Malcolm Bradbury

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 8:47 AM
Subject: Re: Malcolm Bradbury
>
> Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury.  From Puritanism to
>     Postmodernism : A History of American Literature.  New York:
>     Penguin, 1991.
>
>Perhaps in the current
>(?--never know just where you all are at, now that I'm digesting
>it here) discussion, the following might be of help, interest:

It does, Dave, it does (only speaking of the last):

"Gravity's Rainbow, set, as one of the critics puts it, in "the crucial,
explosive, fecund nightmare of all our psychoses and all our plots," the
Second World War, is Pynchon's largest endeavor to date; some have
considered it the late-twentieth-century Ulysses, the exemplary Postmodern
text. As German V2 rockets fall on London, the many characterless characters
of the book engage in clue-rich searches for a "Real Text" to explain the
seemingly random patterns of destruction. The book conveys both the author's
quest for meaning and his massive historical research. But, perhaps like the
world itself, it too ends in anxious indeterminacy, refusing that sense of
completion and acceptance we get from Ulysses or most great works of
Modernism--one reason why to describe this writing by a term like
"Postmodernism" helps.
It may well be that as the century ends Postmodernism is on the wane. If so
it will be undoubtedly remain an influential and revealing phase not just in
the history of American literature but of twentieth-century writing
generally---a deep rooted search for a late Modern form and style in an age
of cultural glut that has been called an age of no style. (...) What it
mostly represents is the feeling that, still under the complex shadow of
Modernism, the aesthetic and intellectual importance of which we have more
and more grown to understand, we have both a stylistic situation all our own
and a peculiar vacancy of meaning. History has upset the coherence of any
single vision---we are after the Modern; we are no longer content with an
innocent and confident realism. Nor do we still share the Modernist crisis
which was related to the historical and political anxieties of the first
half of a century whose fundamental direction has changed. Capitalism and
radicalism have both had to reconstruct themselves, thereby changing our
progressive expectations. The avant-garde is no longer >avant<, but our
political, technological, social and artistic philosophies remain as
perplexed as ever by the ironies, paradoxes and indeterminacies of a
universe science has opened to much vaster exploration. (...) All our
stories have changed, but the fundamental task of stories---to help us
discover for us the meanings we need and the tracks of the imagination down
which we might reach them---remains, but anxiously, the same. Now we are no
longer in the postwar world but near the close of a century that will give
way to a new one with a  yet more extensive conception of out modernity. By
then it may well seem that our critical philosophies of structuralism and
deconstruction were not just explorations but revelations of our awareness
both of philosophical and historical indeterminacy---ambiguous,
half-destructing products of an age that needed to replenish itself by
turning toward the future while re-creating what was salvageable from the
past.
Postmodernism now looks like a stylistic phase that ran from the 1960s to
the 1980s and left the intellectual landscape looking very different---party
reshaped by the anxious, self-doubting liberalism of the 1950s, partly by
the indeterminate, radical spirit of the 1960s which encouraged
expressionist art, aleatory music, performance theater, the happening, the
random street event. Today more conservative styles return to fashion,
intellectually and artistically."

(pp. 391-93)