Postmodern American Authors

Postmodern American AuthorsThomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLilloHistory and challenges to the realTony Hilfer (American Fiction since 1940, Longman,1992): Postmodernism as Black humour: William Burroughs, John Heller, Kurt VonnegutMetafiction: V. Nabokov, John Barth + The paranoids: William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy

PostmodernismA self-referential world where there is no escape (DeLillo, The Names, 1982: the price of oil = an index to the western worlds anxiety s. Jamesons postmodernism as the logic of late capitalism)Expression:FragmentaryReinterpretativeJohn Barth, from The Literature of Exhaustion (The Atlantic, 1967 a manifesto of Postmodernism)Barth disciple of Nabokov and J. L. Borges: Postmodernism as the literature of exhausted possibility or, more chicly, the literature of exhaustion

By exhaustion I dont mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities by no means necessarily a cause for despair. That a great many Western artists for a great many years have quareled with received definitions of artistic media, genres, and forms goes without saying: Pop Art, dramatic and musical happenings, the whole range of intermedia or mixed-means art bear recentest witness to the romantic tradition of rebelling against tradition.Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)Family descended from William Pynchon, who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with John Winthrop in 1630; family background often used as fictional sourceStudied engineering physics at Cornell, but left in the second year to serve in the US NavyReturned to Cornell in 1957 to do a degree in English; started writing and distinguished himself as a literature studentAttended V. Nabokovs lectures at CornellHas always shunned publicity, even though, more recently, his voice has appeared in The SimpsonsEntropy (1960) physics and literature as ways to know the worldPynchons background in physics (also manifested in his early novels)Entropy = a measure of the energy not available for useful work in a thermodynamic processThe second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of a closed system always increases or remains constant. Thermal energy always flows spontaneously from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature, in the form of heat, leading to an increasing state of disorder in the system. - The story: a fictional demonstration of how entropy worksNovelsV. (1963)The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)Gravity's Rainbow (1973) National Book Award for FictionVineland (1990)Mason & Dixon (1997)Against the Day (2006)Inherent Vice (2009)

The Crying of Lot 49the muted post horn, symbol for the secret Tristero society

Main themes (starting with Lot 49)Sociopolitical concerns such as racism and imperialismInteractions between high cultures and elite cultures (inspiration from comic books and cartoons, conspiracy theory, TV programs, popular movie culture)Human life/psychology and the sciencesentropy and communication theory (see Entropy, also The Crying of Lot 49) From Ethos-based Postmodernism to Late-Postmodern Stylistics (Robert Kohn, Style 43.2, 2009)The Crying of Lot 49, published by Thomas Pynchon in 1966, influenced American postmodern art of the 1980s. That art in turn influenced Pynchon's 2006 novel. Against the Day. The early novel was driven by the ethos or guiding beliefs of postmodemism, while the subsequent art was expressed in styles inspired by that ethos. That there would be synergies between his novels and postmodern American art of the 1980s is not surprising given Pynchon's professed interest in art in Slow Learner, where he recalled during his college days "taking one of those elective courses in Modem Art and it was the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention (20). His own artistic inclinations are evident on the double-spread title page of the first edition of The Crying of Lot 49, on the right-hand side of which the number 49 is underlined and flamboyantly displayed in broad numerals four inches tall, suggesting the influence of Jasper Johns, who began his number paintings in 1956 and established an influential prototype for representing numerals as subjects. (194)Pynchon building alternative worlds (s McHale) + the modern political thriller genreGravitys Rainbow: web of links among characters and actions, doubles, role-playing and role-reversing, coordinating systems and parallel ideas.V. ideas about entropy, dehumanization and theoretical ideas put in fictionThe Crying of Lot 49: Pynchons most metafictional novel to dateThe Crying of Lot 49Against the conventions of realist characterisation through characters allegorical names: Benny Profane, McClintic Sphere, Roger Mexico, Oedipa Maas and Mucho Maas.The basic question of the text (Hilfer): whether the protagonist can correctly interpret the text she confronts (a fictional world made up of what looks like signs but may not be) s. Oedipus mythThe Tristero conspiracy, seeking to undermine official systems of communication by substituting an alternative mail systemThe contemporary meaning of hierophanyAmerican jeremiad (Sacvan Bercovitch): denouncing America for backsliding from its chosen status as Gods model theocratic/democratic/economic societyInstead: a society of generalized controlOedipa as textual critic: what passes for reality is actually a highly encoded textThe novel = a story whose plot is a plotMessages left in WASTE baskets: the second law of thermodynamics, which states that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential equilibrate in an isolated physical system. From the state of thermodynamic equilibrium, the law deduced the principle of the increase of entropy and explains the phenomenon of irreversibility in nature. Identity as role-play; reality as fictionBut our beauty lies," explained Metzger, "in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a court room, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I'm a former actor who became a lawyer. They've done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can't fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly. (p. 8)

Art as mirror: SurrealismIn Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedies Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. (p. 5)

Remedios Varo, Embroidering Earths Mantle ', 1961

The quest for the lost America of spirit vs rationalized corporate America (San Narcisos Yoyodine corporation):She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. (p. 6)

Pynchons reinterpretative phase: Mason & Dixon, 1997Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America towards the end of colonial America.Historiographic metafiction (Linda Hutcheon) + stylistic pastiche (18th c novel)Exploration of various instances of dichotomous thinking (black/white, male/female, North/South)History as inexactAgainst the Day (2006)Plot set between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War IMore than 100 characters Set in the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all (Pynchons presentation on the cover). historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance Title: "the heavens and the earth ... [are] reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men (Bible, 2 Peter 3:7) a verse that also made an impact on Faulkner and referred to in Mason&Dixon

Plot (Louis Menand in The New Yorker) An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen, [...] who were hired by the wicked arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Traverse's sons [...] set out to avenge their fathers murder. [...] Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in Against the Day, but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot [...] that is, in Aristotles helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

- Engagement with time as reversible and flexible, ahistorical => refashioning of modernist apocalypticismMajor theme (Louis Menand)An enormous technological leap occurred in the decades around 1900. This advance was fired by some mixed-up combination of abstract mathematical speculation, capitalist greed, global geopolitical power struggle, and sheer mysticism. We know (roughly) how it all turned out, but if we had been living in those years it would have been impossible to sort out the fantastical possibilities from the plausible ones. Maybe we could split time and be in two places at once, or travel backward and forward at will, or maintain parallel lives in parallel universes. It turns out (so far) that we cant. But we did split the atom an achievement that must once have seemed equally far-fetched. Against the Day is a kind of inventory of the possibilities inherent in a particular moment in the history of the imagination. It is like a work of science fiction written in 1900.22Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)B. Indianapolis, started reading chemistry at Cornell, then went to warWas among a group of American prisoners at Dresdens Schlachthof Fnf (Slaughterhouse Five) => war seen in a totally anti-heroic light (in Slaughterhouse-Five and other novels)Read anthropology at the University of Chicago

Major Novels + ThemesPlayer Piano (1952): dystopia of automation and capitalism + their effect on human lifeThe Sirens of Titan (1959)Mother Night (1961) title from Goethes Faust (about an American playwright who becomes a Nazi propagandist)Cat's Cradle (1963): science, technology and religionGod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965): philanthropy and human controlSlaughterhouse-Five (1966)Welcome to the Monkey House (1968): futuristic thrillerBreakfast of Champions (1973): loneliness and the planetSlapstick (1976): SF view of the loneliness of human cond.Jailbird (1979): Watergate effects on small individualPalm Sunday (1981): collection of short stories, speeches, essays, letters, and other previously unpublished works

Slaughterhouse-Five- The overlap of history and fiction + authors organizing part both:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names. (p. 1)

Anti-heroic view of warThen she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. You were just babies then! she said.What? I said.You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs!I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.But you're not going to write it that way, are you. This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.I-I don't know, I said.Well, I know, she said. You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs. (p. 14)

TimeListen:Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between. (...)Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. (pp. 26-27)

SightBilly had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium School of Optometry. Nobody else suspected that he was going crazy. Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed: He was going crazy.They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.The man assigned to the bed next to Billy's was a former infantry captain named Eliot Rosewater. Rosewater was sick and tired of being drunk all the time. (p. 100)

SF as salvation It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in particular to the writings of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had a tremendous collection of science-fiction paperbacks under his bed. He had brought them to the hospital in a steamer trunk. Those beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the ward-like flannel pajamas that hadn't been changed for a month, or like Irish stew.Kilgore Trout became Billy's favorite living author, and science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read.Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy., but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater., for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. 'But that isn't enough any more.' said Rosewater.Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, 'I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living. (p. 100-101)

Don DeLillo (b. 1936, Bronx, Italian American)Americana (1971) End Zone (1972) Great Jones Street (1973) Ratner's Star (1976) Players (1977) Running Dog (1978) Amazons (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell") The Names (1982) White Noise (1985) Libra (1988) Mao II (1991) Underworld (1997) The Body Artist (2001) Cosmopolis (2003) Falling Man (2007) Point Omega (2010)

Postmodernist fiction: engaging with the real1962: historian Daniel Boorstin: shift in the rel. bt. the news media and real-life events

Americana (1971) realist; the episodic adventures of a young TV executive, David Bell, who gives up his job to travel the US in search of himself. => announces DeLillos interest in the exploration of American national consciousnessGreat Jones Street (1973) the entertainment industry: the machinery of fame and its horrors for guitarist Bucky WunderlickEnd Zone (1972, on football players articulating philosophical positions; apocalyptic tones PM) and Ratners Star (1976, on the trappings of SF) high postmodernismWhite Noise (1985) an Airborne Toxic Event just after the 1985 chemical spill in Bhopal, India => an uncanny commentary on the environmental disaster, even though the novel was in press even before the accident occurred. Jean Baudrillard: if the Gulf War was a non-event, 9/11 was the absolute event (The Spirit of Terrorism)Players (1977) and Mao II (1991), Falling Man (2007) 9/11 terrorist attacksRunning Dog (1978) political thriller (sexual activity in Hitlers bunker towards the end of WWII)Libra (1988) a transitional moment in Am. Consciousness: JFKs assassination, which ends an age of political innocence + a moment when the effects of the media serve as fundamental mutation in Americans lived relationship to the world. Underworld (1997) an anatomy of the emergence of paranoia as a constitutive feature of American identity during the Cold-War period.

History John Duvall: DeLillos fiction is an invitation to think historicallyEven though Am PM novels, Libra, Mao II and Underworld promote a social critique that often proceeds from Linda Hutcheons historiographic metafiction (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988: the PM novel blends the reflexivity of metafiction fiction that calls attention to itself as fiction with an explicit questioning of what counts as official history => the fiction/history boundaries are blurred)DeLillo recognizes the power of history, but insists on the novel as a counterforce to the wound of history through the persistence of mystery + the role of the artist in a consumer society

White Noise (1985)//The pressure of advertising makes it difficult to think historically (when the very structures of thought seem to have been coopted by the logic of TV genres: radio, TV, film and the internet = social forcesA culture of simulation (s. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981) => Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies interested in Nazi aesthetics has lost sight of the horrors of the Nazi past and hence of the equal horrors of his intensely media-driven, aestheticised presentInfluencesPost-modern seems to mean different things in different disciplines. In architecture and art it means one or two different things. In fiction it seems to mean another. When people say White Noise is post-modern, I dont really complain. I dont say it myself. But I dont see Underworld as post-modern. Maybe its the last modernist gasp. I dont know. (interview, 1998)DeLillos affinity to modernismJames Joyce: the focus on language (interview, 1993): the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a historyAmericana several characters demonstrate detailed knowledge of Joyces Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).Drawing on high modernist aesthetic => DeLillo complicates traditional distinctions bt modern and postmodern: surreal juxtapositions (s. Ren Magritte)The artist as hero + the artists responsibilityTechniques such as cinematic montage (Joyce, Faulkner)R. Magritte, Le blanc-seing, 1965

R. Magritte, The Son of Man (1964)

White Noises postmodernityOne of the most frequently taught postwar novelsAnthropological attention to aspects of the western worldIs DeLillos writing managing to maintain a critical distance from the culture he describes?Simulation and mediation, but also the waning of affect: Jack Gladneys media saturation is taken to comic effectThe implicit logic of late capitalisma college professor forced to realise that he is just every man in any city + DeLillos own task of finding a critical position from which to delineate a cultural phenomenon without being wholly absorbed by it.Consumption in the late 20th c: global, yet American (Jameson: technology as shorthand)Crowd control: the supermarket offers spiritual consensus (WN p. 18)Groups and crowdsIn WN, the sense of union bt people no longer depends on their physical proximity: Friday night gatherings with Chinese take-out that join Jack and Babettes children from previous marriages into a blended whole also join the enlarged Gladney family to other families in the country through the television shows they watch while eating => TV as a site of parasocial interaction, with the lounge as its siteThe hierarchical importance of events World catastrophes go unnoticed while details can take precedence over them (the influence of surrealism on postmodernism)The comfort of being under control: Babette says that people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do sth is the right way or the wrong way (WN pp. 171-2)Screens/systems/souls (s. M Foucault)Falling ManNickname given to a man who actually fell from the North Tower on 9/11 (emblematic for a more general human condition, like Bellows Dangling Man), inspired from a press article (s. photo taken by Richard Drew, Sept. 11, 2001)Choosing ones deathA survivor of the 9/11 attacks, whose fall is then dubbed by an artist all over the city.