Literature and the Postmodern: A Conversation with Brian McHale

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Volume 3, May 2006, ISSN 1552-5112

Literature and the Postmodern: A Conversation with Brian McHale Brian McHale and Adriana Neagu

Adriana Neagu: As we advance into the twenty first century there

has been less and less talk of postmodernism, speculation of its

death and after-life. Soon after crossing the millennial threshold it

became quite clear that there was life after postmodernism after all.

Could it be that indeed we are past the postmodern age altogether?

In Postmodernist Fiction you describe postmodernism as emerging

from modernism with ‘historical consequentiality’. What does

postmodernism, with its radical questioning of historicity, seem to be

logically and consequentially preparing the way for? Is it now

possible to say with the benefit of hindsight, what postmodernism is

prior to, in order to discern a foreseeable posterity in current

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tendencies? Or else, how different is your take on the postmodernist

experience today from that formulated in Postmodernist Fiction?

Brian McHale: The narrower question is that of whether I do stand

by my own poetics of postmodernism and I think I do. I think I don’t

have any regrets, not important ones, about the position I stake out

there. I still think it’s tenable, given that it’s a limited position, i.e. its

ambitions are limited to a poetics of postmodern fiction, and given

those parameters, poetics and fiction, I think I am still able to stand

by it. My position in the second book, Constructing Postmodernism

was that this after all is an entirely heuristic view of postmodernism

and it does not make strong claims about its own status. So it

organises, still pretty much to my satisfaction, a range of texts; it

establishes some family resemblances; it establishes a sort of range

and some umbrella concepts. As far as I’m concerned, as long as

one accepts the limitations of that project, I think it still works quite

adequately. So, I’m not very interested in going back and undoing

that; I think that’s still satisfactory, to me, anyway. If you wanted to

challenge it at the level of its failure to integrate postmodernist

fiction in a larger whole, you might say that it doesn’t have a very

strong explanatory scheme, its explanatory scheme is entirely

internal to the literary-historical dynamics and does not respond in

any systematic way to larger historical developments. As long as

you’re not looking for that larger historical sequence or history, then

I think the poetics still stands. So that’s an answer at that level of

the issue. At the level of the fate of postmodernism altogether, here

I have to plead agnosticism. I’m actually not a futurologist -- I’m not

in the business of predicting the future, I’m in the business of literary

history, which is to observe what has happened, and to think to

some degree historically, in the literary-historical sense, about the

present moment. But I think I have too good a sense about how

many variables you would have to be thinking about, not to mention

how many unexpected irruptions from elsewhere you would have to

be taking into account, to talk about the future, so I don’t pretend to

have anything useful to say about where we’re going. I’m

sympathetic to the idea, as I suggested in my Edinburgh lecture of 2

days ago, ‘What Was Postmodernism? Or, The Last of the Angels’,

that you heard the other day, that postmodernism may be

exhausting itself, that it may be reaching a kind of limit, but beyond

that, I don’t have anything more sensible to say than anyone else

would. Nobody should treat as reliable anything that I –or anyone

else for that matter-- might say about what is coming next,

especially in the light of the ongoing transformation of the whole

media ecology. It is distinctly possible that talking about

postmodernist literature will be rendered obsolete. I’m not going to

endorse that view either actually, but it is a possibility. I think it’s

more likely that what we’re seeing in the present will continue, which

is to say, verbal literature’s place in the whole media ecology is

going to change as the new media and forms of expression in new

media take up different niches in the overall system. Literature will

shift sideways, parts of it will be superseded by new media, parts of

it will develop new functions, and new niches. So I don’t think I have

to take the apocalyptic view that this may be the last literature

generation or something like that, but I do think it’s a good guess

that literature’s place will be quite different in the future mediascape

than it had been and that it is now. And that being the case, really,

one is in no good position to speculate about what the next thing is

likely to be.

AN: Of a whole plethora of reference works on postmodernism,

Postmodernist Fiction and Constructing Postmodernism are among

the rare few that offer an actual poetics of its forms, a systemic and

periodical understanding of its articulations with Modernism. The

formalist method that you then applied to the analysis of

postmodernist discourse proved enormously enabling and

productive, particularly in its valorisation of the Jacobsonian notion

of dominant. By resorting to a similar mindset, can we distinguish a

High Postmodernism, frozen, canonised, fossilised already, and is

that the unavoidable condition of all literary phenomena, the fate

inscribed, inevitably, as you put it in Postmodernist Fiction, in their

historicity?

Do you think that the obsolescence, the exhaustion that may be

profiling itself is to do with the becoming canonical of postmodernist

forms in literary discourse?

BM: I can see that view of the matter and it’s partly a satisfying

view. Yet, I never bought into the idea, which is a sort of another

apocalyptic idea, that postmodernism was a radical break, a leap

into the unknown, that there was no continuity and no way back

from it to where we had been before. I’m more of the view that

postmodernist literary expression, and maybe postmodernism in

general, behaves like earlier cultural periods and phenomena

behaved, which is to say that precisely the mechanism you were

talking about is working, that a canonical version of it will be or is

being or has been crystallised now, which has its own life cycle, and

that the dynamics of change from the inside and change from the

outside are going on all along. I have no problem thinking about it in

those terms, so I expect to see that being played out. On the other

hand, I’m also attracted to Lyotard’s view of a sort of perpetual

postmodernism, which is not I think at all incompatible with the other

view. Lyotard, as you know, reserves the name ‘postmodernism’ for

what cannot be accommodated by the canonical system – it’s

always what is left over for future recuperation. Therefore, we can

talk apparently paradoxically, to me not paradoxically at all, about a

postmodern that precedes the modern.

AN: An ingrained avant-garde nature, inbuilt in postmodernism,

preventing ossification, keeping the ‘ball’ rolling?

BM: Exactly. I’m quite reconciled to the idea that that’s happening

even as we speak, and that some excluded aspect or part or range

of postmodernism will be left for future generations to make

something of, to take up and shift to the centre – all those dynamics

which derive from the Russian formalists. I don’t see any

incompatibility between Lyotard’s model and what was essentially a

formalist, in part structuralist view that I was using in Postmodernist

Fiction.

AN: In retrospect, if we step back, how much about cultural

postmodernism was media hype and vogue?

BM: I think a nuanced answer would be that, in the first place, the

general media embrace of postmodernism comes very late in the

day. Many of the things we recognise now as being postmodernist

preceded the coinage of the word altogether, and date from the

‘50s-‘60s. Even after the coinage of the word in the 1970s – it had

been coined earlier, but its de facto coinage, its availability, dates

from the seventies -- even in the course of the ‘70s there is not

much media interest in postmodernism. If you go back and search

mass media, the term hasn’t been taken up yet. So, even though

the term is already available in certain areas, to academics and

architecture critics, it still circulates in fairly limited circles, and really

only gets taken up as a media buzzword in the ‘80s sometime and

into the ‘90s. So it’s certainly the case that it was a media

buzzword and a fashion statement, but all that comes rather late in

the cycle, really after the most interesting uses of the term had

occurred in the academy and art practice. In other words, of course

there was exaggeration, of course there was hype and of course

there was a sort of media false consciousness about the

postmodern, but I don’t think it interfered with the actual emergence

of the term, or the actual creation of what we see as its most

distinctive works, or the works likely to have the longest shelf life,

literary-historically speaking, or art-historically speaking. I think

those all predate the use of the term in mass media.

AN: And implicitly any meta-thinking, any form of self-representation

somehow.

BM: That’s right.

AN: Outlooks too are subject to the cycle of ideas hence bound to

change. In rethinking your findings in Constructing Postmodernism

and the developments and refinements to the poetics of

postmodernist forms that the book contributes, is there anything that

you would do differently in methodological terms? And what

prompted the work on The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole?

BM: I think not radically different, certainly not conceptually

different. Rhetorically the book is not entirely satisfactory now, there

are ways that I could have made it a more integrated book in

particular, but conceptually I think I still stand by it, and when I have

had occasions to reread, especially the Introduction, I think on the

whole I’m satisfied with that. You asked about what prompted me to

move to the third book and it wasn’t actually dissatisfaction with the

conceptual position of the preceding books, but a sense that really

there was a whole range of writing, which is to say mainly poetry,

that I didn’t accommodate and didn’t address in the first two books

and it was this that stimulated work on the third book. Out of that I

learnt something valuable, I think, which is that there is no reason to

assume that the model holds across all genres or across all cultural

practices, so that what I think makes a pretty sound argument in the

context of fiction, doesn’t look nearly as sound in the case of poetry.

Poetry from certain points of view had been postmodern before the

postmodern, or had always already been postmodern.

AN: By definition

BM: Yes. And from other points of view, perhaps never

postmodernised. I’m able to entertain both of these possibilities.

What this says is that the model that allowed us to discern the

transition in the history of the novel doesn’t allow that kind of sharp

transition in the history of poetry; that poetry rather is a kind of

range, the umbrella under which you can group it is a much broader

one, and on the whole, the account of poetry has to be less

integrated by the nature of the object.

AN: Comparatively, how did you find the application of a formalist

and structuralist method to verse or perhaps not very productive

given the plurality that you are describing?

BM: It’s not so much that it’s unproductive, it’s just that when you do

that, the results are much more various. You get a much wider

variety of findings. So, I think that’s a net gain actually. One comes

away from this saying, well, after all, there’s not a single unifying

postmodernism across cultural practices. Of course, there’s really

no reason to imagine that there would’ve been. Despite Fredric

Jameson’s very persuasive attempts to make all postmodernism

responsive to a single cultural logic, it’s hard to do, and that

probably has to do with the interference between, indeed the

intersection between, so to speak, exterior history and the interior

histories of each of these disciplines or practices, which are being

driven by their own internal dynamics, at the same time that they’re

all subject and responding to the cultural logic of late capitalism.

And out of that come these different chronologies, these different

sequences, and different strands of development. As I try to show in

the Introduction to The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole, if you

looked at the postmodernisms of different disciplines, you would

immediately see that some have strong postmodernisms, in the

sense that it’s almost inconceivable to talk about the history of that

field without the use of the term, and some have weak

postmodernisms, in the sense that plenty of people get along just

fine without talking in those terms. And there’s some correlation

between the strength of their postmodernism and the strength of

their modernism, so there is such a thing as modern dance in a very

sharply defined way, and consequently postmodern dance is a

relatively clear profile. Equally, modern architecture and postmodern

architecture have strong profiles, whereas it’s much less inevitable

to talk about postmodern painting -- some people do, but it’s not

mandatory. You might talk about the postmodern in the field of the

visual arts, but even that is not as mandatory as it is in the case of

dance and architecture, and by the time you get to something like

postmodern music, then really it’s purely optional, and maybe

useless. So rather than assuming uniformity, that everything in lock

step crossed the same threshold at the same time, we should rather

assume that there are different thresholds that are crossed at

different times.

AN: And this within what might be construed as a plural, eclectic,

yet cohesive dynamics?

BM: Right. And possibly weakly or strongly cohesive at that.

AN: Speaking of degrees of internalisation, do you ever worry that

your paradigm for understanding postmodernism may be taken too

literally or appropriated in a reductionist, prescriptive even way?

BM: Sure and of course it has been. That comes with the territory,

it’s nothing to be worried about. And that happens despite all the

disclaimers that I did or might write -- it doesn’t make any difference,

people will still believe what they please. You can’t worry about it,

but when you get the chance, you complicate it for them, saying,

‘yes, but’ or ‘no, it can’t be as straightforward as that, can it’, and

you just keep reiterating, that this is a heuristic device, this is a

construction, it’s not something I’ve found out in the world, but I’ve

made it in order to accommodate the things that I found out there in

the world. On the one hand, it’s very flattering and it’s very affirming,

because it means that people have found it handy, but it also means

that I have to be philosophical about the applications of it that look

misguided, or, as you say, reductive. I can’t have those satisfactions

without also having the dissatisfactions.

AN: 9-11 and the fateful validations of the millennial anxieties that it

brought, became a periodical term, indeed an almost civilisational

marker. Can we see its reverberations on the scene of the

contemporary as a sudden relapse into an epistemological order, in

identity terms and otherwise? A catch term with Postmodernism

repeated like a mantra by its theorists was its politics of plurality and

multiculturalism. Did 9-11 mark the foundering of the

multiculturalism project?

BM: There are two things here. First, I’ve always been suspicious

of the conflation of postmodernism and postcolonialism. In fact, I’m

suspicious of the conflation of all the ‘posts’. I don’t think

poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism are all the

same ‘posts’ -- quite the reverse, I’m fairly confident that they’re

each responding to different historical sequences, that they are the

fruits of different historical logics. Postcolonialism is coming out of

its own logic, and even its acknowledgement of, let alone its identity

with, postmodernism, is fairly weak; it doesn’t actually need

postmodernism. There would have been a poscolonialism even if

there never were a postmodernism, I’m fairly confident of that. The

conflation of postmodernism and poststructuralism I think is also a

mistake -- it’s a misunderstanding of intellectual history. The

assumption that the postmodernists were illustrating postructuralist

theory, I think, is very easily disproved just by virtue of the dates.

Poststructuralism in North America, where arguably the first

postmodernisms became self-aware, became aware of themselves

as such, wasn’t available at the time when the first postmodernisms

were being put in place. North Americans weren’t reading Foucault

and Derrida in the original, and translations weren’t available yet.

The most that one can say, therefore, is that they share some

common ancestors, which is probably demonstrably true. So

postructuralism and postmodernism are more like cousins than

parent and child. But that’s an aside. As for the 9-11 events,

Randall Stevenson and I, working on our coda to our edited volume

on the Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, have been trying to

work out our position about the end point of the twentieth century.

We’re now thinking about a double end point, instructively double:

there is the endpoint that in prospect we imagined would be the

terminus, which is to say, New Year’s Day of the year 2000, a day

that had been anticipated, arguably, in all kinds of ways,

eschatological as well as utopian. If you remember, there was

anxiety about the possibility that the entire technological system

was going to break down that day because of software bugs, and

then when it didn’t happen, there was this sort of anti-climactic

sense, almost a disappointment, certainly outright disappointment

on some people’s part because they thought that all this was going

to be a great opportunity, that all would be swept away and we’d

start all over again. After the fact there was a certain amount of

resentment, of cynicism, suspicion that it was all hyped, it was all

marketing device, and conversely, a certain ambiguity; the software

engineers’ version of the story at least, is that in fact, they fixed it in

time, that in fact there was going to be a disaster, but that they

managed to patch up the software in a big rush in the few years

before the New Year’s Day 2000, and consequently they staved off

the system crash. We may never know how much truth there was

behind this; it’s very difficult to talk about something that

conspicuously didn’t happen. So that gives us one model of an

endpoint to the century; it’s a kind of ironical and paradoxical model,

a model of how a period, a century could be imagined as ending,

prospectively -- all the millennial expectations and dreads, the

momentum building, and then nothing happens -- which reveals in a

very useful and instructive way the fictionality of that endpoint.

Turning over the calendar is after all an artificial dating system,

really only fairly recently put into place, and coming quite late in the

history of civilisation, adjusted several times, and resting on very

infirm foundations, and conventional in the end. You might recall

there was actually quite a great deal of debate at the time about

whether that was the proper date to be celebrating the millennium

anyway. It ought to have been on the New Year’s Day 2001, the

purists said. Nobody went out and had the millennial party that

night, but still the purists were right, from a purely mathematical

point of view, so the whole thing is a sort of exposure to view of the

fictionality of these sorts of thresholds and endpoints. Then,

conversely, the events of 9-11 give us the alternative model, which

is the violent irruption of history into what we thought was a

sequence, a continuous measured sequence, now suddenly

interrupted at a point we never anticipated, by means we never

imagined, literally unthinkable, out of the blue as they say, and

literally so, and imposing on us a threshold that we never imagined

having to cross. So there’s the other model of how change enters

history and how we might measure endpoints and starting points;

not what we expected, but what we didn’t expect; not what we had

bargained for, the apocalypse that we were being readied for, but

the one that catches us unawares. And that’s a kind of parable.

There are these ways of thinking about measuring out units of

cultural time and periodising, one which we think we have under

control -- we can use the calendar to predict it -- and the other which

we have no control over, and which arrives unbidden and unlooked

for. It also changes our orientation, i.e. Y2K we looked forward to, 9-

11, we look back from, because now we have an endpoint that we

didn’t expect and what we had understood in one way about the

history leading up to that, we must now understand in a different

way, in fact we must understand as a history leading up to 9-11,

instead of as a history leading up to something else, leading up to

Y2K. Now suddenly we begin to perceive a different order in the

cultural history of the twentieth century. In literalistic or pragmatic

terms we understand what was misunderstood about the ‘80s and

the ‘90s, about what was unnoticed or misconstrued, the historical

developments that we did not take seriously enough or didn’t

recognise for what they were, or other points that we failed to see

were on the same line. But then also in our cultural imaginations we

begin to see anticipations where we did not see them before, we

didn’t recognise them as anticipations, and we recontextualise all

our apocalyptic imaginings and the imagination of disaster, we see

dress rehearsals, and sometimes uncanny anticipations that were

invisible before because without the event, there was nothing for

them to anticipate. On American radio in the days after 9-11,

several times over you heard recitations of W. H. Auden’s poem

‘September 1939’, which is hair-raisingly apropos, although to read

it that way is surely anachronistic, because Auden was talking about

the onset of a different war, a different set of circumstances. But it’s

almost impossible, and in future, for students and readers further

away from the events, will be impossible for the poem not to be read

in the light of 9-11.

AN: As though the poem was inscribed with readings of the event?

BM: Pre-inscribed, which is very bad history in some sense, it’s

pure anachronism, but, at this point, impossible not to see. And so,

as you now reread the twentieth century, it has all to be reread

retrospectively, in the light of this event, ironically and uncannily.

AN: I find it a master-irony as well to think of an entire postmodern

dystopian horizon, the notorious post-holocaust, post-apocalyptic

fictions and recontextualise these in light of their premonitory value.

Once charged with a defective historical consciousness,

postmodern authors may in retrospect appear historically prescient,

postmodern readings of the contemporary culture, almost prophetic.

AN: Or at any rate, it looks that way now. It’s exactly the dynamics

of Borges’ essay on Kafka’s precursors. Without Kafka, the

precursors are not related to each other, but as soon as there’s

Kafka, they are. Without that shock of 9-11, there is no recognisable

history that leads up to 9-11, and now there is, and hence it is

impossible not to see it in a certain way.

AN: Do you then think that ‘the fateful day’, has inevitably triggered

a sui generis radically different understanding of the

postmodernism’s relation with history, perhaps a ‘rehabilitation’ of its

ethics even?

BM: I couldn’t say that. For one thing, we’re too near to the event,

and this is also part of my reluctance to be a futurologist -- I don’t

know how that’s going to turn out. As I was indicating in my lecture

at the University of Edinburgh, the other day, I do think there is a

waning of some postmodernist features around 9-11, or maybe it’s

even more correct to say that there’s a notable silence around 9-11,

with regard to matters that you would expect to be expressed. My

account of the rise and fall of the angels is partly motivated and also

partly enhanced by the observable fact that around 9-11 there were

relatively few manifestations of this angel imagery -- not that there

were none, but that, given how angel images proliferated throughout

the ‘90s, you would think that on this occasion of all occasions the

angels would return in a big way. But in fact they’re rather sparse,

which suggests that in spite of 9-11 this sign of postmodernism, the

postmodern angel, is winding down of its own accord, that the life

cycle of postmodernism is coming to its end, as it must out of its

own internal logic, rather than having been brought to an abrupt end

by 9-11. So, in the end, 9-11 is another fictitious boundary; it really

is an irruption out of another order of things and it will be used

maybe as the marker of the end of a development, but it hasn’t

been experienced that way; it will be another fiction.

AN: The vision of postmodernism articulated in your two poetics

stood out also in the positive note it sounded on the phenomenon,

on its discursive and plural nature. Do you subscribe to fellow

theorist Ihab Hassan’s thesis that in part at least, the legacy of

postmodernism can be viewed as in fact ‘an aesthetic of trust’? Too

easy………Do you see that happening at all or being the case?

BM: Again, I’m reluctant to speculate, but I see at least some signs

of restriction of plurality, or I suspect that’s coming into force -- a

kind of retreat from the full multiculturalism to which we at least

gave lip-service once.

AN: At least from its frenzied, celebrational dimension.

BM: Yes, and on the whole, I think it’s a bad sign because it looks

like it is in response to 9-11 and the threat of the ‘clash of

civilisations’, and that what’s being installed in its place is a new

kind of dualism; at least in some quarters that’s sort of the desired

outcome of all this, that people are now going to be sobered up by

this shock of reality and will renounce the ‘luxury’ of indulging in

pluralism, and that they will now confront the reality principle of

opposition and polarity. But there’s such a tone of relief in the

quarters where you’re hearing this from that it’s very suspicious.

After all, they’ve been waiting for this all along, they’ve been trying

to undo the plurality of the postmodern from the beginning; in North

America, and I think also in Europe, ‘plurality’ is often coded in the

terms of the ‘60s and the undoing of the ‘60s. The ‘60s really is only

a figure of speech, it’s only a synecdoche really, but the cultural

warfare has been conducted in these terms. It’s the ‘60s and a kind

of policing of the ‘60s that’s at stake, and a call to order after the

excesses of the ‘60s, which is then recapitulated as a call to order

after the excesses of the ‘80s, again and again a call to order, which

in effect is simply the recoil from pluralism and the nostalgia for the

rather stable organisation of the Cold War years. It’s really a

nostalgia for the clear-cut polarities and divisions of the Cold War,

and now of course you have to reorganise in order to have a

different set of poles, and one can claim the ‘New Europe’ as your

allies against this other threat, but the structure is the same -- the

names have been changed but the structure is the same. So I think

there’s more than a trace of that going on. I don’t welcome it, and I

hope it’s resisted. For all the kind of centrifugal aspects of those

episodes of pluralism, I think that’s preferable and less dangerous in

the long run. I’ve lately been teaching in a course on science fiction

a novel by Samuel Delany called Trouble on Triton, which is from

the midst of the ‘70s, a book written in 1976, reflecting a sort of

utopian projection of that pluralisation, a world in which all kinds of

identities, sexual and otherwise, plural identities and consecutive

identities are made available by technological means, and life is

hard because you always have to be making these choices, always

continuously renegotiating the parameters of identity, and my

students, looking at the text, found it actually a dystopia. It was a

very unsettling project to them. They certainly were able to see that

it belonged to its historical moment, not to the future but to 1975-6.

But on the whole I think Delany was right, this is a sort of version of

utopia, living among the multiplicity of choices and the pain of

choice, rather than fleeing into the security of that Manichean world

view that the Cold War had provided and that after all almost

destroyed us many times over.

AN: Somehow I’ve always been suspicious of postmodern plurality,

thinking that it’s only a shallow form of plurality, stemming precisely

from the refusal to choose, the pathological condition of liminality of

the postmodern logic.

BM: Of course it can be a shallow plurality, but why not, why not

have a shallow plurality rather than none? And it’s not just a

shallow plurality, one that can be easily recuperated by consumer

culture, that comes down to the ‘choice’ between Classic Coke and

Diet, which amounts to nothing. But just because that’s one version

of it doesn’t mean that one wants to ban plurality altogether, and I

think there are deeper possibilities and potentialities. I could tolerate

the shallow pluralism of the marketplace if I felt confident that the

other plurality was also available and secure somehow. The fear is

we’ll be left only with the plurality of the marketplace and in other

respects we’ll be locked back into the Cold War, we’ll be back in

what my friend Alan Nadel calls the ‘culture of containment’.

AN: Which would be anomalous.

BM: Yes, but not unthinkable. The first time around the culture of

containment was about consumer choice and containment of every

other choice, and there’s no reason to think that it couldn’t be

revived.

AN: You have worked with a broad range of authors whose

cataloguing as postmodern comes almost automatic these days.

One of the misconceptions in circulation for sometime in the ‘90s

among consumers, critics even of postmodern literature was that

writers across the ocean have done a lot more at the level of

innovation and experimentation than on this side of the Atlantic. As

with all clichéd judgement, there will be a grain of truth in the

otherwise sweeping generalisation. From the poetician’s point of

view, have North American authors, particularly insofar as the

practice of the novel is concerned, better served the vast panorama

of diversity and multiplicity available in postmodern forms?

BM: I’m not sure I believe that. There are different national

chronologies, different national histories of postmodernism, and

then different national traditions which inflect it in different ways. So

I think it might be arguable that the Americans are first,

chronologically, for reasons which have to do with the internal

dynamics of American literature, and therefore available as models

for imitation, but I don’t think that that means that they offer a

greater range, or that they exhaust the possibilities or anything like

that. I think that’s not true, and in fact there’s plenty of reasons to

think that, in particular French literature had what we are now willing

to call a postmodernism –that’s not a term that was available to

them then, and to this day they’re not very interested in the term—

but it functioned for the American readers and the American writers

as a model of how to proceed in a postmodern direction. So I think,

given the different national histories and the different chronological

sequences, we can think of plenty of European examples that are

not closely related to American models; and even when they are

related, there’s always a crucial element of mutual

miscomprehension which is absolutely essential to literary history.

Everyone is always, systematically getting it wrong, and without that

there would be no literary history. Raymond Federman, for instance,

has had an enormous career in Germany, in German translation,

and he is by now almost entirely unknown in the United States, he’s

pretty much disappeared from sight, and the reasons for it are quite

extrinsic to his reputation in the States, or to the progress, the cycle

of his career in the States, and has everything to do with the

German reception of a certain kind of Holocaust literature. While it

would be incorrect and naive to say the Germans have

‘misunderstood’ Raymond Federman, it’s true in a certain sense

that Germans have a different appreciation of his work compared to

the Americans, but this is an entirely productive misprision, and

keeps happening all the time.

AN: Which brings us back to the larger cycle and the old equation:

literature-reality, and the postmodernist adventure in it. What are to

you the implications of the ‘waning’ of postmodernism upon the

adventure of mimesis? Are we contemplating a return to realism in

mutated forms, a ‘postmodern realism’?

BM: This is the sort of question that I could evade rather than

answer by saying, if you understand realism in the way in which

Jacobson talks about it, which is to say as a historical dynamic,

where what is regarded as realistic in one generation is

subsequently regarded as purely conventionalised, stylised in the

next, and the violation of those conventions then becomes a new

realism – if that is the dynamics of realism, which I think is arguably

so, then, firstly, postmodernism was never unrealistic, and secondly,

the new realisms, whatever they will be, will follow the same

dynamic. They won’t be a return to some imaginary originary

realism, they will be realisms produced by the dynamic of the

response to the last realism, in this dialectical way. So, many of the

postmodernists that I’m aware of, and especially the ones that I

knew personally, always protested that they were strictly speaking

realists, exactly in this Jacobsonian sense -- that the realisms that

were currently available were inadequate to the experience of

reality. This is the John Barth or Ron Sukenick story; they would

say, ‘well, that’s not the way reality seems to me, that’s the kind of

reality which you would only get in a conventionalised fiction. Now

I’m going to show you what reality seems like to me and the only

way to get there is by exploding the forms of the old realism’. From

that point of view, postmodernism was never unrealistic or anti-

realistic or irrealistic. It follows from this that the next moves will be,

structurally, the same sort of move, though the outcomes are

unforeseeable. People will say once again, as they do all the time,

as they are saying now, ‘the forms available to me don’t capture the

reality that I experience, therefore I must invent the new forms,

violate the old ones, and the distance from the old forms is the

measure of my achieving my new realism’. There is of course a

historical form of realism, which, however, we can describe in terms

of a set of conventions, the historical realism that finally reaches its

crystallised form in the nineteenth century; we can point to that and

say, yes, that’s the historical form of realism, but that surely is not

what the postmodernists had in mind; they don’t do historical

realism, they may parody or pastiche it, but they certainly aren’t

faithful to it, rather they are flagrantly unfaithful to it, and it’s unlikely

that any future realism will merely return to that. If it did, it would be

a pastiche, an ironic rewriting of historical realism in the way that

some of those postmodernist versions were ironic rewritings.

AN: And yet we seem to witness an insatiable appetite these days

for various forms of life writing, autobiography, memoirs, as well as

biography. The question arises to what an extent this can be viewed

as an erosion of the postmodernist subversive potential?

BM: Indeed all kinds of documentary writing, all kinds of grey-zone

writing between fiction and other forms, all the forms of life writing

are emerging, but it’s unsurprising that they should arise. I think this

is not a retreat from postmodernism, but the response, in the same

spirit, to the awareness that there must be some other way to

capture the reality that I experience, and to complexify it. And those

forms of biography and life writing don’t look very much like classic

autobiography, or classic biography, or classic documentary genres

of any kind, they look strange, and they look strange in order to

make it strange, make their experience strange.

AN: Back to Russian formalism. Professor McHale, thank you for

de-familiarising the postmodern again at this particular juncture.

Edinburgh, 16 June 2005

an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound,

text and image

Volume 3, May 2006, ISSN 1552-5112

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