Self Awareness

Ptim Callan: The single most important defining characteristic of postmodernism is acute self-awareness. This is a very important point. This is a critically important point. And I'm really glad we're discussing it today. So far in this season, this this show, we have put a lot of effort into some of the markers and techniques and and and the way that self modern postmodernists behave and what they put in their in their literature. But the enveloping concept that ties all of this together and everything we've discussed and everything we will discuss is self-awareness. So let's go back to what postmodernism is. Postmodernism is a response to modernism. What was modernism? Modernism was the extreme iconoclastic treatment of all conventions, norms, and especially prescriptions and proscriptions. So it was saying, I think I can I don't have to do it the way that everybody always did it. I think I can do it in a different way. And so you got the the the dense Faulknarian writing in his in his most extreme cases with the the twenty page parenthetical notes and the long unattributed quotations and and and those things, right? or you got the the you know the the extreme brevity of of Beckett or the you know the strong minimalism of s of of Hemingway or you know early movement into concrete poetry and the a shoeing of conventions of spelling and and grammar and punctuation by E. E. Cummings, etc. What all of these people were doing is they were doing it different. They were breaking the norms. And they were breaking the norms for the sake of breaking the norms. Now the good ones did it well, right? And and found something better. And if they hadn't found something better, we wouldn't have had modernism wouldn't have been a thing and we wouldn't know these writers today. But by breaking those norms they did find something better and they really went at it hard. And so what postmodernism is about is picking up the pieces after the bull has been through the China shot and has exuberantly smashed every piece of porcelain it can find. What do we do? And that's what postmodernism is about. And so built into that fundamentally at its core is this idea of self-awareness that we're looking at ourselves not just in terms of what we want to say, not in terms of our message, but also in terms of our medium, right? The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan. We don't just say I want to tell a story about, you know, people who are struggling to survive in a difficult world. We say I want to tell that story and I know that all of the norms and conventions are fundamentally arbitrary. I live in this world of arbitrariness and you know, existentialism when it comes to art, artistic existentialism. And so what I need to do is I need to ask myself, well, why? Why am I doing things the way I am doing them? Why am I making the choices that I make? And postmodernism by its nature is always aware of the choices. Why am I making the choices that I make? As opposed to traditionalism, where I don't know why I make the choices I make. I'm doing it because that's how it's done. Right. And the difference between a postmodern a traditionalist says, I do it because that's how it's done. A modernist says, I do it differently because everybody else thinks that's how it's done. And a postmodernist says, I am going to think about how I am going to do it. And that will be a conscious decision. Right? And that's the most defining characteristic of postmodernism is. Self-consciousness, self-awareness to say, I know that I am making choices, and the choices I make have consequences, and I'm going to structure it to give me the outcomes that I want. That is a post-modernist viewpoint to writing fiction or poetry or creative literature, creative storytelling. And that's what we see. And then a lot of postmodernists, of course. are are are going to say, and I recognize that if I just make something that looks like a traditionalist, that how is that different from traditionalism? And what am I going to do to ensure that this self-awareness that I have, that the advantage, the opportunity of self-awareness is not squandered, and that I do something that is benefits From that self-awareness. So that's the that's the most basic idea. And everything I have discussed so far on this channel can be tied back to that idea of the postmodern self-awareness. And everything that I will discuss, I think, for the entire duration of this channel, however long it goes, I also believe will be able to be tied back to that self-awareness. And that's why I was really eager to do an episode. To discuss this concept of self-awareness, how it's built in. Now, that may sound abstract and and and also painfully obvious. You might say, well, of course, we're all self-aware. I mean, when I walk down the street, I know that my legs are moving, right? When I when I do anything that I do, when I breathe in and out, I know that I'm breathing air. What's what what what's the big deal, Tim? Isn't everybody self-aware? And so what I want to do is I wanna show you. I just grabbed. This is gonna be a speed round. I grabbed this little big old stack of books off my shelves. And I just want to quickly grab them and explain where self-awareness fits into this book. And all of these are things that I consider to be postmodernism in one form or another. To various degrees, by the way. And we'll get into degrees of how postmodern it is in a future episode. I'm not gonna hit that here, but that's another thing to talk about. So, and and what you'll see when we do this is that you know it takes many forms and it spans a huge range, not only of how postmodern it is, but genre, time, authorial intent. level of seriousness or lightness. there can be fun, funny, cute postmodernism, just like there could be, you know, very serious literary postmodernism, and everything in between. It spans genre, it spans size and length. All of these things are available to to the postmodernist. And it takes many forms. But what you'll see that's common in all of these things is this this awareness of the fact that I am an artificer of written fiction and I am as I create this arc artifact this written artifact I have choice and I have the ability to make decisions about how this artifact will be formed and what it will do. And I will make those decisions knowing what my options are, what the past is, and you know what what is out there in the world as context. And that's the self-awareness that I'm talking about. So let's run down this speed round. And these are literally ordered in descending order of physical size so that I could put them in a stack on my desk. So here we go, starting from the top. and one last thing, sorry. I deliberately tried to go for if not authors, at least works, but I think it's mostly authors, with I think one exception, that I have not yet talked about on this channel. It would be easy for me to pull out the Ten Titans of Postmodernism and show you these things in action. And maybe I'll do that in a different episode, in a future episode. But what I wanted to do here was capture that this is broad. and general and this applies to all walks of postmodernism, not just the people who are really intense. So this is not just a an operator that we apply to infinite gest or gravity's rainbow, right? This is something that we apply to everything that ultimately gets described in post as postmodernism. So this is going to be a long range from the things we normally look at, but they're all postmodern and I'm going to explain why. And they're all self-aware. So let's start with the first one. This is The Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe. And this is a fun, light book. It's like a parody of Treasure Island, right? And so Gideon Defoe is saying, I'm what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this pirate genre that has become well known, that has all these tropes and ideas and things, and I'm gonna write something that uses. The mechanisms of the genre. What do we see on the front cover, right? We see parrots and a monkey and a Jolly Roger and a pineapple, right? I mean, these are the the you know the iconic cliches of the genre. And he's gonna take that, right? Even to the point where it's pirates with an exclamation mark. So he's going to take that and he's gonna say, I know, I'm aware that this is a genre. And that it's a genre with cliches and norms and expectations. And I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna don that like a coat and use that to write the story that I want to write. Self-aware. Self-aware. The next one, going in very different direction. Perchance to Dream by Robert B. Parker. Robert B. Parker, a wonderful, prolific, beloved writer of minimalist mysteries, somebody who would who did consider himself. The apostle and the offspring of previous minimalist writers of mysteries, such as Dashell Hammett and Drummond Please Raymond Carver. So this is Robert B. Parker writing a sequel to The Big Sleep. Right? I'm going to take the big sleep. I'm going to take this beloved work by this beloved author who I consider to be my godfather, right? And my my my inspiration and my mentor. And I'm going to take one of his most beloved works, and I am going to write what is a sequel to it. So in addition to that being somebody with a a lot of cojones, That also is a very postmodern thing. That's a very self-aware thing. This is Robert B. Parker nodding at his past and his history and the the paradigms that he he he follows and the pioneers who led the way for him to follow. And this is a direct tribute, it's an homage, and it's a nod. It's very self-aware. He's aware of what he is, what he does, and where he came from. Don DeLeo, EnZone. I could pick up anything by Don DeLeo, right? I wanted to pick a book that was different from the books that we usually discussed. EnZone is about a world-class college athlete who has professional potential but can't get himself together. And he's trying to get himself together. And the question is, will he will he do it or will he not? Right? He might drop out of school, he might flame out, he might not. but it's about what so much of Delilo's writing is about. It's about expectations, media, fame, how people look at you, what you are versus what outsiders define you as being, and how defining yourself to some degree frames and changes where you fit into the world. These are very self-aware ideas. This is somebody who's thinking about these questions all of the time. And indeed, Dalilo is thinking about these questions all the time. And when he chooses to address a question like, what is the difference between the true person and the person that the media sees? That is a self-aware idea. Right? That is somebody who's looking at himself as an author and saying, What am I doing? Okay. Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zeffon. And this is there's a nice little sub-genre of postmodernism that I definitely will talk about when we get to it, which is literary postmodernism, which is postmodernism where what ultimately what we're doing is we're directly addressing the idea of previously existing books. They're books about books. And what's especially nice about books about books when they're not just Academic and literary, but they're books about books that also fit into the big real world in some way. And that's kind of a genre we have right here. In this case, in Zaffon, this is a mystery, right? This is in the mystery genre, which is the genre he writes in. But the mystery in this case is that somebody is trying to kill a book. Somebody is trying to eliminate all copies of a single book. They want to make that book not exist anymore in the world. And the protagonist gets drawn into this plot and trying to understand who is doing this and why. By the way, that even that sub-sub subgenre we see in more than one postmodern novel. So again, it's a book about books, and but it's a mystery. It's set in the world, like it's got all the exciting page turning stuff we want. But at the same time, what are they what what's it danger at the end of the day? Books, ideas. So this is somebody steeping in a world of books and ideas who's going to talk to us about books and ideas in a very explicit way. Paul West, The Universe and Other Fictions, is a book of short story. And then just in general, the universe and other fictions, that title right there is an interesting one. It's a great title. I love that title. But you know, let's look at some of the things that are in here. Captain Ahab, a novel by the white whale, which is Moby Dick told by the white whale, right? Captain Ahab, it's called instead of Moby Dick, it's called. Brain Cell 9,999,999. is a is a story told from the perspective of a single neuron in Shakespeare's brain that contributes to the writing of one famous line of Shakespeare. That's that's the main character. And that's the perspective, and that's how the story is told. the basement of Kilimanjaro is another one. the those pearls, his eyes, another minotaur, Sinbad's head. you can just imagine by these titles what these are about. So All of this stuff is is Paul West looking at, hey, let's look at the at the literature that is in the world. And let's take a story and that's let's let's twist it or turn it or give it a new spin or tell it in a new way. That too is a big sub-genre of postmodernism and a whole set of things that we need to go into is how do we take the stories? and the tropes and the characters that we accept as part of our cultural zeitgeist and how do we use those, employ those, or flip them, or reinvent And that itself is another whole subgenre of postmodernism. You see that working here. Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. I think that's how you pronounce that. Sorry if I got it wrong. Tell me in the notes in the comments if I got that wrong. Kiss of the Spider Woman. There are two people imprisoned in a Latin American prison, and they are together in the same cell. And one of them is in prison for being a politically active communist agitator, and the other one is in prison for being a homosexual. Right. And so they are stuck in this prison together and they have nothing to do but talk. And as they talk, you know, it's very first of all, it's just very dialogue focused. So right there, we're signing, you know, someone that's somebody who's who's cognizant and aware of the idea of that we're talking. We're here to be talking. That's what we're doing right now. We're talking. But in addition to that, one of the characters keeps wanting to Relate movies, his favorite movies, and he tells his movies. And he tells his movies inside the book. And a large portion of the book is these narrations of these movies. And so what have we done? We've taken movies, we've encapsulated them, taken a film, we've put the film, go back and see my thing on nested frames. We've taken a film, we've put the film inside somebody's. Narration of it, some somebody's perception and description of that film, and then we've put that inside this narrated book. So this is someone who's very aware of the fact that we're here talking and we're telling stories, and the stories we tell are artifacts, and those artifacts change based on the choices, conscious or otherwise, of the person who tells them. It's a very self-aware kind of approach. Michael Shabon, gentlemen of the road. This is Michael Shabon is this road in particular is about some people on the Silk Road. People who are traveling on the Silk Road back in, I don't know, maybe ballpark of 1080. And Michael Shabon in particular is the master of genre. If you took Michael Shabon's corpus of work, of which there's quite a bit, he's pretty prolific. He he he moves fearlessly from genre to genre. Almost as if he's trying to do one of everything. And so there's something, there's stuff that reads like, you know, 1930s pulp literature. There's stuff that reads like an accurate rendition of what life was like in a certain subculture and time in the past. We've got stuff like this. and and he's just he he adopts I talked to earlier one of these earlier about putting on genre like a coat. That's what Michael Shabon does every time, every time he writes a new book. He goes to his closet, he puts on a new set of genre clothes. And those are the ones that we see in that book. And this is his 1000 BC, you know, Silk Road Adventures, exotic, you know, adventures in Araby, as they might have said once upon a time. in his in in this book, right? And I could have grabbed any Michael Shabon book and had a variation on that. So again, self aware. He's consciously aware of these precedents and he's using them very deliberately. The Archivist by Martha Cooley. The Archivist by Martha Cooley is a novel about people and human interactions and relationships. But it's all in the backdrop of these two scholars who are studying T.S. Elliott. And so, similarly to how I talked about one of these earlier books, you know, was a book about books. Several of these are a book about books. This is a book about books too, right? This is this is a book about people. Who are committing significant amount of their brain space to thinking about the great modernist poet T.S. Elliott? It's very self-aware. So it's someone who's aware of the fact that this is what we do in the world. We interact with these things. And I'm gonna write a book about these people, not only interacting with books, but interacting with modernism. Okay? How postmodern is that? In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. So, in a lot of ways, this feels like traditionalism. And if this were fiction, I would argue that this was traditionalism. Or I might argue that this was traditionalism. But what's interesting about In Cold Blood is this was an early example, the first example I know of, become much more common now, of someone to say, I'm going to take a real news item. And I'm going to novelize it. So this is something we see a lot. Another example that's I think kind of like this is the Killer Angels by Michael Shara. I don't have that here, but the Killer Angels, of course, is his Michael Shara's telling as if it were a novel of the real history of the Battle of Gettysburg. Right? And he blends real things that happened in Gettysburg with his own creation of. dialogue and individual characters and their thoughts and he blends them all together. So he's going to take a real thing Gettysburg. He's going to make us understand what happened in Gettysburg. So it's useful as a history text, but he's going to to to to infuse it with his own fiction. So same thing here in Cold Blood. Truman Capote is going to take this real example of this real brutal killing that made big headlines at the time and I'm going to get into the heads of the characters. And I'm gonna invent dialogue and motivations and thoughts and and scenes that nobody ever saw. And I'm gonna blend them seamlessly with the real things that we really know factually. And I'm gonna make this nonfiction novel, what will we call it? Right? So again, this is a very postmodern idea. This is a self-conscious, self-aware idea of someone who says, I know, I understand that I'm making artifacts. And so I understand the difference between this artifact and the real events. And I know that they're not the same because I know that I'm an an author. And so once again, it's self-conscious, even though it's so different from some of these other books. Nicholson Baker. I have traveling sprinkler here. I I probably really should have the the the first book, right? The what's it called? The I'm I I'm blanking on it, but Nicholson Baker the anthologist the anthologist is what it's called. So this book or the anthologist, these are these two books that he wrote about this guy called Paul Chowder. And Paul Chowder is a poet. Paul Chowder is a working poet today. He teaches poetry workshops and creative writing at some community college, and that's how he pays the billbo bills, but he thinks of himself as a poet, but he's nobody's hurt. I mean, he's not a poet. Like as as let me freeze that. As poets go, he's very successful. Nonetheless, there's no money, right? And so he's this successful poet who has to teach to make a living, who's trying to put together this anthology of modern poetry. Who struggles with his own personal procrastination and flakiness and various other things. And it winds up being this wonderful character study. They both are, these wonderful character studies, but again, they're character studies of what? They're character studies of a poet making an anthology of poetry. So it's also a book about books. And as as such, again, it's self-aware, right? I could write about lots of kind of flaky guys who get jobs painting houses because they can't stand their their their their job anymore that they think is pointless and doesn't accomplish everything. But I'm gonna and you know and mm f find find love and have some dates and the things that happen to Paul Chowder, but I'm gonna do it about a poet who is making an anthology of poetry. And that's gonna be central and infused into all of the book and that character and how he thinks and how he acts. Even to the point where an anthologist he has things like he has discussions, he breaks out poetry, he breaks it down, he talks about technically what's going on. And that's in the book, and it's still interesting. And so this again, self-aware, right? Self-aware. Nicholson Baker is a very self-aware writer. We will talk about him some more, but we haven't done it so far. And just to show you the range of what we can look at that we can consider to be postmodern, next one I picked was Steve Martin. Steve Martin's book, Pure Drivel. So Steve Martin is a comedian, right? He's a very famous comedian and actor. He's a very funny guy. I like his writing a lot. He's very smart. And Steve Martin, to my knowledge, had two books of short stories. There was The Cruel Shoes, and there's this one, Pure Dribble. And if we look down it, I'm trying to think actually trying to remember which story here I wanted in particular. But I see Times Roman Font announces a shortage of periods. Right? I the second one here is called Writing is Easy, Exclamation Mark. I think that's probably the the Times Roman Font announced it short as appears the one I was thinking about specifically. But when you look at this, even though it's comedy writing, you got something like the Times, Roman font or the writing is easy story, these are comedy. They're funny. Right? They're fundamentally funny, and that's what they're supposed to be, but they're funny in a way where Steve Martin is using the the the the these very Aware concepts of literature and writing and our past and the stories and things that surround us. And he's building us, even though it's very different from let's say Kiss of the Spider Woman, right? Which is a very serious story about oppression and ideology and people who are victims of an oppressive regime, right? We've got that on one hand, we have Steve Martin's lighthearted comedy on the other, but they both can be postmodern and they both can be self-aware, and they both are. And the last one on my list, I don't think we're gonna have any trouble believing that this one's postmodernism, is Jasper Ford the Fourth Bear. And Jasper Ford has made a whole career out of taking nursery rhyme stories and casting them. As noir mysteries, right? So this one in particular, the investigator is named Jack Spratt. Jack Spratt investigates the fourth bear, right? So we've got the story of the three bears, but apparently there's a fourth bear. And this obviously is a parody of the third man, and this whole thing, everything Jasper Ford writes is a parody. of these other stories, these fairy stories, these nursery rhymes, these things along these lines. He has another, I have another one of his novels on my shelf, which is about investigating who pushed Humpty Dumpty off the sh off the what happened with Humpty Dumpty, right? So that I think it's called the Humpty Affair. I I I I don't quite remember. Tell me in the comments. But that is that is what Jasper Ford just does. Okay, so again, very self aware. I'm aware of the fact that noir fiction is a big thing and mystery is a big thing. I'm aware of the fact that nursery rhymes and nursery stories are all around us in this cloud and we we deal with them all the time. And I can I'm going to merge them together and see what I get. And again, it's funny. It's fun, it's funny, it's light, right? Unlike, you know. The Spider Woman, which is very serious, but still it is self-aware and it's postmodernism. And it's almost would be interesting to contrast that with Perchance to Dream, right? Because these are both tributes to the noir genre genre, but they go in a very different direction with it. They're very different from each other as books. And yet at the same time, they're both tributes to the noir genre, they're both postmodern, they're both self-aware. So this self-awareness idea is definitely now that we've covered it in this episode, is gonna make it into my discussion a lot because it is a huge part of what all of this is about. And and you know, if you're asking yourself, if you want to look at something and say, is this postmodern? I think a very good signpost. Of postmodernism is to say, was this writer consciously acknowledging, if not to us, at least to himself, that there was a that that I am building an artifact in the context of a web. Of writing, literature, culture, knowledge, dialogue, society, etc., that is pre-existing. And inside of that, I'm gonna build an artifact, and I'm knowingly understanding that I'm building an artifact in that bigger web, and I see the bigger web as I choose to build the artifact. And if the answer to that is yes, you know, and and and it's visible in the writing, then. That's postmodernism. Even if it's light, mild postmodernism, that's postmodernism. If the answer is no, if the answer is look, I'm just really focused on my story and I'm gonna do things the way they've always been done because that's how they're done, then that's not postmodernism. Right? And arguably, if it's I'm gonna be an iconoclast just to be an iconoclast, that might be modernism depending on when it occurred to you. And so bear that in mind. as we move forward through through this channel and what we're gonna discuss that postmodernism is always self-aware. Thank you.