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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.
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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