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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.
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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