What Comes after the Postmodern Novel?

pconsidine · Sep 20, 2005

Okay - something to ponder on. Lately, I've been sensing a bit of a backlash against the Postmodern Novel. You know the kind - the ones where the main character always has the same name as the author, but "isn't autobiographical"; the ones where the story always involves someone telling a story about the telling of the story in the book; the ones that spend all their time criticizing something, only to wind up embodying the very thing they criticize - those ones.

So what's next? Are we due for a neo-Neoclassic revival? Should we go dig up Hawthorne and put him back to work? Or is there nothing left but genre novels?

Hmmmm...

PeeDee · Sep 20, 2005

Mary-Kate and Ashley books are about due for a resurgence, really, aren't they? I see them too rarely in Publisher's Weekly, and I don't think I've seen a single interview about them in Locus.

We'll see all sorts of chique shirts that say "Hemmingway Who? Give me Olson Lit!"

(...and then I'm going to go live in a cave and throw rocks at people who get too close and talk to squirrels and keep my books to myself...)

Jamesaritchie · Sep 20, 2005

pconsidine said:
Okay - something to ponder on. Lately, I've been sensing a bit of a backlash against the Postmodern Novel. You know the kind - the ones where the main character always has the same name as the author, but "isn't autobiographical"; the ones where the story always involves someone telling a story about the telling of the story in the book; the ones that spend all their time criticizing something, only to wind up embodying the very thing they criticize - those ones.

So what's next? Are we due for a neo-Neoclassic revival? Should we go dig up Hawthorne and put him back to work? Or is there nothing left but genre novels?

Hmmmm...

Guess I'm out of touch. I've never read a novel where the main character has the same name as the writer. I think I had a preemptive backlash.

Give me a good story, good characters, and entertainment. Everything else is a gimmick.

MadScientistMatt · Sep 20, 2005

I haven't read any novels in that category. I guess this category may have come and gone without my noticing it. But I can only hope that whatever comes next will be able to come up with a better name than "Post-post-modernism." And I have to wonder what postmodernism will be known as once it finds itself on the receiving end of a paradigm shift. Surely that name won't do once it is no longer a contemporary philosophy.

I wouldn't mind seeing writing like Hawthorne's make a comeback. There are worse places to look for inspiration than the Anti-Transendentalists. (On the other hand, right now I'm reading Moby Dick and wondering how well some of his lengthy sections might go over with a modern audience.)

pconsidine · Sep 20, 2005

A few examples, then, of postmodern novels:

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
White Noise by Don DeLillo

Even the work of Philip Roth has been given the label now and then.

I think the example of the protagonist with the same name as the author is a more rare example, but there are many examples of authors whose main characters are understood to be thin imitations of themselves, which is more relevant to the topic.

Please continue.

Nicholas S.H.J.M Woodhouse · Sep 20, 2005

personally they are pretty much the kind of fiction I specifically look for. Eggars, DeLillo, Foer, Auster - they bend my mind and make me think about the entire process of writing, whats real and whats not more than anyother authors.

i think/hope there will always be a market for this kind of writing, as it is, in my opinion, at its best, mind blowing (if sometimes over the top, eg - don's underworld)

Nicholas S.H.J.M Woodhouse · Sep 20, 2005

pconsidine said:
I think the example of the protagonist with the same name as the author is a more rare example, .

for those interested, one such example is the brilliant 'Everything Is Illuminated'

Jamesaritchie · Sep 20, 2005

MadScientistMatt said:
I wouldn't mind seeing writing like Hawthorne's make a comeback. There are worse places to look for inspiration than the Anti-Transendentalists. (On the other hand, right now I'm reading Moby Dick and wondering how well some of his lengthy sections might go over with a modern audience.)

I love Hawthorne, but I also love the long passages in Melville's Moby Dick.

Jamesaritchie · Sep 20, 2005

Postmodernist

In all seriousness, I have tried a few postmoderists, and so far, all have left me cold. They strike me as writers the same way Jackson Pollock strikes me as a painter. For me, random splatters of paint on canvas isn't art, and the jumbled, illogical flow of words and thought I've found in postmodernism isn't writing. It seems to me that those who can't paint well simply splatter paint and call it abstract expressionism, and those who can't write well or think critically splatter words and call it postmodernism.

This may well be a failing in my own taste genes, but if so, it's one I'll just have to live with.

PeeDee · Sep 20, 2005

Just tell me a good story, give me a character to care about, and make me glad to have read your story when I set it down. If I put the book down and say "...wow..." then that's a bonus.

All genres and categories, I think, are just handy ways of grouping things and help tell bookstores where to shelve things. Two sci-fi books will both be in the sci-fi category and about two wildly different things.

Tell me a good "post-modernist" story, I'll follow you all the way. Give me some bizarre crap (much like the splatter-paintings) and I'm probably not going to go much past your first page.

Niesta · Sep 20, 2005

I think the correct way to go about founding the next great literary movement is to just keep writing, and leave things like naming it to the Comparative Literature departments of this world. After all, if we don't write it, there will be nothing for them to theorize about, and that would be a crying shame.

PeeDee · Sep 20, 2005

ay-men to that. I wholeheartedly agree. Write. Everything else is secondary.

emeraldcite · Sep 20, 2005

Maury Povich and Postmodernism

I think post-pomo sounds good. Or maybe we can use Maury Povich as an icon, albeit a post-iconic figure that represents the deconstruction of quality talk show presentations, and title it post-mopo.

I'm a big fan of postmodernism. I really enjoy textual play and experiementation. Although, I also relish good, solid storytelling. It's been argued that postmodernism has been dead for a two or three decades and we are currently in an unnamed, unclassified period of reaction to the self-reflexive absurdism lovingly called pomo.

PeeDee · Sep 20, 2005

I don't think anything particularly dies. They just fade out of the public eye, or fade into the public eye as the case may be.

I mean, just because disco died doesn't mean that you can't find a disco ball, bell-bottoms and an open-collar shirt and break down your moves on the floor to the BeeGees.

(if you do, I will send goons to beat you. But you get my point.)

jackie106 · Sep 20, 2005

pconsidine said:
So what's next? Are we due for a neo-Neoclassic revival? Should we go dig up Hawthorne and put him back to work?

So you want to self-consciously rip off writers from the past to create a new literary movement? Isn't that a little postmodern?

Sorry, but you can't escape it if you do things ironically.

Jackie

BlueTexas · Sep 20, 2005

Nique Zoolio said:
for those interested, one such example is the brilliant 'Everything Is Illuminated'

The main char in Hotel New Hampshire is a John, by John Irving. Not post-modern, though.

danielmc · Sep 21, 2005

Wow. All these fancy terms that i've never heard of. Just ran to grab Lullaby off my shelf, had a flick through. Whats post modern about it, apart from it using different tenses & POV's? Forgive me for my ignorance and lack of education, just curious about the craft.

The main char in the WIP i started this week has my name, because it is me.
But when, if, people read it, they will think its fiction as opposed to autobiogtaphical, or a memoir, because of some of the outlandish / illegal things that happen in it.
Is that such a bad thing? Should i change the names to something else to suit current publishing flavour? Be a pain in the *** having to consciously substitute Rick, John or Walt for Danny. And if i did, would it automatically make the novel non pomo?

MadScientistMatt · Sep 21, 2005

jackie106 said:
So you want to self-consciously rip off writers from the past to create a new literary movement? Isn't that a little postmodern?

Sorry, but you can't escape it if you do things ironically.

Jackie

Each generation of writing always builds on previous ones. Whatever the Next Big Thing in Writing is, it will probably be influenced heavily by authors from before it. There is nothing new under the sun.

pconsidine · Sep 21, 2005

danielmc said:
Wow. All these fancy terms that i've never heard of. Just ran to grab Lullaby off my shelf, had a flick through. Whats post modern about it, apart from it using different tenses & POV's?

The main character is a writer.
The main character at some point explains why he is writing the story, as if he were the author.

Both of those elements point to the more general postmodern element of self-reference. Postmodern novels are often very aware of themselves as novels. The process of creating the story you are reading often becomes an element of the story you are reading, thus creating this kind of feedback loop in the book.

emeraldcite said:
I'm a big fan of postmodernism. I really enjoy textual play and experiementation.

I think that's exactly why I don't like it. As a writer, I don't want to read a story about writing in any sense. I read to either learn something new (non-fiction) or to experience someone else's construction of reality (novels). The whole self-awareness of the writing proces in postmodern novels just makes me feel like there's no point to read it - it's not going to tell me anything I didn't already know.

(Art History Tangent: Jackson Pollack is actually far more than just throwing paint on a canvas, as he is still perceived. Pollack was a mixed media artist in the truest sense - his media were both the paint and the movement of applying it. It was almost as if he was mixing paint and dance on the canvas. The fact that people think they "don't get it" is a result of the Classicist perspective, that says a painting must have meaning in order to have value. With Pollack, the value is simply in the experience of looking at the painting.

However, in order to fully understand his work, it has to be seen in person. A photograph reduces all the complexity and the multi-layered activity to a single flat surface, thus killing it completely. For anyone who has the opportunity, I can't recommend enough seeing a Pollack in person - and the larger, the better. It may well change your mind about him completely. End Tangent)

Can you tell I went to art school?

Greer · Sep 21, 2005

It's funny you have this opinion about Jackson Pollock but not about postmodern literature since postmodern writing is essentially the same thing (about the mechanics of writing as much as the writing itself) only with words.

pconsidine · Sep 21, 2005

Ah grasshopper, that's why I don't paint anymore either.

Okay - serious response.

My feeling about postmodern novels is probably summed up by my last comment about Pollack - that the photograph kills is. To me, the result of postmodern novels is like a photograph of a story - it's flat, lifeless, dead. Now if there were a way to see the original story instead of the photograph, I might not mind so much, but there isn't.

WriterInChains · Sep 21, 2005

pconsidine said:
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Carl Streator is the protag here, & he's a reporter.
I've been a reporter & it's nothing like writing fiction.

Just my unsolicited $0.02. Interesting subject! :Sun:

Caren

PeeDee · Sep 22, 2005

The only time I enjoy reading a fictional story about writing is when the writer's the main character of another story. Stephen King, for example, in 'Salem's Lot, or in Bag of Bones, or in the very-wonderful novella/movie Secret Window.

You will notice, however, that the last thing we ever hear about these writers doing in these books...is writing. They're off fighting vampires, having haunted houses, dodging John Shooter, etc.

I'm afraid I just have a rambling sort of wishy-washy opinion about all this. Sorry.

pconsidine · Sep 22, 2005

Not a problem, PD. Stephen King is a good example of how one can use an author as a protag, yet not fall into the self-referential pitfall of Postmodernism.

Wonder Boys by Micheal Chabon almost fits that category as well, in as much as the story is about his not telling the story in a similary fashion as postmodernism would have made it about him telling his story.

What Comes after the Postmodern Novel?

Too Adorkable for Words

Where's my tea, please...?

Empirical Storm Trooper

Too Adorkable for Words

swooping after you

swooping after you

Where's my tea, please...?

Canada's sweetheart

Where's my tea, please...?

Art is Resistance

Where's my tea, please...?

Back from self-exile land.

Empirical Storm Trooper

Too Adorkable for Words

Too Adorkable for Words

Feed my eyes

Where's my tea, please...?

Too Adorkable for Words