GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

> Olson I know by name, and that's it, though--I'd generally been led
> to believe that it was Ihab Hassan who at least, er, "popularized" the term,
at
> least in academia.  Of course, it was probably Hassan who led me to believe
> that, so .... but I always appreciate any references ...

Charles Jencks was talking about "post-Modernist" architecture as early as
1975 as well, and his notion of "double-coding" was a really important one
across the board I think; but there had been lots of rumblings and
monographs on individual writers in the late 50s, 60s and early seventies -
Richard Chase's *The American Novel and Its Tradition*, Leslie Fiedler's
*Love and Death in the American Novel* and Marius Bewley's *The Eccentric
Design: Form in the Classic American Novel* had worked up the idea of an
intact American literary canon, the *New Yorker* was valorising Don
Barthelme's short "stories", Hassan's *Radical Innocence* of course, the
Black Humour tag, fabulation and fabulators, the New Journalism, Susan
Sontag's essays on camp and kitsch, Tony Tanner's *City of Words* - where
the idea of a new and vital literary mode in the US was being fermented,
even if they weren't using the term postmodernism itself. Philip Stevick's
strikingly-titled 'Scheherezade runs out of plots, goes on talking; the
king, puzzled, listens: an essay on new fiction', *TriQuarterly* 26 1973 pp.
332-362 is another representative eg, but I think Klinkowitz's was the first
full-length study from within the American critical establishment to devote
itself solely to definition and analysis of the metafictive mode as a
paradigmatic cultural "movement". Of course, what none of them were
admitting was the fact that the economic and political primacy of the
American republic after WWII was the major factor which had enabled the
production and mass publication of these writers' works, as well as the
perpetuation of the critical industry itself, and that the thriving literary
scene they were just beginning to notice and celebrate was both sign and
symptom of a somewhat darker cultural hegemony.

>  while Breton
> et cie. were psychologically motivated, autmoatism as allowing the expression
of
> the unconscious, Olson & Co. were doing something rather different, ofering
> themselves up either to some sort of "cosmic" forces or (and this may or may
not
> be the same thing, depending on who you're talking to) to sheer physical
> contingency?  From psychological depth to subjectival depthlessness

Yes, I'm not sure that there is a real difference, certainly the effects
would have been similar: Breton and co. were just as enamoured of randomness
as they were of "pure psychic automatism" I think.

>  But it's been
> suggested to me that the works of Ayn Rand (I cring even typing that, but ...)
> were resolutely, albeit twistedly, modernist, though no doubt dhe would--and
her
> fans will--protest otherwise.  That facsination with the new, the dynamic, the
> mechanical, the industrial, and so forth, a fascination which indeed
insinuates
> her works stylistically.  Not that that helps 'em any, but ...

I hadn't made the connection before but, yes, some of her glorification of
the machine wouldn't have been out of place in one of Marinetti's Futurist
Manifestoes, her reprehensible racism and appalling right wing politics not
all that far afield of what Futurism sort of developed into ...

>  That ludic appropriation
> of the past, perhaps, which is perhaps what makes Pynchon's (for example)
> peculiar syncretism (that word again ...) "postmodern/ist."  But there is a
> certain ambivalence in re" "art" and "art's sake," leading to, on one hand,
> charges of postmodernist apoliticism, and, on the other hand, charges of
> postmodernism's overpoliticization.

Following Bakhtin, who is v. important in all of this I think, Teresa Ebert
distinguishes between a ludic postmodernism which works to "denaturalize and
destabilize the dominant regime of knowledge" through its characteristic
mode of ironic deconstruction, and a "politically puissant" version which
"contends that textuality and difference ‹ the relation of the signifier and
the signified ‹ are themselves the sites of social conflict and struggle."
('Writing in the Political: Resistance Post(modernism)', *Legal Studies
Forum 15.4* 1991 p. 293)

I think there is enough ludic destabilisation going on in Modernist and
pre-Modernist works - Sterne, Melville, Mallarme, Raymond Roussel, Stein,
Joyce, Lowry Beckett, Borges, Nabokov - to render the first category
disputable, but I think it is in moving towards the second type of
postmodernism, the "politically puissant version", that claims for a
renovation of the novelistic genre become valid. The advent of postmodern
fiction a la Pynchon can perhaps be defined, in one respect, as a movement
away from avant-gardism and towards political engagement. I think it is in
the combination of the two textual modes, the ludic and the political,
wherein postmodern fiction achieves its potency as ideological discourse.

best

----------
>From: "Dave Monroe" <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Subject: Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Sun, Jul 2, 2000, 11:34 AM
>