pomo

[Otto Sell]

SOME REASONS WHY I DON'T WRITE THE STORIES I DON'T WRITE INSTEAD OF
NOT-WRITING SOME OTHERS STORIES I DON'T WRITE EITHER SOME OTHER WAY

I'm not a fiction writer but a reader of fiction, metafiction and
non-fiction about fiction. Before I read Postmodernist Fiction I was merely
reading novels for entertainment. Now I understand pieces of "Finnegan's
Wake." (wow!)
Every writer has been a reader too before he has become an author.
Like John Barth says in the essay with the title I have corrupted in my
headline it is hard to invent any extravagant hero.
He raises questions like "What's the proper subject of literature?" and he
maybe a better teacher than novel-author but I think his literature and his
writings on literature are important to understand this strange phenomenom
we tend to call postmodernism, but are additionally interesting enough to
think about concerning literature in general:

"It's in the words that the magic is--Abracadabra, Open Sesame, and the
rest--but the magic words in one story aren't magical in the next. The real
magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what; the trick
is to learn the trick."
(JB, "Chimera," Dunyazadiad, p. 15)

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: Otto Sell <o.sell at telda.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 11:17 AM
Subject: Re: pomo
>
> The basic ideas of the Enlightenment are roughly the same as
> the basic ideas of
> humanism. Jane Flax's article gives a good summary of these
> ideas or premises (on
> p. 41). I'll add a few things to her list.
>
> This is simply not true.
>
"Soziale Utopien und Naturrecht haben ein sich ergänzendes Anliegen im
gleichen humanen Raum; getrennt marschierend, leider nicht vereint
schlagend."
(Ernst Bloch, *Naturrecht und menschliche Würde", 1961, 1972, p. 13)

Dunno if it's "true" in the sense of exactly, but "roughly" - well, it would
be hard to deny (and prove this without quoting Greek letters) that
philosophically Enlightenment and Humanism have the same foundations.

> Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a
> binary opposition between
> "order" and "disorder," so that they can assert the
> superiority of "order." But to do
> this, they have to have things that represent
> "disorder"--modern societies thus
> continually have to create/construct "disorder." In western
> culture, this disorder
> becomes "the other"--defined in relation to other binary
> oppositions. Thus anything
> non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic,
> non-rational, (etc.) becomes
> part of "disorder," and has to be eliminated from the
> ordered, rational modern
> society.
>
> Sounds like cultural fascism, not Modernism.
>

Not only in "modern societies" -  by the way - is Red-China modern, was
Nazi-Germany modern?
As I understood this Derrida-logocentric-thing properly all this is ages old
and necessarily inevitable. All new art first is rejected, gets accepted by
and by and later gets the status of "High-Culture" and is so standing in the
way of even newer art. I consider burning books and threatening authors like
Rushdie is cultural fascism.

> Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same
> ideas, rejecting
> boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting
> rigid genre distinctions,
> emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and
> playfulness. Postmodern art
> (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness,
> fragmentation and
> discontinuity (especially in narrative structures),
> ambiguity, simultaneity, and an
> emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized
> subject.
>
> So what's the difference?
>
> But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in
> these ways, it
> differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these
> trends.
>
> OOOOOOOOH, attitude!
>
> Mary Klages has not defined Postmodernism.
>
> This is a Sophist's trick.
>
> Postmodernism can't be defined.
>
> It refuses to be defined.
>
> It resists all attempts to define it.
>

There cannot be an absolute definition _by_ definition, because
"absolute" -claiming exclusiveness- is on the index. It's like with the
dictionary-question, there can only be descriptive and never prescriptive
definitions of postmodernism. The following statemant of yours is therefore
correct in my view:

>
> An essential constituent or characteristic or intrinsic
> characteristic of Postmodernism is its resistance to all
> attempts to say what it is.
>
>
> But, it is clearly not Modernism
>

Why, I'm not so sure about that. I would prefer to leave this question for
my daughter, your son, Jackson Pynchon, and the children of Margaret
Salinger. Maybe someday someone says something like "The Postmodernist
School of Modernist Fiction in the 20th Century" to give it a proper name
(in his opinion, from his cultural and historical point of view). But
there'd be no pomo without modernism, neither in philosophy nor in the arts,
could we agree in this? You get into trouble claiming that Pynchon is a
modernist like the early Joyce. The Klages-essay is an attempt and I don't
believe that any of the many other books about this topic are, can be, more
than attempts to explain something by differentiating it from another thing.
Our language, our thinking works this way.

>
> Postmodernism defines Modernism: Basically vague, humanist
> ideals, enlightened superiority, elimination of non-white,
> non-male, non-heterosexual, non-hygienic, non-rational ETC.,
> ETC., ETC.....
>
>
> This is propaganda, not education. BTW, don't you find the
> misapplication of Lyotard, Derriada, Jameson offensive?

"Mythology is the propaganda of the winners."
(J. Barth, Bellerophoniad, 3rd part of *Chimera*, 1972, p. 288)

Since it cannot define itself and cannot be defined for intrinsic reasons it
seeks to see itself in difference to the "the other" thing it emerged from.

Why misapplication? Lyotard and Derrida are main postmodern philosophers
(without question) and the American Jameson-point-of-view I find extremely
interesting.

"Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and postmodernism
helps to clarify some of these distinctions. According to Frederic Jameson,
modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations which accompany
particular stages of capitalism. Jameson outlines three primary phases of
capitalism which dictate particular cultural practices (including what kind
of art and literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which
occurred in the eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries in Western
Europe, England, and the United States (and all their spheres of influence).
This first phase is associated with particular technological developments,
namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics,
namely, realism. The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century
until the mid-twentieth century (about WWII); this phase, monopoly
capitalism, is associated with electric and internal combustion motors, and
with modernism. The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or
consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and
consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and
electronic technologies, and correlated with postmodernism."

This goes pretty good along with the terms pre-modern, modern and
postmodern.
Another important thing of pomo is the "away with the big stories" - but
before that read them again to make sure you've understood properly what
they've done and how they maintained our "human" societies so far, all of
them:

"Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in
modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master
narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices
and beliefs. A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that
democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that
democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief
system or ideology has its grand narratives, according to Lyotard; for
Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that capitalism
will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You
might think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology,
that is, an ideology that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story
that is told to explain the belief systems that exist."

Grand narratives are GOD (as seen in many societies from earliest feudalism
up to moslemic fundamentalism), HISTORY (the historical process inevitably
will lead to peace in a communist world Marxists "believe"), TRUTH (various
philosophers), NATION (my toenails begin to curl) and ENLIGHTENMENT (I'm
really sorry 'bout that). These outer-system referential points are
important and if you deconstruct them away very little of the so far "Grand
Narratives" remains except of family history, war, rape and murder.

Therefore Rushdie's "Midnight Children" is not only important for India but
for Europe and America too. This is why "The Tin-drum" and "Mason & Dixon"
are so great books apart from the fact that they're skillfully written -
dealing with grand histories the proper way.

Anyone who has not read yet John Barth's *The Friday Book" now has a
wonderful idea for a wish he/she can tell his/her girl/boyfriend for
Christmas. And check the second-hand bookstores for "Chimera" -  it's
lovely. Both books are blurring the borders of their kind - the secondary
literature develops entertaining qualities whereas the fiction becomes
educating.
But let's listen to Barth. I have no problem at all stripping his essays to
pieces:

"(...) for it is not only postmodernism that lacks definition in our
standard reference books. My "Oxford Literary Dictionary" attests
*modernism* to 1737 (Jonathan Swift, in a letter to Alexander Pope) and
*Modernist* to 1588, but neither term in the sense we mean. My "American
Heritage Dictionary" (1973) gives as its fourth and last definition of
*modernism* "the theory and practice of modern art," a defibnition which
does not take us very far into our American Heritage. My "Columbia
Encyclopedia" (1975) discusses modernism only in the theological sense--the
reinterpretation of Christian doctrine in the light of modern psychological
and scientific discoveries--and follows this with an exemplary entry on *el
modernismo*, a nineteenth-century Spanish literary movement which influenced
the "Generation of  '98" and inspired the ultraismo of which Jorge Luis
Borges was a youthful exponent. Neither my "Reader's Encyclopedia" (1950)
nor my "Reader's Guide to Literary Terms" (1960) enters modernism by any
definition whatever, much less postmodernism." (199) (...)
"In my view, the proper program for postmodernism is neither a mere
extension of the modernist program as described abive, nor a mere
intensification of certain aspects of modernism, nor on the contrary a
wholesale subversion or repudiation of either modernism or what I'm calling
premodernism: "traditional" bourgeois realism." (201) (...)
"A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or
transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and
modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely
repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist
parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the
first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back." (203)

By the way, there are many ways to skin a cat.
What's a star - define it, a magnetic field of force - scientists will get
in trouble stating to be able to give a 100% explanation. All we can do is
to collect pieces. And what makes a great novel?

Jbor has said it quite right and in well-chosen words today which I may
quote here (which is, it goes without saying, one of the big hobbies of
pomo-freaks. But they do it consciously whereas many others who believed to
have said something "original" simply had forgotten the origin):

"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." (...)

"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." (jbor
today)

Otto
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember
that distant afternoon when his father took him
to discover ice."
G.G. Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude)