Prose 'after' Postmodernism: The New American School

 From Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen's American Literature: A History (Routledge, 2014)

(The American Century: World War I to the Present - The End and Return of History: 1980-2010)

Prose 'after' postmodernism

Few of the 'classical' postmodernists who continued writing into the new millennium succeeded in repeating their earlier successes. This applies particularly to Barth, whose many novels, some of them very voluminous, like The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), and story collections endelessly keep turning over themes and techniques identical to those of his earlier work. Gaddis did pretty much the same in A Frolic of His Own (1994), a book harping on the difference between what is true justice and what the judicial system makes of it, while in Carpenter's Gothic (1985) he satirized religious fundamentalism and personal greed. The postmodern fame of Stanley Elkin (1930-95) rests mainly on the combination of exuberant language and black humor in The Dick Gibson Show (1971), about a boy who is enthralled to the voices coming out of the radio, and The Franchiser (1976), about a man who builds a fast food chain but finds the meaning of life thorugh the multiple sclerosis he suffers from, and from which Elkin himself also died. In his later work Elkin took a more and more tragic view of things. George Mills (1982) is about a man who feels betrayed by God. In The Magic Kingdom (1985) a man who has lost his son takes a group of terminally ill children on a trip to Disneyland. In The Rabbi of Lud (1987) a New Jersey rabbi struggles with his faith.

With Slow Learner (1984) Pynchon published a collection of his early stories, and he brought new work with Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006). Although both Vineland, set in Northern California in a milieu of over-age hippies, and Mason & Dixon, about the two men, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, that drew the famous line that divided the Northern, non-slave holding parts of the U.S. from the Southern slave-holding parts, and recounted in eighteenth-century English, sported all kinds of peculiarities (zany ditties, fantastic events, a cavalier treatment of history) also typical of Pynchon's earlier fiction, they both received mixed reviews, the later novel faring somewhat better than the earlier. Against the Day, though was an immediate hit with the critics. A massive affair, like V. A Novel and Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day plays intricate games with history, with language, with its characters, and with the reader. A central plotline features the anarchist Webb Traverse in his fight against capitalism, his murder on behalf of the industrialist Scarsdale Vibe, and the desire on the part of his three sons to revenge their father's death. Set around the turn of the twentieth century the novel indulges in all kinds of eccentrics, including a dog that reads Henry James, travel through the center of the earth, and countless subplots, all of it brought in a welter of styles, varying from the language of juvenile adventure to tough guy hard-boiled and everything in between. Like Pynchon's earliest books, Against the Day finally leaves the reader with more questions than answers, but also with the feeling that something important has been touched upon.

The most overtly technically postmodern early work of Don DeLillo (1936-) is Ratner's Star (1974), in which a fourteen-year-old mathematical genius decodes an alien message announcing that the earth is about to enter a zone in which the laws of physics no longer apply, and which at the time was often likened to the work of Pynchon. DeLillo's other early novels focused, often satirically, on American popular culture phenomena such as American football or rock and roll. White Noise (1985) established DeLillo as a major author. The novel features a university professor in 'Hitler Studies' (yet who cannot read German), who gets caught in an environmental disaster, but who also is confronted with his own fears of death. The novel is a satire of university life, but even more so of how important events are hijacked by the media and turned into spectacle for an audience bent on sensation. Undoubtedly it is not a coincidence that the cable network CNN was launched in 1980, and that this was also the period in which French thinkers such as Guy Debord (1931-94) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) were busily discussed in American literary circles for the relathionship they posited between consumer society, the cult of the spectacle, and the simulacrisation or simulation of reality in the media. DeLille continued this line of thought in Libra (1988), with as protagonist the murderer of President Kennedy, Mao II (1991), and especially the massive Underworld (1997). Waste, and the problems it causes  in a consumerist society, are a central topic in this novel, the action of which spans the 1950s to the 1990s, with many interlocking plots, settings ranging from the New York Giants' baseball grounds to an artist's studio, and both fictional and historical characters. The novel's title refers to how waste is buried, to the criminal underworld, to the things hidden in history, and to how all of this refuses to remain buried and leads a life of its own. On appearance Underworld was hailed as a major achievement and as one of the most important works of American fiction of the final quarter of the twentieth century. Since Underworld DeLillo has delivered shorter fictions. In Cosmopolis (2003) he once again addresses issues of mediatisation, the world of advertising, and the fads dominating American life. Falling Man (2007) describes how a man who has been wounded in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack looks for new meaning in life. Unlike other first generation postmodernists DeLillo does not use metafiction to approach the postmodern life-world, but meticulously mirrors the latter's emptiness and artificiality in the smooth, stylized, polished but clichéd dialogue of his protagonists, who seem to be unable to go beyond the surface of things. His latter works, though, clearly also engage more directly with both human and social reality.

As of the 1980s a new generation of writers started putting postmodern techniques to new ends. Kathy Acker (1947-97; née Karen Lehmann) from the mid-1970s to her death in 1997 published a number of texts that combine the experimentalism of Burroughs, Sukenick and Federman with a militant feminism. Paul Auster (1947-) is most classically postmodern in his early The New York Trilogy, consisting of City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), and in the late Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), which is not only metafictional but likewise heavily intertextual and self-reflective in that all characters, except for the narrator 'Mr. Blank' issue from earlier novels by Auster. Central to the three novels gathered in The New York Trilogy are questions of language, reality and identity. In City of Glass the protagonist, Quinn, on a whim takes on the role of 'the detective Paul Auster' to investigate a case loosely based on the histories of Caspar Hauser and the wild boy of Aveyron, later meets 'the author Paul Auster', gradually loses all his possessions and his identity, and in the end turns out to have literally dissolved into thin  air, the only evidence of his ever having been anywhere being a little red notebook. In Ghosts  a private detective called 'Blue' is hired by 'White' to observe 'Black'. But Black is a detective too, hired to observe someone. Moreover, it begins to look more and more as if White was actually Black in disguise. The story ends with a violent confrontation between Black and Blue. Blue wins, puts on his hat, and departs, leaving the reader totally confused. Quinn and the red notebook from City of Glass return in The Locked Room, be it that the notebook here belonged to Fanshawe, a writer who has disappeared without a trace and whom Quinn is hired to find, without result. The narrator, a friend of Fanshawe's, then gradually assumes the role and identity of Fanshawe, until it appears that Fanshawe is still alive and the narrator has one last conversation with him, though a locked door. Fanshawe is a character from the eponymous novel by Hawthorne, and this is only one of the many intertextual references to literary canonicals throughout The New York Trilogy. Moreover, a number of episodes in the life of Fanshawe, as we get to hear it, correspond with events in the life of Auster himself. In all, The New York Trilogy is a beguiling play with narrative paradoxes, names and identities, the borderlines between fiction and reality, and the literary canon, raising the familiar postmodern issues of language, identity, power, reality, and the (im)possibility of knowing the latter. 

Auster's many novels following The New York Trilogy all in one way or another pose the same questions as did his first and still most popular work. A number of them feature recurring characters, with Quinn for instance resurfacing in In the Country of Last Things (1987) while the protagonest of that novel, Anna Blume, reappears in Moon Palace (1989). Most of them have most unlikely plots, The Music of Chance (1990) being concerned with the building of an endlessly long and useless wall, and Timbuktu (1999) being narrated by a dog. The majority of Auster's characters suffer from one obsession or another. The protagonist of The Book of Illusions (2002), for instance, is obsessed by a movie actor that disappeared in the 1920s. These, and most other fictions by Auster, such as Leviathan (1992) or Oracle Nights (2004), offer a very grim outlook on life, the exception being Mr. Vertigo (1994), in which a nine-year-old orphan learns how to fly. IN some of his later fictions Auster casts characters that after a serious disease or mishap have to get their life back on the rails and make a new beginning. This is so in Oracle Nights, but also in The Brooklyn Follies (2005). Man in the Dark (2008) sees the U.S. torn apart by a new Civil War, while Invisible (2009), a novel in four parts modeled on the seasons, harps on Auster's usual questions about the reliability of language to capture reality, including memories of the past, and authorship. Sunset Park (2010), finally, seems less convoluted, perhaps less 'postmodern' than his earlier work, and once again reflects on how to make a new start in life.

With Richard Powers (1957-) we turn to a set of authors, sometimes referred to as 'The New American School', who have clearly grown up with postmodernism as a major influence, but who in various ways go beyond it. With Powers, as with David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), Mark Z. Danielewski (1966-), Dave Eggers (1970-) and Jonathan Safran Foer (1977-), the postmodern connnection most clearly shows in their fascination with themes of language and identity, and with how they fashion their narratives to reflect them. Powers made his debut with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), which is undeniably postmodern in both technique and themes. We are first given a series of reflections on art, and specifically photography in the modern era, what the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), who is quoted by Powers, called 'the era of mechanical reproduction', followed by episodes in the lives of three young men photographed on their way to a dance in August 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, and by how a Boston editor of a computer magazine discovers that one of the young men pictured in the photograph is his grandfater. Finally, however, everything turns out to be a verbal construct raised on a photograph of three unknown young men on a country road. Prisoner's Dilemma (1988) likewise plays with postmodern constructions and masquerades, and alternative realities, giving Walt Disney Japanese ancestors, for instance. The Gold Bug Variations (1991) via its title to a story by Edgar Allan Poe, but also to J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations as played by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, and to the structure of DNA, the discovery or near-discovery of which by the scientist-narrator provides the backbone of the novel. Although undeniably inventive, The Gold Bug Variation risks sacrificing story and character to erudition, and this applies even more to Operation Wandering Soul (1993). In Galatea 2.2 (1995) Powers himself admits that with his two previous books he had reached a dead end. He does so by mouth of 'the author Richard Powers' who, after having written a couple of books (that is to say Prisoner's Dilemma and The Gold Bug Variations) during a prolonged stay in The Netherlands, on his return to the U.S. discovers that he has nothing left to say. Like Barth in his 1960s fictions, though Powers in Galatea 2.2 turns this defeat into a triumph by having his author Richard Powers narrate the genesis of his earlier Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. If this still sounds very classically postmodern, with his next novel Powers broke out of this mold. Gain (1998) draws a powerful picture of the rise of corporate America, and of how the individualistic and visionary entrepreneurism of the nineteenth century has developed into the nameless and faceless executive leadership of the late twentieth century. In Plowing the Dark (2000) computer-generated virtual reality in the service of the military is juxtaposed to an American being held hostage by guerrillas in Lebanon, the connecting factor between the two being the threat they both pose to man's mental sanity. The Time of our Singing (2003) addresses problems of racial inequality and discrimination via the marriage and offspring of a German-Jewish immigrnat and an African American woman. In The Echo Maker (2006) Powers raises questions about the about the relationship between reality, memory and identity via a protagonist who, as the result of a car accident, suffers from Capgras syndrome, the unfounded conviction that someone familiar is in fact an impostor. At the same time Powers also addresses issues of nature conservation and land and water use vua a refuge of sandhill cranes in Nebraska, the setting of the novel. In Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) the possible discovery of a genetic source of happiness and its possible or potential commercial misuse provide the central strand. 

In several of his essays, collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005) and Both Flesh and Not (2012), David Foster Wallace denounced postmodernism for its ironical anti-humanism and metafictional pirouettes, and for the disrespect it showed its characters. Instead, he argued for '"real", albeit pop-mediated characters'. Especially John Barth seems to have served as Wallace's prime target, as can be seen from the parody of the latter in the story 'Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way', from the collection Girl with Curious Hair (1989). A look at his own work, though, and particularly at his debut, The Broom of the System (1987), leads us to suspect that with these denunciations of his immediate predecessors Wallace was primarily trying to lay his own literary ghosts. With characters named Rick Vigorous, Candy Mandible, Wang-Dang Lang, a talking parrot called 'Vlad the Impaler', a publishing company that goes by the name 'Frequent and Vigorous' (the director of which cannot live up to that motto in the bed of the novel's protagonist Lenore Beardsman), and the zany plan of the Ohio state authorities to create a 'Great Ohio Desert' to foster recreation, the shadow of Pynchon looms heavily over The Broom of the System. Add to this that the plot concerns a search for truth and identity by Lenore, which also involves a search for her great-grandmother also called Lenore, the latter having been a student of Wittgenstein, and the relationship between languasge and reality that is the holy grail of classical postmodernism reappears again here too.

Wallace's massive (1079 pages) second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), definitively established him as one of the most important voices of his generation. In this novel Wallace, in his own words, tries to describe 'what it's like to live in America around the millennium'. The book is set in a near future in which the U.S., Canada and mexico have united to form the Organization of North American Nations, also known as O.N.A.N., with a clear Biblical reference. The President of O.N.A.N. is a former pop-singer and actor, the larger part of New England and South-Eastern Canada is used as a dump for toxic waste, transported there by rocket, and society has become commercialized to the extent that calendar years no longer go by digits but by sponsor advertisements: 'Year of the Whopper', 'Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad'. There is a gang of French-Canadian terrorists ('Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' [sic]) chasing a movie, 'The Entertainment', that is so impossible to tear oneself away from that its spectators die from dehydration, and with which the assassins plan to bring down the hated American society. Infinite Jest also sports 388 endnotes. All of this sounds very Pynchonesque, but other than his postmodernist predecessors, and unlike his own earlier work, Wallace in Infinite Jest focuses on the existential anxieties life in such a disorienting and disoriented society engenders. What matters, Wallace insists, is that notwithstanding all the linguistic frolics and jests his characters are 'real' people, with 'real' problems, even if the environment in which they find themselves is recognizably postmodern. To use postmodern irony in these conditions would be unforgivable and stand in the way of real human communication and compassion. Notwithstanding their often comical use of language and situations, the same move toward what we can broadly call a variation of psychological realism can also be noted in the stories collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004), with the tone of the latter colelction getting grimmer, influenced by the events of 9/11, which are also referred to a few times. 

Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves created a major stir upon publication in 2000. Of all the more recent publications this is probably the most orthodoxly postmodern. The novel's central given is a report of a documentary movie registering how movie producer Navidson and his crew explore the enormous spaces that without warning have attached themselves ot his house and that, like the house itself, can just as unpredictably change shape. The report, written up by a certain Zampanó, after the latters death is found by Johnny Truant, an assistant in a tattoo shop and on the brink of succumbing to his drug addiction. To Zampanó's already copious notes Truant adds his own, which clearly show him to be sliding into paranoia. All of this is edited and edited again by nameless further editors that themselves add the occasional further footnote. Zampanó's notes refer to both existing and non-existing articles and books, to scholarly and pseudo-scholarly discussions, and to pseudo-commentaries by Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen King, and Jacques Derrida. Add o this that the novel's page lay-out mirrors Navidson's moves, thereby forcing the reader to sometimes hold the book upside down or at an anlge, uses different colors, and sports a great number of different fonts, including braille and musical notations, as well as photobraphs, drawings, and poems, and that an exhaustive index concludes it all. House of Leaves is hilariously and irrepresibly inventive in its use of techniques yet at the same time extremely menacing in atmosphere, even to the point of horror. As a result, the reader is constantly torn between a distancing reading of what after all could only be sheer linguistic construction—literally a 'house of leaves', that is to say leaves of a book or pages—and a strong emotional response called forth by the reality of the situations and the characters. It is this tension that finally yields the meaning, and the greatness, of House of Leaves. In his second novel, Only Revolutions (2006), loosely modeled on the genre of the road novel, but also involving a trip through American history, Danielewski tried to outdo the experimentalism even of House of Leaves.

Dave Eggers gained immediate fame with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) a deeply moving and at the same time hilariously funny metafictional recount of the period immediately following the decease of the parents of the protagonist Dave Eggers. When father and mother Eggers die within a month of one another the three older Eggers children, but in the first instance Dave, take upon themselves the care of the much younger Toph. Although based in fact, Eggers' account is thoroughly fictionalized. The book shows many postmodern features, but the pain the Eggers children feel is undeniably real and authentic. Not surprisingly, then, in interviews Eggers has consistently declined to be identified as a postmodernist, a position borne out by his later books, such as You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), in which two friends find out how difficult it is to give away money on reasonable gounds, even in desperately poor places, or What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Dent (2006), the true story of a Sudanese refuge. In A Hologram for the King (2012) Eggers tackles the excesses of globalization and the personal and collective dramas they lead to.

In Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan, a young Jewish American, visits the Ukraine in search of the village where his ancestors emighrated to the U.S. He meets a young Ukrainian, Alex, who, along with his grandfather, the latter's unbelievable dog ('Sammy Davis, Junior, called Junior') and equally incredible car, takes Jonathan to his destination. All this is being recounted by Alex in a hilarious—and occasionally belabored—varian of the English language. Alex also keeps up a running correspondence with Jonathan. The true beginning of the story, thouh, lies in Trachimbrod, the village Jonathan is looking for. It soon transpires that the history of Trachibrod is being reconstructed, or better, construed, by Jonathan , who sends chapters to Alex for the latter's comment. For the longest time the history of Trachimbrod remains as hilarious as Alex's usage of English, but it assumes a grimmer outleook when it becomes clear that Alex's grandfather himself comes from Trachimbrod, that the village has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Nazis, and that the grandfather in question has played a less than heroic role in this event. Issues of memory, reality, and language, and the thin line between fact and fiction, play a major role in Everything Is Illuminated, and give the novel a postmodern tinge, but the latter, as with Eggers, Danielewski, and the later works of  Powers, is here again gainsid by the authenticity of the tragic events and the reality of the characters. This is less the case in Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), notwithstanding the fact that this novel is rooted in the events of 9/11, one of the first novels to do so. Foer's use of typographical and other tricks recalls Danielewski's House of Leaves, but his protagonist oscar Schell, a nine-year-old who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks, is obviously modeled on Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum (1959) by German writer Günther Grass (1927-[2015]). And a number of characters and episodes further recall earlier instances of inhuman behavior, such as the bombardment of Dresden and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima by the Allies in World War II. With Eating Animals (2009) Foer made a plea against present-day commercial practices around food, such as factory farming and commercial fishing. 

The work of Nicole Krauss (1974-) shares a number of characteristics and topics with that of Foer. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room (2002), although not immediately referring to 9/11 itself, has nevertheless been seen as expressing the mood of desolation and despair caused by those events. A novel about memory, the hopelessness and passing of love, and the loneliness of life, all tied together by a nuclear experiment conducted in the Mojave desert in 1957, Man Walks into a Roo is an extended symbolical reflection on good and evil, and on the need for the U.S. to leave the trauma of 9/11 behind while at the same time searching for its causes. Krauss has listed DeLillo as one of her main influences, but the mood of Man Walks into a Room, the apparently aimless conversations, the games with language and memory, the role of coincidence, and how man suffers all this without understanding why and without a hold on her or his own existence, also recall the work of Paul Auster. In fact, the book obliquely refers to Auster when the desert is compared to a 'hunger artist', a thematic constant of much of auster's work, especially in his middle period. The History of Love (2005) is concerned with the Holocaust, features a character from Slonim, in present-day Belarus, from which one of Krauss's Jewish grandparents originated, and its plot at least partially truns upon a manuscript. The Great House (2010), with magical realist traits, again is rooted in Jewish history, and links the lives of characters living as far apart as Chile, the U.S. London and Jerusalem via a desk of many drawers. 

Minimalism, Dirty Realism and Generation X

 

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