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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.
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).
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.
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