GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

> ... well, I think you have pretty much the same take on the 
> postmodern(is/t/m) thing
> as I do
snip

You raise many interesting and valid points (and I only snip them in the
interest of conserving bandwidth, which occasionally becomes an issue for
some of the good folk hereabouts) about postmodernism, and I agree that the
term can be applied just as well to that bad taste that WWII and the decade
preceding left in everybody's mouths, the desire to blot out everything
which had come before and strike out in an entirely new and fresh direction,
a feeling that 'art for art's sake' wasn't quite all that it should or could
have been after all. It might be of interest that it was Charles Olson,
"rector" and all round strange dude at Black Mountain College, who began to
refer to the postmodern age ("post the modern" as he termed it) in essays
from the early 1950s (I think Arnold Toynbee had actually started to talk
about something very much like it back in the 1870s, may have even used the
term), and that the Beat writers and poets adopted the values, at least, if
not the actual terminology, thereafter. Olson & co sought to liberate
artistic expression from formulas and conventions, and "anti-Modernist"
events and happenings were the order of the day at the "college". One such
typical event, staged in the summer of 1952 by John Cage and featuring
Olson, Robert Rauschenberg and the dancer Merce Cunningham, was a
performance blending improvisation and chance, where the throwing of I Ching
coins and spontaneous expression were used to determine the shape and
direction of the performance. So, though explicitly designed as a reaction
against Modernism, the type of automatism and randomness espoused by Olson
and his associates was essentially derivative of earlier surrealist
expressive modes and is thus, to some extent, simply a continuation of one
trend within Modernism after all. And, in their anti-traditionalist pose
these artists were simply echoing demurrers of a century before: Thoreau,
Melville and Hawthorne in particular. (Olson's earlier study of American
culture, entitled *Call Me Ishmael*, was written in 1945 and published in
1947.)

But if you really want to get a historical timeline effect up and running
you've got to start calling people like John Updike and Saul Bellow and
Joyce Carol Oates post-Modernists as well, not to mention Ayn Rand and
Barbara Cartland and, well, everyone who wrote after that certain "moment",
and so the distinction itself starts to become rather meaningless.

And it's also quite accurate to talk of the postmodern age, as you say, of
endless ducting (see *Brazil*) and the desensitised MTV generation and the
information superhighway and the "cultural logic of late capitalism" as
Jameson has it. Peter Porteous posted an interesting article about the
movement against globalisation -- it seems that some pig farmer in
provincial France who has been gaoled for single-handedly "deconstructing"
the local McDonalds being built in his town will become the new King Lud of
the postmodern age btw -- and this looks like the next phase. But I think
that there are two different visions of globalisation too: the corporate
Coca-colonisation of everywhere and everyone into a homogenous little fat
Eric Cartmanish kid (bad) and a somewhat idealistic multicultural vision
which has all sorts of wonderful little admixtures and diverse cultural
perspectives enfolding and enriching the urban ghetto lands (good) ...

All of which is simply to confirm that, yes, postmodernism the word has
outlived its utility, because it's sort of a meaningless everything and
nothing term nowadays, and an easy target. But I do think that there is a
real difference between the Continental outlook and that particular and
precocious American postmodernism of the 1970s which sought to redress the
prevalent trend of "critical despair" (Barth's 'Literature of Exhaustion'
article being the focus for this) perceived in contemporary literary
studies, and thus went about providing manuals, of sorts, for the renovative
practice of postmodern fiction. (See the procedural announcements which open
Sukenick's 1969 novella entitled 'The Death of the Novel', or Klinkowitz's
*Literary Disruptions: The Making of Post-Contemporary American Fiction* and
Federman's *Surfiction: Fiction Now . . . And Tomorrow*, both of 1975, if
its critical manifestoes you're after.) Despite all the rhetoric, the
critical diagnoses of "a radical disruption in the genre's development"
produced by these guys are in effect absolutely parochial responses which do
not address the legitimacy or otherwise of the culture to which they
contribute and with which the works and authors under examination engage,
and thus they inappropriately and injudiciously characterise their subject
matter ‹ the fictional texts themselves ‹ as similarly affirmative
endorsements of the social and cultural regime. The celebratory tone which
is adopted by this self-appointed vanguard of American literature and
criticism places them in almost diametric opposition to the stances taken by
the French philosophers, Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze; by
Marxists such as Lukács, Althusser, Kristeva and Jameson; and, by their
respective followers; (not to mention Pynchon, Gaddis, Burroughs, Gass,
Vonnegut et. al.); all of whom are concerned, at least partially, to
identify and narrate the spread of the peculiarly American cultural and
social phenomena manifest in an imperialistic, technocentric, corporatised,
and, by insinuation, despicable global hegemony:

"As an historical condition, postmodernism is intimately connected to the
blunt facts of economic, political and military power, and has confirmed
America and the West's controlling cultural influence ‹ including the
magnetism of its mythologies and the control Western intellectuals exercise
over communication systems and regimes of truth." (Peter Brooker)

If Hassan and much of the American intelligentsia (like Rorty) have moved
"beyond postmodernism" (wasn't it oxymoronic enough to begin with?) then it
is the US rather than the Continental version which they are consigning to
the wastebasket, and the motives for this, well, what does Leonardo di
Caprio say when he's hanging off the front of that there Titanic ... ?

*****

I was interested in your reading of Fitzgerald's Gatsby as the epitome of
the American "self-made man", and the idea that that wonderful novel is
somehow affirmational. This would rely on taking Nick Carraway's somewhat
naive conclusions at face value, and overlooking the shadowy hinted details
of Gatsby's rather heinous past and his shallowness and irresponsibility in
the present. Perhaps it is read differently by Americans, but I've always
envisaged it as an exemplification of the divorce between author and
narrator. That ashheap between the Eggs and the city, Wilson's appalling
Garage, Dr Eckleburg's eyes, Daisy and her neglected child, the cheating
golfer ... it's a tragedy and a savage critique, surely, and sits alongside
*Death of a Salesman* as another nail in the coffin of the "American Dream"?
In fact, I think that it is Nick rather than Gatsby who is the real focus of
the novel, the personification of what it will mean to be American in the
"brave new world" to come: Gatsby's self-destruction is also the inevitable
snuffing out of the Jazz Age and its attendant excesses, and of FSG himself;
with Nick we get the new generation's idealisation of such superficial
obsessiveness and such waste. FSG is not Nick, nor does he share Nick's
idealisation of Gatsby, for Gatsby is FSG himself, and the novel is
catharsis, a manifestation of self-loathing almost (much like Pollock's
art). Imo.

best



----------
>From: "Dave Monroe" <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Subject: Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Sat, Jul 1, 2000, 5:22 PM
>