Hi. I have a weird love of over-simplified "modernist vs. post-modernist" definitions that always do better than the deeper takes, and yours is pretty great.
I also love your take on rationalism pretty much as a method of sequestering the fear of the unknown, particularly death. This is especially important in the pseudo-Revelations structure of the post-human / singularity zealots of Silicon Valley. But the reason I like your take particularly is because intellectually I am really attracted to rationalism -- I really want things to be rational and understandable through logic whenever feasible -- but when I learned the rationalists existed I spent some time with their work and immediately realized that something profound was missing.
I had a very long streak in my teenage years involving a lot of death: friends, family, classmates. For about seven years I attended funerals all too frequently. And the midpoint of that period was 9/11. So one thing I learned during that period was that American culture's materialistic magical thinking that we call the Dream is exceptionally incapable of handling the discomfort of death. It's one of the areas where I believe Americans in particular are broken, even if the world overall is dealing with similar issues.
And rationalism obviously, in fact cringingly, is just another magnitude higher of desperately seeking to keep death out of sight. Which is really sad because another thing I learned about my seven years of death is that when you can look death in the face, in fact in the mirror, you really can own your own mind and its agency without any of the puzzles and games rationalists set up for themselves to keep their minds busy.
In that sense I love that you referred to Gravity's Rainbow particularly as the exact sort of book that would do those people a lot of good to read. I conclude the same often. These guys are clearly intelligent but too lost to get smart.
Wow. This is really thoughtful and makes me think more. You experienced horror very personally in that seven year period and that sort of experience will make folks turn a number of different ways. Lots of people rely on a religious faith to get through, something not open to me for any number of reasons. Others will try to "make sense" of it, but at some point, the accrual of horrors is only senseless. (I could've talked about Toni Morrison as a postmodern novelist in how ultimately her work comes down to mapping the brokenness without suggesting cure or resolution.)
I'm sympathetic to the impulse of rationalists and like you try to adopt a rationalist view for the most part when I move through the world, but I'm also acutely aware of both the things that mindset cannot explain, and also the deep pleasure in getting comfortable with ambiguity and being able to explore that state.
I wonder if it's sort of that simple, if ambiguity is something these folks just don't want to deal with.
Curious how you might think I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore fits in here, a very thought-provoking book about grief. I'm not good with categorization - and I think you may have put the finger on why I'm disappointed by so many "good" books, and why finding your space has helped me fill a gap.
That's a great question. That was one of my favorite books of last year. I think lots of Moore's work occupies an in between space. All of her characters have the stunning verbal playfulness of their author, and she definitely isn't invested in strict realism, but at the same time, her work feels very grounded in "reality." A bunch of the stories in Self-Help (as I recall) are written in 2nd person, which is a very postmodern-ish thing to do, and she's clearly often "playing" in her fiction. For me, it's that spirit of play that makes her work feel alive, so at some point I stop worrying about how to categorize it and instead just appreciate what's going on, but it's interesting to work backwards to try to better unravel the DNA.
I would say yes because it's magical realism, which I personally think of as a strain of postmodern writing, but you'd get some argument from others on that front who prefer to see it as a distinct movement of its own.
Weighty masculine postmodernism vanished, but slim feminine postmodernism in the Renata Adler mold with Kate Zambreno, Jenny Ofill, Miranda July, etc. It's usually characterized by the first person, somewhat detached tone, lots of pop culture references, shifts in time, flights of imagination and fantasy, and a feeling of restrained terror or despair.
These are all writers I like a lot, particularly Offill in Dept. of Speculation. I tend to think of them all as straddling modernism/postmodernism in a Beckett way, with some relationship to the autofiction of today, which is maybe also informed by the postmodernists. You've giving me something to really gnaw on here!
“Weighty masculine postmodernism” is an excellent summation of why I probably never got into postmodernism—I used to think it was the postmodern part, but I think it’s likely that the weighty and (perhaps especially) masculine parts are the real negative appeal factors for me. I liked The Crying of Lot 49. Gravity’s Rainbow was… not for me, or at least not the couple of times I’ve tried it. I may circle back again. Or it may end up on the list of books I plan to read after I die. (That list starts with Dickens and Nabokov—weighty and masculine are negative appeal factors for me across the board, it seems, though there are exceptions.)
Anyway, I’m interested that John’s list includes almost exclusively men. Are postmodernists predominantly male, or are female writers simply not recognized as postmodern? Or?
The capital "P" (if you will) postmodernists who've made it through the years are largely men, which, it strikes me, is related to your and Naomi's observations about the perceived "weightiness" in terms of those masculine presentations of the works as they were received by the public. "Oreo" by Fran Ross (first published in the 70s) is playing around in postmodern waters for sure (it follows a mythic structure and has all kinds of game playing/jokes) but a book by someone of her background (Black, female) was not slotted into the group from the get go. Toni Morrison has clear postmodernist DNA, but she stands as her own category, ultimately. "Mrs. Caliban" by Rachel Ingalls has the hallmarks of a postmodern novel in terms of technique/approach, but it's a domestic story, rather than a 800 page tome. Zadie Smith's early work especially (the so-called "hysterical realism") has that postmodern DNA, but she's rarely discussed this way. Lots and lots for me to chew on here.
I'll be interested to hear your thoughts. My first reaction to this week's essay was I Am Dumb I Have Never Read Any of These Books. Then I remembered that last year I got Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller mixed up in my head for a minute, felt dumb, and then remembered Keith Richards's line about why they called the album Some Girls ("because we couldn't remember their f***ing names") and decided I was never going to apologize for getting older white dudes confused ever again.
Awhile ago I was reading Lucinda Williams's memoir (great for gossip; otherwise she's a much better lyricist than she is a prose writer), and there's a line where her dad tells her that it's fine if she doesn't like Faulkner--there are a lot of writers out there. It's not that I think one should never try things one doesn't immediately like--but having given them a good shot (or perhaps a few), I also think, well, there are a lot of writers out there. We don't all have to like (or even appreciate) them all.
"We don't all have to like (or even appreciate) them all." Amen to that. I think what we end up reading and when and how we respond is as much chance and fate as anything, and sometimes it's hard for me to assign any kind of big picture meaning to it. I had about a 12 months period where I just went deep on the Pynchon/Gaddis world swallowing stuff because I was super frustrated by my inability to write a Raymond Carver or Bobbie Ann Mason short story and maybe this was something I could do. (It isn't.) Barthelme's work was ultimately a huge influence on how I approached trying to write fiction and I still resonate to his stuff today, but I'm not sure I could read a Gravity's Rainbow with much pleasure anymore. I certainly struggle to make it through those kinds of books now. I like to reflect on what I was enjoying at a particular time and how that's changed as a way to better understand where I am, but I'm wary of drawing big picture conclusions about capital-L literature from it. I just don't relate to books and reading that way for the most part.
I just thought of another example that I should've mentioned, "Ducks, Newburyport" by Lucy Ellmann. Very long, written almost as a single sentence. Could argue it's more modernist stream-of-consciousness, but the distinctions become arbitrary at some point.
I enjoyed this piece very much, and always appreciate discussions of definitions of things that are hard to get a real grasp on like modernism vs pomo. For my own experience--in high school and undergrad in the seventies, I read (sometimes struggled through--let's face it almost ALWAYS struggled through) various post-modern authors. Liked Nabokov, though Pale Fire was a stretch for me though I have always remembered and loved the lines "I was the shadow of a waxwing slain by the pure azure of a windowpane"), didn't get Barth at all, liked Pynchon (read Gravity's Rainbow senior year of HS while taking calculus at the same time which synced nicely). Probably a few others. Gradually as an undergrad English major, I shifted back to mostly realism (though like you say, Tristram Shandy is as pomo as anything, and even Dickens has delightful fantastic elements embedded in novels such as Bleak House).
I was in a "top" PhD English program for one year starting in 81, and that's when post-modernism almost defeated me. The first thing I was assigned in a core class was Roland Barthes' S/Z, and I, basically, did not understand a word of it. I gradually realized that lit classes had become more about lit crit theory than, you know, lit. Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, etc were a language I didn't get. For personal reasons, I had to take a leave after a year and ended up, sadly, never going back. I was mostly enjoying being immersed in words, even though I didn't feel at home in that current construction of the literary milieu. I think I'd have gotten the hang of it eventually. Probably. But I also think that the swing away from that kind of crit theory that I feel has occurred since would have made my experience a lot more person-friendly. (I could have used some guidebooks to these writers instead of being tossed into that ocean without a raft, but that's another story.)
On my own as a reader in the later eighties and nineties, I embraced the "new sincerity". (Aside--as po-mo-y as Infinite Jest was, I think Wallace could also be slotted as embracing sincerity; he was trying to break though to truths about human, as I read it.) I didn't want an emptiness beyond the words. Structuralism and post-structuralism felt like playing games to me. Like, I love baseball partly because it resists being a metaphor for something else like most sports do, but I don't want all my reading to be that. (Another of my infinite asides--thinking about baseball's non-metaphor-ishness--that one team is running around bases while another is catching and throwing a ball, etc., helped me get some understanding of post-structuralism's enclosed, non-referential worlds, years after I was formally studying them).
Reading back, I'm not sure how much of this was coherent! I'm going back a long way in my reading/literary experience. Thanks for a fascinating post that made me think about all this again!
This is really interesting stuff. I had the benefit/detriment of never bing exposed in any deep or sustained way to the postmodern critics/theorists. I only knew the literature and I mostly only knew it through the lens of my own experience with it as a reader. I think you're right about DFW and IJ. I think there's an attempt to find meaning in the digital/commercial world there, but I think he also doubted his own project often. The later sinceritists were more committed to the approach, maybe. Again, lots to chew on here.
I'll just say it was A LOT. I didn't encounter much lit crit as an undergrad, but then two years later at the same university (Michigan) at grad school it was like a fire hose had been turned on.
I pursued my MFA in fiction from 1991-1995, and the battle between postmodernism and "traditionalism" raged. Every time an author came to campus, the introduction of that author by one of the faculty inevitably turned into an impassioned treatise on their "camp" and a high-minded take down of the other camp. This binary of us vs them filtered down into every aspect of your experience as a grad student: which faculty (in CW and Lit) you chose to take classes with or have on your thesis committee, what kind of fiction you put up for workshop, which students won "the plums" and who chose them, who was invited for the visiting writers series, what you said in class about the books the faculty chose for their reading lists and about the stories your peers put up for workshop, even who you were friends with and who you dated. Because I was from Indiana and because I wanted to be taken seriously by male writers (long story) and because in my program, the male writing faculty were all different versions of my dad, I chose the traditional side, and I fought valiantly for "the cause." When I became a faculty member in a small MFA program myself in 1997, I was determined to not take sides, but to present novels and stories that represented everything on the spectrum. I used a Norton anthology called Postmodern American Fiction by Geyh, Leebron, and Levy. And I discovered much to my chagrin and embarrassment that I loved a lot of postmodern fiction. I had just never been exposed to much of it because I'd self selected into the traditional camp in grad school. Another anthology I loved to use for years was The Granta book of the American Short Story edited by Richard Ford, which was very aesthetically representative--Coover, Barth, Gass AND Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason, etc. As I finished my first book, The Circus in Winter, I let myself break so many grad-school rules, esp with regards to POV. I used lots of old-fashioned conventions in ways that also seemed postmodern/metafictional to me, like those subtitles: Chapter One, in which our narrator goes on an adventure. I've taught in four different creative writing programs, and each time, I've tried to not impose "my aesthetic" on students, but to teach them how to pay attention to what their own aesthetic might be. I've even shifted my aesthetic identity a few times, depending on the program and the aesthetic of my fellow fiction faculty. Where I teach now, my fiction colleague is more of a postmodern flash aficionado, so I offer the opposite aesthetics: novel writing, realism, more "commercial" aesthetics. Before that, I taught in an MFA program where traditional aesthetics were already well represented by my fellow fictioneer, so I offered myself as a mentor to those who were more experimental. I know this pedagogy of mine, and my recent forays into teaching "professionalization" for creative writers and English majors, all stems from the way in which I often feel that my MFA experience was kind of fucked up--even though there were nights at the bar when our arguments about postmodernism seemed like the most important conversation in the whole damn world. Thank you for reminding me of all of this, John. Cheers to you.
This is all amazing perspective. I sort of wish that my MFA had more arguments like that, but we had only one fiction writer (Robert Olen Butler), so his perspective reigned (in terms of faculty at least, students were more varied). Bob too was a kind of interesting blend, deeply modernist in his philosophy, but also messing around with magic realism and postmodern premises in some of his work.
But we didn't read much of that stuff in grad school and I didn't really go deep on postmodern writers until I was right at the end of my MFA, latched on to Barthelme, and started writing stories that were blatantly imitative, but also turned out to be my most successful early on, and the ones I could get published.
I loved (and still love) all those minimalists (Carver, et al...) and basically tried to write those stories for years, but that wasn't inside me. I wish I'd had a professor like you who was more open to helping me explore what it is that I might be interested in. The way the dynamics of status and competition get wrapped up into the experience of students (and professors) is, as you say, "kind of fucked up." It's awesome that you're defying them.
Butler interviewed for a job at my program while I was a student, and the entire conversation about whether to hire him or not revolved around his aesthetic, not his other qualifications. That amazes me now! How you wrote determined EVERYTHING.
Hot take: this is a good trend. we want less post-modernists and more people excited about the future who have actual views that aren’t rooted in a milieu of moral relativism
I know in the post I said I was doing a surface level gloss on postmodernism, but I at least was rooted in something observable to reality. What you offer here is a truly unhelpful culture war talking point that only shows up on social media. Why don't you go ahead and dig in with something worth talking about rather than just doing the blah blah blah, I don't like these people thing?
Seems like you can’t engage with my point in good faith and instead have resorted to an ad hominem attack. Shame. Was looking forward to a good faith debate.
Ad hominem is attacking the character of the person, rather than the argument itself, which I did not do. Claiming that a critique of the argument mode is ad hominem as a deflection from the substantive argument is another hallmark of the terminally online. (That last bit is close to ad hominem, but I’m speaking in generalities. You can decide for yourself if it applies.$
You haven’t made a substantive point. Deconstruction of what? What do you mean by moral relativism in the context of literary fiction, the subject at hand here? You’re offering non-sequiturs that have nothing to do with anything in the original post.
It doesn’t seem like you have a firm grasp of what post modernism is if you can’t follow my train of though on this subject.
Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, skepticism, relativism, attempts to destabilize concepts like historical progress, pastiche, lumping together art by claiming there is no objective “good”
These are all hallmarks of post modernism. And my point is they’re destructive and we should be moving away from them as modes of inquiry and thought.
I took it for granted you knew about the movement you were writing about
You bring up excellent points about the narrative finesse that is missing in much of the writing that comes out today. To read the way Faulkner, Nabakov, Vonnegut and other postmodern writers unreel their tales is to witness precious magic prose. George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, and Margaret Atwood are some of the few contemporary writers who can rise to those same heights. But in all honesty, I do have to admit that I tried numerous times to get through Pychon's "Gravity's Rainbow" but it was too much of an amazingly well written dense slog to suffer through.
This is well-done. I think there's a straightforward reality here: major publishers simply will not publish anything akin to Barth or Pynchon anymore. Whether the market exists or not, we'll never know - a lot of veteran editors have been cleaned out, "long" novels are viewed as vaguely threatening, and most fiction is mined for its IP potential. I can't tell you how many 200-250 page newer novels I've read that simply do not work; the writer clearly is told, explicitly or implicitly, to wrap it up, to not push the form to its limits, to not spend time toying with character, with structure, with the novel form itself.
Autofiction, for a while at least, seemed to supplant postmodernism. Some ok stuff there, but ultimately I'm with Oates - it's a lot of wan little husks, not terribly memorable, self-involved in the worst way. One could call Gravity's Rainbow self-indulgent, but Pynchon was wrestling with the twentieth century. Few novelists are even permitted to do that anymore - not if they want to be at a Big 5, and *especially* if they're not established already. Franzen and Saunders can get a little runway.
You didn't address the Oyler dust-up this week (no problem there!) but lost in the shuffle is how bad and forgettable her novel, Fake Accounts, was. In another market, another decade, maybe Oyler is tempted to chase bigger game.
I read the Oyler review, but I don’t have all that much interest in knowing which side (if any) I’m supposed to be on and it’s not a book I’m going to read, so the spectacle is diverting, but not too meaningful.
My friends at McSweeney’s have published some big old-fashioned postmodern stuff and maybe some of Joshua Cohen’s stuff is too, but these are exceptions.
Cohen is excellent. His latest novel, though, shows you the failure of Big 5 publishing today. The Netanyahus won the Pulitzer but I was told a lot of the major conglomerates weren't willing to take it on and that's why it ended up as a paperback with the NY Review of Books. They did pump out Book of Numbers in 2015, which has postmodern elements, but my sense is 2020s corporate publishing is walking away from very large and formally ambitious novels from writers who aren't brand names. It was good you mentioned City on Fire. City on Fire, to me, was definitely the "last" of something, at least for the time being.
Off topic from postmodern but ... read your Apr 9 Inside Higher Ed piece on AI: for me, this was an important insight:
"Each of these examples illustrates what I view as a privileging of institutional operations over the institutional mission. ... Institutional operations revolve around the entity as a business under which activities happen. The most consequential aspect of operations is the realization of revenue through tuition and other means"
This is highly relevant to the status of college athletics at big-time (and not so big-time) universities
Thanks for the mini course on literary movements that kind of passed me by. 😕 I started out measuring everything against Lord of the Rings.... what can I say, that's who I was and sort of still am. I have made some forays into the modern and post modern world, in no small part thanks to you and your correspondents. But I think I am happiest in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, and Claire Keegan notwithstanding.
Helprin is one of many writers included in my book on America’s literary history - The Judeo-Christian Experience In American Literary History: Surprising Spiritual Writings That Once Nourished Our Nation - Rediscovered https://a.co/d/3Y3vE9r
Great insights as always. The whole time I was reading I was hoping you'd mention the rationalists. I distinctly remember Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate, besides being full of logical inconsistencies and strawmen, taking shots at post-modernism several times in the book with the final chapter turning into a strange diatribe against postmodern art (I say strange because he spent the introduction highlighting how he was the most rational, unbiased person out there). This to me is connected to "the end of history" mindset which incredibly mistakenly believed we had found the one best political-economic system in capitalism.
Also I think the cultural shifts are spot-on. There's a weird thing where the internet is 90% sarcasm so people can always claim they weren't being serious if someone gets upset, while at the same time being (somewhat) permanent so you can collect up evidence of a person's behavior over time to "rationally" prove their true opinions
I like the theory that we are in an age of metamodernism. Where the tropes and ideas of postmodernism are used in works that are more sincere (oversimplified as "about something") than purely postmodern works were.
Hi. I have a weird love of over-simplified "modernist vs. post-modernist" definitions that always do better than the deeper takes, and yours is pretty great.
I also love your take on rationalism pretty much as a method of sequestering the fear of the unknown, particularly death. This is especially important in the pseudo-Revelations structure of the post-human / singularity zealots of Silicon Valley. But the reason I like your take particularly is because intellectually I am really attracted to rationalism -- I really want things to be rational and understandable through logic whenever feasible -- but when I learned the rationalists existed I spent some time with their work and immediately realized that something profound was missing.
I had a very long streak in my teenage years involving a lot of death: friends, family, classmates. For about seven years I attended funerals all too frequently. And the midpoint of that period was 9/11. So one thing I learned during that period was that American culture's materialistic magical thinking that we call the Dream is exceptionally incapable of handling the discomfort of death. It's one of the areas where I believe Americans in particular are broken, even if the world overall is dealing with similar issues.
And rationalism obviously, in fact cringingly, is just another magnitude higher of desperately seeking to keep death out of sight. Which is really sad because another thing I learned about my seven years of death is that when you can look death in the face, in fact in the mirror, you really can own your own mind and its agency without any of the puzzles and games rationalists set up for themselves to keep their minds busy.
In that sense I love that you referred to Gravity's Rainbow particularly as the exact sort of book that would do those people a lot of good to read. I conclude the same often. These guys are clearly intelligent but too lost to get smart.
Wow. This is really thoughtful and makes me think more. You experienced horror very personally in that seven year period and that sort of experience will make folks turn a number of different ways. Lots of people rely on a religious faith to get through, something not open to me for any number of reasons. Others will try to "make sense" of it, but at some point, the accrual of horrors is only senseless. (I could've talked about Toni Morrison as a postmodern novelist in how ultimately her work comes down to mapping the brokenness without suggesting cure or resolution.)
I'm sympathetic to the impulse of rationalists and like you try to adopt a rationalist view for the most part when I move through the world, but I'm also acutely aware of both the things that mindset cannot explain, and also the deep pleasure in getting comfortable with ambiguity and being able to explore that state.
I wonder if it's sort of that simple, if ambiguity is something these folks just don't want to deal with.
Curious how you might think I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore fits in here, a very thought-provoking book about grief. I'm not good with categorization - and I think you may have put the finger on why I'm disappointed by so many "good" books, and why finding your space has helped me fill a gap.
That's a great question. That was one of my favorite books of last year. I think lots of Moore's work occupies an in between space. All of her characters have the stunning verbal playfulness of their author, and she definitely isn't invested in strict realism, but at the same time, her work feels very grounded in "reality." A bunch of the stories in Self-Help (as I recall) are written in 2nd person, which is a very postmodern-ish thing to do, and she's clearly often "playing" in her fiction. For me, it's that spirit of play that makes her work feel alive, so at some point I stop worrying about how to categorize it and instead just appreciate what's going on, but it's interesting to work backwards to try to better unravel the DNA.
A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin is the best novel I’ve ever read. Is this considered post-modernism?
I would say yes because it's magical realism, which I personally think of as a strain of postmodern writing, but you'd get some argument from others on that front who prefer to see it as a distinct movement of its own.
Weighty masculine postmodernism vanished, but slim feminine postmodernism in the Renata Adler mold with Kate Zambreno, Jenny Ofill, Miranda July, etc. It's usually characterized by the first person, somewhat detached tone, lots of pop culture references, shifts in time, flights of imagination and fantasy, and a feeling of restrained terror or despair.
These are all writers I like a lot, particularly Offill in Dept. of Speculation. I tend to think of them all as straddling modernism/postmodernism in a Beckett way, with some relationship to the autofiction of today, which is maybe also informed by the postmodernists. You've giving me something to really gnaw on here!
“Weighty masculine postmodernism” is an excellent summation of why I probably never got into postmodernism—I used to think it was the postmodern part, but I think it’s likely that the weighty and (perhaps especially) masculine parts are the real negative appeal factors for me. I liked The Crying of Lot 49. Gravity’s Rainbow was… not for me, or at least not the couple of times I’ve tried it. I may circle back again. Or it may end up on the list of books I plan to read after I die. (That list starts with Dickens and Nabokov—weighty and masculine are negative appeal factors for me across the board, it seems, though there are exceptions.)
Anyway, I’m interested that John’s list includes almost exclusively men. Are postmodernists predominantly male, or are female writers simply not recognized as postmodern? Or?
The capital "P" (if you will) postmodernists who've made it through the years are largely men, which, it strikes me, is related to your and Naomi's observations about the perceived "weightiness" in terms of those masculine presentations of the works as they were received by the public. "Oreo" by Fran Ross (first published in the 70s) is playing around in postmodern waters for sure (it follows a mythic structure and has all kinds of game playing/jokes) but a book by someone of her background (Black, female) was not slotted into the group from the get go. Toni Morrison has clear postmodernist DNA, but she stands as her own category, ultimately. "Mrs. Caliban" by Rachel Ingalls has the hallmarks of a postmodern novel in terms of technique/approach, but it's a domestic story, rather than a 800 page tome. Zadie Smith's early work especially (the so-called "hysterical realism") has that postmodern DNA, but she's rarely discussed this way. Lots and lots for me to chew on here.
I'll be interested to hear your thoughts. My first reaction to this week's essay was I Am Dumb I Have Never Read Any of These Books. Then I remembered that last year I got Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller mixed up in my head for a minute, felt dumb, and then remembered Keith Richards's line about why they called the album Some Girls ("because we couldn't remember their f***ing names") and decided I was never going to apologize for getting older white dudes confused ever again.
Awhile ago I was reading Lucinda Williams's memoir (great for gossip; otherwise she's a much better lyricist than she is a prose writer), and there's a line where her dad tells her that it's fine if she doesn't like Faulkner--there are a lot of writers out there. It's not that I think one should never try things one doesn't immediately like--but having given them a good shot (or perhaps a few), I also think, well, there are a lot of writers out there. We don't all have to like (or even appreciate) them all.
"We don't all have to like (or even appreciate) them all." Amen to that. I think what we end up reading and when and how we respond is as much chance and fate as anything, and sometimes it's hard for me to assign any kind of big picture meaning to it. I had about a 12 months period where I just went deep on the Pynchon/Gaddis world swallowing stuff because I was super frustrated by my inability to write a Raymond Carver or Bobbie Ann Mason short story and maybe this was something I could do. (It isn't.) Barthelme's work was ultimately a huge influence on how I approached trying to write fiction and I still resonate to his stuff today, but I'm not sure I could read a Gravity's Rainbow with much pleasure anymore. I certainly struggle to make it through those kinds of books now. I like to reflect on what I was enjoying at a particular time and how that's changed as a way to better understand where I am, but I'm wary of drawing big picture conclusions about capital-L literature from it. I just don't relate to books and reading that way for the most part.
I just thought of another example that I should've mentioned, "Ducks, Newburyport" by Lucy Ellmann. Very long, written almost as a single sentence. Could argue it's more modernist stream-of-consciousness, but the distinctions become arbitrary at some point.
*limps along with Kate Zambreno, Jenny Ofill, etc
I enjoyed this piece very much, and always appreciate discussions of definitions of things that are hard to get a real grasp on like modernism vs pomo. For my own experience--in high school and undergrad in the seventies, I read (sometimes struggled through--let's face it almost ALWAYS struggled through) various post-modern authors. Liked Nabokov, though Pale Fire was a stretch for me though I have always remembered and loved the lines "I was the shadow of a waxwing slain by the pure azure of a windowpane"), didn't get Barth at all, liked Pynchon (read Gravity's Rainbow senior year of HS while taking calculus at the same time which synced nicely). Probably a few others. Gradually as an undergrad English major, I shifted back to mostly realism (though like you say, Tristram Shandy is as pomo as anything, and even Dickens has delightful fantastic elements embedded in novels such as Bleak House).
I was in a "top" PhD English program for one year starting in 81, and that's when post-modernism almost defeated me. The first thing I was assigned in a core class was Roland Barthes' S/Z, and I, basically, did not understand a word of it. I gradually realized that lit classes had become more about lit crit theory than, you know, lit. Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, etc were a language I didn't get. For personal reasons, I had to take a leave after a year and ended up, sadly, never going back. I was mostly enjoying being immersed in words, even though I didn't feel at home in that current construction of the literary milieu. I think I'd have gotten the hang of it eventually. Probably. But I also think that the swing away from that kind of crit theory that I feel has occurred since would have made my experience a lot more person-friendly. (I could have used some guidebooks to these writers instead of being tossed into that ocean without a raft, but that's another story.)
On my own as a reader in the later eighties and nineties, I embraced the "new sincerity". (Aside--as po-mo-y as Infinite Jest was, I think Wallace could also be slotted as embracing sincerity; he was trying to break though to truths about human, as I read it.) I didn't want an emptiness beyond the words. Structuralism and post-structuralism felt like playing games to me. Like, I love baseball partly because it resists being a metaphor for something else like most sports do, but I don't want all my reading to be that. (Another of my infinite asides--thinking about baseball's non-metaphor-ishness--that one team is running around bases while another is catching and throwing a ball, etc., helped me get some understanding of post-structuralism's enclosed, non-referential worlds, years after I was formally studying them).
Reading back, I'm not sure how much of this was coherent! I'm going back a long way in my reading/literary experience. Thanks for a fascinating post that made me think about all this again!
This is really interesting stuff. I had the benefit/detriment of never bing exposed in any deep or sustained way to the postmodern critics/theorists. I only knew the literature and I mostly only knew it through the lens of my own experience with it as a reader. I think you're right about DFW and IJ. I think there's an attempt to find meaning in the digital/commercial world there, but I think he also doubted his own project often. The later sinceritists were more committed to the approach, maybe. Again, lots to chew on here.
I'll just say it was A LOT. I didn't encounter much lit crit as an undergrad, but then two years later at the same university (Michigan) at grad school it was like a fire hose had been turned on.
I pursued my MFA in fiction from 1991-1995, and the battle between postmodernism and "traditionalism" raged. Every time an author came to campus, the introduction of that author by one of the faculty inevitably turned into an impassioned treatise on their "camp" and a high-minded take down of the other camp. This binary of us vs them filtered down into every aspect of your experience as a grad student: which faculty (in CW and Lit) you chose to take classes with or have on your thesis committee, what kind of fiction you put up for workshop, which students won "the plums" and who chose them, who was invited for the visiting writers series, what you said in class about the books the faculty chose for their reading lists and about the stories your peers put up for workshop, even who you were friends with and who you dated. Because I was from Indiana and because I wanted to be taken seriously by male writers (long story) and because in my program, the male writing faculty were all different versions of my dad, I chose the traditional side, and I fought valiantly for "the cause." When I became a faculty member in a small MFA program myself in 1997, I was determined to not take sides, but to present novels and stories that represented everything on the spectrum. I used a Norton anthology called Postmodern American Fiction by Geyh, Leebron, and Levy. And I discovered much to my chagrin and embarrassment that I loved a lot of postmodern fiction. I had just never been exposed to much of it because I'd self selected into the traditional camp in grad school. Another anthology I loved to use for years was The Granta book of the American Short Story edited by Richard Ford, which was very aesthetically representative--Coover, Barth, Gass AND Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason, etc. As I finished my first book, The Circus in Winter, I let myself break so many grad-school rules, esp with regards to POV. I used lots of old-fashioned conventions in ways that also seemed postmodern/metafictional to me, like those subtitles: Chapter One, in which our narrator goes on an adventure. I've taught in four different creative writing programs, and each time, I've tried to not impose "my aesthetic" on students, but to teach them how to pay attention to what their own aesthetic might be. I've even shifted my aesthetic identity a few times, depending on the program and the aesthetic of my fellow fiction faculty. Where I teach now, my fiction colleague is more of a postmodern flash aficionado, so I offer the opposite aesthetics: novel writing, realism, more "commercial" aesthetics. Before that, I taught in an MFA program where traditional aesthetics were already well represented by my fellow fictioneer, so I offered myself as a mentor to those who were more experimental. I know this pedagogy of mine, and my recent forays into teaching "professionalization" for creative writers and English majors, all stems from the way in which I often feel that my MFA experience was kind of fucked up--even though there were nights at the bar when our arguments about postmodernism seemed like the most important conversation in the whole damn world. Thank you for reminding me of all of this, John. Cheers to you.
This is all amazing perspective. I sort of wish that my MFA had more arguments like that, but we had only one fiction writer (Robert Olen Butler), so his perspective reigned (in terms of faculty at least, students were more varied). Bob too was a kind of interesting blend, deeply modernist in his philosophy, but also messing around with magic realism and postmodern premises in some of his work.
But we didn't read much of that stuff in grad school and I didn't really go deep on postmodern writers until I was right at the end of my MFA, latched on to Barthelme, and started writing stories that were blatantly imitative, but also turned out to be my most successful early on, and the ones I could get published.
I loved (and still love) all those minimalists (Carver, et al...) and basically tried to write those stories for years, but that wasn't inside me. I wish I'd had a professor like you who was more open to helping me explore what it is that I might be interested in. The way the dynamics of status and competition get wrapped up into the experience of students (and professors) is, as you say, "kind of fucked up." It's awesome that you're defying them.
Butler interviewed for a job at my program while I was a student, and the entire conversation about whether to hire him or not revolved around his aesthetic, not his other qualifications. That amazes me now! How you wrote determined EVERYTHING.
Hot take: this is a good trend. we want less post-modernists and more people excited about the future who have actual views that aren’t rooted in a milieu of moral relativism
I know in the post I said I was doing a surface level gloss on postmodernism, but I at least was rooted in something observable to reality. What you offer here is a truly unhelpful culture war talking point that only shows up on social media. Why don't you go ahead and dig in with something worth talking about rather than just doing the blah blah blah, I don't like these people thing?
Seems like you can’t engage with my point in good faith and instead have resorted to an ad hominem attack. Shame. Was looking forward to a good faith debate.
Ad hominem is attacking the character of the person, rather than the argument itself, which I did not do. Claiming that a critique of the argument mode is ad hominem as a deflection from the substantive argument is another hallmark of the terminally online. (That last bit is close to ad hominem, but I’m speaking in generalities. You can decide for yourself if it applies.$
You still haven’t engaged with my point. You’re just telling me that I’m not an independent thinker (at least I think that’s the gist of your remarks)
Post modernism is at its heart about deconstruction. But at the bottom of the well, all thats there, is moral relativism and nihilism.
A point you’re driving home through this line of dialogue about nothing.
You haven’t made a substantive point. Deconstruction of what? What do you mean by moral relativism in the context of literary fiction, the subject at hand here? You’re offering non-sequiturs that have nothing to do with anything in the original post.
It doesn’t seem like you have a firm grasp of what post modernism is if you can’t follow my train of though on this subject.
Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, skepticism, relativism, attempts to destabilize concepts like historical progress, pastiche, lumping together art by claiming there is no objective “good”
These are all hallmarks of post modernism. And my point is they’re destructive and we should be moving away from them as modes of inquiry and thought.
I took it for granted you knew about the movement you were writing about
I bet Sam Bankman-Fried wishes he had a book right now.
I've been thinking the same thing. I hope a journalist gets to him at some point to ask.
You bring up excellent points about the narrative finesse that is missing in much of the writing that comes out today. To read the way Faulkner, Nabakov, Vonnegut and other postmodern writers unreel their tales is to witness precious magic prose. George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, and Margaret Atwood are some of the few contemporary writers who can rise to those same heights. But in all honesty, I do have to admit that I tried numerous times to get through Pychon's "Gravity's Rainbow" but it was too much of an amazingly well written dense slog to suffer through.
This is well-done. I think there's a straightforward reality here: major publishers simply will not publish anything akin to Barth or Pynchon anymore. Whether the market exists or not, we'll never know - a lot of veteran editors have been cleaned out, "long" novels are viewed as vaguely threatening, and most fiction is mined for its IP potential. I can't tell you how many 200-250 page newer novels I've read that simply do not work; the writer clearly is told, explicitly or implicitly, to wrap it up, to not push the form to its limits, to not spend time toying with character, with structure, with the novel form itself.
Autofiction, for a while at least, seemed to supplant postmodernism. Some ok stuff there, but ultimately I'm with Oates - it's a lot of wan little husks, not terribly memorable, self-involved in the worst way. One could call Gravity's Rainbow self-indulgent, but Pynchon was wrestling with the twentieth century. Few novelists are even permitted to do that anymore - not if they want to be at a Big 5, and *especially* if they're not established already. Franzen and Saunders can get a little runway.
You didn't address the Oyler dust-up this week (no problem there!) but lost in the shuffle is how bad and forgettable her novel, Fake Accounts, was. In another market, another decade, maybe Oyler is tempted to chase bigger game.
I read the Oyler review, but I don’t have all that much interest in knowing which side (if any) I’m supposed to be on and it’s not a book I’m going to read, so the spectacle is diverting, but not too meaningful.
My friends at McSweeney’s have published some big old-fashioned postmodern stuff and maybe some of Joshua Cohen’s stuff is too, but these are exceptions.
Cohen is excellent. His latest novel, though, shows you the failure of Big 5 publishing today. The Netanyahus won the Pulitzer but I was told a lot of the major conglomerates weren't willing to take it on and that's why it ended up as a paperback with the NY Review of Books. They did pump out Book of Numbers in 2015, which has postmodern elements, but my sense is 2020s corporate publishing is walking away from very large and formally ambitious novels from writers who aren't brand names. It was good you mentioned City on Fire. City on Fire, to me, was definitely the "last" of something, at least for the time being.
Off topic from postmodern but ... read your Apr 9 Inside Higher Ed piece on AI: for me, this was an important insight:
"Each of these examples illustrates what I view as a privileging of institutional operations over the institutional mission. ... Institutional operations revolve around the entity as a business under which activities happen. The most consequential aspect of operations is the realization of revenue through tuition and other means"
This is highly relevant to the status of college athletics at big-time (and not so big-time) universities
Thanks for the mini course on literary movements that kind of passed me by. 😕 I started out measuring everything against Lord of the Rings.... what can I say, that's who I was and sort of still am. I have made some forays into the modern and post modern world, in no small part thanks to you and your correspondents. But I think I am happiest in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, and Claire Keegan notwithstanding.
Helprin is one of many writers included in my book on America’s literary history - The Judeo-Christian Experience In American Literary History: Surprising Spiritual Writings That Once Nourished Our Nation - Rediscovered https://a.co/d/3Y3vE9r
Great insights as always. The whole time I was reading I was hoping you'd mention the rationalists. I distinctly remember Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate, besides being full of logical inconsistencies and strawmen, taking shots at post-modernism several times in the book with the final chapter turning into a strange diatribe against postmodern art (I say strange because he spent the introduction highlighting how he was the most rational, unbiased person out there). This to me is connected to "the end of history" mindset which incredibly mistakenly believed we had found the one best political-economic system in capitalism.
Also I think the cultural shifts are spot-on. There's a weird thing where the internet is 90% sarcasm so people can always claim they weren't being serious if someone gets upset, while at the same time being (somewhat) permanent so you can collect up evidence of a person's behavior over time to "rationally" prove their true opinions
I like the theory that we are in an age of metamodernism. Where the tropes and ideas of postmodernism are used in works that are more sincere (oversimplified as "about something") than purely postmodern works were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism#:~:text=Vermeulen%20and%20van%20den%20Akker%20described%20metamodernism%20as%20a%20%22structure,the%20modern%20and%20the%20postmodern.
That makes a lot of sense to me. At least, I identify with it in terms of my own writing and what I think about the world.