POSTMODERN AMERICAN FICTION: A Norton Anthology
Edited by Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy
Norton, 672 pages, $24.95 paper
Since the early 1960s, there has been no more prevalent filter through which to interpret American culture than Postmodernism, an idea whose malleability gives it an I-might-not-know-how-to-define-it-but-I- know-it-when-I-see-it cachet. Originally used to describe the writing of a group of outsider authors (including John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and William Gass) whose work, marked by self-consciousness and a reflexive sense of irony, redefined our notions of literary authority and the relationship of a creator to a text, Postmodernism now encompasses an entire sensibility, in which references regularly circle back on themselves, and artificiality is no longer a revelation, it’s a fact. From the sampled sounds of hip-hop to the pixelated visions of “Seinfeld,” where Jerry Seinfeld, a standup comedian, plays Jerry Seinfeld, a standup comedian who once pitched network executives on a TV series about his life, what used to be an esoteric stance has become a common outlook on the world. In recent years, the concept has even bled into the nebulous realm of advertising; just look at the latest Miller beer commercials, whose intentionally poor quality is the pitchman’s equivalent of a knowing wink, or ABC’s current promotional campaign, in which statements poking fun at people for spending so much time watching TV are used to encourage viewers to do just that.
The most recent sign that Postmodernism has traded its outsider’s status for the mainstream is the publication of “Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology,” a companion volume to Norton’s “Postmodern American Poetry,” which appeared in 1994. Like its earlier counterpart, “Postmodern American Fiction” seeks to contextualize work that–in theory, anyway–was initially meant to undermine the very notion of context, or at least redefine it as not fixed but fluid, open to interpretation by writer and reader alike. As editors Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy explain in their introduction:
“(T)he term `postmodernist’ applies to a wide range of concepts, approaches, and positions in ongoing debates, the most significant of which concern the problematic relationship between the real and the unreal; the constructedness of meaning, truth, and history; and the complexities of subjectivity and identity. All of these are marked by a thoroughgoing skepticism toward the foundations and structures of knowledge.”
While that’s a fine capsule description, it is subverted by the canonical nature of “Postmodern American Fiction,” because Norton anthologies have long been synonymous with the “structures of knowledge” Postmodernism rejects. On the most basic level, then, the whole idea of a book like this is oxymoronic, nothing less than a contradiction in terms.
Contradictions, of course, are what Postmodernism is all about; if you buy the paradigm, narrative itself (or “realistic” narrative, at any rate) is little more than an illusion, a conceit that writers from James Joyce to William S. Burroughs to Kathy Acker have successfully exploited in their work. Still, when it comes to “Postmodern American Fiction,” such issues cannot help but influence our responses to the book. Even if you choose to see the existence of this collection as the ultimate bit of Postmodern irony–an illustration of how the renegades have taken over the academy, and tradition and anti-tradition have somehow merged–there’s no question that we’re on tricky ground here, where the claims being made for the work run counter, in many cases, to the intentions of the authors themselves. That’s less troubling in regard to contributors like Burroughs, Gass, Coover, Grace Paley, Ishmael Reed or Kurt Vonnegut, who have long been accepted by the Establishment, and, in fact, have helped change the terms by which the Establishment is defined. But how do we construe the presence of, say, William T. Vollmann or pop diva Laurie Anderson, whose aesthetics seem to stand in opposition to the high culture sanctification a book like this represents? And more to the point, does it diffuse the power of these writings to read them from within the walls of the pantheon they once sought to assault?
The answer, perhaps, is that it doesn’t matter, that inasmuch as any of the writers in “Postmodern American Fiction” were ever considered revolutionary, those days are done and gone. Certainly, that appears to be the perspective of the editors, who spend little time worrying about the contradictory implications of their work. Instead, they seem more interested in opening up both the definition of Postmodernism and their anthology itself to an array of writing wide enough to make such distinctions obsolete. Thus, “Postmodern American Fiction” not only includes selections by such likely suspects as Walter Abish, Don DeLillo, bell hooks and Richard Brautigan, it also features material that eclipses the line between fiction and nonfiction, and, indeed, so-called high and low forms of art. One unexpected, if logical, choice is Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” an extended comic-book meditation in which the author recounts his father’s experiences during the Holocaust. By combining literature, memoir and a popular medium like comics, Spiegelman illustrates the Postmodern intention to dismantle arbitrary demarcations of genre, while creating a form in which his story can make sense. Operating in similar fashion is Paul Auster’s “City of Glass,” a detective story that melds the conventions of literature with those of crime fiction, and Jay Cantor’s “Krazy Kat,” which appropriates the characters and settings of George Herriman’s legendary comic strip and makes them its own.
Still, even on these terms, “Postmodern American Fiction” is so full of refracted meanings that it ultimately raises more questions than it resolves. Oddly enough, part of the problem is its inclusiveness, the unstated assumption that, when it comes to Postmodernism, anything goes. It’s not the idea I take issue with, for my own sense is that the editors are right, that in a culture like this, where ideas connect with fiber-optic immediacy and every individual is a repository for the detritus of our collective imagination, there is no way to avoid a certain openness about the question of where Postmodernism begins and ends. “Postmodern American Fiction” is at its best, actually, when Geyh, Leebron and Levy run with this, expanding their definition to include such (in my view) traditional writers as Bobbie Ann Mason, Sherman Alexie, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. It’s also interesting to find excerpts from Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night” and Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” in a section called “Fact Meets Fiction,” which examines “how the postmodern inclination to blur the boundary between standard journalism and fiction could itself create a new layer of narrative tension within the bounds of the traditional novel.”
For all that, though, one can’t help noticing a certain shallowness in the collection, as if, in trying to encompass so many strands of American literature, the editors have spread themselves too thin. Anthologies, after all, are reductive by nature, and to include journalism and mainstream fiction, the editors must omit a number of potential contributors, many of whom seem more appropriate than those chosen for the book. Why, for instance, do Vladimir Nabokov and Hubert Selby Jr.–both referenced in the introduction–appear nowhere in these pages, while Douglas Coupland and Mark Leyner do? Where, for that matter, is Michael Herr, whose Vietnam narrative “Dispatches” is a far stronger take on the strobe-light surreality of wartime than Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story”? Equally troubling is the editors’ tendency to pay lip service to such areas as noir writing, yet ignore practitioners such as Walter Mosley, whose efforts to navigate a line between literature and popular fiction are more organic than those of literary imitators like Barry Gifford, represented by an excerpt from “Wild at Heart.” What this implies is an editorial inattentiveness, a lack of authority, that’s only emphasized by the at-times-inexplicable decisions the editors make about the material they use. How else do you account for selecting Robert Coover’s “A Night at the Movies” over the clearly superior “The Public Burning,” or presenting “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Breakfast of Champions” as, respectively, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut’s most emblematic works?
In the end, that’s more than a little disappointing, for “Postmodern American Fiction” could have been a groundbreaking anthology, a scrapbook of American literature over the last 35 years. As it is, however, the book falls prey to its own contradictions in trying to pinpoint Postmodernism, and what it’s meant to be. If, as the editors suggest, everything is Postmodern, such a concept ultimately gets in their way. Because of this, “Postmodern American Fiction” never seems fully focused, which leaves the collection’s promise unfulfilled.
