1

Contemporary American Literature

Course 2_1
2
nd
Year American Studies
3
rd
Year English minor
Spring Semester 2011
Profdr !odica "ihaila
THE POSTWAR AMERICAN NOVEL (Postmodernism)
#Cultural Radicalism and the Matrix of Postmodernism from !odica "ihaila$ The
American Challene %&ni'ersitatea (ucuresti$ 1))*+ pp13,-1*0.
Cultural Radicalism and the Matrix of Postmodernism
In a decade like the 1960s, whose hallmark was radicalism,
cultural radicalism quite often borrows attitudes and gestures from
political radicalism, and vice-versa.
35)
In a most pertinent cultural
analysis entitled Sensibility in the 1960s, Daniel Bell singled out five
characteristic features of cultural radicalism in the decade: a concern
with violence and cruelty; a preoccupation with the sexually perverse; a
desire to make noise; an anti-cognitive and anti-intellectual mood; an
effort once and for all to erase the boundary between art and life; and
a fusion of art and politics.
36)
At the general level of culture, violence and cruelty echoed the
political and social violence of the decade; the Vietnam War, city riots,
race riots, students revolts, anti-war demonstrations, rebellious
movements of every kind, and a record of political assassinations:
President Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in
1967 and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Films, such as Bonnie and Clyde,
happenings and paintings, were all saturated with blood-curdling details
meant simply to shock and terrify. Within the context of total sexual
permissiveness created by the sexual revolution in the 1960s and early
1970s, the preoccupation with the sexually perverse, the obsession
with homosexuality, transvestism and other deviations from heterosexual
life became aggressively open and direct, particularly in films and in the
theatre, and so did the release of female sexuality. The desire to make
noise discussed by Bell in contradiction to the desire of the 1950s to
create an aesthetic of silence, as in the plays of Samuel Beckett or the
music of John Cage, made of the sixties a period of noise, the new
sound of the Beatles in 1964 being only the beginning of an indulgence
into scaring crescendos which reached a peak of noisy intensity in the
great rock festivals at Woodstock and Altamont.
37)
The anti-
cognitive, anti-intellectual mood of cultural radicalism was evident, as
Bell argues, in the attack on content and interpretation, in the emphasis
on form and style, in the turn to cooler media like film and dance; it
was, in Susan Sontags words, a mood based on indiscriminateness,
without ideas, beyond negation.
38)
The indiscriminate celebration of life informed much of the
decades efforts to erase the boundary between art and life.
39)
Seen
as a further aspect of the break up of genre, the conversion of a painting
into a happening, the taking of art out of the museum into the
environment, the turning of all experience into art whether it had form or
not, the wish to erase that boundary threatened, in Balls opinion, to
destroy art.
40)
Finally, the last trait of cultural radicalism he identified,
the fusion of art and politics, can be interpreted as corollary to the
previous one. It does not refer to the ideological content of art, but to the
infusion into art of a certain temper and mood created by the alienating
confrontation of the individual with the politics of the 1960s, - a mood
which Bell describes as intensely anti-government, anti-institution,
and, ultimately, antinomian, a mood which turned against art.
41)
The same mood and the same incentive to erase the boundary
between art and life were at the origin of the two tendencies in the
American novel of the 1960s that marked the emergence of Post-modern
fiction: the New Journalism or the New Nonfiction, and Self-
Reflexive Fiction, also called metafiction or surfiction.
42)
Applied since 1965 to the writing of Jimmy Breslin, Gay
Talese and Tom Wolfe, but consecrated only after the publication of
Truman Capotes In Cold Blood (1966) subtitled A Nonfiction Novel,
New Journalism claims absolute adherence to fact without discarding the
truth of subjective vision, freely borrowing congenial techniques from the
novel and various devices from the other media, dissolving the lines
between the traditional literary genres. Wolfes The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test (1968) best illustrates the new nonfiction growing out of the
1960s.
The self-reflexive fiction, produced by the new writers of
the 1960s: William Burroughs, John Barth, Richard Brautigan, Donald
Barthelme, Robert Coover, Williams Gass, John Hawkes, Jerzy Kosinski,
Flannery OConnor, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed and Kurt Vonnegut
Jr., joined in the 1970s by other innovators such as: Ronald Sukenick,
Walter Abish, Steve Katz and Gilbert Sorrentino, contains the same effort
to erase the boundaries between art and life, though for different reasons
and with different means. It attempted to do so neither by making art
reflexive of life, nor by making it indistinguishable from life experience,
but by constructing a text which uses incongruity, disruptiveness,
arbitrariness, absurdity, irony, parody and self-parody, black humor and
fabulation to challenge all meaning, all forms of authority, including its
own possibilities of representing a reality which, as Philip Roth
2
confessed, stupefies, sickens, infuriates, and finally it is even a
kind of embarrassment to ones 3nrave imagination.
43)
In doing so it
casts total doubt on the relation between the real and the imaginary,
between history and the subject, between official discourse and historical
truth; as Raymond Federmann writes, in his double capacity of post-
modern critic and writer: At the end of these intricate stories there is no
real message, no order, no easy resolution, no pseudomoral statement,
only a text that offers itself as a kind of nonsense delirium that, to a great
extend, reflects the nonsense of historical events and the delirium of the
language recounting these events.
44)
In the conclusion of his provocative book The Postmodern
Turn, an inquiry into the cultural field of postmodernism spanning more
than two decades, Ihab Hassan, one of its leading theorists and
chroniclers, contends that the American sixties, with all their liberationist
and countercultural tendencies may be regarded as the energizing
matrix of postmodernism, if not its origin.
45)
As Hassan argues,
Postmodernism emerged in complicity with things falling apart, its
two main constitutive tendencies, indeterminacy and immanence (fused
in the term indetermanence) pointing in the sixties toward either
artistic Anarchy, or Pop.
46)
By indeterminacy, or rather
indeterminacies, he means a complex referent that these concepts help
to delineate: ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism,
randomness, revolt, perversion, deformation, the latter alone
subsuming various terms of unmaking, such as decreation,
disintegration, deconservation, decenterment, displacement, difference,
discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, decomposition, de-definition,
demystification, detotalization, deligitimization the rhetoric of irony,
rupture, silence, all of them expressions of the vast will to
unmaking, which affects the entire discourse of the sixties and makes
everything questionable.
47)
Immanence, which Hassan describes by evoking such concepts
as diffusion, dissemination, pulsion, interplay, communication,
interdependence, connected with the ideas of language, of homo pictor
and homo significans, designates the capacity of mind to generalize
itself through its own abstractions and so become its own
environment.
48)
Language changes nature into culture and culture into
an immanent semiotic system.
49)
As an artistic, philosophical and social phenomenon,
postmodernism in America represents a culture revolution for which the
spirit of the sixties, from the visionarism of the New Frontier and the
hopes of the Great Society through anger, revolt, and iconoclasm to the
3
antinomianism, skepticism and alienation of the ending years, acted as a
catalyst.
50)
In the pluralist and individualist climate of the following
decade, the reflexive, parodic and antinomic postmodernism of the 1960s
would dissolve into various eclectic tendencies: neoromantic (particularly
in music and architecture), deconstructionist, neodadaist, pop, camp,
kitsch, and many others.
51)
Have the sixties really made a change? Considering the decade from the
vantage point of the late l980s, Gitlin sees it as a long 4nraveling, a fresh
start, a tragicomic Kulturkampf, the overdue demolition of a fraudulent
consensus, a failed upheaval, an unkempt promise, a valiant effort at
reforms camouflaged as revolution.
52)
POSTMODERNISM
From Ihab Hassan: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism - Postface
in The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1982)
pp.84-96 in The Postmodern Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture
(1987) - Schematic differences p.91 si in American Challenge nota 50 p.220.
pp.167-173 Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective:
A series of Postmodernist features :

Indeterminacy (Vezi definitie mai sus): All manners of ambiguities, ruptures, and
displacements affecting knowledge and society. ...We relativize. Indeterminacies
pervade our actions, ideas, interpretations; they constitute our world.

Fragmentation- The postmodernist only disconnects , fragments are all he

trusts. He rejects totalization and any synthesis whatever, social, epistemic. Hence
his preferance for montage, collage, for metonymy over metaphor. Hence his
recourse to paradox, paracriticism, open forms.
Lyotard: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the
uinpresentable; let us activate the differences .. Poststructuralist emphasis on
difference.

Decanonization - It applies to all canons, all conventions of authority. Lyotard:

a massive delegitimation of the mastercodes of society.
From the death of God to the death of the author and revision of the
curriculum - we decanonize culture, demystify knowledge, deconstruct the languages
of power, desire. Versions of subversion: revision, feminization of culture.
*

Postmod. vacates the traditional self. Nietzche: declared the subject only a
fiction. Postmod. suppresses or disperses the deep romantic ego. It voids it,
abandons it as a totalizing principle by:
1]- simulating self-efacement or self-multiplication, self-reflection (vezi The
Floating Opera. a procession of masks. The presence of mirrors.

Postmod. is irrealist, aniconic. It repels mimesis. It entertains its exhaustion.

Subversts itself in forms of articulate silence. It contests the forms of its own
representation. Its magic realism

Irony. In absence of a cardinal principle, we turn to play, interplay, dialogue,

allegory, self-reflection (deci to irony). Irony assumes indeterminacy. It offers a
radical vision of multiplicity, randomness, even absurdity. It expresses the recreations
of mind in search of a truth that continually eludes it.

Hybridization or the mutant replication of genres, including parody, travesty,

pastische, plagiarism. The subversion of genres engenders new modes: the new
journalism, the nonfiction novel, paracriticism.

Carnivalization. What Bakhtin calls novel or carnival - that is antisystem - may

stand for Postmod.s ludic and subversive elements. The term used by Bakhtin to
embrace indeterminacy, fragmentation, hybridization, decanonizaation, selflessness,
irony, but also: -the comic and absurdist ethos (anticipated in the heteroglossia of
Rabelais and Sterne)
-polyphony, the centrifugal power of language, the gay relativity of
things - elements of subversion and renewal.

Postmod. invites performance. Indeterminacy elicites participation. As it

transgresses genres postmod. art calls itself performance. The text wants to be
written, revised, acted out

Constructionism. it constructs reality in post-Kantian fictions. It sustains the

movement from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right
and even conflicting versions of worlds in the making.

Immanence. Refers to the growing capacity of mind to generalize itself through

symbols. We experience the extention of our sences through new media and
technologies. Languages reconstitute the universeinto signs of their own making,
turning nature into culture, and culture into an immanent semiotic system.
,