Go Read Something Else: In Defense of Modernism, Postmodernism, and Beyond

I was going to wait to bring this out, but Dan Green's post has got my angry anti-pomo-haters energies going, so . . .

Lee Siegel, Gail Caldwell, James Wood, and anyone else who categorically doesn't like postmodern fiction, go read this essay from The Nation. I'll understand if you don't have the energy to click over and spend 10 minutes on it, so here's the money part:

Sadly, fictional realism, a misnomer from the get-go because artists have always highlighted one aspect of experience and ignored another, calcified into naturalism, which claims absolute fidelity to brute existence. . . . This is doubly dulling because, at the same time, new technologies and media have made pure literary verisimilitude superfluous. . . . Upton Sinclair could still write The Jungle, which swayed legislation, but Jacob Riis's slum snapshots accomplished the same thing in an instant. When it comes to representation, a picture is worth a thousand words.

You got that? It means that #1 all fiction is unrealistic to a certain extent, and #2 if you want to adhere so close to realism, stop writing fiction and become a journalist and/or pick up a camera.

Now that we got that straightened out, here:

So what's a writer to do? Compelled by nature to string words together, loath to take up a squeegee instead of a pen, the novelist shifts to the less easily representable. Literature moves in an ascending trajectory from the Modernist peregrinations through internal consciousness of Joyce, Proust and Woolf into the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, and then into a uniquely contemporary crackpot realism exemplified by "world writers" like India's Salman Rushdie, Israel's David Grossman, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk and Japan's Haruki Murakami. [Their style] irks some critics, who see them as navel-gazing, if occasionally brilliant, solipsists who avoid the moral and emotional core of life that "ought" to be the proper domain of the novel.

These critics--reporters really--who disdain works not easily fact-checked are wrong. What these writers are aiming at is not facts but truth.

You got that? That means stop picking on Wallace because his characters do wacky shit. Stop picking on Murakami because Colonel Sanders makes a cameo.

Repeat after me: Haruki Murakami is not writing to explore the inner mental and emotional state of Colonel Sanders! You cannot repeat this often enough.

Believe it or not, there are other ways to render emotions than to impale a benighted widow on the horns of a dilemma. There are other ways to explore the alienation of modern society than by describing a man who drinks himself to death.

In fact, I'll go you all one better. I'm not even sure if good old 19th century realism is adequate to fully comprehend some of the stuff going on in this world of ours. Shoot folks, this is a wacky world we're living in. We're passing laws to make the custom genetic resurrection of dead pet cats illegal. We've got computers that let us find information on virtually any topic instantly, and let us communicate worldwide easily and quickly. We've lost our faith in both God and Communism and I think we're running out of utopic visions to believe in. This is some heavy shit, and maybe, just maybe, we need a little experimental fiction to think about it in new and interesting ways. Maybe all this carping over how great Chekhovian realism was is just like good old mom and dad remembering back to how nice everything was in the 1950s. Nice and romanticised, but actually false and dangerous.

Comments

[Matt]

Great post.

[R J Keefe]

Doesn't it come down to this: some people find fantasy destructive and keep it to themselves, while others find it liberating and inspirational. I don't think that either group is right, any more than sexual preferences can be right. It's best just to leave the stuff that doesn't appeal alone.

[Scott]

R.J.,

Hence my post's title. What pisses me off is that certain critics think they have a monopoly on saying which genre is best of all, and they get extremely snooty when they lower themselves to the bothersome task of dismissing works that don't adhere to their annointed genre.

[SisterRye]

I like this part (in reference to crit. of Vollman)--

"Note the pejorative quotation marks with which he surrounds "big, ambitious novel." Would he prefer a "small, lackadaisical novella"?

[SisterRye]

Another good quote -- "Of course, ambition does not inevitably lead to accomplishment, but it's a necessary precondition, and not all such books are successful. Nonetheless, they are the only ones that, by replicating the disorder, are attempting to create order in a painfully inchoate universe. Their various tongues blend into a single voice that aspires to no less than rebuilding Babel. From its beginnings until now, this has been the ultimate task of fiction."

[jai]

hey thanks for the link! my phd needs quotes like these thank you! tomorrow I'll link it!