pomo

[jbor]

Hi jp, welcome back.

I rather suspect that Barth's 'Literature of Exhaustion' essay from 1967,
takes its place alongside other such pessimistic critical works by Norman
Podhoretz, Susan Sontag, Louis Rubin and Leslie Fiedler from the same
period, in lamenting the demise -- or "exhaustion" -- of the genre of prose
fiction. Barth focuses on the way contemporary fiction-writing constantly
rebounds on itself, its self-consciousness or navel-gazing propensities, and
the concomitant absence of such standard 'outward-looking' pretensions of
the traditional novel as plot, characterisation etc. as symptoms of this
decline. In terms of a "definition" or description of postmodern fiction
this essay takes a somewhat antagonistic stance. Of course, in writing it he
was pretty well consigning much in his own back catalogue to the dustbin as
well.

In later times he changes his tune somewhat. His 1979 article entitled 'The
Literature of Replenishment' is a companion essay to (indeed, almost a
retraction of) the earlier 'Exhaustion' essay. In it he exhorts the revival
of "premodernist" values in fiction: he writes that a

    true postmodernist keeps one foot always in the narrative past ... and
    one foot in ... the Parisian structuralist present; one foot in fantasy,
    one in objective reality.

The two writers who most epitomise the replenished postmodernity Barth
envisages are Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez.('The Literature of
Replenishment: Postmodernism and the Rebirth of the Novel', _Atlantic
Monthly_ 245.1, January, 1980, p. 70)

In the later essay Barth warns that "disjunction, simultaneity,
irrationalism, anti-illusion, self-reflexiveness [sic], medium-as-message,
political olympianism, and a moral positivism approaching moral entropy ‹
these are not the whole story either." The new writers of "replenishment"
are seen to have availed themselves of the full repertoire of rhetorical
figures and tropes, as well as wide-ranging literary and non-literary
allusions in their fiction. Barth describes the "ideal postmodernist novel"
as one which "will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and
irrealism, formalism and contentism, pure and committed literature, coterie
fiction and junk fiction."

Brian McHale reclaims and realigns Barth's conceptions of the "literature of
exhaustion" and "replenishment" with categories of late-Modernist and
postmodern fiction respectively, and locates a more extensive collection of
writers and texts in each category. (See _Constructing Postmodernism_, pp.
26-32, 194-5.) Of course, Barth's (and McHale's) are just one "story" of
postmodernism: there are a myriad others, which is just as it should be and
is.

best

----------
>From: Jedrzej Polak <jedpolak at mac.com>
>To: Mark David Tristan Brenchley <mdtb at st-andrews.ac.uk>, <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: pomo
>Date: Fri, Dec 1, 2000, 11:03 PM
>

> The main point of "The Literature of Exhaustion" published in the late
> sixties may be summerized like that: "Literature said everything what was to
> be said,  and now it can only repeat itself".  Barth illustrates his
> argument with the discussion of novellas by Jorge Luis Borges  (especially
> "Tlon"). I feel a bit uneasy about elaborating on  an essay, which - no
> doubt - was meant to be read and  discussed, and not "elaborated upon" in
> one or two email sentences; at the same time I realize that "elaborating on
> the Literature of Exhaustion" puts me in a very tempting, postmodern and
> metaliterary situation Barth writes about. Nonetheless,  I shall  advise all
> interested parties to read Barth, and then have a look at his opus
> (especially "Letters", but also "The Sot-Weed Factor")  from the perspective
> of the "Literature of Exhaustion".  I'm sure he wrote those two books
> bearing in mind what he had postulated in the essay.  In that respect, those
> two novels (if one can call "Letters" a novel) are the best elaboration of
> the thesis I mentioned  above.
>
> jp