Term Paper on "Postmodernist Literature"

Term Paper 9 pages (3083 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Postmodernist Literature

Discuss the representation (or the deconstruction) of national culture in the postmodernist fiction of the United States (reviewing four novels).

Postmodernism is, according to Fredric Jameson's Introduction to Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, "...an attempt to think about the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place." Moreover, Jameson writes, the "moderns" were interested in "what was likely to come of" changes that were emerging in the culture; they thought "compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being" (ix). However, Jameson continues, the postmodernist only tallies up the variations in changing cultures themselves; hence, "postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good."

If that definition seems a tad bit esoteric, or even vague, it might be helpful to view another description of postmodernism, this one from Professor John Lye of Brock University. Postmodernism, he writes, is "a broad range of...responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects." It is also "responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism..."

In his Columbia Journalism Review article ("We're All Postmodern Now...") Mitchell Stephens writes that postmodernism is "a loose collection of philosophical ideas and aesthetic notions that have in common a revolt against the belief that any one perspective, any one view of reality, has ultimate priority." Does that make sense? To say that postmodernism is "a revolt against" the position that any view of life has priority seems unnecessary, doesn't it? Since when have authors, artists, poets, painters, embraced the idea that there's only one way to look at reality? Still, Stephens does make sense when he writes that "...as deconstruction and other postmodern theories have long argued, interpretation is inextricably bound with reality..."

It is fair to note that Stephens was alluding to the fact that journalism has recently entered the "postmodern" genre because almost every article one reads has "spin" or interpretation woven into its fabric. Meanwhile, Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado (Boulder), writes in a more scholarly style that to understand postmodernism one must first relate to the various themes in modernism - "a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points-of-view, and clear-cut moral positions."

Postmodernism, then, while it follows most of the same ideas as modernism, nevertheless is a "rejection of the distinction between 'high' and 'low' or popular culture..." It also "rejects boundaries" and celebrates "incoherence" and "provisionality." It rejects "rigid genre distinctions" and instead emphasizes "pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony and playfulness."

Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint

In his much-heralded novel Portnoy's Complaint Roth certainly moves away from "omniscient third-person narrators" and indeed "rejects boundaries" (to quote from Dr. Mary Klages) of sexual and cultural mores although it's a pretty safe bet that he would object to being called "incoherent" (also a Klages' quote) in any sense.

Meanwhile, to focus in on the postmodernist representation of the national culture of the United States in Roth's novel, he brings numerous interesting Jewish cultural idiosyncrasies (the Jewish culture plays a significant part in American "national" cultural dynamic) into the novel along with the themes of Nazis, family, football, puberty, menstruation and various shades and tones of sexual narrative. In his chapter "The Jewish Blues," on page 41, Roth juxtaposes the blood drained from meat ("...so as to make it kosher and fit for consumption") with his mother's menstrual blood. Every little boy everywhere has probably seen his mom's "box of Kotex" and "her erogenous zones" at one time or another, but Roth's narrator takes it to the edge of the personal envelope when his mother sent him (Roth 42), "an eleven-year-old boy in hot pursuit of sanitary napkins!"

This is the same mother who stood over her son with a "bread knife," with which "my own blood would be threatened when I refuse to eat my dinner." Bleeding intertwined with sexual desire and imagery becomes an integral part of this portion of the book. Roth certainly gets a leg up on postmodernism (in Klages' version of it) through his apparent rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" popular culture. First, more bleeding - the marble cake is "beautifully bleeding"(Roth 43) when the chocolate bleeds in and out of the vanilla - and then sexy scene with a mother, who had been so "insensitive to [his] shame" when she sent him to fetch Kotex, and yet, "on the other" hand was "so attuned to [his] deepest desires!"

Those desires became red hot with passion and he was "absolutely punchy with delight" when he, a four-year-old boy, watched his mother getting dressed "in the sunshine of her bedroom" after he has drawn a picture for her with crayons. He watches the "tight, slow, agonizingly delicious journey" (44) of her "transparent stockings" that give her "flesh a hue of stirring dimensions move up her legs. He gets up close to her so he can "appreciate better the elastic intricacies of the dangling straps to which the stockings" will be hooked. And next, does he smell his tuna salad lunch, or his mother's vagina? "Oh, I want to growl with pleasure," he writes. Just four years old and yet he senses "in [his] blood...how rich with passion is the moment, how dense with possibility."

Still on page 44, the narrator hopes he'll "be lucky" and his sister and father will never come back, leaving him alone to explore the passion he feels towards his mother. Even 25 years later, his mommy "still hitches up the stockings in front of her little boy" (45). Certainly the postmodernism defined by Professor Lye fits here, a world where "...all things are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire)... [and are] replaced by simulation and spectacle..."

Eventually, the narrator's family move away from New Jersey "because of the anti-Semitism," and because Nazis "used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house" and because swastikas were painted on buildings. The only place for a Jew to live "is among the Jews, especially...when children are growing up with people from the other sex" (Roth 51), the narrator describes.

And while it is morally repugnant to be reminded about social and cultural bias against Jewish folks that is manifested through Nazi bigotry, the Jews themselves in Roth's book express their own version of mean-spirited cultural bias (53). To wit, Heshie married hottie cheerleader named Alice, who wore a "tiny white skirt with the white satin bloomers: and was in reality a "...dumb, blond goyische beauty!" Note, "goyische" is Yiddish slang, a pejorative, meaning something non-Jewish to be looked down upon.

In the next paragraph, gorgeous Alice - who twirls batons wrapped in oil rags at each end and set on fire while people shrieked as she seemed (52) "about to set ablaze her two adorable breasts" - is "...blatantly a shikse..." Note, shikse is another Yiddish pejorative that means, literally, something "detestable," and "loathed" - e.g., a "blemish" on society. That cheap shot at one of the few gentiles in a high school that was 95% Jewish, is a trip down to the "low" popular culture of Klages, and hence, fits into the genre of postmodernism.

And in the words of Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson of the University of Judaism (www.judaism.uj.edu),the use of goyische and shikse are no less offensive and improper than jokes about "jewing someone down" for money or comments about "Jewish-American Princesses." The rabbi goes on to say, "characterizing and slandering ethnic, religious, or racial groups must be seen as no less than a rebellion against God and Torah, a violation of our covenant of peace." But, that having been pointed out by a respected member of the clergy, such use in a novel is still not out of bounds of good literature; rather, its use is perhaps seen as a twisted kind of celebration of deconstruction and postmodernism, much the same as was witnessed in the Oscar-winning film "Crash," which brilliantly and graphically pointed to the fact that there's a little racism in just about every conceivable cultural group - and a lot of racism in some.

The bias Roth uses is, on one postmodernist hand, as Stephens expresses, "interpretation inextricably bound with reality" and on the other it is seemingly a rejection of the lovely "melting pot" flavor that Americans would like to have the world believe about U.S. cultural diversity (but in truth isn't there much at all). It should be mentioned that author Roth's dive into seamy sexual desire for one's mother was representative of a component of the popular American culture during the 1950s - psychoanalysis utilizing Freudian theories and influences.

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