JSF = The End of Postmodernism as we know it?

JSF has taken a lot of criticism so far for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but this graf from a NYTBR review by Walter Kirn may hurt the worst. If I'm reading it right, Kirn is calling ELIC the death-knell for postmodernism.

Once they've cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today's neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today's realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery. The avant-garde tool kit, developed way back when to disassemble established attitudes and cut through rusty sentiments, has now become the best means, it seems, for restoring them and propping them up. No traditional story could put forward the tritenesses that Foer reshuffles, folds, cuts into strips, seals in seven separate envelopes and then, astonishingly, makes whole, causing the audience to ooh and aah over notions that used to make it groan.

One final example. What if, Oskar muses at the conclusion of this triumph of human cuteness over human suffering, time could somehow run backward as in a movie and dead people could hop up and not be dead? This is when the novel's ideal reader is meant to riffle through the flip-book, while Oskar riffles through it in the story, and let himself, for one Peter Pan-ish moment, imagine how incredible that would be. Sept. 11 would never have happened! Even cooler and weirder, the pages of this novel, starting with the last, would all turn blank (except for the pages that are blank on purpose to teach us that some extremes of pain and loss can be signified only by the text of no text)!

I think Kirn is right:
1. We've had posmodernism as a legitimately incisive way to cut through the morass of a post-1960s world and say something new and interesting (Pynchon, et al.).
2. We've had postmodernism as a fun and somewhat interesting packaging for decent fictions meant to be consumed by average readers brought up in a computer/Internet age (Eggers et al.).
3. We now have postmodernism as kitschy, recycled garbage used to wrap up new-age koans in a pseudo-intellectual framework (ELIC + ?).

Where else is there left to go but down? I really have to agree with Kirn. It was a good run, we learned a lot, and much fun was had, but it's time to either a) be truly experimental and strike off in an entirely new direction or b) accept that pomo tools are now no more experimental or innovative than classic realism, and stop trying to pretend like you're doing something new or that simply employing them in your book is enough these days.

I think this has been true for some time now, but ECIL may be the book that finally shows us what we've become. It may be that central experince around which we can all glimpse the truth of the matter together and understand, as a group, what we've been suspecting individually.
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UPDATE
As part of the Brownie Watch, Ed provides some counterpoint.

Comments

[karl]

I think what we see with the likes of Foer and Eggers & "House of Leaves" especially isn't really postmodernism (which I still seem to see in the 1st definition you had, of the Pynchon sort) but more navel-gazing because of the capabilities of desktop publishing programs at present. When you go in 40 years' time from writing a novel on a manual typewriter to doing it on a computer in a program that gives you a file ready for the printer as soon as you last click save, people are going to tinker around and find ways to express things with design. That the book becomes more about its design than its spirit is obvious, sad, but unavoidable. We have books like "The Cheese Monkeys," which was written by a guy whose prior experience is that he designs book jackets. That book even noted on its copyright page is was composed entirely in QuarkXPress.

So I think we're moving away from Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, etc., & are going to be just left with "Things" - like Foer's book and McSwny's - objects that can compete with digital and online media because they are new and weird in their physical appearance. Things you can't render on a webpage, even if it means sacrificing what books are supposed to accomplish in the first place.

[Dan Wickett]

Great post and great comments by Karl. I agree that what we're seeing with these types of books do not compare at all to the Pynchon - Coover, etc. books of the late sixties.

Enjoy,

[Chris]

No, I can't agree with Kirn here. Jonathan Safran Foer employs them to make sentimental kitsch, _ergo_ modernist and postmodernist techniques are now devoid of value? Seems like a flawed equation to me, a throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. Kirn certainly doesn't back it up with examples of some pervasive "neo-experimentalist" movement doing the good work of Hallmark. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of novels being published by commercial imprints in the USA are in the tried-and-true mode of mimetic realism. Some of them are lousy. Some of them are terrific. Ditto with the stuff that employs what I'll refer to as "twentieth century techniques." Anyway, technique is technique. So the innovations of the last century have been absorbed into mainstream? About time. They can join all the other highly artificial, highly contrived tropes, mannerisms, and conceits that the novel has been adding to the tool kit since the days of DeFoe--the sorts of things that are the sum total of what any novel consists. To suggest that the "experimental" (in the sense Kirn means) is somehow deviant from some "normal" form in which the novel has been cast by the God of Fiction is just wrongheaded, and any technique can be used toward any end. Or, if I may: techniques don't make shitty books. Writers make shitty books.

[Ed]

I didn't see Chris' comment when I was banging out this week's Brownie Watch. But essentially, that's the problem. One book does not signal the end of a style or a movement. Nor can Kirn really figure out what JSF's intentions were. I suspect that having lots of time on his hands, JSF's intimately familiar with postmodernism.

Perhaps because JSF's book is high-profile, it's a setback or a wakeup call. If as you suggest, Scott, postmodernism is something firmly embedded in anyone's literary toolbox, then I think that's a positive thing. Because now the books don't have to be EXCLUSIVELY about the trickery. They can cut more to the heart of the matter.

And don't bemoan literary experimentation. It will continue so long as people are writing books.

[Scott]

Ed,

I totally agree. Now that pomo is pretty standard stuff, the books should be about more than the trickery, which seems to be the problem with JSF's newest.

I'm sure the experimentalism will continue. I just think that people should be aware that they'll need more than funny typesetting, etc to be considered experimental (which Foer, from his Village Voice interview, appeared to understand, even if his book indicates otherwise).

[derik]

I am tired of the word "trickery" in relation to experimentation. It's as if the author is trying to scam the reader in some way. If "trickery" is relevant to postmodernist experimentation it is no less relevant to mimetic realism (which in itself is trying to "trick" the reader into thinking it is somehow re-presenting reality).