 383–4 “Rapper’s Delight,” 385 Hirsch, E. D., 440 historiographic metafiction, 3, 177–8, 190, 287, 300–5 double-coding in, 303 form in, 302 historical context for, 293–5 historiography in, 298–300 irony in, 301–2 language play in, 301–2 metahistorical romance and, 304–5 pastiche, 301–2 poststructuralism and, 298 techniques in, 302–3 trauma theory and, 303–4 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 125–6 History of Future Cities (Brook), 364–5 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams, D.), 1 HIV/AIDS crisis, art world influenced by, 378–9 Hoberek, Andrew, 404 Hobsbawm, Eric, 52 Holland, Mary K., 450–1 Hollein, Hans, 17 the Holocaust Derrida and, as thematic influence, 46–7 historical context of, compared to other genocides, 41–2 Levinas’ philosophy influenced by, 44–6 in Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence (Levinas), 45–6 postmodernism as response to, 39–49 as theme in fictional works, 42 in Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 44–5 trace and, 49–50 uniqueness of, 41 Holocaust Consciousness, 42

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Index Hong, Cathy Park, 501 Hopper, Dennis, 214–15, 220, 226–7 Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination (Wilde), 56–7 Horkheimer, Max, 56–7, 134–5, 167–9 Hoshi, Shin’Ichi, 406 Houllebecq, Michel, 493–4 House of Leaves (Danielewski), 182, 190, 311, 331, 456–7 House of the Spirits (Allende), 154–5 How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Roussel), 324 How Late It Was How Late (Kelman), 282 Howe, Irving, 56–7, 405 Howe, Susan, 195, 317, 331–2 Howl (Ginsberg), 309 Howl and Other Poems (Ginsberg), 114 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 434 Huggan, Graham, 275 Huizinga, Johan, 56 Hulme, Keri, 266–7 A Humument (Phillips), 193–4 Hung Liu, 442–3 Hunter, John Paul, 28–9 Huntsperger, David, 326 Hurtado, Aída, 257 Hutcheon, Linda, 3, 59, 177–8, 189, 295, 300–1. See also historiographic metafiction Huyssen, Andreas, 7–8, 177, 309 hybridity, multiculturalism compared to, 443–5 Hyde, Lewis, 455–6 Hynde, Chrissie, 343 I Hotel (Yamashita), 457 Iacocca, Lee, 441–2 Ichiyanagi, Toshi, 406 identity ethnic model of sexual identity, 249 in Hip-hop music, authenticity of, 392–5 magical realism and, 143 in O’Hara works, 73 as performative, during postwar era, 68 If on a winter’s night a traveler (Calvino), 8–9, 320, 330 The Image (Boorstin), 95–8 The Immaterial (Gorz), 169–70 Immendorf, Jörg, 376–7 In Persuasion Nation (Saunders), 461–2 “In the Ruins of the Future” (DeLillo), 497 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or the End of the Social (Baudrillard), 104–5 independence movement, after World War II, 53–4 Infinite Jest (Wallace), 453–4, 457–60, 462, 498–9, 502–3

525

Inherent Vice (Pynchon), 507 The Inheritance of Loss (Desai), 268–9 The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Zamora), 150–1 The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (Kuppner), 281, 289 International Postmodernism (Bertens and Fokkema), 484 intertextuality, 488–9 Invisible Man (Ellison), 67–8, 81 Invocation of My Demon Brother, 227–8 Ionesco, Eugène, 58, 117–18 IQ84 (Murakami), 145–6, 413 Ireli, F. Abiola, 146 Irigaray, Luce, 238–9 Iser, Wolfgang, 430 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 433, 504 Ishikawa, Takashi, 407–9 Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Derrida), 272–3 Izenour, Steven, 90, 175–7, 188–9, 309–10 Jabès, Edmond, 193–4 Jack the Modernist (Glück), 251–3 Jackson, Henry “Big Bank Hank,” 385 Jackson, Michael, 347–8 Jacobs, Harriet, 241–2 Jacobs, Jane, 90 La Jalousie (Robbe-Grillet), 129, 131–2 James, Henry, 19–20, 134 James, William, 116, 441 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 18, 59, 402, 480–1 on late capitalism, 8, 283, 353 on Marxism, 122 on New Journalism, 121 on postmodernism, 161, 178, 185, 296–8, 308, 469 Japan Dadaism in, 409–13 Fafrotskies in, 417–18 futurism in, 363–4 Neuromancer and, 409–11 Pax Japonica, 410–12 postmodern visual narratives in, 413–18 postmodernism in, 401–2, 406–9 Rikiishi fake funeral, 407 Starship Troopers controversy in, 407–9 Surrealism in, 409–13 Warholian influences in, 406–7 Japan as Number One (Vogel), 411 Jeffries, Leonard, 437 Jencks, Charles, 175, 177–8, 186–90, 310, 487–8 Jenkins, Keith, 2–3 Jett, Joan, 343

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526 John Wesley Harding (Dylan), 88 Johns, Jasper, 373, 380 John’s Wife (Coover), 461 Johnson, B. S., 86, 133–4 Johnson, Barbara, 242–3 Johnson, Lyndon B., 437 Johnson, Philip, 188–9 Johnson, Ronald, 193–4 Jolas, Eugene, 127–8 Jones, LeRoi, 118 Jones, Mick, 341 Jones, Steve, 341 Jorn, Asger, 371–2 Joyce, James, 18–19, 127–9, 133–4, 136–7, 324 Joyce, Michael, 419 Judd, Donald, 199, 207, 213 Jungle Fever (Lee, S.), 447 Kafka, Franz, 63–4 Kafka on the Shore (Murakami), 415–18 Kajiwara, Ikki, 407 Kalfus, Ken, 500 Kalliney, Peter, 61 Kaplan, E. Ann, 346 Kaprow, Allan, 373–4 Kara, Juro, 406 Karatani, Kojin, 186 Karl, Frederick, 464 Kato, Naoyuki, 408 Katz, Steve, 138–9, 194 Kaup, Monika, 150–1 Kawamata, Chiaki, 410–13 Kazin, Alfred, 453–4 Keating, Larry, 82 Keaton, Diane, 236–7 The Keep (Egan), 455–6, 504 Keightley, Keir, 342 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 240–1 Kellner, Hans, 2–3 Kelly, Adam, 498–9 Kelly, Gary, 34 Kelman, James, 182, 281, 286 Kennedy, Robert, 222 Kent, Nick, 344 Kentridge, William, 10–11 Kerouac, Jack, 56–7, 65, 114 Kesey, Ken, 113, 117, 225–6 Ketjak (Silliman), 333 Keymer, Thomas, 26–7 Kiefer, Anselm, 179, 369 Killen, Andreas, 5, 7–8 Killian, Kevin, 251 King, Martin Luther, 222 King, Stephen, 152, 507 King, Thomas, 147, 152

Index Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 430 Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig), 319–20 kitchen sink realism, 61 kitsch, 312–13 Kittler, Friedrich, 108–9, 430 Klein, Melanie, 239 Klein, Naomi, 363 Koch, Kenneth, 190, 324–5 Kolodny, Annette, 434 Komatsu, Sakyo, 406–7, 412–13 Koons, Jeff, 369 Koselleck, Reinhart, 299 Kosuth, Joseph, 199, 207 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 61–2 Kouyaté, Seydou Badian, 61–2 Koyanisqaatsi, 315–16 Krasner, Lee, 233, 372–3 Krauss, Nicole, 461 Krauss, Rosalind, 193, 374–5 Kristeva, Julia, 2–3, 87, 238–9 Kroetsch, Robert, 152 Kubrick, Stanley, 214–15, 227 Kundera, Milan, 11, 26 Kundun, 227–8 Kunzru, Hari, 493–4 Kuppner, Frank, 281, 288–90 Kushner, Tony, 11, 180–1, 190, 247, 258–60, 463–4 Lacan, Jacques, 2–3, 55, 86–7, 497 LaCapra, Dominic, 298 Laclau, Ernesto, 2–3 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 42 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 309 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 488 Laing, R. D., 281 Lamming, George, 60–1 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, 56–7 Lanark (Gray), 281–2 language autonomy of, 136–7 in historiographic metafiction, 301–2 in nouveau roman, 137–8 in second-wave feminism, as marginalization tool, 236 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (Jencks), 310 Language Poetry, 8–9, 331–5 Lanser, Susan Sniader, 242–3 Larkin, Philip, 133–4 Lash, Scott, 18–19 The Last Movie (Hopper), 226–7 The Last of the Savages (McInerney), 447–8 late capitalism, 8, 283, 353 Later Derrida (Rapaport), 274

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Index Lattimore, Owen, 69 The Lawnmower Man (Leonard, B.), 432–3 Lawrence, D. H., 117–18, 309 Lawson, Thomas, 377 Laye, Camara, 61–2 L.C. (Daitch), 300 Le Guin, Ursula, 182–3, 355–6, 406 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour), 90, 175–7, 188–9, 309–10 Leary, Timothy, 114, 120 Lee, Chang-Rae, 488, 491–2 Lee, Spike, 447 Lee, Wen Ho, 505 Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin), 406 Lennon, John, 316 Leonard, Brett, 432–3 Leonard, Tom, 281 Lepucki, Edan, 499, 508 Lerner, Ben, 451–2 Lerner, Gerda, 240–1 Lessing, Doris, 128–9, 233 Lethem, Jonathan, 331, 461, 499, 502 Levin, Harry, 56–7, 127 Levin, Michael, 437 Levinas, Emmanuel, 21, 44–6, 273, 439 Levine, Chris, 179 Levine, Sherrie, 324–5 Lévy, Pierre, 170, 420–1, 429–30 Lewis, Hal, 372–3 Lewis, Wyndham, 17 Lewitt, Sol, 199, 207 Leyner, Mark, 182 Li Shaoqi, 469 Li Xianting, 475 Li Yuchun, 473–4 liberation movements, 180–1. See also feminism; second-wave feminism Libra (DeLillo), 293 Lichtenstein, Roy, 313 Life a User’s Manual (Perec), 8–9, 330 The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 20, 26–7 Like Punk Never Happened (Rimmer), 344–5 Lind, Michael, 435 Lionnais, Francois Le, 327 lipograms, 328–9 Lippard, Lucy, 179, 199–212 liquid materiality. See soft materiality A Literature of Their Own (Showalter), 241–2 Littérature et développement (Mouralis), 61–2 Little Big Man (Penn), 223 Little-Englandism, 61 The Living Theater, 22, 80, 123 Local Histories/Global Designs (Mignolo), 64–5 Location of Culture (Bhabha), 435

527

Lochhead, Liz, 281 Lodge, David, 133–4 logocentrism, 271–2 Lolita (Nabokov), 22, 70–2 Lone Star (Sayles), 443–4 long nineteenth century, 52–4 the long Nineties, 10–11 the long Sixties, 5–6, 144 Longino, Helen, 240–1 Longo, Robert, 177–9 Look Back in Anger (Osborne), 131 Looking Backward (Bellamy, E.), 122–3 Lookout Cartridge (McElroy), 458–60 Lord, Audre, 241–2 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 42 Lost in the Funhouse (Barth), 139, 457 The Lost Scrapbook (Dara), 456–7 Love Medicine (Erdrich), 464 low culture. See high and low culture Lowell, Robert, 72 LSD, role in psychedelic counterculture, 116 Lu Xun, 465, 467–8 Lucas, George, 214–15, 227 Lucifer Rising, 227–8 Luhmann, Niklas, 95–6, 105–8 Lukács, Georg, 125–6 Lydon, John, 341 Lynch, David, 227 Lynch, Kevin, 90 Lynn, Victoria, 378 Lyotard, Jean-François, 2–3, 18, 42–3, 59, 105–6, 120, 136–41 Continental philosophy of, 298 on posthumanism, 419, 427–8 on postmodern literature, 58–9 on postmodernism, 161–2, 177–8, 376, 470 on structuralism, 167 Ma Yuan, 465, 469–70 Maciunas, George, 374 Mack, John E., 11 Mackinnon, Catherine, 240 Macleod, Ken, 282 Madonna, 348–9 The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar), 241–2 A Maggot (Fowles), 293 magical realism in African fiction, 273–4 in American fiction, 152 antecedents for, 145 Barth on, 144 characteristics of, 147–8 common elements of, 147–8 criticism of, 151–2, 154

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528

Index

magical realism (cont.) as critique of Eurocentrism, 63 defamiliarization of indigenous beliefs in, 151 defined, 143–4 development of, 62–4 ecology and, 154–5 European influences on, 146 expanded literary geography for, 63–4 feminism and, 154–5 globalization of, 152–3 heterogeneity of, 153–4 historical trajectory of, 144–7 identity and, 143 the long Sixties and, 144 merging of real and magical within, 147–9 narrative techniques in, 148–9 postcolonialism and, 152–3 postmodernism and, 153–4 lo real maravilloso Americano, 150–1 as specific genre, 155–6 thematic dualisms within, 148 theoreticians of, 150–2 Magicians of the Earth, 378 Magnolia (Anderson, P. T.), 413–15 The Magus (Fowles), 132, 137–8 Mailer, Norman, 56–8, 121 Major, Clarence, 194 The Making of a Counterculture (Roszak), 113 Malamud, Bernard, 56–7 Malick, Terrence, 214–15 Malone Dies (Beckett), 127–8, 131–2 Mamet, David, 435–7 Man, Glenn, 219 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Wilson, S.), 455 The Man in the High Castle (Dick), 401–2 Mandel, Emily St. John, 499, 508–9 Mandel, Ernest, 161 Mandela, Nelson, 399 The Mandelbaum Gate (Spark), 137–8 Manley, Delarivier, 25–6 Mann, Sally, 445–6 Mansbach, Adam, 387–9 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Chomsky and Herman), 108 Mao Zedong, 92 Marcus, Ben, 456–7, 509 Marcus, Greil, 341–2 Marks, Craig, 346 Marotti, Arthur, 163 Márquez, Gabriel García, 11, 63–4, 144, 149, 151, 153, 467–8. See also magical realism Marra, Anthony, 461 The Marriage Plot (Eugenides), 502–3 Marshall, Richard, 208

Martin, George, 316 Martin, Jean-Hubert, 378 Martone, Michael, 331 the marvelous American real. See lo real maravilloso Americano Marwick, Arthur, 124 Marxism, 121–2, 296–8 Masculine Feminine (Godard), 6–7, 89 Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), 451 mass media. See also film; television Baudrillard on, 101–5 Boorstin on, 95–8 celebrity in, 96 Chomsky on, 108 cool, 100–1 Debord on, 95–8 differentiation of, 107–8 evolution of, 95–6 Herman on, 108 hot, 100–1 Kittler on, 108 Luhmann on, 105–8 McLuhan on, 92–3, 98–101 New Journalism and, 121 pseudo-events and, 95–6 systems approach to, 107 technology for, 99–100 transmission of, 96 travel and, 97 “Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction” (Howe, I.), 405 Massie, Alan, 281–2 Mathews, Harry, 57–8, 319, 328–9 Matlock, Glen, 341 Matsumoto, Leiji, 413 Mattessich, Stefan, 115–16 Maus (Spiegelman), 314–15 Mauss, Marcel, 102 Maxwell, J. C., 289–90 May, Who, 412–13 Maysles, Albert, 224–5 Maysles, David, 224–5 Mazower, Mark, 53–4 McCaffery, Steve, 331–2 McCaffrey, Larry, 26, 190, 310–12 McCann, Colum, 493–4 McCarthy, Cormac, 499, 507–10 McCarthy, Joseph, 68, 80–1 McCarthyism, 68, 80–1 McCollum, Allan, 369 McElroy, Joseph, 8–9, 86, 458–60 McEwan, Ian, 493–4 McGrath, Tom, 281 McGuane, Thomas, 58 McGurl, Mark, 453–4, 462

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Index McHale, Brian, 56–7, 59, 133–4, 138–9, 223, 262, 324, 335, 497 McHale, John, 312–13 McInerney, Jay, 447–8 McLaren, Malcolm, 341, 343–4 McLean, Ian, 377 McLuhan, Marshall, 92–3, 98–101, 430 McMillan, Joyce, 288 McNamee, Eoin, 182 “Meditations on an Emergency” (O’Hara), 74 Medium Cool (Wexler), 222 Mega Novels, 464 megafiction, 8–9 Memmi, Albert, 62 “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (Lowell), 72 Men of Maize (Asturias), 145 Merrill, James, 11, 190, 195–6 Messini, Alessandro, 17–18 Messud, Claire, 500 mestiza consciousness, 256 metafiction, 69–70, 78–9. See also historiographic metafiction metahistorical romance, 304–5 metanarratives, 18–19 metaphysics, 48–50 Meyer, Doris, 154 Michie, Helena, 244–5 Middlesex (Eugenides), 458–60, 503 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 63–4, 189, 264, 293, 300 Mignolo, Walter, 64–5 Milius, John, 216–17 Miller, David, 225–6 Miller, Frank, 314–15 Miller, Henry, 117–18, 309 Miller, Nancy K., 242–3 Miller, P. Schuyler, 355 Millet, Kate, 234, 245–6 Milton, John, 193–4 mimesis, 159–60 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 274 minimalist music, 315–16 Minow, Newton, 75 Mitchell, David, 190, 320, 455–6, 458–60, 493–4 mixing, in high and low culture, 316–19 Miyazaki, Hayao, 413 Mo Yan, 465, 469–70, 474 modern era, 52–3, 85–6 modernism dating of, 5 development of novel influenced by, 128 postmodernism and, 269–70 rock music influenced by, 339

529

modernismo, 55–6 modernity, 486–8 modularity, 318–19 Molesworth, Helen, 378 Molina, Antonio Muñoz, 493–4 Molina, Judith, 80 Molloy (Beckett), 127–8 Monch, Pharoahe, 394 Mones, Nicole, 488 money and capitalism late capitalism, 8, 283, 353 theory influenced by, 169–71 Monolinguism of the Other (Derrida), 274 Monterey Pop (Pennebaker), 224–5 Moore, Alan, 293, 314–15 Moore, Charles, 177–8, 188–90 Moorman, Charlotte, 374 Moraga, Cherríe, 241–2 Moraru, Christian, 399 Moretti, Franco, 144 Morgan, Edwin, 281 Morris, Robert, 199, 207 Morrison, Toni, 151–2, 293, 499–500 Morrissey, Paul, 6–7 Morvern Callar (Warner, M.), 282 Motherless Brooklyn (Lethem), 461, 499, 502 Moulthrop, Stuart, 420, 422–4, 431–2 Mouralis, Bernard, 61–2 “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (Woolf ), 490 MTV. See Music Television Mullen, Harryette, 331, 336–7 multiculturalism in educational institutions, 435 equality arguments and, 437–8 hybridity as alternative to, 443–5 identity politics and, 439–40 as national discourse, 440–3 in popular American culture, 434–5 Mulvey, Laura, 239 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed, I.), 190, 294, 406 Munslow, Alan, 2–3 Murakami, Haruki, 145–6, 413–18 Murao, Shigeyoshi, 114 Murdoch, Iris, 137 music, popular. See also Hip-hop music and culture; New Pop; rock music concept albums, 88–9, 314 high and low crossovers in, 314 in 1966, 88–9 postmodernism and, 88–9, 179–80 Music Television (MTV), 345–50 music videos female narratives in, 348–9 male narratives in, 347–8

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530

Index

My Education (Choi), 505 My Life (Hejinian), 334–5 Nabokov, Vladimir, 22, 70–2, 487 Naipaul, V. S., 60–1 Nairn, Tom, 284 Nakazawa, Shinichi, 411–12 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 117, 309 The Name of the Rose (Eco), 8–9, 116, 177–8, 189, 293, 310, 320–1 The Names (DeLillo), 498 narratives, postmodern in 1973 literature, 7–8 in cyberpunk science fiction, 358–9 in Hip-hop music, 384–7 in magical realism, 148–9 metanarratives, 18–19 in music videos, 347–9 in painting, 376–7 of postcolonialism, 268–9 in television, 76 Nashville (Altman), 224 National Organization of Women (NOW), 233–4 Native Speaker (Lee, C-R.), 491–2 Nauman, Bruce, 199, 208 Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Miyazaki), 413 Naylor, Gloria, 434 Nealon, Jeffrey, 499 Negri, Antonio, 486 négritude movement, 61–2 Nelson, Frank, 223 neo-liberalism, postmodernism as, 8 Nervous Conditions (Dangaremba), 268–9 Netherland (O’Neill), 493, 500 Neuromancer (Gibson), 182–3, 314–15, 354, 356–8, 363–4, 409–11 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro), 433, 504 New Brutalism, 89–90 The New Brutalism style, 89–90 new cosmopolitans, 9 New Critics, 72, 186–7 New Hollywood cinema, 214–17. See also Apocalypse Now circular image as metaphor in, 218 critique of American society through, 214–15 Direct Cinema methods in, 221–5 director as auteur in, 226–7 European influences on, 214–15 framing in, 219–20 musical drama elements in, 224 paranoid conspiracy thriller as subgenre, 225–6 perceptual realism in, 219 rock music documentary elements in, 224–5 technology as influence on, 221–6 Vietnam War and, 215–17

New Journalism, 121 New Narrative movement, 251 New Philosophy, 37 New Pop, 344–6 corporate appropriation of, 345–7 MTV and, 345–9 New Statesman, 129–35 new tide novelists, 469–70 New World Myths: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism (Vautier), 264–5 New York, New York (Scorsese), 224 New York Trilogy (Auster), 190, 320–1 Newman, Barnett, 371 Newman, Saul, 270–1 Newton, Judith Lowder, 242–3 The Next American Nation (Lind), 435 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 59–60 Nichols, Mike, 214–15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18–19 Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze), 18–19 A Night at the Movies (Coover), 320 Nights at the Circus (Carter), 190 9/11, postmodernism after, 497–9 The 1960s. See also countercultures; the long Sixties; Sixties culture emigration from U.K., 61 second-wave feminism during, 232–5 1966 onset of postmodernism in, 5–7, 86–91 popular music in, 88–9 postmodern architecture in, 6–7, 89–90 postmodern literature in, 7, 86–8 1968, onset of postmodernism in, 91–2 1970s cultural theory during, 237–9 literary theory during, 237–9 second-wave feminism during, 235–7 1973 cultural developments during, 175–8 director’s cinema during, 8 grand narrative of, 7–8 as high point of postmodernism, 7–8, 175 1980s cultural theory in, 241–3 high and low culture in, 314–15 literary theory in, 241–3 second-wave feminism during, 239–43 1982, Janine (Gray), 281–2 1989 new cosmopolitans, 9 postmodernism during, 9–10, 399–404 1990s. See also the long Nineties cultural theory during, 244–6 literary theory during, 244–6

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Index second-wave feminism during, 243–6 third-wave feminism during, 244 Nixon in China (Adams, J.), 315–16 No Country for Old Men (McCarthy, C.), 507 Nomads, 443 Non-Aligned Movement, 54 Noon, Jeff, 359 Norfolk, Lawrence, 294–5 nostalgia, 446–8 Note: Make a Painting of a Note as Painting (Beery), 208 nouveau roman, 56–7, 129–32 in British fiction, 131–2 evolution of, 129–30, 135–8 history and authority as influence on, 137 in Irish fiction, 133–4 power of language in, 137–8 World War II and, 138 nouvelle cuisine, 131 nouvelle vague, 131 Nova Express (Burroughs), 117 “The Novelist at the Crossroads” (Lodge), 133–4 novels. See also graphic novels; nouveau roman encyclopedic, 456–7 Enlightenment ideals and, 134–6 Joyce as major influence on, 127–8 modernism as influence on, 128 in Scotland, 281–2 story cycles in, 457–62 NOW. See National Organization of Women nuclear age, 54 NW (Smith, Z.), 455–6, 458–60 Nyman, Michael, 315–16 Oakeshott, Michael, 300 Oates, Joyce Carol, 507 Oblivion (Wallace), 458 O’Brien, Flann, 128–9, 133–4, 136–7 O’Brien, Tim, 499–500 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 271–2, 406 Of Spirit (Derrida), 39–40, 48 O’Hara, Frank, 73, 74, 324–5, 331–2 Oiticica, Hélio, 374 Okri, Ben, 145–6, 273–4 Olaniyan, Tejumola, 275 Oleanna (Mamet), 435–7 Oliver, Douglas, 281 Ollier, Claude, 58 Olsen, Lance, 311 Olson, Charles, 331–2 Omensetter (Gass), 86 On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts (Himmelfarb), 435 On the Road (Kerouac), 114

531

On with the Story (Barth), 461, 464 Once Upon a Time (Barth), 451 Ondaatje, Michael, 294–5 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 113, 117, 225–6 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez), 63–4, 144, 149, 151, 153, 467–8 O’Neill, Joseph, 493, 500 Ono, Yoko, 316, 406 Optimism, 166–7 Orientalism (Said), 59–60, 271 The Origin of the Brunists (Coover), 86 Orlando (Woolf ), 20, 23 Osborne, John, 131 Oshinsky, David, 68 Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence (Levinas), 21, 45–6 OuLiPo group. See Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle group Our Bodies, Ourselves, 235–6 Ousmane, Sembène, 61–2 Out (Brooke-Rose), 131–2 Out of Place (Baucom), 60–1 Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo) group, 182, 327–31 goals of, 327 lipograms and, 328–9 literary constraints for, 328–9 long-term influence of, 330–1 potential literature for, 329–30 procedural poetics and, 328–9 Owens, Craig, 378 Oyono, Ferdinand Léopold, 61–2 Paik, Nam June, 374 painting, art world and. See also Abstract Expressionism; visual arts Aboriginal art, 377 AIDS crisis as influence on, 378–9 end of master narratives in, 376–7 feminist influences on, 378 postmodernism in, 9, 370 Pakula, Alan J., 225–6 The Pale King (Wallace), 450, 452–7 Palmer, Michael, 331–2 Pamuk, Orhan, 493–4 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 312–13 Paradise Lost (Milton), 193–4 The Parallax View (Pakula), 225–6 Parry, Benita, 269 Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (Tiffin and Adams), 263 Pasternak, Boris, 56–7 pastiche, in historiographic metafiction, 301–2 Pattern Recognition (Gibson), 319–20

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532

Index

Pax Japonica, 410–12 Pedro Páramo (Rulfo), 144–5 Penck, A. R., 376–7 The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, 281–2 Penn, Arthur, 214–15, 223 Pennebaker, D. A., 224–5 Perec, Georges, 8–9, 182, 319, 325–30, 453 Perelman, Bob, 331–2, 335 Perkins, Hetti, 378 Perkins, Pamela, 33–4 Perloff, Marjorie, 325, 334–5 A Person of Interest (Choi), 505 Persona (Bergman), 6–7 personism, 73 Pessl, Marisha, 456–7 Phillips, Tom, 193–4 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty), 18 Pierce, David, 26 Pietri, Arturo Uslar, 144, 150 Piketty, Thomas, 499 Pinochet, Augusto, 7–8 Pinter, Harold, 58, 117–18 Pirandello, Luigi, 118–19 Place, Vanessa, 336–7 planetarism, 492–4 cosmodernism and, 492–3 geomethodology of, 493–4 planetary humanism, 4 Plato, 159–60 Platoon, 227 Platt, Len, 264–5 The Player of Games (Banks), 286 Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (Galassi), 445–6 The Plot Against America (Roth), 507 Plowing the Dark (Powers), 433 A Poetics of Postmodernism (Hutcheon), 59, 189, 295 poetry. See also Language Poetry New Critics and, 72 personism in, 73 during postwar era, 72 spatial forms of, 187–8 political correctness, 438–9 politics, postmodernism in, 7–8 Polke, Sigmar, 312–13 Pollock, Jackson, 371–2 Poor Things (Gray), 285 Pop Art, 374 Abstract Expressionism and, 374 Baudrillard on, 374 breakthrough of, 309–10 camp and, 312–13 modularity in, 318–19

The Pope’s Rhinoceros (Norfolk), 294–5 popular music. See music, popular pornography, 240 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, J.), 127–8 Possession: A Romance (Byatt), 294–5 Possum, Clifford, 377 post-apocalyptic novel, 507–10 postcognitive art, 5, 91 postcolonial exotic, 275 postcolonialism in African fiction, 275 in Da Silva Da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness (Harris, W.), 265–6 decline of European empires and, 59–62 Derrida on, 271–3 in French literature, 61–2 immigrants and, 60–1 magical realism and, 152–3 narratives of, 268–9 origin of term, 59–60 postmodernism and, 263–9, 484–6 reconceptualization of, 64–5 revisioning of, 272–4 “the said” and, 266–7 posthumanism Artificial Intelligence and, 428–9 digital literature and, 419–21 Lévy on, 429–30 Lyotard on, 419, 427–8 postmodernism and, 419–21 in print literature, 433 totality of, 429–30 universality of, 427–30, 433 Postmodern and History (Evans), 2 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard), 18, 59, 105–6, 120, 136–41 postmodern literature. See also cyberpunk science fiction; science fiction in 1966, 7, 86–8 authorial authority as theme in, 70–2 culture wars as influence on, 295–6 early classical canon of, 58–9 Lyotard on, 58–9, 177–8 metafictional confession in, 69–70 ontological dominant of, 28 in peak decades, 181–3 post-apocalyptic novel, 507–10 scope of, 134 trauma theory and, 296 world-modeling in, 28 postmodern memory, 137 postmodern model, of architecture, 188–9

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Index postmodernism. See also China, postmodernism in after 9/11, 497–9 1966 as onset of, 5–7, 86–91 in 1968, 91–2 in 1973, 7–8, 175 in 1989, 9–10, 399–404 as American concept, 55–9 angel imagery and, 11 in architecture, 6–7, 89–90 avant-garde movement and, 5 branding of, 176–9 change and, 19–20 in China, 402–3 classical, 19–20 continuity and, 19–20 cosmodernism and, 4, 9, 482–3 criticism of, 18–19 culture wars and, 10–11 defined, 37 definition of, 37 as disruption of comprehension, 43–4 double-coding and, 177–8, 188–90 early mentions of, as term, 56–8 as egology, 484–6 eighteenth-century novel as precursor to, 25–7, 32–7, 28–32 family imagery influenced by, 445–6 in film, 6–7, 89–90 geoproblematization of, 480–2 globalization of, 470–2, 484 high, 17–18 historiography of, 1–11 Hutcheon on, 300–1 Jameson on, 161, 178, 185, 296–8, 308 in Japan, 401–2, 406–9 late capitalism and, 8, 283, 353 liberation movements and, 180–1 The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy and, 26–7 in literature, 7 during the long Nineties, 10–11 during the long Sixties, 5–6 Lyotard on, 161–2, 177–8, 376, 470 magical realism and, 153–4 McCarthyism and, 68, 80–1 modernism and, 269–70 MTV and, 346–7 as neo-liberalism, 8 optimism and, 166–7 in painting, 9, 370 peak phase of, 8–9 phases of, 4 in politics, 7–8

533

popular music and, 88–9, 179–80 postcolonialism and, 263–9, 484–6 posthumanism and, 419–21 postrealism of, 181 poststructuralism and, 2–3, 269–74 as problematic concept, 1–2 protest movements and, 92 reconceptualization of, 64–5 relationality and, 486–8 as response to Holocaust, 39–49 rise of theory and, 159, 161–3 second-generation, 450–62 second-wave feminism and, 245–6 simulation models for, 123–4 Sixties culture and, 5–7 start of era, 5–6, 405–6 in television, 75–9 theory and, 87, 160–2 visual arts and, 179 after World War II, 138 year 2000 computer bug and, 497–8 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson), 18, 335 Postmodernism and Race (Platt and Upstone), 264–5 postmodernism of reaction, 370 postmodernism of resistance, 370 postmodernismo, 55–6 Postmodernist Culture (Connor), 262 Postmodernist Fiction ( McHale, B.), 56–7, 59, 133–4, 138–9 post-postmodernism, 450–62 altermodernism, 451 digimodernism, 451 encyclopedic novel in, 456–7 story cycle and, 457–62 poststructuralism, 2–3 historiographic metafiction and, 298 Levinas’ influence on, 273 postmodernism and, 269–74 postwar era identity as performative during, 68 immigrant waves during, 54 The Living Theater and, 22, 80, 123 metafictional confession during, 69–70 modernist poetry during, 72 nuclear age and, 54 television during, 75–9 potential literature, 329–30 Pound, Ezra, 19–20 Powell, Enoch, 61 Powell, Padgett, 331 Powers, Richard, 433, 455–6, 461 practical past, 300

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534

Index

Présence Africaine (Damas), 61–2 Press, Joy, 343 Pricksongs and Descants (Coover), 194, 457 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Sparks), 137 Prince, Richard, 369 proceduralism, 326–9, 335 product placement, 319–21 protest movements, 92 Proust, Marcel, 131 pseudo-events, 95–6 psychedelia as counterculture, 116–17 LSD’s role in, 116 radical pluralism and, 116 The Public Burning (Coover), 294, 501 Puig, Manuel, 319–21 punk rock, 341, 343–5 Purdy, James, 58 “Put You on Game,” 390–2 Pynchon, Thomas, 7–8, 11, 58, 86–8, 114–16, 120, 135–6, 138–9, 165, 176, 190, 294, 319–21, 406, 451, 457–8, 507 Qian Zhongshu, 465, 468–9 Quayson, Ato, 151, 264–5 queer theory, 250–1 Queneau, Raymond, 327, 329–30 radical artifice, 325 Radical Hard, 355 radical pluralism, 116 Rage is Back (Mansbach), 387–9 Ragtime (Doctorow), 116, 294 Rampersad, Arnold, 441 Rankin, Ian, 282 Rap music. See Hip-hop music Rapaport, Herman, 274 “Rapper’s Delight,” 385 Rauschenberg, Robert, 317, 324–5, 373 Readme (Stephenson), 360 Reagan, Ronald, 7–8 lo real maravilloso Americano (the marvelous American real), 150–1 The Reality of the Mass Media (Luhmann), 105–8 Á la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 131 The Red Pony (Steinbeck), 464 Reed, Ishmael, 58, 190, 294, 406 Reed, Lou, 316 Reflection on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Roszak), 120 Refractions (Levin, H.), 56–7 Reggio, Godfrey, 315–16 Reich, Steve, 315–16 Reid, Jamie, 344

Reinharz, Shulamit, 240–1 El reino de este mundo (Carpentier), 62–4 relationality, 486–8 The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid), 504 Report on Probability A (Aldiss), 131–2 reproductive rights, 232–3, 235–6 Republic (Plato), 159–60 Return of the Jedi (Lucas), 227 Revolver (The Beatles), 88–9, 314 Reynold, Simon, 343 Rhodes, Bernie, 341 Rhys, Jean, 7, 294 Ricardou, Jean, 164 Rich, Adrienne, 241–2 Richardson, Samuel, 29 Richter, Gerhard, 312–13 Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting (Kuppner), 281, 290 Riffaterre, Michael, 164 Rikiishi, Toru, 407 Riley, Terry, 315–16 Rimmer, Dave, 344–5 rise of theory American New Criticism, 164 Enlightenment ideals and, 167–9 history of, 163–5 postmodernism and, 159, 161–3 Russian Formalism, 164 structuralism and, 165 Rivers, Larry, 80 The Road (McCarthy, C.), 499, 507–10 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 19–20, 117–18, 129–32, 135. See also nouveau roman Robbins, Harold, 317 Robbins, Michael, 501 Roberts, Adam, 355–6 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 402–3 rock music cultural capital of, 341–2 as distinct from pop music, 342–3 form and content in, 341 historical tradition in, 339–40 modernism as influence on, 339 as political, 339, 343–5 punk rock, 341, 343–5 Roh, Franz, 62–4, 150 Roiphe, Katie, 439 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf ), 236–7 Rorty, Richard, 2–3, 18 Rosenberg, Ethel, 72 Rosenberg, Harold, 371 Rosenberg, Julius, 72 Rosset, Barney, 118 Rossi, Aldo, 6–7, 90 Roszak, Theodore, 113, 120

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Index Roth, Philip, 507 Roubaud, Jacques, 327 Roussel, Raymond, 324 Rubin, Gayle, 237, 240–1 Rubin, Jerry, 124 Rucker, Rudy, 354 Ruhl, Sarah, 463–4 Rulfo, Juan, 144–5 Rushdie, Salman, 8–9, 26, 63–4, 144, 189–90, 264, 271, 293, 300 Russ, Joanna, 182–3 Russell, Karen, 456–7 Russell, Shannon, 33–4 Russia. See Soviet Union Russian Formalism, 164 Sabor, Peter, 29 Sacred Games (Chandra), 504 Sacred Hunger (Unsworth), 294–5 Sadler, Joseph (Grandmaster Flash), 386–7 Sag Harbor (Whitehead), 457 Said, Edward, 59–60, 271 “the said,” 266–7 Salinger, J. D., 56–7 Salle, David, 9, 177–9, 310, 370 sampling, in high and low culture, 316–19 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 114 Sardar, Ziauddin, 484 Sarraute, Nathalie, 129, 131–2, 165 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 104–5 Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 190 Saunders, George, 455–6, 461–2 Savage, Jon, 343–4 Sayles, John, 443–4 Scharf, Kenny, 315 Schismatrix (Sterling), 318 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 371, 440–1 Schnabel, Julian, 9, 370 Schroeder, Shannin, 154 Schulz, Bruno, 194 Schwerner, Armand, 193–4 science fiction, 57–8, 116, 182–3. See also cyberpunk science fiction flat characters in, 360–2 thematic features of, 355–6 scientific socialism. See Marxism Scorpio Rising (Anger), 220–1, 227–8 Scorsese, Martin, 214–15, 218, 224, 227–8 Scotland. See also Celtic postmodernism historiography of, 283–7 late capitalism crisis in, 283 literary tradition in, 280–1 neo-nationalism in, 283–7 postmodern novel in, 281–2 second Renaissance in, 283

535

Scott, Joan Wallach, 240–1 Scott, Ridley, 401–2 Scott Brown, Denise, 90, 175–7, 188–9, 309–10 Scripts for the Pageant (Merrill), 195–6 SDS. See Students for a Democratic Society Seasons on Earth (Koch), 190 Sebald, W. G., 493–4 The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 234–5 second-generation postmodernism, 450–62 altermodernism, 451 digimodernism, 451 encyclopedic novel in, 456–7 story cycle and, 457–62 second-wave feminism during 1980s, 239–43 during 1990s, 243–6 during 1960s, 232–5 during 1970s, 235–7 abortion rights and, 232–3, 235–6 androgyny and, 236–7 birth control pill and, 232–3 Civil Rights Act and, 232 cultural theory and, 234–5, 237–9, 241–6 defined, 230–1 in educational institutions, 240–1 emergence of reproductive rights and, 232–3 essentialism and, 238 film theory and, 239 French Feminists, 238–9 language as marginalization tool, 236 literary theory and, 234–5, 237–9, 241–6 man-hating and, 234 in performing arts, 237 in political movements, 233 posthumanism and, 245–6 postmodernism and, 245–6 psychoanalysis in, 239 public opposition to, 233–4 reproductive rights and, 232–3, 235–6 The Second Sex, 234–5 semantic distinctions for, 237–9 sexual harassment in workplace and, 239–40 theory wars and, 242–3 under Title VII, 239–40 Woolf as influence on, 236–7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, 245, 249 Seidman, Steven, 249 Seiji, Tsutsumi, 411–13 Sekula, Sonia, 233 Selvon, Sam, 60–1 semiotic model, of architecture, 187–8 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 61–2 Serrano, 443 Sexing the Cherry (Winterson), 293

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536

Index

Sexton, Anne, 233 sexual harassment, against women, 239–40 Sexual Politics (Millet), 234 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles), 88–9, 314 Shapiro, David, 194 Shelley, Pete, 341 Shen He. See Xiao Shenyan Shepherd, Reginald, 463–4 Sherman, Cindy, 179, 319–20, 369 Shi Hengxia, 473–4 Shiner, Lewis, 353–5, 363–4 Shippey, T. A., 353, 355 Shiraga, Kazuo, 371–2 Shocklee, Hank, 317 Shono, Yoriko, 406–7 short twentieth century, 52 Showalter, Elaine, 241–2 Signac, Paul, 17–18 Sijie, Dai, 493–4 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 152, 434 Silliman, Ron, 195, 331–4 Silverman, Kaja, 242–3 Simians, Cyborgs and Women (Haraway), 245–6 Simonon, Paul, 341 Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard), 103–4, 110 Simulations (Baudrillard), 18 Singleton, John, 446–7 Situationists, 344 Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Lippard), 179, 199–212 Sixties culture, 5–7. See also the long Sixties Skinner, B. F., 123–4 The Sky Changes (Sorrentino), 86 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 138–9 Slemon, Stephen, 64, 153, 268 Slick, Grace, 6–7 Slusser, George, 353–5 Smith, Ali, 250 Smith, Barbara, 241–2 Smith, Patti, 339–43 Smith, Rachel Greenwald, 460 Smith, Zadie, 455–6, 458–60, 491–2 Smithson, Alison, 89–90, 312–13 Smithson, Peter, 89–90, 312–13 Smithson, Robert, 374–5 A Smuggler’s Bible (McElroy), 86 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 358 Snow White (Barthelme), 117, 139, 406 Snyder, Gary, 114 The Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 98, 222 The Soft Machine (Burroughs), 7, 86 soft materiality, 4

Solitaire (Eskridge), 358–9 Sollers, Philip, 58 Somehow, Crystal (Takana), 409–10 Sommers, Christina Hoff, 439 Sommervell, D. C., 56 Sondheim, Stephen, 441–2 Sontag, Susan, 18–19, 40–1, 294–5, 313 Sororophobia, 244–5 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 8–9, 86, 195–6, 331 The Sot-Weed Factor (Barth), 300, 457–8 Southern, Terry, 58 Southern Reach (Vandermeer), 362 Soviet Union, 54, 68 Soyinka, Wole, 59–60 Space Battleship Yamato (Matsumoto), 413 Spanos, William, 176–7 Spark, Muriel, 128–9, 131–2, 137–8, 281 Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Pessl), 456–7 Spectres of Marx (Derrida), 48, 271–2 Speer, Albert, 195–6 Spengler, Oswald, 56 Spiegelman, Art, 314–15 Spielberg, Steven, 214–15, 227 Spivak, Gayatri, 59–60, 242–3, 268, 484 standpoint theory, 125–6 Stapledon, Olaf, 363–4 Starship Troopers (Heinlein), 407–9 Station Eleven (Mandel, E. S.), 499, 508–9 Stein, Chris, 343 Stein, Gertrude, 241–2, 324, 331–2, 441 Steinbeck, John, 464 Steinberg, Leo, 373, 380 Stephenson, Neal, 354, 358, 360 Sterling, Bruce, 317–18, 354, 359, 364–6 Stern, Robert A. M., 177–8, 310 Sterne, Laurence, 20, 26–7 Stevens, Wallace, 441 Stone, Oliver, 227 The Stone Gods (Winterson), 433 Stonewall riots, 247 Strada Novissima, 17 The Street of Crocodiles (Schulz), 194 structuralism, 165, 167 Structure and Power (Asada), 412 The Structure of Art (Burnham), 201, 204 Strummer, Joe, 341 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 112 A Study of History (Toynbee), 56, 134 Su Tong, 465, 469–70 Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Hebdige), 343–4 Such (Brook-Rose), 86 Sugar Hill Gang, 385 Sugiyama, Takayuyki, 407–8 Sukenick, Ronald, 32, 58, 182, 190, 194, 311, 487

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Index Sun Ganlu, 465, 469–70 surfiction, 86–7. See also metafiction Suvin, Darko, 355–6 Sweeny, Bob, 82 Swift, Graham, 293 Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard), 102–3 The Tablets (Schwerner), 193–4 Takahashi, Gen’Ichiro, 406–7 Takana, Yasuo, 409–12 Takemitsu, Toru, 406 “Taklamakan” (Sterling), 365–6 Tannen, Deborah, 435–6 Tannenbaum, Rob, 346 Tatsumi, Takayuki, 401–2 Tawada, Yoko, 493 Taxi Driver (Scorcese), 218 Taylor, Charles, 485–6 Telegraph Avenue (Chabon), 502 television as cultural pastiche, 77 diegesis and, 79 Golden Age of, 75 as mass media, 100 narrative artifice in, 76 postmodernism and, 75–9 during postwar era, 75–9 self-awareness of viewers and, 76–7 Tennant, Emma, 282, 286 Tepper, Sheri, 355–6 Terayama, Shuji, 406–7 Terra Nostra (Fuentes), 294 Teshigawara, Hiroshi, 406–7 Texts for Nothing (Beckett), 194 Thatcher, Margaret, 7–8, 283 To the Lighthouse (Woolf ), 128 theory. See also rise of theory in ancient forms, 159–60 culture of management and, 170–1 deconstruction and, 165–7 diegesis and, 159–60 Enlightenment ideals and, 167–9 Franco-German, 164 mimesis and, 159–60 money and capitalism as influence on, 169–71 neutering of, 170 Optimism and, 166–7 postmodernism and, 87, 160–2 purpose of, 159 second-wave feminism and, 234–5, 237–9, 241–3 structuralism and, 165 trauma theory, 296, 303–4

537

theory wars, 242–3 Third World, 54 third-wave feminism, 244 Thomas, Clarence, 243–4 Thomas, D. M., 189, 293 Thompson, Alice, 281 Thompson, Hunter S., 121 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (Powers), 455–6 Three Guineas (Woolf ), 236–7 The Ticket That Exploded (Burroughs), 139 Tientos y diferencias (Carpentier), 62–4 Tiffin, Helen, 59–60, 64, 263 Tillman, Lynne, 331 Time Out of Joint (Dick), 498 The Tin Drum (Grass), 267 Title VII, 239–40 Tjanting (Silliman), 333–4 Toíbín, Colm, 282 Tom Jones (Fielding, H.), 29 Toomer, Jean, 503–4 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 44–5 Tower, Wells, 456–7 Toynbee, Arnold J., 56, 134 trace, as metaphysical concept, 48–50 Trainspotting (Welsh), 282 Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Raja (Hamilton), 20, 25, 32–7 trauma theory, 296, 303–4 travel, mass media and, 97 Travelling People (Johnson, B. S.), 133–4 Trawl (Johnson), 86 Tree of Codes (Foer), 194 The Trick is to Keep Breathing (Galloway), 282 Trifonas, Peter Pericles, 271–2 Trilling, Lionel, 453–4 Trocchi, Alexander, 281 Tropic of Cancer (Miller, H.), 309 Trout Fishing in America (Brautigan), 117, 406 The True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey, P.), 294–5 Tschumi, Bernard, 186–7, 192, 195–6 Tsiolkas, Christos, 493–4 Tsujii, Takashi, 411–12 Tsutsui, Yasutaka, 406–7 Tsutsumi, Seiji, 409–13 The Tunnel (Gass), 456–8 Tutola, Amos, 59–60 Twain, Mark, 434 The Twenty-Seventh City (Franzen), 503 Ubik (Dick), 6–7 Ulysses (Joyce, J.), 18–19, 127–8, 324

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538

Index

Under Albany (Silliman), 334 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan), 98–101 The Unfortunates (Johnson), 133–4 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. See Soviet Union United Kingdom (U.K.) Commonwealth Migration Act in, 61 emigration from, during 1960s, 61 nouveau roman in, 131–2 United States (U.S.). See also countercultures Civil Rights Act in, 232 Cold War and, 54, 68 ERA in, 235 geopolitical rivalry with Soviet Union, 54 multiculturalism in popular culture, 434–5 during nuclear age, 54 postmodernism linked with, 55–9 theory wars in, 242–3 The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (Coover), 139, 406 universality, 427–30, 433 The Unnamable (Beckett), 127–8 The Unnamed (Ferris), 461 Unstable Universalities: Poststructuralism and Radical Politics (Newman, S.), 270–1 Unsworth, Barry, 294–5 Updike, John, 56–7 Upstone, Sara, 146, 264–5 Urban Tumbleweed (Mullen), 336–7 Urfe, Nicholas, 137–8 utopianism, of countercultures, 121–4 V. (Pynchon), 135–6, 138–9 van den Berg, Laura, 499 van der Rohe, Mies, 90, 309–10 Vandermeer, Jeff, 362 Varnedoe, Kirk, 308 Vautier, Marie, 264–5 VDC. See Vietnam Day Committee Velasquez, Diego, 18–19 The Velvet Underground, 87 Venturi, Robert, 6–7, 90, 175–7, 186–92, 309–10 Verhoeven, Paul, 409 Vico, Giambattista, 19–20 Victory Garden (Moulthrop), 420, 422–4, 431–2 Vidal, Gore, 294 Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), 124 Vietnam War, 215–17 Vineland (Pynchon), 319–20 The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam: an interactive story in four parts (Campbell and Bedford), 420, 424–7

Virus (Komatsu), 413 A Visit from the Goon Squad (Egan), 457–60, 504 visual arts camp in, 312–13 kitsch in, 312–13 Pop Art breakthrough in, 309–10 in postmodern China, 474–5 postmodernism and, 179 The Vital Center (Schlesinger), 371 Vogel, Ezra, 411 The Volcano Lover (Sontag), 294–5 Vollmann, William T., 190, 294–5, 311, 403–4, 457 Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 57–8, 138–9, 406 Vurt (Noon), 359 Wadleigh, Michael, 224–5 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 137–8 Walden Two (Skinner), 123–4 Walker, Alice, 241–2 Walker, Rebecca, 244 Wall, Jeff, 199, 209 Wallace, David Foster, 182, 190, 311, 403–4, 450, 452–60, 462, 498–9, 502–3 Walter, Jess, 500 Wang Min’an, 475 Wang Ning, 402, 465 Wang Shuo, 465, 469–70 Wang Yichuan, 465 The Waning of the West (Spengler), 56 Warhol, Andy, 6–7, 87, 118–19, 176, 313, 319, 324, 406–7 Warhol, Robyn, 242–3 Warner, Alan, 281 Warner, Michael, 248, 282 Warnes, Christopher, 150–1 Watchmen (Moore, A.), 293, 314–15 Waterland (Swift), 293 Watten, Barrett, 325, 331–2 Weems, Carrie Mae, 369 Wegner, Philip, 10–11, 497 Weicheng (Qian Zhongshu), 468–9 Weiner, Lawrence, 199, 207, 374–5 Weiss, Peter, 58 Wells, H. G., 363–4 Welsh, Irvine, 281–2 Wenaus, Andrew, 359 Wenders, Wim, 11, 316 West, Cornel, 53–5 Westwood, Vivienne, 343–4 Wexler, Haskell, 222 White, Hayden, 2–3, 298–300 White Album (The Beatles), 88–9 The White Hotel (Thomas), 189, 293

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Index White Noise (DeLillo), 319–21, 445, 457–8 “White Rabbit” (Slick), 6–7 White Teeth (Smith, Z.), 458–60, 491–2 Whitehead, Colson, 403–4, 453, 457, 461, 499, 505 Who Was that Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (Bartlett), 253–6 Wichita Vortex Sutra (Ginsberg), 92 The Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 294 The Wig (Wright, C.), 86 Wigley, Mark, 186–7 Wilde, Alan, 56–7, 450–1 Will, George, 441 Williams, Pat Ward, 442 Williams, Raymond, 77, 146 Williams, Saul, 389–90 Williams, William Carlos, 72, 331–2 Wilson, Ian, 199, 211 Wilson, Robert, 195–6, 315–16 Wilson, Sloan, 455 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson, S.), 453–6 Wingrove, David, 402 Winterson, Jeanette, 293, 433 Wittig, Monique, 234, 238–9 Wojnarowicz, David, 378–9 Wolf, Christa, 293 Wolfe, Tom, 121 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 37, 230–1 Wols, 371–2 Woman, Native, Other (Minh-ha), 274 Wonder Boys (Chabon), 502 Wong Kin Yuen, 364–5 Woodruff, Hale, 372–3 Woodstock (Wadleigh), 224–5 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 20, 23, 128, 490 on change in human character, 85–6, 91 as early feminist, 230–1 second-wave feminism influenced by, 236–7 Wordsworth, William, 19–20 “Work in Progress” (Joyce, J.), 127–8 World War I, 52–3

539

World War II, 53–4, 138 world-modeling, in postmodern fiction, 28 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 62 Wright, Charles, 86 Wright, Richard, 434 Writing and Difference (Derrida), 271–2 Xiao Shenyan, 474 Xu Bing, 475 Xudong Zhang, 467–8 Yacine, Kateb, 61–2 YAF. See Young Americans for Freedom Yamano, Koichi, 406–7 Yamao, Yuko, 406–7 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 403–4, 457, 488 Yano, Tetsu, 407–9 Yarber, Robert, 9 Ye Zhaoyan, 469–70 year 2000 computer bug, 497–8 The Years of Rice and Salt (Robinson), 402–3 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Reed, I.), 190 Yetnikov, Walter, 347–8 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Chabon), 502 Yoshihara, Jiro, 371–2 You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (Tannen), 435–6 Young, Robert, 62, 271–2 Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), 124 Yu Hua, 465, 469–70 Yûzô, Tsujimi, 411–12 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 150–1 Zemeckis, Robert, 227 The Zero (Walter), 500 Zhang Yiwu, 465 Zhu Qingsheng, 475 Žižek, Slavoj, 497–8 Zone One (Whitehead), 499, 505 Zukofsky, Louis, 331–2

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