POSTmodernISM

Author(s): Ihab Hassan

Reviewed work(s):
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries,
Reflections, and Speculations (Autumn, 1971), pp. 5-30
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 POSTmodernISM
A Paracritical Bibliography

Ihab Hassan

I. Change

DIONYSUS and Cupid are both agents of change. First The

Bacchae, destruction of the city, then The Metamorphoses,
mischievous variations of nature. Some might say that change
is violence, and violence is continuous whether it be Horror or High
Camp. But sly Ovid simply declares:

My intention is to tell of bodies changed

To different forms; the gods, who made the changes,
Will help me-or I hope so-with a poem
That runs from the world's beginning to our own days.

To our own days, the bodies natural or politic wax and wane, carpen
perpetuam. Something warms Galatea out of ivory; even rock turns
into spiritual forms. Perhaps love is one way we experience change.
How then can we live without love of change?
6 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Evolution has its enemies, that quiet genius, Owen Barfield,

knows. In Unancestral Voices, he calls them by name: Lucifer and
Ahriman. Most often, they coexist in us. Lucifer preserves the past
utterly from dissolution. Ahriman destroys the past utterly for the
sake of his own inventions.

a. Thus in one kind of history, chronicles of continuity, we deny

real change. Even endings become part of a history of endings. From
schism to paradigm; from apocalypse to archetype. Warring empires,
catastrophe and famine, immense hopes, faraway names-Cheops,
Hammurabi, David, Darius, Alcibiades, Hannibal, Caesar-all fall
into place on numbered pages.
Yet continuities, "the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was
Rome," must prevail in Story, on a certain level of narrative abstrac-
tion, obscuring change.
b. Thus, too, in another kind of history, we reinvent continually
the past. Without vision, constant revision, the Party chronicles of
1984. Or individually, each man dreams his ancestors to remake him-
self. The Black Muslim takes on a new name, ignoring the deadly
dawn raids, cries of Allah among slave traders, journeys across Africa
in Arab chains.
Yet relevances must persist in Story, on a certain level of fictional
selectivity, veiling change.
Behind all history, continuous or discrete, abstract or autistic, lurks
the struggle of identity with death. Is history often the secret biography
of historians? The recorded sense of our own mortality?
POSTMODERNISM 7

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

II. Periods

When will the Modern Period end?

Has ever a period waited so long? Renaissance? Baroque? Neo-
Classical? Romantic? Victorian?
When will Modernism cease and what comes thereafter?
What will the twenty-first century call us? and will its voice come
from the same side of our graves?
Does Modernism stretch merely to stretch out our lives? Or, ductile,
does it give a new sense of time? The end of periodization? The slow
arrival of simultaneity?
If change changes ever more rapidly, and the future jolts us now,
do men, paradoxically, resist both endings and beginnings?

Childhood is huge and youth golden. Few recover. Critics are no

exception. Like everyone else, they recall the literature of their youth
brilliantly; they do not think it can ever tarnish.
8 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Let us consider where the great men are

Who will obsess the child when he can read.

So Delmore Schwartz wrote, naming Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Rilke,

Yeats, Kafka, Mann. He could have added: Proust, Val6ry, Gide,
Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, O'Neill.
A walker in the city of that literature will not forget. Nor will he
forgive. How can contemporaries of Mailer, Pinter, or Grass dare
breathe in this ancestral air? Yet it is possible that we will all
remain Invisible Men until each becomes his own father.

III. Innovation

All of us devise cunning ceremonies of ancestor worship. Yet there

is a fable for us in the lives of two men: Proteus and Picasso, mentors
of shapes.

Masters of possibility,ponder this. They used to say: the kingdom

of the dead is larger than any kingdom. But the earth has now
exploded. Soon the day may come when there will be more people
alive than ever lived.
When the quick are more populous than all the departed, will
history reverse itself? End?
POSTMODERNISM 9

We resist the new under the guise of judgment. "We must have
standards." But standards apply only where they are applicable. This
has been the problem with the Tradition of the New (Harold Rosen-
berg).
Standards are inevitable, and the best of these will create them-
selves to meet, to create, new occasions. Let us, therefore, admit
standards. But let us also ask how many critics of literature espouse,
even selectively, the new, speak of it with joyous intelligence? Taking
few risks, the best known among them wait for men of lesser reputa-
tions to clear the way.
Reaction to the new has its own reasons that reason seldom acknowl-
edges. It also has its rhetoric of dismissal.
a. The Fad
-"It's a passing fashion, frivolous; if we ignore it now, it will
quietly go away."
-This implies permanence as absolute value. It also implies the
ability to distinguish between fashion and history without benefit
of time or creative intuition. How many judgments of this kind
fill the Purgatorio of letters?
b. The Old Story
-"It's been done before, there's nothing new in it; you can find
it in Euripides, Sterne, or Whitman."
-This implies prior acquaintance, rejection on the basis of un-
established similarity. It also implies that nothing really changes.
Therefore, why unsettle things, require a new response?
c. The Safe Version
-"Yes, it seems new, but in the same genre, I prefer Duchamp; he
really did it better."
-This implies a certain inwardness with the tradition of the avant-
garde. The entrance fee has been paid, once and forever. With-
out seeming in the least Philistine, one can disdain the intrusions
of the present.
d. The Newspeak of Art
-"The avant-garde is just the new academicism."
-This may imply that art which seems conventional can be more
10 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

genuinely innovative, which is sometimes true. It may also

imply mere irritation: the oxymoron as means of discreditation.

About true innovation we can have no easy preconceptions. Pre-

diction is mere extrapolation, the cool whisper of RAND. But
prophecy is akin to madness or the creative imagination; its path,
seldom linear, breaks, turns, disappears in mutations or quantum
jumps.
Therefore, we can not expect the avant-garde of past, present,
and future to obey the same logic, assume the same forms. For in-
stance, the new avant-garde need not have a historical consciousness,
express recognizable values, or endorse radical politics. It need not
shock, surprise, protest.

Footnote
Consult Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge,
Mass, 1968).

What the avant-garde probably still needs to do for a time is

serve as the agent of change, which is recognizable when still newer
change is in progress.
And yet everything I have said here could lend, has lent, itself
to serious abuses. The rage for change can be a form of self-hatred
or spite.
POSTMODERNISM 1I

IV. Distinctions

The change in Modernismmay be called Postmodernism.Looking

at the former with later eyes, we begin to discern in it fringe figures
closer to us now than the great Modernswho "will obsess the child"
someday.
Thus the classic text of Modernism is Edmund Wilson's Axel's
Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931).
Contents: Symbolism,Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Stein.
Thus, forty years later, my alternateview, The Dismembermentof
Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971). Contents: Sade,
'Pata-physics to Surrealism, Hemingway, Kafka, Existentialism to Alit-
erature, Genet, Beckett.
Erratum: Gertrude Stein should have appeared in the latter work,
for she contributed to both Modernism and Postmodernism.

But without a doubt, the crucial text is

K I

A N

W e N

S E

N G

A
12 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

If we can arbitrarilystate that literaryModernismincludes certain

works between Jarry'sUbu Roi (1896) and Joyce's Finnegans Wake
(1939), where will we arbitrarilysay that Postmodernismbegins? A
year earlier than the Wake? With Sartre's La nausde (1938) or
Beckett'sMurphy (1938) ? In any case, it includes works by writers
as different as B arth, arthelme, eckett, orges, recht, roch, urroughs,
utor.

V. Critics

The assumptionsof Modernism,elaboratedby formalistand mytho-

poeic critics especially,by the intellectual culture of the first half of
the century as a whole, still define the dominant perspectiveon the
study of literature.

Exception:
Karl Shapiro'sBeyondCriticism( I953), In Defence of Ignorance
(I96O), works we acknowledge in a whisper. Why?

In England as in America, the known critics, different as they may

POSTMoDERNISM 13

seem in age or persuasion,sharethe broad Modernistview: Blackmur,

Brooks, Connolly, Empson, Frye, Howe, Kazin, Kermode, Leavis,
Levin, Pritchett, Ransom, Rahv, Richards, Schorer, Tate, Trilling,
Warren, Wellek, Wilson, Winters, etc. In saying this, surely I take
nothing away from their various distinctions.
No doubt, there are many passagesin the writingsof these critics-
of Leavis, say, or Wilson-which will enlighten minds in every age.
Yet is was Herbert Read who possessedthe most active sympathyfor
the avant-garde. His generosityof intuition enabled him to sponsor
the new, rarely embracing the trivial. He engaged the Postmodern
spirit in his anarchic affinities,in his concern for the prevalence of
suffering, in his sensuous apprehensionof renewed being. He cried:
behold the Child! To him, education through art meant a salutation
to Eros. Believing that the imagination serves the purpose of moral
good, Read hoped to implicate art into existence so fully that their
common substance became as simple, as necessary, as bread and
water. This is a sacramentalhope, still alive though mute in our midst,
which recalls Tolstoy's What Is Art? I can hardly think of another
critic, youngereven by severaldecades,who might have composedthat
extraordinaryromance, The Green Child.
The culture of literarycriticismis still ruled by Modernistassump-
tions. This is particularlytrue within the academic profession,except-
ing certain linguistic, structuralist,and hermeneuticsschools. But it
is also true within the more noisy culture of our media. The New
York Review of Books, Time (the literary sections), and The New
YorkTimes Book Review share a certain aspirationto wit or liveliness,
to intelligence really, concealing distaste for the new. All the more
skeptical in periods of excess, the culture of the logos insists on old
ordersin clever or current guises, and, with the means of communi-
cation at hand, inhibits and restrains.

Self-Admonition:
Beware of glib condemnationsof the media. They are playing
a national role as bold, as crucial, as the Supreme Court played
in the Fifties. Willful and arbitraryas they may be in their crea-
tion of public images-which preempt ourselves-they are still
custodiansof some collectivesanity. Note, too, the rising quality
of the very publicationsyou cited.
14 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

VI. Bibliography

Here is a curious chronology of some Postmodern criticism:

I. George Steiner, "The Retreat from the Word," Kenyon Review

XXIII (Spring, 1961). See also his Language and Silence (New
York, 1967), and Extraterritorial (New York, 197 ).

2. Ihab Hassan, "The Dismemberment of Orpheus," American Scholar

XXIII (Summer, 1963). See also his Literature of Silence (New
York, 1967).

3. Hugh Kenner, "Art in a Closed Field," in Learners and Discerners,

ed. Robert Scholes (Charlottesville, Va., 1964). See also his Samuel
Beckett (New York, 1961, 1968), and The Counterfeiters (Blooming-
ton, Indiana, 1968).

4. Leslie Fiedler, "The New Mutants," Partisan Review XXXII (Fall,

1965). See also his "The Children's Hour: or, The Return of the
Vanishing Longfellow," in Liberations, ed. Ihab Hassan (Middle-
town, Conn., I971), and Collected Essays (New York, I97I).

5. Susan Sontag, "The Aesthetics of Silence," Aspen, No. 5 & 6 (1967).

See also her Against Interpretation (New York, 1966), and Styles
of Radical Will (New York, 1969).

6. Richard Poirier, "The Literature of Waste," New Republic, May 2o,

1967. See also his "The Politics of Self-Parody," Partisan Review
XXXV (Summer, 1968), and The Performing Self (New York,
1971).

7. John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic Monthly,

August, 1967. See also his Lost in the Funhouse (New York,
I968).
POSTMODERNISM 15

And here are some leitmotifs of that criticism: the literary act
in quest and question of itself; self-subversion or self-transcendence of
forms; popular mutations; languages of silence.

VII. ReVisions

A revision of Modernism is slowly taking place, and this is another

evidence of Postmodernism. In The Performing Self, Richard Poirier
tries to mediate between these two movements. We need to recall the
doctrines of formalist criticism, the canons of classroom and quarterly
in the last three decades, to savor such statements:

Three of the great and much used texts of twentieth century criticism,
Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Waste Land, are written in mockery of system,
written against any effort to harmonize discordant elements, against any
mythic or metaphoric scheme .... But while this form of the literary
imagination is radical in its essentially parodistic treatment of systems, its
radicalism is in the interest of essentially conservative feelings ....

The most complicated examples of twentieth-centuryliterature,like Ulysses

and The Waste Land, the end of which seems parodied by the end of
Giles [Goat-Boy by Barth], are more than contemptuous of their own
formal and stylistic elaborateness.

Certainly some profound philosophic minds of our century have

concerned themselves with the disease of verbal systems: Heidegger,
Sartre, Wittgenstein. And later writers as different as John Cage,
16 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Norman O. Brown, and Elie Wiesel have listened intently to the

sounds of silence in art or politics, sex, morality, or religion. In this
context, the perceptions of Poirier do not merely display a revisionist
will; they strain toward an aesthetic of Postmodernism.
We are still some way from attaining such an aesthetic; nor is it
clear that Postmodern art gives high priority to that end. Perhaps we
can start by revisioning Modernism as well as revising the pieties we
have inherited about it. In Continuities, Frank Kermode cautiously
attempts that task. A critic of great civility, he discriminates well
between types of modernism-what he calls "palaeo- and neo-modern"
corresponds perhaps to Modern and Postmodern-and takes note of
the new "anti-art" which he rightly traces back to Duchamp. But his
preference for continuities tempts him to assimilate current to past
things. Kermode, for instance, writes: "Aleatory art is accordingly,
for all its novelty, an extension of past art, indeed the hypertrophy of
one aspect of that art." Does not this statement close more possibilities
than it opens? There is another perspective of things which Goethe
described: "The most important thing is always the contemporary
element, because it is most purely reflected in ourselves, as we are in
it." I think that we will not grasp the cultural experience of our
moment if we insist that the new arts are "marginal developments
of older modernism;" or that distinctions between "art" and "joke"
are crucial to any future aesthetic.
Whether we tend to revalue Modernism in terms of Postmodernism
(Poirier) or to reverse that procedure (Kermode), we will end by
doing something of both since relations, analogies, enable our thought.
New lines emerge from the past because our eyes every morning open
anew. In a certain frame of mind, Michelangelo or Rembrandt,
Goethe or Hegel, Nietzsche or Rilke, can reveal to us something about
Postmodernism, as Erich Heller incidentally shows. Consider this
marvelous passage from The Artist's Journey to the Interior:

. . . Michelangelo spent the whole of his last working day, six days before
his death, trying to finish the Pieta which is known as the "PietA
Rondanini." He did not succeed. Perhaps it lies in the nature of stone
that he had to leave unfinished what Rembrandt completed in paint: the
employment of the material in the service of its own negation. For this
sculpture seems to intimate that its maker was in the end determined to
use only as much marble as was necessary to show that matter did not
matter; what alone mattered was the pure inward spirit.
POSTMODERNISM 17

Here Michelangelo envisions, past any struggle with the obdurate

material of existence, a state of consciousness to which we may be
tending. Yet can we justifiably call him Postmodern?

Where Modern and Postmodern May Meet: Or, Make Tour Own
List:
i. Blake, Sade, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Whitman, etc.
2. daDaDA
3. SURrealism
4. K A F K A
5. Finnegans Wake
6. The Cantos
7.? ? ?

VIII. Modernism

This is no place to offer a comprehensive definition of Modernism.

From Apollinaire and Arp to Valery, Woolf, and Yeats-I seem to
miss the letters X and Z-runs the alphabet of authors who have
delivered themselves memorably on the subject; and the weighty work
of Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., The Tradition of the
Modern, still stands as the best compendium of that "large spiritual
enterprise including philosophic, social, and scientific thought, and
18 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

aesthetic and literary theories and manifestoes, as well as poems, novels,

dramas."
Expectations of agreement, let alone of definition, seem superlatively
naive. This is true among stately and distinguished minds, not only
rowdy critical tempers. Here, for instance, is Lionel Trilling, "On
the Modern Element in Modem Literature":

I can identify it by calling it the disenchantment of our culture with

culture itself ... the bitter line of hostility to civilization that runs through
it [modern literature].... I venture to say that the idea of losing oneself
up to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience
without regard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping
wholly from the societal bonds, is an "element" somewhere in the mind
of every modern person....

To this, Harry Levin counters in "What Was Modernism?":

Insofar as we are still moderns, I would argue, we are the children of

Humanism and the Enlightenment. To identify and isolate the forces of
unreason, in a certain sense, has been a triumph for the intellect. In
another sense it has reinforced that anti-intellectual undercurrent which,
as it comes to the surface, I would prefer to call post-modern.

Yet the controversy of Modernism has still wider scope as Monroe

K. Spears, in Dionysus and the City, with bias beneath his Apollonian
lucidity, shows. Released as energy from the contradictions of history,
Modernism makes contradiction its own.

* More accurately,the quotation appearsin a note preceding the essay. See Harry
Levin, Refractions (New York, 1966), pp. 271-73.
POSTMODERNISM '9

For my purpose, let Modernism stand for X: a window on human

madness, the shield of Perseus against which Medusa glances, the
dream of some frowning, scholarly muse. I offer, instead, some
rubrics and spaces. Let readers fill them with their own queries or
grimaces. We value what we choose.

a. Urbanism: Nature put in doubt, from Baudelaire's "citd" to

Proust's Paris, Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. It is not a question
of locale but of presence. The sanatorium of The Magic Mountain
and the village of The Castle are "cities" still. Exceptions, Faulkner's
Yoknapatawpha or Lawrence's Midlands, recognize the City as per-
vasive threat.

b. Technologism: City and Machine make and remake one

another. Centralization, diffusion of the human will. Yet technology
does not feature simply as a theme of Modernism; it is also as a form
of its artistic struggle. Witness Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism. More
subtle reactions to technology: Bergsonian time, mythical space, the
occult image, the dissociation of sensibility, etc.

c. "Dehumanization": Ortega y Gasset really means Elitism,

Irony, and Abstraction (The Dehumanization of Art). Style takes
over: let life and the masses fend for themselves. "Poetry has become
the higher algebra of metaphor." Instead of Vitruvian man, Leo-
nardo's famous image of the human measure, we have Picasso's beings
splintered on many planes. Not less human, just another idea of man.
20 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Elitism: Aristocratic or crypto-fascist: Rilke, Proust, Yeats, Eliot,

Lawrence, Pound, D'Annunzio, Wyndham Lewis, etc.
Irony: Play, complexity, formalism. The aloofness of art but also
sly hints of its radical incompleteness. Dr. Faustus and Con-
fessions of Felix Krull. The irony of Nonbeing.
Abstraction: Impersonality, sophistical simplicity, reduction and
construction, time decomposed or spatialized.
Mondrian on Reductionism. "To create pure reality plasti-
cally, it is necessary to reduce natural forms to the constant
elements of form and natural colour to primary colour." Gabo
on Constructivism: "It has revealed a universal law that the
elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess
their own forces of expression, independent of any association
with the external aspects of the world. ." The literary equiv-
alent of these ideas may be "spatial time."
... (See Joseph Frank,
"Spatial Form in Modem Literature," The Widening Gyre.)
"Dehumanization" and the Nonhuman: There is more to it than
"another idea of man"; there is also a revulsion against the
human, or a renewal of the sense of the superhuman. Rilke's
"Angels." Lawrence's "Fish":
And my heart accused itself
Thinking: I am not the measure of creation
This is beyond me, this fish.
His God stands outside my God.

d. Primitivism: The archetypes behind abstraction, behind civiliza-

tion. An African mask, a beast slouching toward Bethlehem. Structure
as ritual or myth, metaphors from the collective dream of mankind.
Cunning palimpsests of time, ironic palingenesis of literary forms. Also
Dionysus and the violent return of the repressed.
POSTMODERNISM 21

e. Eroticism: All literature is erotic but Modernist sex scratches

the skin from within. It is not merely the liberation of the libido, a new
language of anger or desire; love now becomes an intimate of disease:
sado-masochism, solipsism, nihilism, anomie. Consciousness seeks
desperately to discharge itself in the world. A new and darker stage
in the struggle between Eros and Thanatos. (See Lionel Trilling, "The
Fate of Pleasure.")

f. Antinomianism: Beyond law, dwelling in paradox. Also dis-

continuity, alienation, non serviam! The pride of art, of the self,
defining the conditions of its own grace. Iconoclasm, schism, excess.
Beyond antinomianism, even, toward apocalypse. Therefore, deca-
dence and renovation. (See Nathan A. Scott, Jr., The Broken Center.)

g. Experimentalism: Innovation, dissociation, the brilliance of

change in all its aesthetic shapes. New languages, new concepts of
order. Also, the Word beginning to put its miracle to question in the
midst of a miracle. Poem, novel, or play henceforth can never really
bear the same name.

In those seven rubrics, I seek not so much to define Modernism as

to carry certain elements which I consider crucial, carry them forward
toward Postmodernism.
22 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

IX. The Unimaginable

The unimaginable lies somewhere between the Kingdom of Com-

placence and the Sea of Hysteria. It balks all geographies; bilks the
spirit of the traveler who passes unwittingly through its spaceless
realm; it boggles time. Yet anyone who can return from it to tell
his tale may also know how to spell the destiny of man.
I know the near-infinite resources of man, and that his imagina-
tion may still serve as the teleological organ of his evolution. Yet
I am possessedby the feeling that in the next few decades, certainly
within half a century, the earth and all that inhabits it may be
wholly other, perhaps ravaged, perhaps on the way to some strange
utopia indistinguishable from nightmare. I have no language to
articulate this feeling with conviction, nor imagination to conceive
this special destiny. To live from hour to hour seems as maudlin
as to invoke Last Things. In this feeling I find everyday that I am
not alone.
The litany of our disasters is all too familiar, and we recite
it in the name of that unholy trinity, Population, Pollution, Power
(read genocide), hoping to appease our furies, turn our fate inside
out. But soon our minds lull themselves to sleep again on this song
of abstractions, and a few freak out. The deathly dreariness of
politics brings us ever closer to death. Neither is the alteration of
human consciousnessat hand. And the great promise of technology
-which? Fuller's? Skinner's? Dr. No's? Engineers of liberation or
of control?-the promise is conditional on everything that we are, in
this our ambiguous state.
Truly, we dwell happily in the Unimaginable. We also dwell at
our task: Literature. I could learn to do pushups in a prison cell,
but I can not bring myself to "study literature" as if the earth were
still in the orbit of our imagination. I hope this is Hope.

X. Postmodernism

Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Un-

imaginable which Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic
POSTMODERNISM 23

moments. Certainly it is not the Dehumanization of the Arts that

concerns us now; it is rather the Denaturalization of the Planet and
the End of Man. We are, I believe, inhabitants of another Time and
another Space, and we no longer know what response is adequate to
our reality. In a sense, we have all learned to become minimalists-
of that time and space we can call our own-though the globe has
become our village. This is why it seems bootless to compare Modern
with Postmodern artists, range "masters" against "epigones." The
latter are closer to "zero in the bone," to silence or exhaustion, and the
best of them brilliantly display the resources of the void. Thus the
verbal omnipotence of Joyce yields to the impotence of Beckett, heir
and peer, no less genuine, only more austere. Yet moving into the
void, these artists also pass to the other side of silence, and discover
the sacrament of plenum. The consummation of their art is a work
which, though art still, pretends to abolish itself (Beckett, Tinguely,
Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt) or else to become indistinguishable
from life (Cage, Rauschenberg, the Man Within Mailer's Fiction).
Duchamp coolly pointed the way.

Nihilism is a word we often use, when we use it unhistorically,

to designate values we dislike. It is applied to the children of Marcel
Duchamp.
When John Cage, in "HPSCHD" for instance, insists on
Quantity rather than Quality, he does not surrender to nihilism-
far, far from it-he requires:
-affluence and permissionof being, generosity
-discovery in multitude, confusion of prior judgment
-mutation of perception, of consciousness,through randomness
and diversity
Cage knows how to praise Duchamp: "The rest of them were
artists. Duchamp collects dust."
24 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

I have not defined Modernism; I can define Postmodernism less;

and the parallels and contrasts between these movements are least
obvious to me. No doubt, the more we ponder, the more we will need
to qualify all we say.* Perhaps elisions may serve to qualify these notes.

Modernist Rubrics PostmodernistNotes

a. Urbanism - -The City and also the Global Village

(McLuhan) and Spaceship Earth (Ful-
ler). The City as Cosmos.

- -Meanwhile, the world breaks up into

untold blocs, nations, tribes, clans, par-
ties, languages, sects.
Anarchy and fragmentationeverywhere.
A new diversity or prelude to world to-
talitarianism? Or to world unification?

- -Nature recovered partly in ecological

activism, the green revolution, urban re-
newal, etc.

- - Meanwhile, Dionysus has entered the

City: prison riots, urban crime, por-
nography, etc.

b. Technologism - -Runaway technology, from genetic engi-

neering and thought control to the con-
quest of space.

- -All the physical materials of the arts

changed. New media, new art forms.

* New journals are now founded for the purpose of

exploring Postmodernism.
See, for instance, Boundary 2, Binghamton, New York.
POSTMODERNISM 25

- -Art following the trend of ephemeraliza-

tion. Also, boundless dispersal by me-
dia. The sensuous object disappearing
into a concept?

- The computer as substitute conscious-

ness or as extension of consciousness?
Will it prove tautological, increased reli-
ance on prior orders? Or will it help
to create novel forms?

- Human needs soon to be altered, per-

haps on the most basic level, and the
end of art? Hence sporadic artistic re-
actions against Technologism.

c. "Dehumanization" - -Anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism.Dif-

fusion of the ego. Participation. Art
becomes communal, optional, gratui-
tous, or anarchic.

-
-Irony becomes radical, self-consuming
play. Black canvas or blank page. Si-
lence. Also comedy of the absurd, black
humor, insane parody and slapstick,
Camp. (See Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Ne-
gative Capability.)

- Abstraction taken to the limit and com-

ing back as New Concreteness: the
found object, the signed Brillo box or
soup can, the non-fiction novel, the
novel as history. The range from Con-
cept Art (abstract) to Environmental
Art (concrete) .

--Warhol: "I want to be a machine;"

Burroughs simulating insect life. From
infrahumanism to posthumanism, be-
26 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

yond man and into the cosmos. Sci-fi.

To love life and to love man are no
longer the same.

"Dehumanization," both in Modernism and Postmodernism, es-

sentially means the end of the old Realism. Increasingly, Illusionism
takes its place, not only in art but also in life. The media con-
tribute egregiously to this process in Postmodern society. In Act
and the Actor Making the Self, Harold Rosenberg says: "History
has been turned inside out; writing takes place in advance of its
occurrence, and every statesman is an author in embryo." Thus the
Illusionism of politics matches that of Pop Art or Neo-Realism.
The end of the old Realism also affects the sense of the Self. Thus
"Dehumanization," both in Modernism and Postmodernism,implies
revision of the Self evidenced:
In Modernism-by doctrines of impersonality, the masks of
Yeats, the tradition of Eliot, the dramatic objectivity of
Joyce; or by the opposite, the stream of consciousnessof
Joyce, the allotropic ego of Lawrence. (See Robert
Langbaum, The Modern Tradition, pp. 164-184.)
In Postmodernism-by phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Mer-
leau-Ponty), Beckett's fiction of consciousness, varieties
of the nouveau roman (Sarraute, Butor, Robbe-Grillet),
the linguistic novel of Tel Quel (Sollers, Thibaudeau).
(See Vivian Mercier, The New Novel, pp. 3-42.)

d. Primitivism - -Away from the mythic, toward the exis-

tential. Beat and Hip. Energy and
spontaneity of the White Negro (Mail-
er).
POSTMODERNISM 27

- -The post-existential ethos, psychedelics

(Leary), the Dionysian ego (Brown),
Pranksters (Kesey), Hell's Angels, mad-
ness (Laing) .

- -The Hippie movement. Woodstock,

rock music and poetry, communes. The
culture of The Whole Earth Catalogue.

- -The primitive Jesus.

e. Eroticism - -Beyond the trial of Lady Chatterley's

Lover. The repeal of censorship. Grove
Press and the Evergreen Review.

- -The new sexuality, from Reichian or-

gasm to Brownian polymorphous per-
versity and Esalen body consciousness.

- -The homosexual novel (Burroughs,

Vidal, Selby, Rechy, etc.). And the
lesbian?

- -Camp and comic pornography.

f. Antinomianism - -The Counter Cultures, political and

otherwise. Free Speech Movement,
S.D.S., Weathermen, Church Militants,
Women's Lib, J.D.L., Black, Red, and
Chicano Power, etc. Rebellion and Re-
action! Not only aesthetic but also
actual (guerilla) attacks on reason and
history, science and society.

- -Beyond alienation from the whole cul-

ture, acceptance of discretenessand dis-
continuity. Evolution of radical em-
28 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

piricism in art as in politics or morality.

- -Counter Western "ways" or metaphy-

sics, Zen, Buddhism,Hinduism. But also
Western mysticism, transcendentalism,
witchcraft, the occult.

- -The widespread cult of apocalyptism,

less as renovation than as destruction.

g. Experimentalism - -Open, discontinuous, improvisational,

indeterminate, or aleatory structures.
Absurdist and neo-surrealistmodes. But
also reductive, minimalist forms. In
general, anti-formalism. (See Calvin
Tompkins, The Bride and the Bach-
elor.)

- -Simultaneism. Now. The imperman-

ence of art (sculpture made of dry ice or
a hole in Central Park filled with earth),
the transcience of man. Absurd time.

- -Play, humor, happening, farce. (See

"Irony"above.)

- -Intermedia, the fusion of forms, the

confusion of realms. An end to tradi-
tional aesthetics focused on the "beauty"
or "uniqueness"of the art work?

Morse Peckham argues, in Man's Rage for Chaos, "that art is a

disjunctive category, established by convention, and that art is not
POSTMODERNISM 29

a category of perceptual fields, but of roleplaying." And in The

Art of Time, Kirby White says: "Traditional aesthetics asks a par-
ticular hermetic attitude or state of mind that concentrates on the
sensory perception of the work .... [Postmodern] aesthetics makes
use of no special attitude or set, and art is viewed just as anything
else in life."
Is this why Postmodern art, viewed in a Modernist perspective,
creates more anxiety than it appeases?

XI. Alternatives

The reader, no doubt, will want to judge for himself how much
Modernism permeates the present and how much the latter contains
elements of a new reality. The judgment is not always made rationally;
self-love and the fear of dissolution may enter into its as much as the
conflict of literary generations. Yet it is already possible to note that
whereas Modernism created its own forms of Authority, precisely
because the center no longer held, Postmodernism has tended toward
Anarchy, in deeper complicity with things falling apart. The cere-
monies of Yeats' own work, indeed of his life, are to the point.
Speculating further, we may say that the Authority of Modernism-
artistic, cultural, personal-rests on intense, elitist, self-generated
orders in times of crisis, of which the Hemingway Code is perhaps the
starkest exemplar, and Eliot's Tradition or Yeats' Mythology is a more
devious kind. Such elitist orders, perhaps the last of the world's
Eleusinean mysteries, may no longer have a place amongst us,
threatened as we are, at the same instant, by extermination and
totalitarianism.
Yet is the Anarchy of Postmodernism a deeper response, somehow
more inward with our destiny? Though my sympathies are in the
present, I can not believe this to be so. True, there is enhancement of
life in certain anarchies of the spirit, in humor and play, in love re-
leased and freedom of the imagination to overreach itself, in a cosmic
30 NEWLITERARY
HISTORY

consciousness of variousness as of unity. I recognize these as values

intended by Postmodern art, and see the latter as closer, not only in
time but even more in tenor, to the transformation of hope itself.
Still, I wonder if any art can help to engender the motives we must
now acquire; or if we can long continue to value an art that fails us
in such endeavor. These are not assertions; they are open questions.
It is time for everyone to open up alternatives to the Unimaginable.
Who knows but that the only alternative man does possess is one to
his "human" consciousness?

UNIVERSITYOF WISCONSIN, MILWAUKEE