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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.
There's a lot that I agree with here in principle, but as I've said several times here on the Motte, when it comes to books I'm a cheap date. I think where I'd differ is that I don't necessarily need a cohesive narrative in order to enjoy a book. I have a yen for absurdist humor and surrealism (oh hai Illuminatus! Trilogy), so it isn't hard for me to take delight in the riffing of a stylish author, regardless of the presence or absence of plot, as long as I find the book engaging. Take this passage from White Noise for example:
Forget the punchy, rapid-fire prose, for a second. This is a main character that is pretentious to the point of having his head so far up his own ass that I can't even say that he rivals William Shatner simply because said MC still takes himself far too seriously. At least Shatner is self-aware! And just about every adult in the book, with the possible exception of Babette, is like this! And that last sentence in the quoted passage was enough to jolt me right out of my reading; juxtaposing Formalism with bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles was so dissonant to me that I had to think about it before I could grok it, which just made me love it, and the book, even more. Does White Noise have any essential meaning? Not so much, in my view. It's much more a collection of loosely joined commentary with some exceptional scenes and turns of phrase, but the skewering of the self-important academia types alone is worth the price of admission for me--everything else is just bonus points.
In contrast, the works of Samuel Delany would, I think, would also qualify for purposes of this discussion, and as much as I want to like his books, I just don't. I slogged through both Triton and Dahlgren, hoping that either of them would hook me, but they never did. Dahlgren in particular had more than enough surreality to potentially pique my interest, but Odindamn, if there's ever a book that embodies the literal meaning of YAOI!, which is to say that it had no climax, no point, no meaning, brother that one is it! Perhaps they are a little too much of their time, and/or personal to the author himself, but I had to give him up as a bad job after going 0-2.
Now Pynchon, that dude is something else. He is, to me, a unique mix of dense, rich, and oddly engaging that adds up to something like Neal Stephenson meets the Coen brothers on a mind-obliterating dose of LSD. When I first picked up Gravity's Rainbow, I think I read the first section introducing Pirate Prentice and didn't read any more for like months, if not a year. That said, when I returned to the book, it did in fact engage me enough to keep me reading all the way through, though the freewheeling nature of the plot, such as it was, combined with the richness of the prose brought it, if not exactly adjacent to, at least into the same zip code as, a slog for me, at least at times. There was so much going on, with so many plot threads and countless references that there was no way in Hel that I was ever going to be able to keep it all straight on a single reading! But unlike with Delany, above, as the madcap insanity of Gravity's Rainbow finally, inevitably ended in its utter decoherence, I admired Pynchon for his elegance in pulling off the ending. I found I had thoroughly enjoyed it! And I absolutely thought to myself, "what the actual fuck did I just read?"
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