Postmodern literature: key themes and characteristics

Postmodern Literature Final

In terms of the use of experimental techniques in the assigned readings this semester, I think I would judge Vonnegut to be the best and Ishmael Reed to be the worst. The simple criterion here is accessibility. There is no reason why experimental writing should be difficult or a chore to read. The constant emphasis on a surface level of linguistic novelty in Ishmael Reed makes the actual reading experience difficult. For example, we might consider a sentence like "A place without gurus monarchs leaders cops tax collectors jails matriarchs patriarchs and all the other galoots who in cahoots have made the earth a pile of human bones under the feet of wolves." This is the narrator's description of the town of Yellow Back Radio (itself already a frustratingly unrealistic name for a town) and the experimental quality of the sentence here gets in the way of apprehending its meaning. There is no particular reason for the lack of commas in the catalogue, and the jingling colloquialism "galoots who in cahoots" does not sit harmoniously with the sonorous solemnity of "a pile of human bones under the feet of wolves." Instead the mix of linguistic registers frustrates the reader, who frequently has to work to even understand what is going on. Vonnegut by contrast maintains a clear flexible prose style throughout, and the experimental method is largely one of digression. Rather than trying to impress on the surface with linguistic novelty, Vonnegut writes patiently as though trying to explain everything to a seven-year-old child. Although at times the style of Breakfast of Champions verges on faux-naif (e.g., "Fucking was how babies were made"), at its best it manages to use the radical simplicity of the style to be experimental in a way that is consistently readable and engaging. If Vonnegut's simplistic hand-drawn illustrations are an example of an experimental technique, they are certainly one that is instantly available to any reader. Accessibility is not sacrificed.

2. In terms of handling the distinction between fact and fiction, I think Art Spiegelman's Maus does the best job, while Audre Lorde's Zami is ultimately tiresome. Speigelman's work is so engaging precisely because the story itself is repeated more or less as fact: it does not seem melodramatized or mythologized in terms of the actual words used. The key factor, however, is that there is so much more to Maus than words: as a graphic novel, the work depends crucially upon its sharp visual depictions of cartoons depicting what the text narrates. As a result, the story of the Holocaust is represented using cartoon cats for Nazis and cartoon mice for Jews. What makes this so engaging is precisely the disconnect between word and image: the words of the actual text are a straightforward survivor testimony, and the story told is not intended to be extraordinary, melodramatic, or even particularly distinguished as prose. The imagery, meanwhile, is inherently charged and thus interacts fruitfully with the text: the cartoons of cats and mice seem to correspond to our instinctive notion of what a Holocaust narrative is going to be about (predators and prey, an asymmetrical power relation) even though the text itself seems utterly straightforward. This stands in firm contrast to the "biomythography" of Audre Lorde, which attempts to use words alone to blur the lines between a straightforward account of actual events and a larger more "artistic" or mythologized version of the same story. Spiegelman's method ultimately seems satirical -- which runs the risk of seeming offensive to those who think that the Holocaust is morally different from "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" -- while Lorde's method seems grandiose. We could potentially justify Lorde's technique as a reflection of the subaltern oppressed status of the black woman in twentieth century America, but this does not make her prose seem any more appealing to a reader. Unlike Spiegelman, there does not seem to be a trace of irony in Lorde, and this makes her work seem a bit dreary.