Postmodernist literature: characteristics, themes, and major works

Postmodernist Literature

Discuss the representation (or the deconstruction) of national culture in the postmodernist fiction of the United States (reviewing four novels).

Postmodernism is, according to Fredric Jameson's Introduction to Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, "...an attempt to think about the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place." Moreover, Jameson writes, the "moderns" were interested in "what was likely to come of" changes that were emerging in the culture; they thought "compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being" (ix). However, Jameson continues, the postmodernist only tallies up the variations in changing cultures themselves; hence, "postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good."

If that definition seems a tad bit esoteric, or even vague, it might be helpful to view another description of postmodernism, this one from Professor John Lye of Brock University. Postmodernism, he writes, is "a broad range of...responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects." It is also "responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism..."

In his Columbia Journalism Review article ("We're All Postmodern Now...") Mitchell Stephens writes that postmodernism is "a loose collection of philosophical ideas and aesthetic notions that have in common a revolt against the belief that any one perspective, any one view of reality, has ultimate priority." Does that make sense? To say that postmodernism is "a revolt against" the position that any view of life has priority seems unnecessary, doesn't it? Since when have authors, artists, poets, painters, embraced the idea that there's only one way to look at reality? Still, Stephens does make sense when he writes that "...as deconstruction and other postmodern theories have long argued, interpretation is inextricably bound with reality..."

It is fair to note that Stephens was alluding to the fact that journalism has recently entered the "postmodern" genre because almost every article one reads has "spin" or interpretation woven into its fabric. Meanwhile, Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado (Boulder), writes in a more scholarly style that to understand postmodernism one must first relate to the various themes in modernism - "a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points-of-view, and clear-cut moral positions."

Postmodernism, then, while it follows most of the same ideas as modernism, nevertheless is a "rejection of the distinction between 'high' and 'low' or popular culture..." It also "rejects boundaries" and celebrates "incoherence" and "provisionality." It rejects "rigid genre distinctions" and instead emphasizes "pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony and playfulness."

Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint

In his much-heralded novel Portnoy's Complaint Roth certainly moves away from "omniscient third-person narrators" and indeed "rejects boundaries" (to quote from Dr. Mary Klages) of sexual and cultural mores although it's a pretty safe bet that he would object to being called "incoherent" (also a Klages' quote) in any sense.

Meanwhile, to focus in on the postmodernist representation of the national culture of the United States in Roth's novel, he brings numerous interesting Jewish cultural idiosyncrasies (the Jewish culture plays a significant part in American "national" cultural dynamic) into the novel along with the themes of Nazis, family, football, puberty, menstruation and various shades and tones of sexual narrative. In his chapter "The Jewish Blues," on page 41, Roth juxtaposes the blood drained from meat ("...so as to make it kosher and fit for consumption") with his mother's menstrual blood. Every little boy everywhere has probably seen his mom's "box of Kotex" and "her erogenous zones" at one time or another, but Roth's narrator takes it to the edge of the personal envelope when his mother sent him (Roth 42), "an eleven-year-old boy in hot pursuit of sanitary napkins!"

This is the same mother who stood over her son with a "bread knife," with which "my own blood would be threatened when I refuse to eat my dinner." Bleeding intertwined with sexual desire and imagery becomes an integral part of this portion of the book. Roth certainly gets a leg up on postmodernism (in Klages' version of it) through his apparent rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" popular culture. First, more bleeding - the marble cake is "beautifully bleeding"(Roth 43) when the chocolate bleeds in and out of the vanilla - and then sexy scene with a mother, who had been so "insensitive to [his] shame" when she sent him to fetch Kotex, and yet, "on the other" hand was "so attuned to [his] deepest desires!"

Those desires became red hot with passion and he was "absolutely punchy with delight" when he, a four-year-old boy, watched his mother getting dressed "in the sunshine of her bedroom" after he has drawn a picture for her with crayons. He watches the "tight, slow, agonizingly delicious journey" (44) of her "transparent stockings" that give her "flesh a hue of stirring dimensions move up her legs. He gets up close to her so he can "appreciate better the elastic intricacies of the dangling straps to which the stockings" will be hooked. And next, does he smell his tuna salad lunch, or his mother's vagina? "Oh, I want to growl with pleasure," he writes. Just four years old and yet he senses "in [his] blood...how rich with passion is the moment, how dense with possibility."

Still on page 44, the narrator hopes he'll "be lucky" and his sister and father will never come back, leaving him alone to explore the passion he feels towards his mother. Even 25 years later, his mommy "still hitches up the stockings in front of her little boy" (45). Certainly the postmodernism defined by Professor Lye fits here, a world where "...all things are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire)... [and are] replaced by simulation and spectacle..."

Eventually, the narrator's family move away from New Jersey "because of the anti-Semitism," and because Nazis "used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house" and because swastikas were painted on buildings. The only place for a Jew to live "is among the Jews, especially...when children are growing up with people from the other sex" (Roth 51), the narrator describes.

And while it is morally repugnant to be reminded about social and cultural bias against Jewish folks that is manifested through Nazi bigotry, the Jews themselves in Roth's book express their own version of mean-spirited cultural bias (53). To wit, Heshie married hottie cheerleader named Alice, who wore a "tiny white skirt with the white satin bloomers: and was in reality a "...dumb, blond goyische beauty!" Note, "goyische" is Yiddish slang, a pejorative, meaning something non-Jewish to be looked down upon.

In the next paragraph, gorgeous Alice - who twirls batons wrapped in oil rags at each end and set on fire while people shrieked as she seemed (52) "about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts" - is "...blatantly a shikse..." Note, shikse is another Yiddish pejorative that means, literally, something "detestable," and "loathed" - e.g., a "blemish" on society. That cheap shot at one of the few gentiles in a high school that was 95% Jewish, is a trip down to the "low" popular culture of Klages, and hence, fits into the genre of postmodernism.

And in the words of Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson of the University of Judaism (www.judaism.uj.edu),the use of goyische and shikse are no less offensive and improper than jokes about "jewing someone down" for money or comments about "Jewish-American Princesses." The rabbi goes on to say, "characterizing and slandering ethnic, religious, or racial groups must be seen as no less than a rebellion against God and Torah, a violation of our covenant of peace." But, that having been pointed out by a respected member of the clergy, such use in a novel is still not out of bounds of good literature; rather, its use is perhaps seen as a twisted kind of celebration of deconstruction and postmodernism, much the same as was witnessed in the Oscar-winning film "Crash," which brilliantly and graphically pointed to the fact that there's a little racism in just about every conceivable cultural group - and a lot of racism in some.

The bias Roth uses is, on one postmodernist hand, as Stephens expresses, "interpretation inextricably bound with reality" and on the other it is seemingly a rejection of the lovely "melting pot" flavor that Americans would like to have the world believe about U.S. cultural diversity (but in truth isn't there much at all). It should be mentioned that author Roth's dive into seamy sexual desire for one's mother was representative of a component of the popular American culture during the 1950s - psychoanalysis utilizing Freudian theories and influences.

Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle

In his book, Deliberate Criticism Towards a Postmodern Humanism, Stephen R. Yarbrough quotes Ihab Hassan, who describes postmodernism as the "literature of silence" in that it "communicates only with itself," a reference that initially astounds the rational mind. Then, reading further in Yarbrough, Hassan is quoted as saying the term postmodernism applies to "a world caught between fragments and wholes, terror and totalitarianism of every kind."

In Vonnegut's novel, characters reflect the deconstruction of American society in the 1950s, during the period of paranoia dominated by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's fascist-like search for "communist sympathizers," which created terror and loathing and reflected how morally shallow yet potent the hammer of temporary totalitarian authority can be.

On page 96, Chapter 44, it is revealed that Horlick Minton had once been fired by the State Department for allegedly being "soft on communism" - but the only "real evidence" used to justify his dismissal, his wife announced, was a letter she wrote to the New York Times from Pakistan. What did it say? "It said a lot of things...because I was very upset about how Americans couldn't imagine what it was like to be something else...and be proud of it," Claire Minton explained. Horlick Minton quoted from the letter: "Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."

That "vanished frontier" is perhaps Vonnegut's allusion to the loss of the idealism that America once represented. "The highest form of treason is to say Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do," Minton added on page 98.

Vonnegut's postmodernism style throughout this book is a quasi-cynical but not entirely exaggerated representation of America; the folly of religion, for example, is shown in numerous passages. On page 4-5, God liked people "in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats." And on page 2, humanity is organized into teams to do "God's will" but those teams never discover "what they are doing." Hence, God is a mystery, and writers like Vonnegut have license to muse over society's clumsy attempt to define and categorize Him for their own future salvation from themselves.

Irony abounds in Vonnegut's postmodernism; on page 8 the theme continues involving what various people were doing when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; Newt's dad was in his pajamas "...smoking a cigar...playing with a loop of string." What could be more profoundly petty while hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens are being vaporized in an as yet un-heard-of firestorm of splitting atoms?

The America culture, whose citizens search vainly for answers to the deeper questions of life, is constantly parodied by Vonnegut; "The trouble with the world was...that people were still superstitious instead of scientific," Sandra (page 24) says, recalling what Dr. Breed uttered during his commencement address. Sandra continues recounting the inane and brutally simplistic theory of Dr. Breed: "He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble there was," and that "science" was going to discover "the basic secret of life someday."

Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they'd finally found out what it was?" The bartender interjects into the conversation (page 25). "What is the secret of life," the narrator asks. "I forget," said Sandra, but the bartender remembered what he had read. "Protein. They found out something about protein." "Yeah," Sandra remembered, "that's it." Indeed, Dr. Klages' description of postmodernism - "pastiche, parody...irony and playfulness" - comes to life poignantly through the tactics and strategies of Vonnegut and his characters.

A classic example of Vonnegut poking fun at how Americans hide behind their religion (or use religion as a shield against threats to their pride) is on page 167, as Julian Castle tells the narrator, if you happen to "run across" Dr. Albert Schweitzer, "you can tell him he's not my hero...but...thanks to him, Jesus Christ is." Wise-cracking, John the narrator says he thinks Schweitzer will "be glad to hear it." "I don't give a damn if he is or not," Castle returns. "This is something between Jesus and me."

Saul Bellow: Herzog

While Herzog is buying a suit of clothes in New York (with money borrowed from brother Shura) the salesman insults him (page 19-20), reacting to Herzog's 34-inch waist with, "Don't boast." Americans are not always willing to bite back when bitten, its considered embarrassing to loudly confront hostility with hostility, but this particular salesman has "a meat-flavored breath, a dog's breath," and though Herzog was "too gentlemanly to hold it against him," he nonetheless wrote the salesman a note in the fitting room. "Dear Mack. Dealing with poor jerks every day. Male pride. Effrontery. Conceit...hard job if you happen to be a grudging, angry fellow."

The American national culture is continually interacting with a perceived (or real) lack of professionalism in the retail milieu, and Bellow is certainly bringing that cultural flaw to light in this passage. Also, New Yorkers are notorious for seeming to be - albeit perhaps unfairly - pushy and brash. "Bless you, you are not nice," Herzog writes to the salesman, although unwilling to get into his face verbally and spar, still, being a New Yorker, he is obliged to express his true heart-felt reaction to a lack of grace.