National identity and deconstruction in postmodern American fiction

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.

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.

And religion, too, takes a deconstructive hit by Bellow when Roman Catholic Madeleine, on page 115, argues with Moses who is "bent on making trouble" because the seeming absurdity of Madeline's need to confess her sins to the Monsignor. Beyond the inherent conflict between Herzog's Judaism and Madeleine's Catholicism, Madeline "wanted Moses and the Monsignor to struggle over her. It heightened the sexual excitement."

Religion and sex as bed partners - that would certainly represent the deconstruction of the American national culture - and when "all was said and done" (118), the narrator continues, "Madeleine didn't marry in the Church, nor did she baptize her daughter. Catholicism went the way of zithers and tarot cards, bread-baking and Russian civilization. And life in the country."

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man young black man's search for personal and social identity is not a new theme in American literature, but in Ellison's novel, the exaggerative characters that respond to the black man in outrageous fashion create an ugliness that goes beyond representing America's institutional, historical cultural bias. The racism actually seems to transcend racism and move into parody of the truth. Readers expect Ellison's protagonist to be ridiculed, rejected and bullied by the white society, and readers get what they expected to get; but the author's preoccupation with "white" takes the novel past irony into comedy and almost to tragedy as well.

On page 165 the paint supervisor Brockway says "If It's Optic White, It's the Right White" with an "upraised finger, like a preacher quoting holy writ." On page 36, the narrator follows the "white line" and passes a collection of "shacks and log cabins...bleached white" and featuring "chinks filled with chalk-white clay"; and on page 37 two women are dressed in "blue-and-white checked ginghams..." And the "white family" - white, white, white, everywhere in this novel.

There is white that black can't mix with; this is a man who indeed is caught between a world of fragments and wholes. He, the black protagonist, is taunted with fragments of the good life that white Americans are allowed to taste; like the white woman in the "Battle Royal" incident who is so sexy and so desirable but black boys aren't allowed to touch her. In the book as in American culture, white women are portrayed as something black men would certainly love to snuggle up to, but they are forbidden fruit. American society may well have progressed beyond the cruelty and shameful Jim Crow period, but still when a black man is seen with his arm around a white woman, red flags go up. The protagonist in The Invisible Man turned to Sybil, because she was naive and stupid and could be used. She had a cliched approach to the virility of black men (as "brute bucks" who were powerful in the sheets); she could not hide her empty-headed and lonely reality, and unlike the Invisible Man, she was inept when it came to creating a better world for herself. She had no idea of what the Brotherhood was really designed to be or to do. That fact is probably intended by the author as a metaphor for the fact that many white people (male and female) in the national culture have not a vague clue as to what African-Americans are all about.