pomo

[Jedrzej Polak]

> From: Mark David Tristan Brenchley <mdtb at st-andrews.ac.uk>
> Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 15:19:01 +0000 (GMT)
> To: Jedrzej Polak <jedpolak at mac.com>
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: pomo
> 
> I understand your hesitation in cutting someone else's essay to a few
> brief email sentences. But surely there must be more to Barth's essay than
> just saying that literture always repeats itself. If it's a case of
> nothing-new-under-the-sun, then big deal, literature has always had that
> problem. I'm not even sure how much I'd agree with that statement myself.
> Besides, even if its been said before, there will always be new ways in
> which the novel can be expressed....
> 
> MArk
> 

Exactly. And those new ways - according to Barth et al - are post modern
ways. If you take a look at "The Sot-Weed Factor", what you get is a regular
picaresque novel in the vein of "Tom Jones". But why - one should wonder -
is there a need for a 20th century writer to revive a somehow forgotten
literary genre? The answer is quite simple: it's next to impossible to write
a convincing, let's say, psychological (in modernistic terms) novel after
Faulkner, and there's no real need for that. As jbor wrote quoting another
of Barth's essays: the "ideal postmodernist novel
will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and
irrealism, formalism and contentism, pure and committed literature, coterie
fiction and junk fiction."

Let me point out that Barth does not say "literature is dead". He only
strives to to revive its vitality (as the title of his second essay
suggests). But that's of course - as jbor wrote - only one side of the post
modern story, and there are many others. There are even people, who - as one
of my literature professors - contest the very existence of postmodernism on
the grounds it has not invented any new literary devices (like e.g.
modernism with its stream of consciousness and all). True. Again, there's no
need for that. It is more fun to include a stream of consciousness in a
picaresque novel. And that's what postmodernism does: shuffling, always
shuffling.

jp