GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

> Perhaps the problem is that Modernist/postmodernist binary in the first place.

Mostly it's not seen as a binary at all, except by those who want to
pigeon-hole postmodernism (with a capital "P" perhaps) as a deliberate and
discrete historical genre (as, indeed, Modernism saw itself, or, for the
pedants, as many of the Modernists perceived their work), and thereby
consign it to the archives. While some American critics and writers in the
1970s were quick to jump onto that sort of bandwagon (Jerome Klinkowitz in
particular, but Raymond Olderman, Raymond Federman, Ihab Hassan, Robert
Scholes, Philip Stevick, Joe David Bellamy and others as well in the
critical department, with Federman and Ron Sukenick as the young tyros of
the American postmodernist "breakthrough" in fiction) and did reappropriate
Vonnegut, Gaddis, Pynchon, Gass et. al. at the time, this wasn't so much
postmodernism in the more general, (anti-)philosophical, eclectic,
multi-purpose, anti- or irrationalist description of "it" undertaken by
(mostly) European theorists in the 1960s and after, but a sort of
self-promotional, and largely patriotic, attempt to construct an
avant-gardist literary movement in the old-fashioned Bloomsbury-style
concoction of what an avant-garde literary movement should be. (Granted,
Alain Robbe-Grillet & co. attempted much the same sort of thing in France in
the early 60s and produced equally colourless and unappetising fiction,
though some quite sensible prose essays ... )

Anyway (and I'd love to continue to wax lyrical about all that side of
things, the literary/critical history of it), to the question about "The
Story of Byron the Bulb" which, as Kai pointed out, does stand by itself as
a short story pretty well (and so gives one pause to consider whether that
was the way it was originally written and intended, only subsequently
inserted into that problematic fourth section of *GR*, modified to fit of
course, much like 'Under the Rose' was for *V.*, but even so hardly having
anything much to do in terms of character, setting etc with the rest of the
novel), I'd classify it as pretty standard detached, omniscient narrative
fare of your realist or naturalist ilk. It's fiction, of course, a paranoid
fantasy, inspired by a drug or dream-vision perhaps (think Coleridge) ...
but what it really is is *science* fiction of a particularly tasty,
spine-tinglingly 'Twilight Zone'-ish, cyberpunk-preempting mode. Imo.

What makes *GR* postmodern, then, is the way this approach to
fiction-writing is spliced holus bolus into a long, more or less unified
text which also utilises Modernist stream-of-consciousness narration,
traditional realist and naturalist techniques of the novel, allegory,
picaresque, fabliau, Menippean (and common and/or garden) satire, a haiku,
bad song lyrics, film jargon, aphorisms, opera scores, some pretty snappy
movie dialogue, a tv sitcom script, cues for the band and more, with nary a
thought to consistency or "literary decorum" or the apparent mutual
exclusiveness of these genres as they have been codified and manifestoed by
their respective practitioners and proponents. Iconoclasm and so forth. It's
not that this sort of thing hadn't been done before, because it has -- in
painting, architecture, philosophy, and in literature by Dante, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Rabelais, the Spanish picaresque novelists, Cervantes, Sterne,
Melville, Stein, Joyce -- ...

And this is only part of the story anyway because postmodernism is
inelucatably about the reading, or perceiving, of the text, and its
intertexts, and thus is a perpetually dynamic and elusive concept as well.
Recognition of the inescably logocentric and subjective nature of any
utterance means that *any* attempted expression of that recognition is
ultimately doomed to the same fate, as we pretty well established here
recently. Thus reflexiveness, infinite regress, mise en abyme, sometimes
despair, sometimes whimsicality, in the texts of writers who have come to
such a recognition. Possibly the typifying narrative space of the postmodern
text is the palimpsest. It's nothing like that silly Ken Wilber quote either
because the "value" (and social force) of any text is appointed by its
reader/s, and is not intrinsic to the text itself. There's no difference
between Hitler writing "and" in *Mein Kampf* and Primo Levi writing "and" in
*If This is a Man*. The "perspective", the way the Nazis read Nietzsche say,
or the KKK read the Bible, is a text in and of itself, and you and I or the
Unabomber or Ernst Nolte or the US Department of Defense or anyone else are
free to read the text of their actions any way we want to, and act upon it,
but this is then another text, and so forth and so on. There's no final
point, no ultimate perspective: we have to move "beyond good and evil" to be
able to get anywhere or else we're just stuck. Remember, it's a *distrust*
of the grand metanarratives, not throwing them out and replacing them with a
new one. And while it's all very well to trip up Derrida with semantics,
what you're doing in the exercise is exposing the infidelity of language and
confirming his point anyway ...

With postmodernism there's no time limit or use by date, and boundaries and
binaries are pretty much anathema. And (for the Francophobes among us) to
echo Eco (echo echo ... ) postmodernism is best perceived as a
transhistorical phenomenon, "not a trend to be chronologically defined, but,
rather, an ideal category ‹ or better still a Kunstwollen, a way of
operating." So Eco says of James Joyce's work: "*The Portrait* is the story
of an attempt at the modern. *Dubliners*, even if it comes before, is more
modern than Portrait. *Ulysses* is on the borderline. *Finnegans Wake* is
already postmodern, or at least it initiates the postmodern discourse: it
demands, in order to be understood, not the negation of the already said,
but its ironic rethinking." I'm not sure I quite understand the last bit,
and I'm not so keen on *Finnegans Wake* and much of Beckett for that matter
but ... what was the question again?


best


----------
>From: "Dave Monroe" <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
>Subject: Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Fri, Jun 30, 2000, 9:14 AM
>

> Perhaps the problem is that Modernist/postmodernist binary in the first place.
> While I'd have no difficulty leaning toward the latter--thinking esp. of Linda
> Hutcheon's notion of "historiographic metafiction" as a "postmodern" genre as
> evoked here earlier, of J-F Lyotard's characterization of the "postmodern" as
> entailing a distrust of "grand narratives" (which is not to say that GR is
> neither a narrative, nor grand, but ...), of the world/literary historical
> moment of Gravity's Rainbow in general--it does seem responsible to posit just
> how and where and when and why that slash is being written, to specify how a
> given work is "modernist" vs. "postmodernist" (and vice versa), and so forth
and
> so on ... so perhaps jbor might specify?  It's not a prticular bone of
> contention to me, however, though, again, I do have my predilection(s) ...
>
> David Morris wrote:
>
>> >From: "jbor"
>> >
>> >>>From: Terrance: I also think this story is told by Slothrop. Whata think
>> >>>about that?<<<
>>
>> >If it is told by Slothrop (which seems doubtful even so) then it would tend
>> >to contradict the earlier contention that *GR* is a straight Modernist
>> >narrative. You [DM] seem to be hinting at this too:<
>>
>> >>But I think we're in a realm now in GR where it's getting more and more
>> >>futile to try to link the narrative to any reality.  Threads and Themes
>> >>seem to take precedence, and the characters are only there for
>> >>illuminating the issues.<<
>>
>> Who in the world could contend that GR was a "straight Modernist narrative?"
>>   Maybe I don't understand the term???
>> DM
>>
>> ________________________________________________________________________
>> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
>