by John Barth
Well, but what is postmodernism? When one leaves off the mere recitation of proper names, and makes due allowance for the differences among any given author’s works, do the writers most often called postmodernist share any aesthetic principles or practices as significant as the differences between them? The term itself, like “post-impressionism,” is awkward and faintly epigonic, suggestive less of a vigorous or even interesting new direction in the old art of storytelling than of something anti-climactic, feebly following a very hard act to follow. One is reminded of the early James Joyce’s fascination with the word gnomon in its negative geometrical sense: the figure that remains when a parallelogram has been removed from a similar but larger parallelogram with which it shares a common corner.
My Johns Hopkins colleague Professor Hugh Kenner, though he does not use the term postmodernist, clearly feels that way in his study of American modernist writers (A Homemade World, 1975): After a chapter on William Faulkner entitled “The Last Novelist,” he dismisses Nabokov, Pynchon, and Barth with a sort of sigh. The later John Gardner goes even farther in his tract On Moral Fiction (1978), an exercise in literary kneecapping that lumps modernists and postmodernists together without distinction and consigns us all to Hell with the indiscriminate fervor characteristic of late converts to the right. Irving Howe (The Decline of the New, 1970) and George P. Elliott (The Modernist Deviation, 1971) would applaud—Professor Howe perhaps less enthusiastically than Professor Elliott. Professor Gerald Graff of Northwestern University, writing in Tri-Quarterly in 1975, takes a position somewhat similar to Kenner’s, as the titles of two of his admirable essays make clear: “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough” (Tri-Quarterly 26) and “Babbitt at the Abyss” (Tri-Quarterly 33). Professor Robert Alter of Berkeley, in the same magazine, subtitles his essay on postmodernist fiction “reflections on the aftermath of modernism.” Both critics proceed to a qualified sympathy for what they take to be the postmodernist program (as does Professor Ihab Hassan of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in his 1971 study The Dismemberment of Orpheus: towards a postmodern literature), and both rightly proceed from the premise that that program is in some respects an extension of the program of modernism, in other respects a reaction against it. The term postmodernism clearly suggests both; any discussion of it must therefore either presume that modernism in its turn, at this hour of the world, needs no definition—surely everybody knows what modernism is!—or else must attempt after all to define or redefine that predominant aesthetic of Western literature (and music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the rest) in the first half of this century.
Professor Alter takes the former course: His aforementioned essay opens with the words “Over the past two decades, as the high tide of modernism ebbed and its masters died off…” and proceeds without further definition to the author’s reflections upon the ensuing low tide. Professor Graff, on the other hand, borrowing from Professor Howe, makes a useful quick review of the conventions of literary modernism before discussing the mode of fiction which, in his words, “departs not only from realistic conventions but from modernist ones as well.”
It is good that he does, for it is not only postmodernism that lacks definition in our standard reference books. My Oxford English Dictionary attests modernism to 1737 (Jonathan Swift, in a letter to Alexander Pope) and Modernist to 1588, but neither term in the sense we mean. My American Heritage Dictionary (1973) gives as its fourth and last definition of modernism “the theory and practice of modern art,” a definition which does not take us very far into our American Heritage. My Columbia Encyclopedia (1975) discusses modernism only in the theological sense—the reinterpretation of Christian doctrine in the light of modern psychological and scientific discoveries—and follows this with an exemplary entry on el modernismo, a nineteenth-century Spanish literary movement which influenced the “Generation of ’98” and inspired the ultraísmo of which Jorge Luis Borges was a youthful exponent. Neither my Reader’s Encyclopedia (1950) nor my Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms (1960) enters modernism by any definition whatever, much less postmodernism.
Now, as a working writer who cut his literary teeth on Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, and the other great modernists, and who is currently branded as a postmodernist, and who in fact has certain notions, no doubt naïve, about what that term might conceivably mean if it is to describe anything very good very well, I am grateful to the likes of Professor Graff for not regarding his categories as self-defining. It is quite one thing to compare a line of Verdi or Tennyson or Tolstoy with a line of Stravinsky or Eliot or Joyce and to recognize that you have put the nineteenth century behind you:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. Constance Garnett)
riverrun, past Eve’s and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake)
It is quite another thing to characterize the differences between those two famous opening sentences, to itemize the aesthetic principles—premodernist and modernist—from which each issues, and then to proceed to a great postmodernist opening sentence and show where its aesthetics resemble and differ from those of its parents, so to speak, and those of its grandparents, respectively:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, tr. Gregory Rabassa)
Professor Graff does not do this, exactly, though no doubt he could if pressed. But I shall borrow his useful checklist of the characteristics of modernist fiction, add a few items to it, summarize as typical his and Professor Alter’s differing characterizations of postmodernist fiction, disagree with them respectfully in some particulars, and then fall silent, except as a storyteller.
The ground motive of modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order and its world view. Its artistic strategy was the self-conscious overturning of the conventions of bourgeois realism by such tactics and devices as the substitution of a “mythical” for a “realistic” method and the “manipulation of conscious parallels between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Graff is here quoting T. S. Eliot on James Joyce’s Ulysses); also the radical disruption of the linear flow of narrative, the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause-and-effect “development” thereof, the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical “meaning” of literary action, the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at the naïve pretensions of bourgeois rationality, the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse, and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the objective social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.
This checklist strikes me as reasonable, if somewhat depressing from our historical perspective. I would add to it the modernists’ insistence, borrowed from their romantic forebears, on the special, usually alienated role of the artist in his society, or outside it: James Joyce’s priestly, self-exiled artist-hero; Thomas Mann’s artist as charlatan, or mountebank; Franz Kafka’s artist as anorexic, or bug. I would add too, what is no doubt implicit in Graff’s catalogue, the modernists’ foregrounding of language and technique as opposed to straightforward traditional “content”: We remember Thomas Mann’s remark (in Tonio Kröger, 1903), “… what an artist talks about is never the main point”; a remark which echoes Gustave Flaubert’s to Louise Colet in 1852—“… what I could like to do… is write a book about nothing…”—and which anticipates Alain Robbe-Grillet’s obiter dictum of 1957: “… the genuine writer has nothing to say… He has only a way of speaking.” Roland Barthes sums up this fall from innocence and ordinary content on the part of modernist literature in Writing Degree Zero (1953):
/> … the whole of literature, from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of language.
This is French hyperbole: It is enough to say that one cardinal preoccupation of the modernists was the problematics, not simply of language, but of the medium of literature.
Now, for Professor Alter, Professor Hassan, and others, postmodernist fiction merely emphasizes the “performing” self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism, in a spirit of cultural subversiveness and anarchy. With varying results, they maintain, postmodernist writers write a fiction that is more and more about itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life in the world. For Graff, too, postmodern fiction simply carries to its logical and questionable extremes the antirationalist, antirealist, antibourgeois program of modernism, but with neither a solid adversary (the bourgeois having now everywhere co-opted the trappings of modernism and turned its defiant principles into mass-media kitsch) nor solid moorings in the quotidian realism it defines itself against. From this serious charge Graff exempts certain postmodernist satire, in particular the fiction of Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, and Stanley Elkin, as managing to be vitalized by the same kitschy society that is its target.
I must say that all this sounds persuasive to me—until I examine more closely what I’m so inclined to nod my head yes to.
It goes without saying that critical categories are as more or less fishy as they are less or more useful. I happen to believe that just as an excellent teacher is likely to teach well no matter what pedagogical theory he suffers from, so a gifted writer is likely to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles, not to mention what others take to be his aesthetic principles. Indeed, I believe that a truly splendid specimen in whatever aesthetic mode will pull critical ideology along behind it, like an ocean liner trailing seagulls. Actual artists, actual texts, are seldom more than more or less modernist, postmodernist, formalist, symbolist, realist, surrealist, politically committed, aesthetically “pure,” “experimental,” regionalist, internationalist, what have you. The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories. On the other hand, art lives in human time and history, and general changes in its modes and materials and concerns, even when not obviously related to changes in technology, are doubtless as significant as the changes in a culture’s general attitudes, which its arts may both inspire and reflect. Some are more or less trendy and superficial, some may be indicative of more or less deep malaises, some perhaps healthy correctives of or reactions against such malaises. In any case, we can’t readily discuss what artists aspire to do and what they end up doing except in terms of aesthetic categories, and so we should look further at this approximately shared impulse called postmodernism.
In my view, if it has no other and larger possibilities than those noted by, for example, Professors Alter, Graff, and Hassan, then postmodernist writing is indeed a kind of pallid, last-ditch decadence, of no more than minor symptomatic interest. There is no lack of actual texts illustrative of this view of the “postmodernist breakthrough”; but that is only to remind us that what Paul Valery remarked of an earlier generation applies to ours as well: “Many ape the postures of modernity, without understanding their necessity.” In my view, the proper program for postmodernism is neither a mere extension of the modernist program as described above, nor a mere intensification of certain aspects of modernism, nor on the contrary a wholesale subversion or repudiation of either modernism or what I’m calling premodernism: “traditional” bourgeois realism.
To go back a moment to our catalogue of the field-identification marks of modernist writing: Two other conspicuous ones are not yet there acknowledged, except by implication. On the one hand, James Joyce and the other great modernists set very high standards of artistry, no doubt implicit in their preoccupation with the special remove of the artist from his or her society. On the other hand, we have their famous relative difficulty of access, inherent in their antilinearity, their aversion to conventional characterization and cause-and-effect dramaturgy, their celebration of private, subjective experience over public experience, their general inclination to “metaphoric” as against “metonymic” means. (But this difficulty is not inherent, it is important to note, in their high standards of craftsmanship.)
From this relative difficulty of access, what Hassan calls their aristocratic cultural spirit, comes of course the relative unpopularity of modernist fiction, outside of intellectual circles and university curricula, by contrast with the fiction of, say, Dickens, Twain, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. From it comes also and notoriously the engenderment of a necessary priestly industry of explicators, annotators, allusion-chasers, to mediate between the text and the reader. If we need a guide, or a guidebook, to steer us through Homer or Aeschylus, it is because the world of the text is so distant from our own, as it presumably was not from Aeschylus’s and Homer’s original audiences. But with Finnegans Wake or Ezra Pound’s Cantos we need a guide because of the inherent and immediate difficulty of the text. We are told that Bertolt Brecht, out of socialist conviction, kept on his writing desk a toy donkey bearing the sign Even I must understand it; the high modernists might aptly have put on their desks a professor-of-literature doll bearing, unless its specialty happened to be the literature of high modernism, the sign Not even I can understand it.
I do not say this in deprecation of these great writers and their sometimes brilliant explicators. If modernist works are often forbidding and require a fair amount of help and training to appreciate, it does not follow that they are not superbly rewarding, as climbing Mount Matterhorn must be, or sailing a small boat around the world. To return to our subject: Let us agree with the commonplace that the rigidities and other limitations of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism, in the light of turn-of-the-century theories and discoveries in physics, psychology, anthropology, technology, etc., prompted or fueled the great adversary reaction called modernist art—which came to terms with our new ways of thinking about the world at the frequent expense of democratic access, of immediate or at least ready delight, and often of political responsibility (the politics of Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Nabokov, and Borges, for example, are notoriously inclined either to nonexistence or to the far right). But in North America, in western and northern Europe, in the United Kingdom, in Japan, and in some of Central and South America, at least, these nineteenth-century rigidities are virtually no more. The modernist aesthetic is in my opinion unquestionably the characteristic aesthetic of the first half of our century—and in my opinion it belongs to the first half of our century. The present reaction against it is perfectly understandable and to be sympathized with, both because the modernist coinages are by now more or less debased common currency and because we really don’t need more Finnegans Wakes and Pisan Cantos, each with its staff of tenured professors to explain it to us.
But I deplore the artistic and critical cast of mind that repudiates the whole modernist enterprise as an aberration and sets to work as if it hadn’t happened; that rushes back into the arms of nineteenth-century middle-class realism as if the first half of the twentieth century hadn’t happened. It did happen: Freud and Einstein and two world wars and the Russian and sexual revolutions and automobiles and airplanes and telephones and radios and movies and urbanization, and now nuclear weaponry and television and microchip technology and the new feminism and the rest, and except as readers there’s no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens. As the Russian writer Evgeny Zamyatin was already saying in the 1920s (in his essay On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy): “Euclid’s world is very simple, and Einstein’s world is very difficult; nevertheless, it is now impossible to return to Euclid’s.”
On the other hand, it is no longer necessary, if it ever was, to repudiate them, either: the great premodernists. If the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism, taught us that linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and middle-class moral
conventions are not the whole story, then from the perspective of these closing decades of our century we may appreciate that the contraries of those things are not the whole story either. Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy—these are not the whole story either.
A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis or transcension of these antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naïveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels (by my definition) as Beckett’s Texts for Nothing or Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace—not to mention the great mass of television-addicted non-readers. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art.
I feel this in particular for practitioners of the novel, a genre whose historical roots are famously and honorably in middle-class popular culture. The ideal postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and “contentism,” pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction. Alas for professors of literature, it may not need as much teaching as Joyce’s or Nabokov’s or Pynchon’s books, or some of my own. On the other hand, it will not wear its heart on its sleeve, either; at least not its whole heart. (In a recent published exchange between William Gass and John Gardner, Gardner declares that he wants everybody to love his books; Gass replies that he would no more want his books to be loved by everybody than he’d want his daughter to be loved by everybody, and suggests that Gardner is confusing love with promiscuity.) My own analogy would be with good jazz or classical music: One finds much on successive listenings or close examination of the score that one didn’t catch the first time through; but the first time through should be so ravishing—and not just to specialists—that one delights in the replay.
