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an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern
cultural
sound, text and image
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
dont
have any regrets, not important ones, about the position I stake
out
there. I still think its tenable, given that its 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 Im concerned, as long
as
one accepts the limitations of that project, I think it still
works quite adequately. So, Im not very interested in going back
and undoing
that; I think thats 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 doesnt 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
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youre not looking for that larger historical sequence or
history, then
I think the poetics still stands. So thats an answer at that
level of
the issue. At the level of the fate of postmodernism altogether,
here
I have to plead agnosticism. Im actually not a futurologist --
Im not
in the business of predicting the future, Im 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 dont
pretend to
have anything useful to say about where were going. Im
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 dont 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. Im not going
to
endorse that view either actually, but it is a possibility. I
think its
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more likely that what were seeing in the present will continue,
which
is to say, verbal literatures 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 dont think I
have
to take the apocalyptic view that this may be the last
literature
generation or something like that, but I do think its a good
guess
that literatures 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
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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 its 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. Im 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, Im also attracted to Lyotards 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 its
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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. Im quite reconciled to the idea that thats
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 dont see any
incompatibility between Lyotards 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
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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 hasnt 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 its 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 dont 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.
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BM: Thats 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 Im satisfied with that. You asked about what prompted me
to
move to the third book and it wasnt 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 didnt accommodate and didnt 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
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practices, so that what I think makes a pretty sound argument in
the
context of fiction, doesnt 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. Im 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 doesnt 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: Its not so much that its unproductive, its just that when
you do that, the results are much more various. You get a much
wider
variety of findings. So, I think thats a net gain actually. One
comes
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away from this saying, well, after all, theres not a single
unifying
postmodernism across cultural practices. Of course, theres
really
no reason to imagine that there wouldve been. Despite
Fredric
Jamesons very persuasive attempts to make all postmodernism
responsive to a single cultural logic, its 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
theyre
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 its 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 theres 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
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architecture have strong profiles, whereas its much less
inevitable
to talk about postmodern painting -- some people do, but its
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 its 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,
its nothing to be worried about. And that happens despite all
the
disclaimers that I did or might write -- it doesnt make any
difference,
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people will still believe what they please. You cant worry about
it,
but when you get the chance, you complicate it for them,
saying,
yes, but or no, it cant be as straightforward as that, can it,
and
you just keep reiterating, that this is a heuristic device, this
is a construction, its not something Ive found out in the world,
but Ive
made it in order to accommodate the things that I found out
there in
the world. On the one hand, its very flattering and its 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 cant 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?
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BM: There are two things here. First, Ive always been
suspicious
of the conflation of postmodernism and postcolonialism. In fact,
Im
suspicious of the conflation of all the posts. I dont think
poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism are all
the
same posts -- quite the reverse, Im fairly confident that
theyre
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 doesnt actually need
postmodernism. There would have been a poscolonialism even
if
there never were a postmodernism, Im fairly confident of that.
The
conflation of postmodernism and poststructuralism I think is
also a
mistake -- its 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, wasnt available at the time when the first
postmodernisms
were being put in place. North Americans werent reading
Foucault
and Derrida in the original, and translations werent 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
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parent and child. But thats 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.
Were 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 Years 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 didnt happen, there was this sort of
anti-climactic
sense, almost a disappointment, certainly outright
disappointment
on some peoples part because they thought that all this was
going
to be a great opportunity, that all would be swept away and
wed
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 Years Day 2000, and consequently they staved
off
the system crash. We may never know how much truth there was
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behind this; its very difficult to talk about something that
conspicuously didnt happen. So that gives us one model of an
endpoint to the century; its 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 Years 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
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literally so, and imposing on us a threshold that we never
imagined
having to cross. So theres the other model of how change
enters
history and how we might measure endpoints and starting
points;
not what we expected, but what we didnt expect; not what we
had
bargained for, the apocalypse that we were being readied for,
but
the one that catches us unawares. And thats 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
didnt 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 didnt
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
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begin to see anticipations where we did not see them before,
we
didnt 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. Audens
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 its
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,
its
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
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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. Its exactly the
dynamics
of Borges essay on Kafkas precursors. Without Kafka, the
precursors are not related to each other, but as soon as
theres
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
postmodernisms relation with history, perhaps a rehabilitation
of its
ethics even?
BM: I couldnt say that. For one thing, were too near to the
event,
and this is also part of my reluctance to be a futurologist -- I
dont
know how thats 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
its
even more correct to say that theres a notable silence around
9-11,
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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 theyre 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
hasnt
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 Hassans thesis that in part at least, the legacy
of
postmodernism can be viewed as in fact an aesthetic of trust?
Too
easyDo you see that happening at all or being the case?
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BM: Again, Im reluctant to speculate, but I see at least some
signs
of restriction of plurality, or I suspect thats 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 its a bad sign because it
looks
like it is in response to 9-11 and the threat of the clash
of
civilisations, and that whats being installed in its place is a
new
kind of dualism; at least in some quarters thats 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 theres such a tone of relief in
the
quarters where youre hearing this from that its very
suspicious.
After all, theyve been waiting for this all along, theyve 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, its only a synecdoche really, but the
cultural
warfare has been conducted in these terms. Its the 60s and a
kind
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of policing of the 60s thats 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. Its 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
theres more than a trace of that going on. I dont welcome it,
and I
hope its resisted. For all the kind of centrifugal aspects of
those
episodes of pluralism, I think thats preferable and less
dangerous in
the long run. Ive 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
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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 Ive always been suspicious of postmodern
plurality,
thinking that its 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 its 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 thats one
version of it doesnt 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
well be left only with the plurality of the marketplace and in
other
-
respects well be locked back into the Cold War, well 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 theres no reason to think that it couldnt
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 clichd judgement, there will be a grain of truth in the
otherwise sweeping generalisation. From the poeticians 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: Im 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 dont think that that means that they offer
a
greater range, or that they exhaust the possibilities or
anything like
that. I think thats not true, and in fact theres plenty of
reasons to
think that, in particular French literature had what we are now
willing
to call a postmodernism thats not a term that was available
to
them then, and to this day theyre 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, theres 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,
hes
-
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, its 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 wont 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 Im 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, thats not the way reality seems to me, thats the kind
of
reality which you would only get in a conventionalised fiction.
Now
Im 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 dont 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, thats the historical form of realism, but that surely
is not
what the postmodernists had in mind; they dont do historical
realism, they may parody or pastiche it, but they certainly
arent
faithful to it, rather they are flagrantly unfaithful to it, and
its 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 its 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 dont 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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