Back when I was cutting my milk-teeth on literarese, "postmodern" was still a big phrase, describing the age we were apparantly in as well as the aesthetic of the last 40 or so years. Since then, the term, while not exactly falling by the wayside, has become less resonant, for any number of reasons. For myself, who is more interested in the aesthetic definition, there are some obvious problems with the term. For one, on a formal level, many of the literary devices employed in "postmodern" work can be found in those "modern" works that the postmodernists were supposed to be rejecting, or at least over (as in "We are so over that.") Self-reflecxive fiction, cultural pastiche, metaphor AND metonymy, hybridity, play, slippage of signifiers, etc., are all devices that start showing up well before the term "postmodern" had been applied or invented. If this is the case, then one is hard pressed to say that there are actual formal characterisitics distinguishing one from the other.
Which means you have to look elsewhere for a working definition of the term. One such elsewhere is "telos"--the aesthetic intent by which and for which the work was generated. Simply because similar devices are utilized doesn't mean those devices are used in the same way or toward the same ends. The post is generally less interested in "ends" at all, which raises interesting problems. Another place is the cultural exchange in which the works of art participate. Perhaps postmodern works of art are simply "modern" devices more fully integrated into the flows of global capitalism? These are matters for other posts.
I will say, tho, that the role of style, at times emphasized by theorists of the postmodern, is actually a highly modernist question. This last week, I read again three famous modernist stylists: Joyce, Stein, and Hemingway. These three artists can be read as guideposts in the world of modernist prose; when we do so, there differences become all the more striking due to their similarities.
It comes down to this: style is not simply a matter of self-generation, "creativity, "or rhetoric: it is a way of approaching the world. When one doubts one's country (Stephen Dedelus), one's religion, either the one born into or adopted (Leopold Bloom), the cause for which one is fighting (Robert Jordan), one is forced to come up with some other mode of interpretation, some other method of negotiating reality. "Composition," as Stein says, can be a matter of "explanation." Style-as-composition, taken in the active sense of composing, making, is far from Romantic expression. Style does not come naturally or spontaneously; instead it emerges laboriously, specifically, generating its own criteria of evaluation and exploration. Thus, it is experimental.
To say that style equals experiment runs counter to many of our ways of thinking about it. Perhaps the most basic assumption in both everyday and critical philosophy is that there is some disjunct between language and the world (even when one argues that language is the world, one takes that position after passing through the problem itself). To emphasize style seems to leave the world behind, to end up in a place where only language reigns supreme. But the matter is much more interesting than that. Karen Lawrence, in her The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses, argues that there is no totalizing aesthetic in Joyce's novel; the pieces do not fit, precisely because it is the evolution of style that Joyce is interested in. The novel moves from a specific author-reader contract into a continual, and unpredictable, violation of that contract, substituting language-as-system for the cohereing consciousness we all assume resides behind a narrative voice. At the same time, what is remarkable about Ulysses is that it's "dramatic action . . . is still very much rooted in 'the real world,'" and that its "meticulous documentation of geography and time" gives the text a "realistic substratum" (11). The result of this interplay, between radical artifice, radical style, and the inescapable real (which is often signified, as Lawrence points out, by "a surplus of detail") is that Ulysses
creates [a] second kind of realism in the text--an imitation of the wealth of life. In Ulysses, Joyce abjures the notion of closure and shape to which fictions usually submit; the details of the text overflow all neat aesthetic patterns, signifying the arbitrariness and plurasignificance of life. Ulysses is both spectacularly artificial and, in its own way, realistic. A bizarre form of exaggeration and experiment . . . (12)
It is precisely because the substratum of reality pushes through Joyce's artifice that the style becomes experimental. On the interstice between language and the world, the modernist work of art par excellence generates its own interpretation, creates its own multi-coordinate map of Dublin. Which is not to say that it is mimetic--Joyce is not holding a mirror up to reality, he is using form, language, style, to intersect with, and, by doing so, interpret reality.
Stein and Hemingway do something similar, but that will come in a follow-up post.
Posted by pjaussen at May 14, 2007 3:00 PM