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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.
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.)
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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