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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 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.
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.
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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