NP - Poo-pooing PoMo, futility for the feeble minded

[Mark Kohut]

Since this thread is back I'm going to appropriate it--in a modernist way,
I would argue--for another  post on *Operation Shylock. *

First, this is the only Philip Roth novel that one might even imagine being
written
by Thomas Pynchon, I suggest, stretching it. Why? All the layers of
narrative ambiguity is the major reason.
One could, in a Borgesian backward-looking influence way--Borges did this;
it is fun--, call it *The Bleeding Edge of the Middle East. *

Second, I can still hear Philip Roth decidedly disagree so fully, laughing
gently but firmly with Terri Gross whom he had to set straight,
when she asked him about his postmodern turn. The interview could
have been about this novel, or the one about an adulterous affair he tells
backward or *The Counterlife, dunno, *which will inevitably
bring up Pynchon's Counterforce concept in some of us. He said "Terri, I do
not even know what postmodernism *is, *really...I just try to
tell the story [with its meanings] the best way I can".

Three: the midwife of Roth--Pynchon would be Le Carre in this convoluted
novel about spying, and lying, and therefore identity
and reality and truth. Roth has written that Le Carre's *A Perfect Spy
[1986] *was 'the best' English novel since the war.
Imagine, all those grand English novels, a Nobelist or three in there and
Philip said this.

And, unlike some PoMo books, I say, it is anchored in the real (sic)
reality of the Demjanjik trial--the defense argued, of course, that this
Cleveland autoworker
was NOT the young Ukranian peasant who gleefully-- happily- tortured some
Jews unspeakably as he herded all he could into death. Identity and reality *in
real life. *The riff where Roth
writes of him as if his youthful, manly self was FULFILLED, in a
perverted/inverted Aristotelian Ethics or Maslow way, so to speak, is so
over the top
yet .....one gets it. A Byron the Bulb-like sublimity on evil, maybe.

And the NOT POMO conceit: a man calling himself Philip Roth is getting
attention in Israel for his solution to the Middle East problem, which
I won't spoil, so THE real Philip Roth has to meet him and challenge him
and then what happens and there is an old grad school friend of Roth's,
whom he hasn't seen in over 30 years but, of course, in a Pynchon plot-like
parodic way, "who should he run into" in this outdoor market, etc....
This man is Egyptian and as obsessed with his view of Israel as is the fake
Roth and, as is said by some about Israel, the relentless arguing is
Israel.

Roth has a good line about paranoia, which I cannot find, which permeates
this novel too, since, well, think about it.

And, on IF--how, whether--a writer can get to the thing-in-itself in his
fiction, esp this fiction, Roth's brilliant drilling into the whole
history of fictional naturalism, realism, the redefinition of realism
always asserting NOW we're there....... yet........are we?

A great novel, I say. I vote that three of Roth's are greater than all the
good ones. The Ghostwriter, Sabbath's Theater and Operation Shylock.
and maybe American Pastoral (but not quite imho). Portnoy strains a bit,
LOL. The great Zuckerman novels are four, of course.   Richness, beauty of
execution, originality, life.

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 5:54 AM matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ciao Leute,
>
> I know this pertains to a recent thread that seems to have run its course
> and therefore I arrive late to the conversation, but it seems Prof.
> Peterson arrived when the party was already over.
>
> Given the state of the world, I was a bit loath to respond. Proto-fascistic
> posturing politicians and their corporate fellow travellers throw democracy
> to the dogs and enable dictators and strongmen from N. Korea to Venezuela
> and Brazil while ignoring the urgent UN environmental report from last week
> and wrecking the future of coming generations, all for their 30 pieces of
> silver.
>
> And yet when I see Peterson position himself thus and target the Humanities
> so broadly, I see it as a move to delegitimize those academic agents that
> have long been under attack from the right and I feel the need to respoond.
> For what it's worth.
>
> Jordan Peterson seems to be unaware that his nemesis received its post
> mortem reports some time ago. He is tilting at the monsters of his mind;
> one step from arguing with evangelists proselytizing outside the Uni.
> student union. Or Flat-earthers. (Not that surprising since conservatives
> rarely have intellects of any real stature - not since Edmund Burke, though
> some might add Buckley). Let me explain.
>
> JP is late to the PoMo bashing game. Had he done some research he would
> have found early reports of its passing. One of the first came from John
> Frow in his essay "What Was Postmodernism" in 1990. Almost 30 years ago.
> However, more recently some of the intellectual architects that summoned up
> PoMo into the scholastic realm have declared it to be past. See none other
> than Linda Hutcheon's "Postmodern Afterthoughts" (2002) or even Andreas
> Huyssen's "After the High/ Low Debate" (1999).
>
> Richard Rorty once said (more or less) that there can be no end to
> philosophy, just to research paradigms. He's right. When's the last time
> you heard someone employ the term elan vital while citing Henri Bergson? Or
> what about Sartre who was widely cited in the 50's and 60's? Perhaps now we
> are seeing those mandarins of thought so oft cited in the 80's and 90's
> being relegated to a different shelf.
>
> I've never gone in for bashing postmodernism, in part out of respect for
> those that are so heavily invested in this research paradigm but also
> because I saw no need. My own trajectory brought me into contact with
> thinkers that simply did not engage with the term in the way that some
> thinkers or artists seemed to wrap themselves in the banner of Pomo (think
> of Lyotard or Baudrillard in philosophy, John Barthes in literature). Both
> Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier managed to keep their distance from the
> term in the work that they did. In fact, the whole explosion of
> 'postmodernism' was always a greater phenomena in the US than in Europe.
>
> (If anyone is interested in looking anew at the issue - the High/ Low
> debate as a base for the idea of modernity and postmodernity -  but from
> the perspective of intellectual history, one would do well to read
> Michaels North's "Reading 1922". He provides powerful documentation and
> argumentation that seriously challenges Huyssen's claims in "After the
> Great Divide".)
>
> That said, is there a complaint to be made regarding the academic ivory
> tower and its orders and proselytes and the rhetoric they employ to
> communicate? Yes. All of us have heard or read what amounts to jargony B.S.
> by those that have learned to mimic the use of certain terms and concepts
> accompanied by a nice name sauce (add the usual Pomo suspects); that is
> what made the Sokal hoax possible.
>
>  This is a disservice to the Human Sciences (humanities) and more so to
> students who then learn to talk the talk. The effect is that Administration
> sees these departments as less than serious or essential to a University -
> so where have cuts been felt more deeply and for longer? Not in the MB
> programs or STEM careers.
>
> Obviously, I can't provide an answer in a post that is already a bit too
> long, but I can say that I am partial to Gerald Graff's idea of "teaching
> the controversy" (not to be mistaken with the appropriated version used by
> creationists). As long as departments and faculty exist in separate
> academic cantons it will be very difficult or even impossible to move
> beyond talking past one another or worse throwing academic insults over
> theoretical walls.
>
> Hey, maybe Peterson and Zizek can go on the road like Liddy and Leary back
> in the day. On second thought... maybe not.
>
> ciao
> mc otis
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>