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I'm interested into getting into some deep NPR level culture war.
No geopolitics, no woke-vs-not debates, no (not) Trusting The Science.
I want to talk about books.
Let me NPR whisperspeak overanunciate that: mmmmbbbboooOOOOkksszzzz
Is postmodern literature
To throw up some examples of what I mean;
I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre.
I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."
Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.
In my opinion, I think postmodernism pretends to be this ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.
But ... it isn't? Nothing actually holds together. The plot becomes a non-plot or endless branches of a single plot. The characters become weird disposable mouthpieces for the author talking to himself. The commentary, such as it is, gets so jumbled that you lose the point.
And so postemodernism reveals what it actually is; a heavily stylistic exercise, much like jazz, where unnecessary complexity is treated as "skill." Additionally, it's a pure signalling mechanism. People get to do that think when you bring up Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow; "Dude, there's like SO MUCH in that book, right? Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" Which isn't saying anything at all, but inviting you to be the one who makes a fool of himself by venturing something like, "I'm not sure I got it though" to which the other person gets to puff themselves up and retort with, "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely pretty dense, haha." With the snide implication being "But me and my big ole brain totally got it".
This is why I ask, first, "is it real?" The serpentine prose in postmodern literature seems to me to be a kind of forer statement; a reader can (literally) read anything into what's being written and arguments trying to pin down essential meaning are pointless because the point is there is no essential meaning.
I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative. Blood Meridian is an Epic in the classic Homeric sense. You can re-read it 10 times and pick up new strands of thinking on the biggest of The Big Questions; life, death, judgement, heaven, hell.
And it's also a sick western. So you can read it at the level of "fuck yeah, they killed those comanches" and get a lot out of it. You do not need to (although you may want to) keep a notebook next to you while reading. You can just read and get a lot out of it.
There's a lot that I agree with here in principle, but as I've said several times here on the Motte, when it comes to books I'm a cheap date. I think where I'd differ is that I don't necessarily need a cohesive narrative in order to enjoy a book. I have a yen for absurdist humor and surrealism (oh hai Illuminatus! Trilogy), so it isn't hard for me to take delight in the riffing of a stylish author, regardless of the presence or absence of plot, as long as I find the book engaging. Take this passage from White Noise for example:
Forget the punchy, rapid-fire prose, for a second. This is a main character that is pretentious to the point of having his head so far up his own ass that I can't even say that he rivals William Shatner simply because said MC still takes himself far too seriously. At least Shatner is self-aware! And just about every adult in the book, with the possible exception of Babette, is like this! And that last sentence in the quoted passage was enough to jolt me right out of my reading; juxtaposing Formalism with bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles was so dissonant to me that I had to think about it before I could grok it, which just made me love it, and the book, even more. Does White Noise have any essential meaning? Not so much, in my view. It's much more a collection of loosely joined commentary with some exceptional scenes and turns of phrase, but the skewering of the self-important academia types alone is worth the price of admission for me--everything else is just bonus points.
In contrast, the works of Samuel Delany would, I think, would also qualify for purposes of this discussion, and as much as I want to like his books, I just don't. I slogged through both Triton and Dahlgren, hoping that either of them would hook me, but they never did. Dahlgren in particular had more than enough surreality to potentially pique my interest, but Odindamn, if there's ever a book that embodies the literal meaning of YAOI!, which is to say that it had no climax, no point, no meaning, brother that one is it! Perhaps they are a little too much of their time, and/or personal to the author himself, but I had to give him up as a bad job after going 0-2.
Now Pynchon, that dude is something else. He is, to me, a unique mix of dense, rich, and oddly engaging that adds up to something like Neal Stephenson meets the Coen brothers on a mind-obliterating dose of LSD. When I first picked up Gravity's Rainbow, I think I read the first section introducing Pirate Prentice and didn't read any more for like months, if not a year. That said, when I returned to the book, it did in fact engage me enough to keep me reading all the way through, though the freewheeling nature of the plot, such as it was, combined with the richness of the prose brought it, if not exactly adjacent to, at least into the same zip code as, a slog for me, at least at times. There was so much going on, with so many plot threads and countless references that there was no way in Hel that I was ever going to be able to keep it all straight on a single reading! But unlike with Delany, above, as the madcap insanity of Gravity's Rainbow finally, inevitably ended in its utter decoherence, I admired Pynchon for his elegance in pulling off the ending. I found I had thoroughly enjoyed it! And I absolutely thought to myself, "what the actual fuck did I just read?"
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I find this to be pretty accurate. I look at modern art and I don’t think it’s real in the sense that it’s trying to explore or explain something the creators feel deeply about. I can generally enjoy well-made art that has a viewpoint I disagree with. But most modern art — films, books, paintings, or sculptures seem to be a very fraudulent thing. They make great claims of being great avant garde art, but their entire existence is the opposite. There’s no real commentary. A sculpture of broken glass that is commentary on the holocaust that begins with “the night of broken glass” isn’t clever commentary. It’s fraud, in my mind because it’s not deep, not even surprising (surprising commentary shouldn’t be identical to the accepted wisdom of the era. Being against the holocaust isn’t much of an original thought). It also takes little thought or skill to make something that says little and does so in ways that don’t make sense.
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De gustibus non est dispuntandum
TLDR: People probably like the things they say they like, even if there are people who pretend to like it they probably aren't the majority and definitely aren't universal.
So you haven't actually read any examples of post-modern literature, but you question whether anyone enjoys it because you don't think you would enjoy it if you actually read it?
I think you should probably be very hesitant to assume that no one actually enjoys thing because you don't enjoy thing, even if you yourself pretended to enjoy thing as a signaling exercise.
There are things that in my life, I tried to pretend I enjoyed because I thought it was the cool thing to like. Sometimes these weren't even things that would get me credit among my actual peers. When I was heavy into straight edge punk or metal, I'd listen to bands like Earth Crisis or atonal Norwegian black metal outfits because online forums told me those were the coolest bands to like, and I'd listen to them on my ipod and try to like them even though I didn't actually enjoy atonal screeching and lack of melody. But I thought for whatever reason that was the cool thing so I tried to like it.
At the same time, there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to believe that I like the things that I like. Amon Amarth isn't a universal taste. My workout playlist contains at least one song that will offend anyone.
My favorite books are full of things that people would call posing, or say that no one actually enjoys. I've read War and Peace four times, and loved it every time. Euros will tell me that there's no way I can possibly enjoy a boring sport like Baseball or Football, Americans will tell me that there's no way I can enjoy a BORING sport like soccer. The arguments over which sexual acts women actually like and which they are pretending to like could fill a new Talmud with disputations in volumes on BDSM, Anal sex, blowjobs; some contend that women don't actually get horny at all! Atheists claim no one can possibly enjoy going to church. People tell me that the gym is a chore and that one can't possibly enjoy it; the gym puritans even tell me that enjoying lifting is sin, indicative that you aren't engaged in proper lifting which must be unpleasant. For every one of my favorite things there's somebody who wants to tell me I don't actually like it I'm just a poseur.
Now for the genre arguments, Chuck Pahluniuk is normally labeled as postmodernist author, and I don't think Fight Club is a book that you can reasonably say that it isn't enjoyable. One doesn't have to like every postmodern novel for the genre to be real or any good, any more than I have to enjoy every piece of scifi for scifi to be real or any good.
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The one thing I have to give post-modernists a point for is their observation that there is no such thing as objective truth, value or morality, in the strict sense. That, and that it is impossible to remove the filters that exist between us and "reality", the mind is a lens: in the absence of the lens, there is no mind.
The map is not the territory. This is true, it cannot be otherwise. I then immediately part ways with them: yet, you cannot remove the map and still have navigation.
There is no observation without an observer, and there is no such thing as truly objective, privileged observer.
This is, once again, true. But I disagree with every fiber of my being on the implications.
I think that is a poor excuse to entirely dispense with the idea of consensus reality, of shared standards, or even making moral arguments. It would be akin to claiming that since the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle rules out a perfect ruler or clock, your broken timepiece is just as good as the atomic clock in NIST's basement. Or that your eye balled estimate of your dick as actually 12 inches long is of any value, though accuracy would probably be preferable given the tendency/desire that some postmodernists display: they enjoy sucking themselves off. At least it would get in the way of the unproductive navel gazing.
We might agree that taste is not an objective phenomenon, but when you use that as an excuse to write utter dross, and pretentiously to boot? I'm glad to be with the other side in calling them out for their sophistry and nonsense. If all aesthetic judgments are equally valid expressions of equally valid perspectives, then the person saying your novel is self-indulgent dreck is expressing a perspective that is just as valid as your own conviction that it is a masterwork of transgressive poststructuralist prose. The relativist move was supposed to protect you from criticism, but it has accidentally also dissolved the grounds for your own aesthetic pride. You can't have the shield without also losing the sword.
The fact that perfect objectivity is unavailable does not mean that the concept of better and worse approximations of it has dissolved, which is why science and empiricism works. The fact that we cannot deduce a universal system of ethics from scratch does not mean we cannot seek to find a theory of morality that most of us will happily subscribe to, or at least consider a directional improvement. You are telling me that we all wear glasses, but I will object to the sleight of hand you then employ, which is snatching them away and declaring that the myopia is honesty.
(I once had a lengthy relationship with a scholar who subscribed to post-modernism, if not as awfully as what I have described. It was... painful, even if think she's not a bad person, even if we parted amicably.)
I'll have you know that I didn't just eyeball it, I eyeballed it really hard
Better than eyeballing it flaccid, I can grant that much.
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Your comment reminds me of the famous Asimov line from an essay, which I agree with: "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.
E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?" The choice of the question is subjective, but this question certainly has an objective answer, which we can figure out or at least approximate, and then we can decide whether or not the answer has some use.
And anyone motivated to actually learn about beauty standards or anything else so fundamentally subjective would certainly be motivated to come up with objective measures like that. But the fact that so many stop before that step and just say, "Welp, I guess that means I can just declare that any arbitrary beauty standard that places me at the top is exactly as reasonable and proper as the mainstream ones that place me at the bottom, and enforce it through righteous violence."
I recall first encountering something like this back in 2014 during the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, when the exact same people who had decried the Jack Thompsons of the world in the 90s-00s for falsely (or at least empirically unjustifiably) attributing violent acts by gamers to influence from playing violent video games were championing the Anita Sarkeesians of the world for alleging that "misogynistic" tropes in video games would cause gamers to adopt misogynistic attitudes. When I pointed out the obvious contradiction, I was rebuffed with the notion that misogynistic attitudes aren't like violent actions because they're internal and subjective and whatever, and so we can just declare it to be the case through standard literary analysis.
When, of course, the simple, completely obvious next step would be to do some sort of study or analysis of comparing like-for-like gamers exposed to identical video games but-for the presence of misogynistic tropes, and then measure their behavior afterwards (or rather: measure the delta of their behavior afterwards versus beforehand) with respect to enacting acts or saying things determined to be misogynistic. And equally obvious is that without at least 2 different independent, ideally competing, parties doing the hard work of this kind of research and all having to inevitably, helplessly, conclude the same thing, we really can't make any confident statements of truth regarding that matter, and that anyone who does claim to know the truth is at best ignorant and most likely a charlatan like Jack Thompson was.
Pointing this out basically never got any response from such people.
My answer is that you aren't talking about "true objectivity" but something that is about as close as we can get in practice.
When you that kind of study on aesthetic standards, what does emerge is not some kind of agent-independent, viewpoint neutral fact. What you have you established is a fact about the very subjective people and cultures you've studied.
(Assuming the statistics was done correctly, which does not happen as often as anyone would like in sociology or anthropology.)
It is an "objective" fact that X beauty standard is the most popular for Y (most humans, assuming your sampling was representative). That does not make it truly universal. Language is imprecise, so I will say that have found out an empirical truth about the specific subset of entities you have surveyed. In the same manner as we normally talk about truth, of course.
In other words:
Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color. You have a frame of reference, just a reasonably well specified one. An alien would possibly disagree, or the people who are colorblind and simply can't see blue. What you have won is a popularity contest (done scientifically), and not one about ontology.
You can't dodge this metaphysical headache, but most of the time, it can be ignored from a pragmatic point of view. If the NIST clock has the endorsement of the best physicists, if it predicts temporal events with better accuracy, if it matches the consensus of other clocks better? Then I will say it's the best clock, without worrying too hard about the fact that I can't help smuggling in my own preferences about what it means to be a better clock or even the importance of telling time.
Right, and my point is, if we were to answer that question I asked previously, it wouldn't establish the "objectively correct beauty standards" or whatever, just "beauty standards that are shared among cultures in the world, as measured by [the people involved]." This will forever be intrinsically subjective, and we will never have any access to some sort of "objective" beauty standard unless God comes down and proves His existence and then declares it So. But the point of an "objective" beauty standard, like any standard, isn't to be some sort of invariant Truth about our world that we can write down onto some tablets to shoot out into space or whatever, it's a tool against which to measure other things when trying to decide how to categorize those things for use in our real life. And we can certainly discuss how useful the objective standard I came up with is for those - the judgment on how useful that is compared to other objective metrics one could come up with is also inescapably subjective and context-dependent. But we can still argue about which ones are the best and then come to a conclusion that we decide is useful enough for accomplishing our goals.
I would argue with God if he tried this, or at least I'd ask for reasons to believe in objectivity beyond the fact that he's God and thus could be expected to know better. So would I if he claimed that 1 = 2 (without definitional trickery). Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.
I've already been writing a detailed essay about the topic, and this is something I will address in more depth. Otherwise I agree with the rest of your arguments and their implications.
I think the same, but I assume that omnipotence includes the ability to convince people like you or me that we are wrong about this, without resorting to hypnosis or mind control or whatever.
Perhaps and (probably yes), but just because an argument is compelling or the person making it rhetorically sophisticated beyond my ability to parse does not make it actually true. I'd say it's cheating, but I doubt an actually omnipotent being would care what I think if it was trying to make me believe false things on purpose.
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Or that special relativity implies moral relativity.
That observation is one of those things that is a reasonable point, and then once you've given that inch, the worst people in the world steal a child-sex-trafficking mile. Everything worthwhile about the point is better organized as the map/territory distinction, and anyone who seems to be trying to disparage the territory in general is probably pseudointellectual trash.
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The "signalling" perspective is not really that helpful. Sure, people get into things to signal, whether it's becoming goth to hit on hot goth chicks or going fishing to make your red-tribey dad like you. What's the evidence that (1) this does not result in them actually liking the thing, and finding ways of deriving enjoyment from it qua itself? I suspect that (2) this is how most people actually come to like things most of the time, and (3) there is a pronounced tendency to only see the signalling component of preferences where we don't like the signalling component. (This is so obnoxiously outgroupy! Surely they're just doing this on purpose to shit on the ingroup!)
I know, because whenever I see this for US red tribe culture (like gratuitously mentioning your gun collection or (non-furbaby) dogs), my gut instinct is also to cringe and interpret it as "pure signalling", in much the same way. Like, who would actually enjoy hunting? "Dude, I camped in the woods for three days during the hurricane the other day, just me and my .22, and shot a 400 pound buck! Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" - "I'm not sure I get what's so fun about that" - "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely got pretty grimey, haha." with the snide implication being "But me and my big masculine outdoorsy self had a great time." If any of our red-tribe denizens think this interpretation is ridiculous and sneering, good; consider the possibility that that is also how Infinite Jest enjoyers feel about the above dismissal.
(...and I say this as someone who hasn't read any of these books. The most stereotypically pomo piece of literature I've made it through was House of Leaves, out of a sense of duty to xkcd, and I found it silly.)
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Since no one has defended jazz yet, I will. There is signalling in jazz and perhaps moreso than the average music genre, but structurally it tends to stay inside the lines, it just has high level of potential complexity that does take legitimate skill to navigate. But listening to those complex songs with the technical improvisation can be extremely viscerally pleasurable and spiritual. You may have to get stoned. I got stoned with a young friend I made and played him Coltraine's A Love Supreme and afterward he was excitedly exclaiming "I get jazz! I get jazz!" and became a permanent fan. There's a passage about getting stoned and listening to jazz in the beginning of "Invisible Man" as well that was one of the best parts of that book.
Anyway I think progressive rock is the genre more like post modernism, which plays with structure in more experimental ways.
I took a good amount of formal music lessons as a kid and young adult. Much of the syllabus of instruction back in the 80s/90s for this was classical, marches, and jazz. Acedemic Jazz is a thing, and when its all you have experienced you have to take other people's word for it that jazz is cool, or maybe that it used to be cool? Then one day when I was 18 I got hired by a friend of my father's to take over for their recently departed drummer, mostly jazz standards and Great American Songbook stuff. Still pretty 'square', but some of these guys played in other jazz groups too, who performed at bars, who had drug and alcohol problems. Real Musicians. Thats when I learned that Jazz is a conversation. It has a huge history with a smaller present day, but the conversation has never stopped. An improvisational jazz performance, if the musicians are good enough and know about the history of the conversation, about the muscial past and present of jazz, is itself a small new addition and a reflection on that shared past. There are inside jokes, touching tributes to passed away friends, challenges and submissions, all expressed entirely through their instrument, wordlessly. There's an entire other world in there, as wide as it is deep, if you can speak the language.
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I think jazz is one of those genres meant to be experienced live, especially given that improvisation is such a core part of it. Listening to recordings doesn't have nearly the same impact.
Counterpoint: You are right, but I think you undersell the value of recordings especially on the subject of jazz.
I got to experience a decent jazz scene in the 80’s and 90’s in Montreal. Montreal has always been a jazz city and the drop in/sit in random player thing was still happening at a club called Biddles. Way better than what NY clubs had become at the time in terms of the casual feel of working musicians meeting up.
Live jazz as it exists today is art music or nostalgia. The vanguard of live avant garde music is probably well past hip hop by now but jazz it is not.
When jazz WAS in its heyday the recording of music was also approaching its pinnacle. Jazz recordings of the 50’s and 60’s were a serious and intentional endeavor, and these recordings as of 2026 ARE the legacy of jazz (since no one wrote it down for one thing).
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I think that there are two disjoint subsets of readers. One subset (including both you and me) prefers literature which has an obvious, engaging plotline. The other subset seems to prefer to signal their sophistication by preferring books which are utterly unreadable for anyone unwilling or unable to analyze at least three layers of meaning.
For class membership signalling, saying that you have read The Lord of the Rings will prove little. After all, the books are very readable even if you stay on the surface level and never engage with the deeper levels of meaning. By contrast, saying that you have read some postmodern novel which is utterly unreadable on the surface level will assure your class peers that you are one of them.
Personally, I am a bit less prescriptivist about it than you are, as long as nobody is making other people read books without an engaging plot. (Decades later, I am still bitter about having been made to read Tod in Venedig and Effi Briest in school. Admittedly, neither was postmodern -- they both had some excuse of a plot -- but the surface level plot was thin as hell, something which could be paraphrased in two pages.)
I've seen this in anime a lot. Evangelion is the most obvious one, but even lowbrow series can be so long and have so much material that understanding them as a whole requires basically as much effort. You have series which people are rabid fans of because they know some obscure thing that is needed to properly understand the series. The major difference is that unlike classical literature, liking these series gains no status in the outside world.
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It's amazing that the cutoff between "sincerely enjoying literature" and "poser" passes exactly through your own limitations and tastes. It's funny, I've never heard anyone who espouses your theory place that line anywhere else.
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The signaling claim seems to have become the strawman of the other side of the "Skill Issue" dispute. I enjoy Infinite Jest, Faust Part II, Twin Peaks, etc. in part precisely because the plots and themes are weird and difficult. It means every time you come back, you can bring new questions, find new answers, and leave with new questions. Imagine saying that some people prefer to signal their sophistication by preferring videogames which are utterly unplayable for anyone unwilling or unable to analyze at least three layers of strategy meta - do you think that's what they're actually doing?
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I don't think this is necessarily the case. You may signal your sophistication by other means as well. For instance you can talk how you enjoyed Antigone or The Orphan of Zhao for classics and something actually readable by Roberto Bolaño - for instance By Night in Chile, which is just 150 pages as opposed to 2666 slog. You can pick any other "ethnic" author and you can be golden. I just randomly searched for some Indonesian author and apparently Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan seems to be a good read and also just 150 pages. You cannot get more sophisticated for cheaper, you just have to say that an actually readable story is an allegory for colonialism or that is shows the world through other ways of knowing or some such.
You can also show sophistication by reading something else and readable from famous authors. For instance I really liked Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell. It is not as edgy and plebeian as 1984, and it shows how you went deeper into famous authors.
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I'm surprised no one mentioned Scott's attempt to explain postmodernism to a rationalist audience (which he later retracted, although I don't think he should have).
His explanation is really about the postmodern "mindset" rather than postmodern literature specifically, although it could be argued that postmodern literature is just a textual representation of the postmodern mindset. He sees the unreliable narrator as key to postmodern literature: much as postmodern readings of history challenge us to consider how historical metanarratives have been selectively constructed to favour the powers that be ("history is written by the winners"), postmodern novels routinely feature narrators whose testimony cannot be relied upon, forcing the reader to consider what "really" happened versus what the narrator wants us to think happened, and why they want us to think that. Unreliable narrators are likewise a common feature of films, video games etc. which have been characterised as postmodern.
My distaste for postmodern "writing" is usually for the way the authors write in their pet peeves or personal greviences, disguised as plot. The "deconstruction" usually goes one way. I'm happy for any examples where one of these deconstructed gender nonconformity or anti-classism or anti-statism or w/e with the same zeal as they are deployed usually to the other side. The only thing off the top of my head is Harrison Bergeron.
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Why aren't the unambiguous literary achievements of Nabokov, especially Pale Fire and Lolita, on this list? If the defining feature of postmodernism is a metatextual nature and unreliable narrator, well, um, let's include king of it. Hell, there is quite a bit of Faulkner that is pretty close to postmodernism, too, including Absalom and As I Lay Dying, two of his very finest works. I personally view the critical achievement of Ferrante's Neapolitan novels as resting heavily on unreliable narration, though this might be more controversial and my idiosyncratic interpretation. In SF, it is precisely the postmodernism of Wolfe that puts him on a tier far above all others.
In your list, I really only see Vonnegut as having true critical achievement, so I am concerned that this is far more a critique of middlebrow than it is postmodernism.
Man I like Wolfe, and he's undoubtedly got a gift for the striking image. But I remember reading a critique once that said, basically: Wolfe takes a fairly conventional sf/f plot and storyboards it out a-b-c-d. Then he decides which parts of the structure to remove or obfuscate to get the reader to play literary guessing games. Ever since then, that critique has always been at the back of my mind. I think it works, but I get why some people thinks it's a writers parlor trick.
This criticism of Wolfe's obfuscation as a parlor trick reminds me of Wallace Stevens' critique of TS Eliot, with Stevens saying that Eliot fails to make "the visible a little hard to see". Not that Eliot's poetry is particularly obvious to interpretation, but I would argue that some degree of obfuscation is actually quite important for artistic achievement, kind of like how there is not much purpose to a merely photorealistic painting.
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On what list? Did you mean to reply to the OP?
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This isn't directly related to the top-level question, but having read basically this sort of explanation of postmodernism is before, the one thing that struck me as the completely obvious next logical step is to question how this particular meta-metanarrative about metanarratives has been selected by the "powers that be" and why they want the rest of us to believe that that's a meaningfully useful way to analyze metanarratives. How does it benefit them, possibly at the cost to us, because almost certainly, people pushing narratives, metanarratives, meta-metanarratives, or anything else, are doing so under the belief that success in pushing it will result in favor for themselves, possibly at cost to people they don't care about or actively dislike. The moment you realize that the turtle you're on is on another turtle, it's pretty trivial to wonder if that turtle is on another turtle, possibly all the way down.
Unfortunately, a stack of turtles seems pretty likely to be unstable even in finite numbers, to say nothing of when there's infinite of them. Unstable doesn't mean false, of course, but in this case, the instability manifests in the reality that there's no reason to stop on this turtle instead of the next one or the one after that or the one 13 turtles down which happens to be the one that concludes that all of history was actually just setup to justify you specifically getting everything you want and all your enemies being mercilessly crushed.
Scott sort of gestures at this in the linked post:
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In most anything related to postmodernism, I think of the midwit meme. Sometimes things are complicated and ambiguous, but that's usually a confusion about words and minds and uncertainty about the state of the underlying reality. But there usually is an underlying reality that actually is true or false, and all the words and perspective shifts won't actually change that underlying reality.
Here then, there is a recursively stable narrative climb of "I'm telling you a thing because it's true, and true things are good for people to know and understand." If you try to climb up to the meta-narrative, I AM trying to push this narrative because it will favor myself, because I am a straightforward and logical person, and therefore disseminating truth and objectivity, and increasing people's trust in truth and objectivity, helps make society better for everyone. People knowing true things is generally good for society, and I am part of society, therefore people knowing true things is generally good for me. It doesn't have to be a zero sum game, me benefiting from telling you a thing does not need to come at your expense. (And also I get a small ego boost from being right and explaining ideas to people, because it makes me seem smart, but that's predicated on them being true).
And if you go up another level, just reread the previous paragraph. I'm telling you that this narrative is self-recursively stable because it's true, and you knowing it to be true helps society (and gives me a small ego boost). Ad infinitum.
To be clear, I certainly understand that people can have dishonest motivations and biases making their narratives differ from the truth. But this is not the only possibility. Because objective truths exist, honesty can exist, and stable narratives can exist that become more coherent under self-reflection rather than devolving into infinitely complex recursions. Infinite sequences can converge.
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It strikes me as an example of "Every accusation is a confession." Perhaps this sort of thing hits better if the reader is a dissembling, delusional jackass.
In fairness, I have read none of these books, but in fairness, they mostly sound just dreadful.
I thought I had read Catch-22, but checking the wiki article, I now suspect that was a segment of a couple chapters in some English class, rather than the full book. Or I've just forgotten 90% of it over the last 20 years.
I really doubt that everyone who accused Obama of having a faked birth certificate was secretly worried about their own birthplace.
I don't think that phrase is meant to be taken so literally, even if it's phrased as an absolute. It especially breaks down in very granular, binary political contexts... but then I'm the guy who harps on the point that political hypocrisy is almost always mirrored.
But please allow me to rephrase more carefully, and in my own words: If a person claims that there is no objective or knowable truth, that is Bayesian evidence that the speaker is a liar. If a person claims that all the bad stories about them are false narratives made up to persecute them, that is Bayesian evidence that the stories are true. If a person tells you that, really, everyone is a bad person, then that is Bayesian evidence that the speaker is a bad person. And if a person tells you that there is no "truth", only competing power narratives, then you need to start acting like you are in a power struggle because you are.
"Bayseian evidence" doesn't imply "enough evidence that it makes a practical difference" so that's technically true but useless. Otherwise, I can think of situations where it doesn't make a practical difference. Every narrative of the evil of Jews as a race is a false narrative made up to persecute them.
My friend, set aside the politics and philosophy for a moment. In the real world, in your real life, if you meet someone who always seems to have an excuse for why everyone dislikes them for bad, unfair reasons, STAY AWAY. The reason appearances can be deceiving is because they are usually not. If your first encounter with someone matches that pattern, sure, maybe it's an unfair fluke (but probably not). If three out of the first four encounters match that pattern, you should accept that that person is a walking disaster, and engage at your own peril.
"Oh, yeah, I have to go to court tomorrow. No, no, it's a crazy story, my ex-landlord is a total psycho."
9 times out of ten, that's actually exactly what it looks like and the person speaking is meaningfully guilty and the kind of person who does crimes and constantly lies.
If you recommend seeking legal redress for their purported "crazy" persecution and they waffle and deflect, increase that certainty to 100%.
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And certainly all the people complaining about hospice and daycare fraud aren't running their own fraudulent hospices and daycares.
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I've read three of the items on OP's list. I loved Slaughterhouse-Five, though as I said elsewhere in this thread I question its categorisation as postmodern literature. I also remember really enjoying Catch-22, but it's probably twenty years since I read it and I've been meaning to read it again. Of the three that I've read, White Noise strikes me as the closest to the platonic Ideal of what most people think of when they hear the word "postmodern", and I hated it.
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It makes sense when you consider the context of the times: Is communism the inevitable future or a plot by satan? Was the westward expansion glorious civilization being brought to the wilderness or a standard nationalistic project of consolidation and extermination? Was the cause lost?
This is the time period where you could grow up learning all that shit, go from stick and hoop to moon landing in one life. Makes you question your received wisdom, and if wisdom can be received at all.
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As an aside, here are some works in other media that might be considered postmodern, which I consider to be very good:
deconstruction of the meandering prog song?
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#4 really dredges up some memories. I don’t recall the block but the very first book of the whole franchise I ever read was the one with Karona(?) the angel that I think was a fusion between Akroma and Phage, if I recall right.
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Wes Anderson is so postmodern it's crazy. Those are movies that want you to know at all times you are watching a FUCKING MOVIE, but also accept that what you are seeing is a kind of hyperreal metaphor at the same time.
I'll always remember the scene in one of his weaker films where owen wilson is literally abandoning what weighs him down to get on the train in slow motion as a guy ROLLS A HOOP in the background, do you get it? Do you get it? But the heavy handedness is part of the point. The
No, I don't get it. This is why I don't like postmodern art, I never get the references, or only very fuzzily. It seemed like he was referencing things in "Asteroid City," but that I didn't get it, and also didn't enjoy it.
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I was reading Catch-22 on my subway commutes in NYC. Then 9/11 happened in the middle of it.
So I had this feeling of being at war, but not really sure who we were at war with. People randomly bursting out into tears sitting next to me. Overhearing some of the most jingoistic stuff ever. Huge delays because people were hallucinating suspicious packages and people everywhere.
The book suddenly felt very, very relevant.
The absurdity of war and bureaucracy. The true believers intersecting with the grifters. The loyalty oaths. Before 9/11 the book came off as a work of almost gonzo journalism and afterwards read like an autobiography.
I probably would have abandoned it out of boredom if not for 9/11.
I loved Catch-22 in high school just because it was actually funny. I was predisposed to it due to experience with socialism, so absurdity of beurocracy and hollow slogans was something I understood quite well mostly from stories, but partially also from personal experience during my childhood. On top, it was part of the package of War Literature and to me it seemed more relatable to a teenager compared to pretending that I understand what happens to young boy in All Quiet on The Western front.
Even now if I read the reasons why the book is postmodern, I do not really get it. Supposedly the signifiers of it as postmodern book is as follows: gallows humor, anti-hero in the story, unreliable narrative also related to uncertainty if protagonist is hero or antihero, absurdity represented by literal Catch-22, non-linear structure, breaking the fourth wall etc. If these are the signifiers of postmodern story then all the stories of my uncles and great uncles especially those during their conscription into Czechoslovak army during communism are postmodern as hell.
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I adored Catch-22 in high school so maybe I’m in the minority here. Made an entire essay on Milo Minderbender who I maintain is one of the greatest fictional characters of all time.
Half my usernames in the 00s incorporated “Yossarian” which is a great name in addition to a great character.
The Milo Minderbender character was just funny until I met people who were actually like him in real life, and then I decided every friend group needs one.
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You get kudos for reading any of those as far as I'm concerned. Last time I read any fiction my midwit ass was reading those paperbacks based on the Aliens franchise, with cool space marines on the cover.
St. Anthony of the Desert couldn't even read.
You are so far beyond most Mottizens, we can't even see you. Please remember us when you ascend.
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It's basically just literature that's very self-aware and meta about being fictional, like characters who break the 4th wall in a TV show to make fun of the show. Like you've got the old traditional classics that follow a structure, sometimes a very specific structure like the 3 volume novel, and often draw heavily on the same themes of greek myths and christian morals. Then you've got the modern literature, which blows up a lot of the old rules and is often kind of nihilistic in the wake of the world wars, but its still pretty readable as a novel with plot, characters, themes, etc. The post-modernist stuff assumes you've already read a lot of that stuff, and is sort of a meta-commentary. Like, catch-22 assumes you've already read a lot of war stories, both the heroic kind and the tragic kind, so it's just trying to show the madness and petty nonsense of war in a way that might not make logical sense. Slaughterhouse Five is similar, throwing in a weird time-travel plot that doesn't exactly make logical sense but does convey the madness. Infinite Jest is more about addiction and modern entertainment- what's the point of writing a novel when we're constantly being bombarded by other stimula that are way more entertaining? What's the experience of reading like when we're constantly being distracted? What do we remember, and what do we forget?
TLDR: it's any kind of literature that has blatant plot holes and it doesn't matter.
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I actually really liked IJ! Some thoughts on it below!
Infinite Jest is a book that is primarily concerned with the role of entertainment in American culture. The book explores this question on multiple levels. Firstly, through the three-pronged plot that follows the Incandeza family (the youngest son Hal mainly) at an elite American tennis academy, the recovering narcotics addict Don Gately at a halfway house, and a thriller sci-fi intrigue between the US government and Quebecois separatists over a rather ridiculous superweapon. But unlike many other novels, Infinite Jest also addresses its themes through its structure: the first 300 pages of the book are incredibly hard to read, and the copious amount of (rather important) endnotes does nothing to help the situation. I believe this was deliberate on the part of DFW, as it ties directly to the primary thesis: that we should be skeptical of a culture that only knows how to express itself through pleasure seeking and entertainment.
Background
I have a fairly long history with this book. I first tried to read it in the summer of 2018 with one of my friend from college, Billy, while we were both busy with our research. Billy finished the book, but I made it barely 200 pages due to the complexity of the plot and the fact that I was reading on a Kindle. This was the first time I had failed to complete a book because of its difficulty, and though I moved on to many other books, Infinite Jest stuck around in the back of my mind as a mountain I had not yet summitted. Six years later, I added it to my ten books to read before I die list. In the interim, I had fallen in love with David Foster Wallace’s work as an essayist and as a interviewee, and so when the opportunity presented itself to read the book with my philosophy book club, I leaped at the chance to tackle this book again.
David Foster Wallace was an English professor at Pomona College, novelist, and essayist, whose work focuses on how modernity makes it very difficult to be an individual with a grounded identity. Infinite Jest is his shot at grappling with this conundrum: it was published in 1996, right before the take off the internet, and the subsequent real acceleration in the strength of the dissolving power of our culture. DFW killed himself in 2008, more than likely because of the how reality seemed to match the worst of his prognostications.
I personally got three main things out of Infinite Jest: culture is not entertainment, drugs are bad actually, and postmodernism isn’t the devil it’s cracked up to be. More on each of these below.
Culture is not entertainment
I think one of the biggest flaws of modern American (or Western in general) culture is a deep-seated fear of engaging with one’s own life. On one hand we have the work-a-holics, who spend every waking (and sleeping in some cases) moment in pursuit of productivity. We see these kinds of people in Infinite Jest, at the tennis academy, where Hal Incandenza, his family, and his friends seem to dedicate their entire lives to excellence in tennis without ever thinking about why they are doing so, or about the other aspects of their life that might suffer as a result. On the other extreme, we have those who numb themselves with the stories of other people’s lives. Before the internet, the average American used to watch around 6 hours of television a day. With YouTube and social media it’s probably even worse. DFW addresses these kinds of people through the Hal’s late father, James Incandeza, who makes thoughtful but commercially unsuccessful films, various funny and on-the-nose anecdotes about media technology, and finally with the central premise of the book, a film so entertaining you can’t do anything else other than watch it.
Can we approach media differently? I have to hope that DFW thinks so: he spent his life as a novelist, which seems like a strange thing to do if one believes all media is bad. I think rather he would argue that there is value in literature, but not primarily in its entertainment value. Rather, literature is for helping us to understand how other people think and live their lives, so we can live our own better.
Drugs are bad, actually
The second big plot arc of this book revolves around Don Gately, an ex-addict who now works as a live in a halfway house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This meandering storyline explores how Gately came clean, and the depraved world of substance addiction through his interactions with other people at the house and at Alcoholics’ Anonymous meetings. The AA sections of this book came off extremely positively, despite Foster Wallace’s clear initial skepticism of the metaphysical claims the group makes. Those claims are extremely important to Gately’s continued sobriety, namely the existence of a moral power above one’s own desires.
Aside from the mild comedy at seeing marijuana portrayed as this world’s version of heroin (hyperaddictive and supremely damaging to one’s mental health), these were quite tough sections of the book for me to read. Although I have used a fair amount of drugs, they have always been in limited amounts, and in the safe, middle-class environment in which I have lived my whole life. Drugs for Wallace’s characters, and for many in real life, are a path to an underworld that eats people alive. In many cases, the drugs are an attempt to cope with something worse, but they never really end up helping.
This book has firmly convinced me that drugs are another example of what Charles Murray calls a failure of bourgeoises values. It might be okay for Elon Musk or Bill Gates to have a heroin or marijuana addiction, just as it is okay for those men to destroy their families because the monetary resources that both enjoy mean that they can recover from such setbacks. For the lower class, no such thing is true. Drugs are a road straight to hell (here on earth). I honestly think this is a huge flaw in libertarian thinking, and I wish there was more discussion around this topic.
Postmodernism is good actually (to a point)
I find it very frustrating how those on the Right (and also the Left) refuse to engage with the substance of what postmodernism is actually trying to say. A lot of this comes from a confusion on definitions. I would define postmodernism in two separate ways. The first in its purely literary sense: a work that uses its structure to reinforce its themes. My favorite example to turn to for this definition is the video game Dark Souls,which beyond the usual RPG levelling system has a mechanic of respawning you at the nearest bonfire after death with one chance to reobtain your lost “souls” and items at the spot of your defeat. This has the effect of reinforcing the theme of the loss of larger purpose due to repetition: it is very easy to forget the larger plot of the game when you’re so focused on making runbacks to the same boss.
Infinite Jest has the same relationship between structure and theme. We already discussed how the book suggests that it’s important to separate culture and understanding the world from mere entertainment. How does Infinite Jest do this? By being quite difficult (although rewarding to read). There are three main plot lines with innumerable side characters with various degrees of importance introduced within the first two hundred pages: the length of many shorter novels. It takes time to understand how these arcs fit together, and for me these two hundred (and to a lesser extent the next three hundred) pages were not fun in the normal sense of the word, although David Foster Wallace does happen to be quite a humorous writer. There’s also an endnote on almost every page, which requires flipping to the back of the book to read (to simulate a tennis match according to DFW). Yet the slow start and the footnotes both allow DFW to build a rich literary world deep in meaning that would not be possible to the same extent) in shorter and shallower fiction.
The second definition of postmodernism is probably closer to what people on this platform actually have a problem with.
From Hans Bertens:
I’m sympathetic to a critique of this kind of post-modernism taken too far. You can’t actually live (or at least live well) without a system of guiding values. Nor do people on the woke left actually live this way: they have merely replaced one system of values with another (worse) one. Yet I think the critics miss some important points about what postmodernism was (and is) trying to accomplish.
First, there is a clear misunderstanding of the primary targets of postmodern critiques. Postmodernism is a response to modernism, not the traditional faiths of the West (Catholicism) or the East (Hinduism, Buddhism). Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world. And this is reflected in Infinite Jest. DFW doesn’t shit so much on Alcoholics’ Anonymous, a traditional Christian organization, but on the vapidity of the Tennis Academy, and the empty slogans of the reality TV show that is what has become of the US government.
Then, I think many people mistake critique for dismissal. Just because the representations of our ideals and values are flawed and corrupt, and exposed as such by postmodern critiques does not mean that those ideals are wrong, or that we should abandon those institutions. Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive. I’m thinking primarily here of the Catholic church and the child molestation scandals in the Northeastern United States, but this critique could just as well apply to the American electoral and university systems.
Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths. The book of Job and Ecclesiates are both in the Bible, and if they were written today, they would surely be taken as post-modern critiques. The church itself has a long history of mystical and out-of-the-box thinkers, and even many of Jesus’ parables could not be less clear. To shy away from the issues raised by post-modernism is an act of cowardice, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty.
Steve Sailer made the same argument in 2009.
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Also really enjoyed Infinite Jest and despite it being almost a decade since reading it I think back to it all of the time. Like many, I too bounced off of it in my first few attempts. I think finally making it past the first 200 or so pages (that Wardeen section) was all it took to get me invested through to the end.
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Super high value comment. Rec'd for an AAQC.
A couple points.
Okay, that legitimately helps. I will admit I was hung up on the hyper-stylistic nature of this writing and, I guess, missed the point (score one for the "ToolBooth is too dumb to get it" clique). I'll still retain the point, however, that the highly stlytistic nature of PoMo writing undermines its mission. If I can't even tell who's talking, I sure as hell can't parse their "critique" of modernism.
Which leads me to;
Then offer potential solutions! I remember when DFW killed himself. I was in college at the time and sort of adjacent to literary circles. His death was received as a Big Deal and a Major Loss. From time to time, I find myself re-googling DFW to look back at his suicide. The two thoughts I always come away with are 1) If only he had been a Catholic and 2) I think one cause of his permanent despair was that he was so problem oriented in his critiques of the current world and had failed to find a way to attempt to drive towards a solution. Yes, I am aware that many, many people (including quite a few here on the Motte) think that It's All Too Fucked Up To Save (TM) and that any effort to try is doomed to failure. I'll even acknowledge they could be right - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try because, at the very, very least, it gives you a reason to get out of bed, a sense of pride and purpose, and stops you from over-intellectualizing yourself to death .... literally (DFW).
Hard, but respectful, disagree. I'm a practicing traditional catholic. I make fun of myself on here for being a n00b at it, but the truth is I work at it; I know all of The Most Necessary Prayers in English and Latin, I say the rosary daily, read The Imitation of Christ along with other devotionals and newer academic Theological Books. I'm currently working my way through the 700+ page Catechsim of Fr. Spirago. I can follow Low and High mass without a Missal. I'm considering taking some voice lessons so I could participate in chant and polyphony.
The Catholic faith is, by far, the most complex thing I have ever approached. I already know that I will spend my entire life trying to figure it out spiritually, intellectually, mentally, and emotionally and will utterly, utterly fail. To mix some metaphors; the Catholic faith makes a kubernetes deployment across availability zones look like a game of tic tac toe. It makes matrix algebra look like finger counting.
But I find all of this complexity legible.
I know what various theological points are trying to do, even if they haven't migrated fully into my mind and heart. I know what even the more mystical devotionals are getting at, even if takes time parse. I can read canon law and think, "This is above my paygrade, but I'm following the nouns and verbs and basic structure."
With PoMoLit, it's so esoteric at times (really thinking of Gravity's Rainbow here) that it loses meaning at the basic sentence level. I remember reading one passage and saying to myself, "Pynchon, I think, is using some sort of double nested reference to an event outside of the book as metaphor for the internal thoughts of one of the brand new characters he's just introduced ... and is also wrapping it in tounge-in-cheek irony." Being deliberately obtuse is often a feature of pretentious academics trying to hide their fundamentally ineptitude. I'm still not convince many or several PoMoLit authors suffer the same fate.
Another poster brought up LOTRad being relatively low brow compared to PM work. But your post reminds me of enduring truth JRRT embedded in LOTR: most of the time, knowing what is the just thing to do isn’t complicated. Instead, choosing to do good even when you know you are likely to fail is the important thing.
People often scorn LOTR because it lacks moral complexity (somewhat unfair criticism). But in reality, the simple truth of “do good even when it might cost you or you might not succeed” is in reality a powerful antidote to the “problem obsessed but no solution” attitude you identify in PM work. And sometimes, that good results in restoring the kingdom.
Which is what Rings of Power tried to do with their family man Orc (to great mockery). So what happens to our morally complex, it's a grey area, family guy Orc? Happily (to all appearances) engages in the siege of Eregion where priceless cultural artefacts are destroyed, literally engages in back-stabbing of (the new) Adar (the triggering incident apparently being "Daddy doesn't love me?") and ends up getting murderated himself in about five seconds by Sauron for daring to be "but what about all the Orc footsoldiers you are sending out as cannon fodder?" which, ironically, was the reason he initially switched loyalties from Adar to Sauron.
So much for moral complexity.
And from the selected letters, notes from 1956:
That last - the 'good' side do bad things, but those bad things do not take away from the rightness of their position - probably would be a leetle too morally complex for the critics!
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The point about the nature of postmodernism is good, yes. Postmodernism, as the name implies, is a critique of modernism, and modernism is a type of progressive model narrative that is itself at odds with traditional faith. I take one of the claims of postmodernism to be that no theory or model of the world can ever be sufficient to the reality - this to the extent that it is impossible, in principle, to adequately describe the world in language. Thus their obsession with using language in destabilising ways, to trouble categories once thought to be certain. Even though postmodernists usually include religious narratives (I would argue simplified strawman versions of religious understandings) within the category of theoretical models of the world that must be destabilised, they are just recapitulating the insight of Augustine and his seashell.
That said I think it is a valid critique of postmodernism to say that often its adherents have gone too far, or become obsessed with destabilisation for its own sake. By contrast I'd argue that theology must always find a balance between its kataphatic and apophatic modes - nothing we can say of God can ever be wholly adequate to his being, but nonetheless we are commanded to speak of him. Theological speech must occur, despite its always-contingent nature.
Speaking of religion, to Catholicism...
I suppose, as a traditional and even somewhat doctrinaire Protestant, I feel obliged to push back a little here, albeit in what I hope is a charitable manner, aimed at our mutual growth in faith. To the extent that you are deeply immersing yourself in the broader Christian tradition and growing in knowledge of God and love of Christ, I have nothing to say but "amen", and I affirm the necessity of growing in the understanding of the gospel, even knowing that you will never be able to wholly comprehend it.
Even so I would like to suggest, tentatively and as kindly as I can, that the heart of Christian faith does not lie in all the prayers you know, or in following mass without a missal, or participating in polyphony. All those things can be good, and the deliberate effort to discipline yourself so that you can more fully attend to divine things is good, but we must always be careful not to mistake the tools for the things the tools are there to point us to.
I'm sure you understand this principle, but just as a reminder, I suppose, there is little need for a lay Catholic to understand the details of canon law. The administration and good order of the church is important, but you don't need to understand the science of architecture to live in a house, nor the science of nutrition to benefit from a well-cooked meal. Sometimes I see converts, whether to Catholicism or to any other tradition, become obsessed with understanding everything, even things that are not needful for them, and they pile up so many burdens on themselves that they stumble in their walk towards God.
The catholic faith - both in the small-c, universal Christian sense, and inthe capital-C, Roman Catholic sectional sense - is in some ways the most complex thing in the world, but in other ways it is very simple, and to be received with the simplicity and humility of a child.
Master the intellectual doctrines, the liturgy, the public performance of worship, all these things are good, but it is worth occasionally pausing to ask ourselves the question, "Is my work at these things helping me grow closer to God?"
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the idea of the 'entertainment' from Infinite Jest seems relevant in our time with the rise of the 'algorithm' and now people becoming addicted to AI. The book was written before Facebook and Youtube.
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I'm confused at the selection. Personally I find Vonnegut easy reads, and though I don't agree with him in the slightest about almost anything, I appreciate the propositions his novels create and the challenge they pose to my worldview.
Meanwhile Infinite Jest is... you have to have a motivation to read it because the book doesn't create the motivation to read the next page by itself. At least that's my experience. I like shorter essays by the author but Infinite Jest itself is a thing in itself. Like House of Leaves. What are you reading it for? To be one of those who read it.
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Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 are legit, although I can't say the same for every work of postmodern literature.
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Oh boy, literature sniping, my favorite kind of geek-out.
So, what is art? You're right to observe that "If I like it it's good" is a shallow way to judge artistic quality. Clearly the purpose of art is not merely to entertain and enthrall.
On the other hand, "To increase collective well-being?" Shades of Fredric Wertham–all that is not wholesome, morally fortifying, and artistically meritorious should be thrown out! Art can be just a thing to entertain.
Art, in my opinion, is all the things people look to it for: entertainment, escapism, a display of talent and craft, a few moments of amusement, but also meaning, reflection, new lenses through which to see the world, education, enlightenment.
No book or other work of art, of course, is going to be all of those things. Some will be none of those things.
I am one of those people who thinks there is such a thing as "good" and "bad" writing and that there are, if not completely objective, then at least generally agreed-upon rubrics by which you can judge it. It's more than style (19th century classics would be considered "badly written" by modern stylistic standards) but it's also more than theme or symbolism or capturing some essential essentialness of the human experience or your place in the world or the current zeitgeist or whatever.
I'm going to take the very unchallenging centrist view that you can like high literature and comic books at the same time. You can enjoy both experimental postmodernism and Extruded Fantasy Product like Brandon Sanderson.
If you are incapable of critically examining what you consume (at least to the degree that you recognize, "Yeah, this is kind of crap, but it's fun") then you probably aren't getting much out of anything you consume but whatever time it takes you to consume it. But that doesn't mean reading things just to be entertained is bad in and of itself.
Of the works you mention, I have yet to tackle Infinite Jest (I read DFW's debut novel, The Broom of the System, and was so thoroughly unimpressed I've been putting off tackling IJ). I have read Thomas Pynchon, and while I still love The Crying of Lot 49, it's not a coincidence that that's one of his shortest novels. Gravity's Rainbow was an ordeal to get through, and I only finished it out of sheer determination. Like several other commenters, I would not categorize either Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22 as post-modern. Satirical and cynical, certainly, but post-modernism is not just irony and counter-culturalism.
I think, therefore, that you are completely wrong about post-modern not being "real" or there not being anything "there" (at least two of your books aren't post-modern at all, and they definitely do have clear themes and plots). Post-modernism is also not just a "stylistic" exercise. Post-modernist books are generally characterized by being "experimental" and defying the conventions of traditional novels–hence, non-linear storytelling, unreliable narrators, metatextual references, disregard for conventional plot and characterization, etc. But there are always ideas there, and I would argue most of those books do have a cohesive (if meandering and self-indulgent) narrative.
I'm bemused that you praise Blood Meridian (which is also one of my favorite books), as many people consider Cormac McCarthy very much a post-modernist writer, and if anyone can be accused of writing in an abstruse way as a "stylistic exercise," it's him. (He demonstrates both how you can break punctuation and sentence structure rules, and why they exist.)
The fact that what you love, someone else will hate, and what you find deep and meaningful, someone else will find cheap trash, is why it's very hard to arrive at any real consensus on artistic "quality." I've dunked on Brandon Sanderson plenty, but I have read a lot of his books, and I have seen people say that they got a lot of value out of his handling of various kinds of mental illness, etc. (To which I want to say, "read something better," but there I go again.) I both love and hate Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon (I'm 50/50 for any given book), and there are people who are fierce devotees and people who think they're both just orthographical prestidigitators.
The vast majority of writing is crap. This has always been the case, we just didn't have so much writing produced at such scale. People will argue that the likes of Charles Dickens and Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes are only well-regarded today because they had comparatively less competition; this is true, but they also had a comparatively much smaller audience. They are admired today because in one way or another they captured something about their time and place and wrote about human lives we still find interesting and relatable today even if we are far removed from those eras.
But! All of them (except maybe Tolstoy, who was rich and also batshit crazy) were also writing for money! They were very much writing to their markets (Cervantes wrote the sequel to book one of Don Quixote because a rival was plagiarizing him!) And a lot of people dunk on all of them for being pedestrian or prosaic or culture-bound or just boring and consider them to have been the Brandon Sandersons of their day. (They had plenty of critics in their own time.)
I remember reading an interview once with Piers Anthony, the original Dirty Old Man of SF&F, who was once an enormously prolific bestseller before kind of falling out of favor with the fandom. He genuinely considers himself to be a Great Author who will someday be recognized alongside the likes of Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy. While it's hard to imagine the author of The Color of Her Panties being so remembered, who can say? It may well be that Brandon Sanderson is remembered as the great American fantasy writer of the 21st century. I think there is something to be said for telling literature snobs to get their heads out of their asses. At the same time, there is something to be said for telling Millenials whose literary horizons never expanded beyond Harry Potter and Twilight to Read Another Fucking Book. (But you could say the same thing to a lot of hippies and neckbeards who never read anything but Tolkien and Heinlein.)
Catch-22 is listed as seminal postmodern book everywhere from wiki to various literally journals. It is a seminal book, so some critics say that it is still a little bit modern - e.g. Yossarian is not completely insane, but they still say it is a postmodern book. It would be like arguing that Hamlet is actually Medieval as opposed to seminal Renaissance/Early modern book. By the way this is quite a postmodern analysis from you.
Well, not to keep getting post-modern, but who defines what is and isn't post-modern? Like I said, I think Cormac McCarthy is very much a post-modern writer, but there are critics who disagree.
Catch-22 didn't seem post-modern to me. But it has been a long time since I read it.
I wrote it elsewhere here, Catch-22 has a lot of postmodern literature signifiers: gallows humor, anti-hero in the story, unreliable narrative also related to uncertainty if protagonist is hero or antihero, absurdity represented by literal Catch-22, non-linear structure, breaking the fourth wall etc. I guess it was considered postmodern due to it being product of 1961 where it went against the grain, it was pre-Vietnam war.
Earlier you said that:
The first half is something you see in every new literally epoch. Modern literature was experimental compared to pre-modern one. People are now also fed-up with postmodern "experimentation" and want to try something else, they talk about post-postmodernism or metamodernism etc. If you go deeper, then no, breaking the 4th wall is not experimental, Shakespeare used it hundreds of years ago when characters addressed audience directly. Brooding antihero is your cookie cutter romantic trope, heck some people say that Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground have postmodern vibes. It is quite a postmodern self-parody, "there is nothing new only recycling of old" is quite self-aware.
I think that the best solution is not to be in awe with postmodernism and categorize it as any other literary epoch. It was product of its age, and it is characterized by usage of specific literary techniques - be it new or old. So yes, Catch-22 was postmodern literature and Notes From Underground was realist or seminal existentialist literature even if you think of it the other way around - is Yossarian not your typical existentialist hero and can there be something more realist than Hellers description of war in visceral detail? Sorry, the timeline does not agree with that.
Also worth pointing out that this isn't a new thing either, and goes back 3,000 years to the Book of Ecclesiates.
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I didn't ask this question.
I didn't make that assertion. I asked the question is it "real"?
Amadan, I think you're a great mod. Sincerely. You've banned me a couple times for being a dickbag. I find most of your bannings and non-bannings to be as fair as is reasonable for an unpaid mod. Even though I was (just barely) on the other side of the Hylnka affair, I think the decision was a valid one.
I have no idea what point you made, if any, in your response. There's equivocation after equivocation. In your closing you state "there's something to be said" twice ... what is it, then? Say it!
This is a quality paragraph (with a final, concrete point)
This is not a criticism:
I wonder if dislike of post-modernism and dissatisfaction with Ama's post are tied together.
A bit of a meander, with much attention paid to form and structure, tendencies and purpose (and the meta of popularity in writing etc) - that shit is all post-modern as fuck.
Clarity and getting to the fucking point has a ton of value. So does taking a big ass puff of the reefer and going "hey man but what about..."
If you are more the former (especially when it comes to the domain of art and writing) some of this shit is going to seem like purposeless masturbation. Which it is to some extent! It has value also tho.
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Well, I wasn't posting as a mod, so I appreciate the sentiment but you're allowed to dislike my posts.
I thought my thesis was clear enough, but evidently not.
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The Broom of the System is... bad. In many ways DFW's later writing is reacting to a feeling that stuff like TBotS is the only kind of thing that you can write in the exhausted conditions of late postmodernism, and that just writing more novels like that but with minor improvements would be a complete waste of time.
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Is Catch 22 postmodern? Like it's definitely written from a position of irony but from my memories of reading it in high school it wasn't that complicated or byzantine
Postmodernism doesn't entail that it be byzantine and unapproachable. It's just often the nature of texts that see deconstruction as their main task.
Literary postmodernism is specifically "deconstructing" the form of the novel, the assumed nature of the text, etc.. Modernism has no shortage of stories "deconstructing" the idea that the World Wars were glorious affairs.
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So, uh, why are you reading? Like what are you reading for?
You should read what you like if it's for enjoyment. Whether that's Tom Clancy(RIP) or Jane Austen(also RIP), or in your case Cormac McCarthy(RIP again). If you're trying to become well read, then read Shakespeare. If you just want to blend in with a certain crowd, well, that's going to entail plenty of other things you wouldn't necessarily choose to do, I'm not sure why the modern equivalent of Dickens is a bridge too far.
I have never understood the appeal of Shakespeare at all and I’ve tried to grasp it. Although the one book I suspect that has a chance at making me like him I haven’t got around to yet.
I enjoy Shakespeare because the language is beautiful (as @HereAndGone2 said), but also because I find the way in which he highlights the universality of the human condition to be deeply moving. I remember when I was young and I finally understood the meaning of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy (rather than just bouncing off the language). It was a formative moment for me, realizing that his topic (wishing to die, but being too afraid of what comes after to death to commit suicide) was something that was still relevant to modern people. It made me realize that humans through all the years have felt the same kinds of feelings we do, and struggled with the same kinds of things we do.
Also seconding that Shakespeare meant his work to be performed, not read. I still enjoy reading his plays, but seeing them performed brings a lot to the experience.
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For me, anyway, it's the beauty of the language. I first tackled a Shakespeare play, "Hamlet", when I was about fourteen-fifteen expecting it to be a hard slog because it was Great Literature and more than that, Great Poetry, and all the Great Poetry I had encountered up till then was difficult to understand because of what seemed to be deliberate obscurantism and excessive verbiage.
So I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and expected to have to hack my way through the undergrowth. But it wasn't like that at all. First, I suspect, because I was reading a schools edition of the play which was in modern English and meant for idiot school kids to be able to follow. Second, because a lot of the terminology was recognisable to me as idioms still current in Hiberno-English (e.g. the bit about "walking abroad", I didn't need a note telling me this meant 'outside' because this was how it was used in my locale as well).
I ended up with bells ringing in my head because the words all struck against one another and chimed. When I finished, I understood why Shakespeare was considered a great.
Maybe you're not as susceptible to the mere sound-music of words, but yeah. The plays are meant to be performed and not just read, but even Iago's little speech here is just so hypnotising because of the slurring, murmurous repetition of the syllables if you read it aloud:
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The problem with Shakespeare is that he's (really well done) junk food that was so good and foundational that it has aged into literary prominence.
This causes problems - he has a lot of just funny shit, low brow humor, and satisfying basic chicken soup plotting (think Star Wars original trilogy). The facet of "you" that can enjoy Billy without engaging in classiness masturbation is the low brow blockbuster side of things.
But because most modern people require a reference guide or really turning their brains on they'll try and engage in a more "literary" way.
Those two things end up hitting at cross purposes.
The end result is that the most rewarding way is experience - know it well enough that you don't need to think really hard to realize that something someone just said was an upscale dick joke.
This is not helpful because a good response to "ehh I'm doubting" is not "watch it 50 times."
I guess I would recommend trying to see a stage version after recently having struggled through the written, and then just trying to vibe with the play.
Yeah, Shakespeare is hilarious but some of the jokes definitely don't land without footnotes. Like in Hamlet:
"May I lie in your lap?" "No, my lord." "I mean my head in your lap." "Ay, my lord." "What, did you think I meant country matters [sex]?" "I think nothing, my lord." "That's a fair thought, to lie between maids' legs." "What?" "Nothing."
That scene is funny as hell if you know that "nothing" was used as slang for the vagina, and that Shakespeare was doing the equivalent of making "pussy" double entendres. But that's something most people aren't going to know without having it pointed out, which just makes the scene confusing to a modern audience.
An actor can probably get "country matters" across, perhaps by breaking accent and rhythm a bit so it's clearly "cunt-ry matters" (whether that's the derivation or not). As for "nothing" meaning "vagina" (or "pussy"), that's likely a recent fabrication.
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I agree with @07nk. Shakespeare is meant to be performed, not read, and reading a play is almost always an inferior experience. Sure, some people do enjoy reading his plays because most of them have some banger lines, but the drama, the humor, the intensity, is all in the performance. It's why there are so many "interpretations" of Shakespeare using the same lines but completely different sets and costuming and you can still deliver a compelling experience even if they don't look like Elizabethans.
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Are you not getting it because of the dialect issues, or because of something else? I find his plots very funny, but with writing that requires some footnotes(and of course, it often doesn't have a deeper meaning, it's entertainment)- but, the first folio and the KJV are, literally, the defining core of modern English literature, and if you want to understand literature in modern English, you have to read those two things.
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Does this come from trying to read Shakespeare? I feel like Shakespeare is best enjoyed in performance form, and trying to enjoy his works from reading them is like trying to enjoy The Godfather from reading the script. There's enjoyment to be had, likely, but there's a lot to the experience that's missing, because the target audience for the script wasn't readers, but rather actors and directors and such, for the purpose of informing them on what to perform for viewers. Personally, my favorite Shakespeare experience is the 90s film Twelfth Night starring Ethan Hawke and Helena Bonham Carter.
I have never watched Shakespeare on stage, but I have watched film adaptations that kept the original language, such as Romeo and Juliet (1968), Othello (1995), and Hamlet (1996). I prefer reading the plays; they have helpful footnotes, and in any case I can't understand what the movie actors are saying because they speak too fast. Besides, Shakespeare's directions are very minimalist ("exit, pursued by a bear"), with most of the action being implied through dialogue, so they are hardly distracting.
I'd recommend the Olivier Lear. TV version, stage-bound, and it started off (to me) slow. But when Lear hit "Come not between the dragon and his wrath" it just revved up and kept going from there on.
You can see why Edmund might have a grudge against his father, since Dad keeps insisting on introducing him as "Do you know my bastard son? Yeah, he's illegitimate. I have a proper born in wedlock elder son, but I never married this kid's mom." Yeah, thanks Dad!
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The first time I ever enjoyed Shakespeare was in a tavern that served food and booze while putting on the performance. Can't recommend highly enough (no tomatoes thrown, alas).
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I don't like Shakespeare either.
But to give him credit, I'm sure he was exceptionally talented in his time. I think it's like criticizing Newton because he only discovered classical physics: we've progressed not only material and objective knowledge but changed taste.
Likewise, I read Lovecraft and his depiction of eldritch horrors is tame compared to what he inspired.
(Although unlike material and knowledge, whether our culture's taste "progresses" is debatable. Especially because sometimes "what's old is new again". I do think it progresses in that some concepts, like tropes, are discovered then always remain in style; at least until we undergo change as radical as an apocalypse that destroys material and knowledge progress.)
Part of the criticism I have for him lies on me. How can I say I don’t like him if I don’t understand what he’s about? I just don’t see the appeal at all. I’m not sure if Newton is a good parallel case. And actually in his case, Newtonian Mechanics still has a ton of practical applicability today, specifically in fluid dynamics.
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The first and only time I encountered Infinite Jest, it was the guy so dedicated to social climbing he became a gay black communist to pick up college-educated white chicks. And he had suddenly started talking about infinite jest without ever mentioning anything about infinite jest. I was just there when he reliably brought it up with the same lines in every interaction with a new person. He was 30 though and knew exactly what he was doing.
I was frankly confused as to why he was so obsessed with a book he wasn't actually reading and couldn't explain what he liked about it.
I like genre trash, and am not embarrassed about it, and I have very low tolerance for performative waffling.
I initially thought the first paragraph was a joke about you meeting Obama in his law school days.
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Keeping a notebook while reading Gravity's Rainbow is not how you should be reading it; you'll inevitably be bogged down. The jazz analogy is right, but perhaps not how you mean it: it's a kaleidoscope, and the fractured lack of a coherent narrative is itself what you're supposed to get out of it. It's an experience, not a textbook.
I'd also not overly index on Gravity's Rainbow as postmodern literature, just as it wouldn't make sense to overly index on Finnegan's Wake as modernist literature. You could just as well choose Pale Fire or the Name of the Rose as exemplars of postmodernism, and those are excellent and have a highly readable narrative.
As to their value, I enjoyed those two exemplars immensely; if they bring value to your life, then they have value. Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest have the unfortunate status of being i-am-very-smart books, and if read as that, you're not going to have a good time or get any value out of them.
You are entirely correct that Cormac McCarthy is unsurpassed in 20th century literature, though.
The same thing with Infinite Jest. The first time you read it, just let it wash over you. Maybe keep a bookmark on the timeline chapter when that comes up. Don't sweat puzzling out the story too much - you can always read Aaron Swartz's theory afterwards - just enjoy (or "enjoy") the characters, atmosphere, style. Also, thanks for bringing up Pale Fire, somebody had to.
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What’s post modern about Name of the Rose?
I suppose the broadness of the term "postmodernism" is one of its weaknesses, but reasons I'd argue for it:
Several people replying to you point out that the traits that you cite as quintessentially postmodern have antecedents in literature prior to the postmodern era. As ever, there's nothing new under the sun. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is often called the first postmodern novel despite having been written smack-bang in the middle of the modernist era. Many of the techniques associated with experimental postmodern literature were first used in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), if not earlier.
I've heard the quip than Don Quixote was the first postmodern novel.
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The characters in the later parts of Don Quixote have read the first part of Don Quixote.
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So is The Lord of the Rings, or Dinotopia.
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Some of the earliest novels were epistolary novels, framed as a series of letters written by a fictional person. This would make it more premodern than postmodern.
Postmodernism is a historical attitude more than a rigid set of textual features, even if textual features point towards or away from a book being written in a postmodern spirit. The Voynich Manuscript is weird as hell, but it's not postmodern, and good luck drawing a line between modernism and postmodernism (and some even argue that we are now in a post-postmodern era, so good luck drawing that line too).
I vote that we call it metamodern. We can just change the prefix every time we reach a new era.
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Hoofprints in the snow might not tell you something is a horse. But then you see a tuft of shoulder-high fur caught in the brush, then a stirrup, and then, hey, it's Brunellus.
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I haven't read Infinite Jest, or Gravity's Rainbow, or White Noise. However I adore Catch-22, and find Slaughterhouse 5 perfectly fine. YMMV.
Gravity’s Rainbow left me feeling like I was intellectually nauseated and on psychedelics the entire time. Great book but it can catch you very off guard if you aren’t prepared for it.
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Yeah Catch 22 is great and I wouldn't consider it guilty of being overly complex or allegorical. You can read it pretty straight up as 'man beset by the system' and it works
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I really enjoyed Infinite Jest, it's definitely a slog in the beginning. There's a real plot there, but it's well camouflaged and you have to search it out in the references and clues left in the text.
I still think the part about masks and video calls is probably the single most perceptive observation of the coming culture of social media and I'm amazed that it was written when cutting edge social media was a geocities my first text web page.
Also Kate Glompert's description of depression is so alien to my experience (I was raised on a steady diet of Norman Vincent Peale). It's a very useful reminder of how different other people's mental experience are.
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I would say this is exactly what GR and IJ do. GR is commentary on technology and the systems of control growing ever-larger. Think Seeing Like a State mixed with some of Uncle Ted's critiques, but in novel form. It's also really, really funny. I've read it three times and it keeps making more sense. There is a narrative present and the plotlines converge, even if not explicitly.
IJ is commentary on addiction, technology, and alienation. Large parts of it are tedious and terminally unfunny. There is a cohesive narrative, although it's jumbled up. As someone who has dealt with many, many addicts, the parts about addiction and rehab are especially poignant.
I would agree that plenty of other post-modernist novels fit your critiques and are sorely lacking as novels. I got very little from Gaddis' The Recognitions for example, even with a reader's guide, and wouldn't recommend it (J R, though, is a good one).
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I'm literally reading Infinite Jest right now. Honestly it's a Skill Issue if you don't get it if you ask me. The more well read you are otherwise the more you'll get out of it. Blood Meridian was a harder read for me the Infinite Jest (though it's an amazing book as well).
Of these, I have read Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity's Rainbow. The others simply didn't appeal to me (Catch-22) or there is no way in hell I'd read them (Infinite Jest, White Noise). Vonnegut is Vonnegut, he's nearly always good. I did manage to make it through Gravity's Rainbow and came out the other end agreeing it's a great novel. About a third of the way through, I was "yeah it's fine", half-way through I was "what the hell" because it just about had hit me over the head by then, but I staggered on to the end and was glad I did.
Skill Issues? Eh, maybe. Some books just don't work for some people, and I have no problem with that. The problem I do have is sneering, if a book doesn't work for someone then it's because the book is terrible (to be fair, some books are terrible) and not because the person reading it doesn't want to put the work in/expected it to agree with their preferences.
I started in on Gravity’s Rainbow, but it was in no way a book I enjoyed. After three pages I returned it to the library.
I want to enjoy reading. My flavor is more in line with Weymouth’s Veddy British translation of the New Testament. His St. Paul is a true philosopher.
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Dude, you literally just became the imagined antagonist from my original post.
This is becoming one of themotte's great long-running arguments. I'm mostly in the Skill Issue camp, but it does forget the critical role that individual taste plays - I love Infinite Jest, but also put down Gravity's Rainbow. If you can handle McCarthy you can pretty much handle anything DFW throws at you (the main difference is IJ's nonlinear structure, both temporally and with the footnotes). You should consider picking up The Passenger/Stella Maris and seeing if you hate it.
Edit: my other advice is that you appear to have come away from Infinite Jest with pretty much the same critique of postmodernism that DFW makes in his essays on the topic. He Has Noticed The Bodies, and IJ is a kind of desperate thrashing against the limits of postmodern literature (the Pale King, too, and far more tragically). I think this is one reason that IJ is so long, because even with its postmodern style it's nearly impossible to finish the book without coming away from it with the kind of genuine love and care for its characters that postmodernism apparently forecloses. Every time I finish IJ, it feels like the end of a lengthy trip visiting good friends in a foreign country.
I don't know why your comment was the reason, but it made me remember that I did really enjoy Sadly, Porn by The Last Psychiatrist / Edward Teach.
It is drastically non-linear and starts with several dozen pages of footnotes that are longer than the primary text. I think you could call it something like "postmodern meta-psychology analysis" or something. And yet, I did find it good, readable, and deep.
Maybe that's the whole point of postermodernist literature? Different elements of it are highly resonant with a reader while others are not. It's less a bellcurve (like, say, 18th century American literature) and more of a stochastic matching algorithm.
Yeah I would call that about as postmodern, in a certain sense, as philosophy gets. It goes another level beyond the CCRU's "theoryfiction" (we all know Land, but Reza Negarestani would be a more fitting example). Where Negarestani is doing this wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how he's putting fiction in his serious philosophical work to problematize it, TLP makes that itself a central problem. I think the real issue is that we have no proper sense of a unified post-postmodernism - my bet would be that the next generation will see this as totally ridiculous, that there was a unified yet-to-be-named movement encompassing all the TLPesque/Landian/Wallachian/Cormago-Mullenite/Artheauxvian forces that were both unleashed by and reacted against the postmodernism of the late 20th Century.
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This is an area where I find utilitarianism helpful. What’s the purpose of art? If art is to increase collective wellbeing, however indirectly, then a lot of literature is worthless. It’s endless yapping and bickering, shilled by a class of people with a high verbal IQ who are paid to professionally yap and have no interest in considering the longterm outcome of their recommendations, and yet somehow have authority on what people should read. The great cathedrals were built by men who had no concept of literature, and every horrible monstrosity of today was designed by some pretentious bespectacled architect who surely claims to love “literature”. All of my civilizational enemies are well-read.
Well some of them surely can't read... unless you don't classify them as civilizational?
Anyway, I agree with your main point. Going too meta and abstract is generally bad for writing. Professional authorities on writing don't seem to be very good at it. How many great novelists got a degree? How many NYT 'bestsellers' are actually good and fun to read? Not to mention all the destructive fads that have been spurred by books. In Germany for instance "The Cloud" terrified millions, written just after the Chernobyl disaster with a brutal description of a meltdown, radiation poisoning, social breakdown. It was taught in schools.
Then we see German denuclearization and horrendously costly energy policies, in part spurred by electoral realities from a generation who'd been brought up on these scare stories.
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I find your comment nonsensical.
You don't consider the bible "literature"?
The elite of both the red and blue tribe are well read, they just read different things and want to be known for reading different things. OP has good examples of blue-tribe reading, so here's some examples of red-tribe coded reading: the Bible, ancient greek plays, Shakepseare, John Locke, Federalist Papers, Heinlein, Tom Clancy, Little House on the Prairy.
Red tribe normies read Clancy(if male) and Little House(if young and/or female), and sometimes Heinlein. But a lot of your list is just elite coded, not particularly tribal coded.
I mostly agree. My point is just that elites of all belief systems read. And so saying "my civilizational enemies are all well-read" as @coffee_enjoyer did as a way to associate reading with his out group is nonsensical.
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There are similarities between the medieval approach to the Bible and literature, but the differences are too significant to usefully classify them together under the same umbrella term. A medieval Christian did not read the Bible for entertainment, but usually heard the text within a solemn (and multisensory) context with the specific aim of learning from God as sole authority. The normal context of digesting the Bible was distinct from that of literature, even among those who were literate, as they engaged in rich devotional activities. Among literate monks who were taught the Bible for the purpose of teaching the masses, the books were analyzed allegorically and tropologically, yet this was always oriented toward something of Christ or the moral life. Symbols in Isaiah were not considered in light of what an author had in mind, but in light of what God was saying about Christ and what Christ was saying about the urgently-important things which a man had to know and believe. There was no interest in discerning whether the text was written well (an early complaint against the Greek gospels was that they were written poorly, and the early church fathers did not disagree). They had no interest in dissecting the structure, plot, character development, authorial intent, milieu, or anything else which characterizes the modern appraisal of literature. The Bible was treated in a contextually and psychologically distinct way, and analyzed in a distinct way, from the modern treatment and analysis of literature. (Modern “Bible study” has a lot more in common with literature. But that’s an aberration from the medieval era. The master masons who built the cathedrals might have never read the Bible and instead kept a devotional book at home, and the monks who commissioned the cathedrals did not read it as literature in the sense in which we we understand the category).
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Specifically thanking you for this comment.
I wish people would dive to a deeper level of analysis rather than posting variations on "No, actually, I liked that book" - which is most of the other comments in thread.
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Catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5 and White Noise are genuinely entertaining and powerful books imo. I admit to giving up on Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest, but I loved The Crying of Lot 49 and quite liked Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, so I am confident both David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon are capable of great things.
In summary, from my experience, postmodernism doesn't have shit to do with it. It's just that Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are stupidly long.
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I’ve read Catch-22 three times and Slaughterhouse-Five a couple. Both number among the best novels written in the 20th century. They are the seminal anti-war novels. Go read them, you will probably enjoy it! The former has a slow start, but picks up.
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Personally, I wouldn't even characterise Slaughterhouse-Five as postmodern literature. It's a very short and accessible novel which employs a sci-fi* premise in order to make a powerful anti-war statement. Other works in Vonnegut's oeuvre are far more overtly postmodern and meta (e.g. Breakfast of Champions), but Slaughterhouse-Five is remarkably straightforward.
*Although its author hates his work being so categorised.
Having read this for the first time around 10 years ago in my late 20s or early 30s, I generally agree. However, I must admit that I don't recall the book making an anti-war statement, powerful or not. I listened to the audiobook of All Quiet on the Western Front after I read Slaughterhouse Five, but looking back, the latter book reminded me a lot of the former, in describing the horrors of war in basic, matter-of-fact ways, i.e. the famous "so it goes."
I'll also add that, the scifi film Arrival came out while I was close to finishing the book, and it was kinda surreal watching that film and realizing in-the-moment that the core scifi concept was pulled directly from that book.
I'm not sure if all editions of Slaughterhouse-Five include Vonnegut's preface in which he describes a meeting he had with a Hollywood person who scoffed when Vonnegut told him he was writing an anti-war novel, telling him that he might as well write an anti-glacier novel. In light of that preface, my read ofhow the Tralfamadorians perceive time is that it's Vonnegut's critique of a particular kind of fatalism which sees war and conflict as inevitable and inexorable. If the Tralfamadorian mindset (that it's pointless to try to change the future, because it's predetermined) seems alien to us, then that is intended to shock us into a realisation about war and conflict in our world.
Arrival is a direct adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life". I love Ted Chiang, but this is one case where I think the adaptation is marginally superior to its source material. Villeneuve and his screenwriter are to be commended, not just for adapting a short story which is aggressively uncinematic and cerebral, but for doing so faithfully and in a way which is engaging throughout. I'd be curious to know if Chiang has ever read Slaughterhouse-Five.
Of course, the concept behind both these books could have been come up with independently by both authors, but given the time periods, the extreme similarities, and Vonnegut's stature, it would be truly shocking to me if Chiang had never read Slaughterhouse Five, or at least a summary of it. It'd be like some prominent author writing a successful story about a prince whose father is murdered by his uncle deciding to orchestrate a revenge plot never having read Hamlet by Shakespeare or a summary of it.
The Lion King is old enough that there could well be adults who've been inspired by it without knowing the work that inspired it!
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I certainly would not include Catch-22 either. More a comic late modernist novel. Huge inspiration to the postmodernists, though, you don't get Gravity's Rainbow without Catch-22.
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Catch-22 is both hilarious black comedy war satire, and highly quotable. I never really had trouble following the plot or parsing the time shifts. Can't speak for the rest.
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