Who’s Afraid of a Postmodern Novel?

When I told people last spring I was teaching a class on some postmodernist novels, a few shot me puzzled glances. Maybe they were wondering why anyone on earth would do that, but the questions they actually asked out loud were two:

1) What were we reading in the class?

2) What the heck is postmodernism, anyway?

Answering the first question was easy. I had picked three of the books I’d enjoyed teaching to my bright high school students: Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. My high school students had loved them. In the Learning In Retirement class last spring, too, we had great discussions, with some fierce (though civil) and illuminating disagreements.

Answering the question about what postmodernism is, though—that wasn’t easy. But the difficulty of defining postmodernism was part of the reason for teaching the class. We live in a postmodern world, after all—a world of global communication, global terrorism, and global diseases. We don’t have to like any of it, but I think it helps to have some grasp of it–in the arts as much as in politics and society.

At some level, the term postmodernism just means “after modernism,” and since modernism signifies different things in different fields, postmodernism does, too. (Well, that’s helpful, isn’t it? But it has to be said.)

In general, modernism evokes cities and skyscrapers; the telegraph, telephone, and television; science as the model of how we know things and industrialism as how we make things; the political centrality of nation-states as they move towards democracy; individualism and capitalism as our big ideologies; “form follows function” in our architecture; realism in our fictions.

Until sometime in the twentieth century, this was all heady stuff—radical and exciting. But after the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, we now live in a world that is decisively post-modern, where those modern discoveries don’t feel fresh or new any longer. In the early 21^st century, we may still believe in science, nations, individualism, and capitalism, but we also see their failures and fissures. We may not want to ditch them–though some radicals do–but we do understand the need to supplement them, revise them, and correct them.

So, in general, postmodernism calls all the modernist beliefs and practices into question. It’s not built around one shining ideal; instead, it’s intensely skeptical. Do nation-states still work in our global age, when money, missiles, and diseases cross borders almost instantly? Is capitalism still an ideology we should support when international corporations control so much of the financial world, with so little care for the workers who produce that wealth? Will democracies be able to negotiate the reality of diverse populations and the threat (or lure) of authoritarianism?

And—since modernist art took itself very seriously—postmodernist artists ask why a building, a piece of art, or a work of literature can’t be playful. Why can’t it be exuberant? Why shouldn’t a statue or a novel be a little outrageous, fantastical, or even weird?

Postmodernist novelists have gleefully embraced the freedom of the imagination. Most of them deliberately overleap the limitations of realism: they may include ghosts (Morrison’s Beloved, Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo), impossibilities (magical realism and fantasy), alternative histories (Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union), and projected futures (science fiction in general but especially dystopias like Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale).

Both modernist and postmodernist novels experiment with time and structure: they fragment and disrupt traditional forms of narrative. (As a result, both can be difficult for readers raised to expect that stories will travel from beginning to middle to end.) But where modernist novels tend to be poetic and quietly elegant as they explore consciousness, postmodernist novels often sprawl loose-limbed and lavish, with meandering digressions and bawdy bits of humor rarely found in English literature since Tristram Shandy. Think, for example, of Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—two wild magic-carpet rides through decades of history in South America and India. One reason for the many pages and huge casts of characters in many postmodern novels may be that they explicitly concern themselves with how we inhabit politics and history—or perhaps how politics and history inhabit us.

I’m not a rah-rah fan of postmodernist novels—I read lots of delightfully ordinary fiction and have avoided the more abstruse postmodernist classics like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow—but I often enjoy their freshness, energy, intelligence, and humor. And I do admire their ambition: sometimes the authors are just fooling around and showing us how cool they are, but the best ones deal intelligently with the scars left by the traumas of war and oppression They show us how people get damaged—sometimes even smashed to bits—by the large forces that sweep through history. They tend to be on the side of the victim, the marginalized, the ordinary. A great postmodern novel like Lincoln in the Bardo may confuse us at times and make us laugh at others, but its climax juxtaposes Lincoln’s private life with his public decisions. It invites us to feel both his grief and his greatness.

Do you have postmodern novels that you love or hate? Why?