THE EXCREMENTAL SUBLIME

[Otto]

THE EXCREMENTAL SUBLIME:
THE POSTMODERN LITERATURE OF BLOCKAGE AND RELEASE
by ROBERTO MARIA DAINOTTO,
Dept. of Comparative Literature, New York University
_Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.3 (May, 1993)

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[6]       There seems to be general agreement today about the
     fact that the first epochal horizon within which one can
     speak of postmodernity coincides with the alleged death of
     the subject--or, at least, with an "attenuation of the
     self," as Lionel Trilling puts it in _Sincerity and
     Authenticity_.  From the "loss of the self" of Wylie
     Sypher, through the "divided self" of Ronald Laing, to the
     "deconstructed self" of Leo Bersani, the identity of the "I"
     is dramatically scattered.
[7]       One can locate the first symptoms of the vanishing
     Emersonian self in the %schlemiel% of the literature of the
     fifties.^2^  Undoubtedly, there are specific historical
     reasons that generate this sense of pessimism and loss.  The
     crisis of consciousness in the literature of the fifties may
     well witness, in Edmund Wilson's words, the "homicidal and
     menacing schemes" of McCarthyan policy (Wilson 128).  At
     the turn of the new decade, Ken Kesey's _One Flew over the
     Cuckoo's Nest_ warns against the clinical suppression of the
     subject in the political style of Kubrick: "[they] try to
     make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow
     their rules, to live like they want to" (Kesey 57).  As
     Hendin puts it, society, as symbolized in Kesey's asylum,
     "controls and infantilizes [the subject] in the name of the
     best interests of the inmates" (Hendin 132).
[8]       And yet, the fiction of the sixties muses, with Kesey's
     McMurphy, an outside space ("We want to live out of this
     society," the king of the Merry Pranksters avows), the
     revival of the American dream, the fantasy of an ultimate
     frontier that, once crossed, will open onto the
     uncontaminated plains of ultimate innocence and freedom.
     Although the themes of power and suppression undergo some
     variations, say, from Kesey's dystopic vision to Kerouac's
     beatnik quest, the literature of the sixties traces a neat
     line between a power reduced to mere symbol of evil and an
     Adamic individual consciousness outside power and
     innocently extraneous to it.  Curiously enough, the writer
     of the sixties uses the themes of power and consciousness in
     a way that resembles Thoreau's, Whitman's, and Hawthorne's
     more than it resembles any postmodern writer's: the Walden
     of literature is still a sacred wood in which I sing myself
     far from the evil of civilization and far from its scarlet
     symbols of doom.  But is there any such a space of innocence
     in the coming society of the spectacle?
[9]       Postmodern statements on politics and society, from
     Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_ to Coover's _The Public
     Burning_, persistently echo the gloomy tones of Kesey's
     Foucauldian clinic--but where is the ultimate frontier of
     innocence and freedom?
          America was the edge of the World.  A message from
          Europe, continent-seized, inescapable.  Europe had
          found the site for its kingdom of Death, the special
          Death the West has invented. . . .  Now we are in the
          last phase.  American Death has come to occupy Europe.
          It has learned empire from its old metropolis. . . .
          Is the cycle over now and a new one ready to begin?
          Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon?
          . . . Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere,
          there is always the danger of falling.  (Pynchon 722-
          23)
     Or, as Richard Nixon admits in _The Public Burning_, some
     pages before being sodomized by Uncle Sam, "we cannot
     escape" (Coover 8).
[10]      Yet, the theory and practice of postmodernity may
     recast the question of "the crisis of consciousness," raised
     in the fifties and brought to its final "paranoid"
     conclusions in the sixties, in "a more positive mode of
     confrontation between subject and power" (Olderman 124);
     the postmodern answer to this question attempts at producing
     new and different structures of survival--"new mutants," to
     say it with Leslie Fiedler.  The argument I want to support
     with this paper can be summarized as follows: the claim of a
     death of the subject in postmodern discourse must be
     understood, %pace% all those critics who take the
     "death-theme" in absolute earnestness, as a "radical irony"
     (Ihab Hassan) which aims at reconstituting what one can
     call--%faute de mieux%--the "radical subject": a subject
     which stands to represent "the community of disappointed
     . . . literary intellectuals--and how many of us really
     stand outside this class?--whose basic need is to believe in
     the autonomy of self-fashioning."^3^  Escape is impossible,
     since Kesey's clinic is virtually everywhere, in "the crime
     labs . . . the records . . . the radios and the alarm system
     and the TV over the teller's cages . . . the cells and the
     jails and the schools and institutions . . . the traffic
     signals and the alternate-side-of-the-street parking
     regulation . . . the magnified maps of the city . . . the
     beats and patrols," as Elkin's _Bad Man_ witnesses (70); and
     yet, the repressive project of society reveals itself
     inefficient to discipline the postmodern self-fashioning
     individual.
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http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/dept/libdata/applications/ejournals/b/n-z/.unindexed/PMC/by_filename/3/dainotto.593