How Postmodern Is It?

Ptim Callan: I want to talk today about the idea of degrees of postmodernism. Now I see where it would be easy to say, well, look, something is postmodern or it is not. And if it is most modern, then we're going to put it in that category, and if we're not, we're going to put it in that category. And I get that. And that's a way of looking at it. But if we look at the qualities that we associate with postmodernism that cause us to say this thing is postmodern or this thing is not. Those qualities can vary in terms of how intensely they appear, or how thoroughly they appear throughout the work, or how many of those qualities appear. And using that as a concept, we can start to think about something as being more or less postmodern. And I think this is an interesting pris prism to put this discussion of postmodern fiction through. So what I want to do today is I'm gonna walk you through four books. One is just a tiny bit postmodern, and they're increasingly levels to the last one is just very, very, very postmodern. And as I explain why I'm categorizing them this way, I hope we can all see how this idea of a degree of how postmodern something is is a sensible way to look at it and hopefully a useful way to look at it. So with that, let's get into it. So the first book I have. is A Canticle for Leibowitz by Frank Miller. Now or or not Frank. Walter Miller by Walter Miller. So A Canticle for Leibowitz is a science fiction novel. It is like an epitome late 50s nuclear angst science fiction novel. And it is about a post-war apocalypse. And this was early on, right? So this is a very early book. This is in the late 50s. And in that sense, none of that is particularly postmodern. If you look at my content versus technique episode, where I can talk about just just about because something occurred in the same era as postmodernism doesn't make it naturally postmodern. And certainly a book about nuclear war or post-nuclear apocalypse is not on the face of it postmodern. This is mostly a traditional science fiction book looking at the future, where where after the nuclear deluge, they call it the deluge, and what what what happens and how society rebuilds. What makes it postmodern is that it has a strong interest in documents, in pre-war documents. And those are being viewed and seen in the post war world. So this book is broken into three parts, three equal, more or less equal parts. And those parts are spaced out by hundreds of years. So the first part is hundreds of years after the nuclear war. The next part is hundreds of years after that. The third one is hundreds of years after that. So we see the rebuilding of society in three stages. And the first stage is basically. Stone Age for all intents and purposes, or back to, you know, there's no central government, there are small local tribes and warlords, there's no real technology to speak of. it's it's it's really back to very basic levels of of human needs and and and what's going on. 'Cause presumably all the infrastructure and supply chain and manufacturing and all that stuff was destroyed, right? Seats of learning, etcetera. And this book in particular focuses on the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church in the post-war world sets itself up as the preservers of knowledge, just as in the dark ages. So there are monasteries, and these monasteries get books and keep them. And they transcribe them. They have scribes, just like in the dark ages. And as the old books fade, they transcribe them into new books, and they're passing down this knowledge. They're preserving these books and these works. And they don't know really what for. They're just preserving them. They don't understand them. They don't know what they mean. They are just faithfully describing them. And the key guy in the first section of this book winds up finding they're the first person, you're not the first person, but the kind of the protagonist of the first section of this book winds up finding an undisturbed underground room. And in this room, there are some documents documents from Saint Leibowitz. And Saint Leibowitz was an electrical engineer from before the Deluge. And he winds up his life's work is to do a beautiful, faithful transcription of a of a flow chart, of a f of an electronic flow diagram of s for some for some device, right? We don't know what. So what you see here is There's this this this view of of documents and the artifactuality of those documents, that these are not. vessels for meaning necessarily, right? They're created by somebody who has a sense for meaning, and then they go through a an entirely new Melieu and they wind up being interpreted by people who don't really have the equipment to interpret them the way the original people did and they wind up with very different, kind of a very different attitude toward the documents. the second section is also similar. What's happening in the second section is now it's the Enlightenment. So we've gone from Middle Ages to Enlightenment. And in the Enlightenment, scientists are discovering things like the scientific method. And part of what they're interested in is these old documents and seeing what they can glean from them. And then the third spar, this is gonna be a spoiler, sorry, the third part is that we learn nothing and we destroy ourselves again with nuclear weapons. That's what happens in the third part. But the first two parts are very focused on this idea of documents and their role and their meaning and the separation, the disconnection of the of of of of truth, right? Or true communication or content, and the fact that a document is rendered and then a different person has to look at the document and apprehend it and try to tease meaning from it. It's very deconstructionist ahead of deconstruction. And so that theme and those ideas and this approach toward document in particular documentation in particular, in my mind tells me that a canical for Leibowitz, instead of being just straight traditionalism, is a little bit postmodern. Now let's move on. Next one on my list, more postmodern, is the Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh Proprietor. And this is a Robert Coover book. Robert Coover is one of my ten titans of postmodernism. And what happens in this book, this is one of Carl Coover's early books. What happens in this book is There's this guy, J. Henry Waugh, who has invented this simulation baseball game that he plays. He rolls dice and he has all these charts and things and he plays the games and he plays the teams against each other and he tracks the standings and all that stuff. And it's a very sophisticated game that he plays. This is before computers, right? This is when you would have done this kind of thing on paper. This book was written in the 1960s. And so he he's playing this this game. And in addition to just like playing the teams against each other, he gives the players names and he gives them backgrounds and he gives them personalities and he starts telling the stories to himself of what they're doing off the field. And he's inventing this entire rich life in this society around this game. And the more seasons that he plays this game, and he can crank through a bunch of seasons a year. So their time is moving faster for the baseball players than it is moving for for Henry. And as he does that, he gets more and more elaborate and sophisticated in the world he's been doing. And they have families and they have political parties and they have their own lore and legends and songs, and all of the stuff is all what Henry's inventing in in his own mind and as his his surrounding material for the core of the game. And So right there, that's a little postmodern, right? Because we've got this kind of these two tiers of ont two ontological tiers. You got the creator, and then you got the stuff that's created. But what Coover does, it's really interesting, is he really gets rich into the the the baseball association, the invented world that J. Henry Waugh has. And in the beginning of the book, it's we're seeing Henry, and Henry's playing his games, and Henry's imagining in his mind what's going on and the players all have their their their their roles and everything and Henry's really really really into it and he's got his favorites and he's got his favorite teams and his favorite players and his least favorite players the good guys and the bad guys and he's like really into it. And as the book progresses the the baseball association becomes more and more dominant inside the book. In a couple ways. One of which is that the baseball association starts affecting Henry. So I'll give you a couple examples. One is just good old-fashioned. He's spending too much time and focus on this game and he's suffering at his job because of it. He's tired when he goes to work and he's distracted. And this game has so consumed him that he ultimately winds up losing his job. Right. The second way, though, that's more interesting, is that this fantasy world that Henry's developing starts to come back on his own world. So there's a multiple examples of this, but I'll give you just one. He's got this bar that he goes to called Pete's. And he has used Pete's as the model for a bar inside the baseball association, which is called Jakes. And so there's a scene where he goes to Pete's. And he accidentally addresses Pete as Jake. So what's happened is the fantasy world is creeping up into the real world through Henry. Now, this isn't this isn't any breaking the fourth wall characters in rebellion, you know, all you know, pure metafictional like the character walks out and talks to the author, right? This isn't the kind of thing you see in Breakfast of Champions or a bunch of John Barth or stuff like that. Or later Coover work. This is early, right? This is early stuff. This is written in the 1960s. But already here, Coover is kind of breaking making the the difference between the two. and again, it progresses more and more to the point where Henry eventually kind of disappears from the story. And the end of the book is just the baseball association and what's happening with them. And Henry's, we just kind of leave Henry. He just doesn't, we don't see him anymore. and the last chapter of the Baseball Association is a hundred years in the future. And they are now a hundred years from the events of the rest of the book leading up to that point, and they talk about the events of the rest of the book like myth and legend. Nobody knows exactly what happens, and some scholars think this and some scholars think that, and there's debate about blah blah blah. And that's what like that's that's ha what has happened. So these stories that Henry was creating now in his world in the baseball association are themselves. Becoming mysterious and taking on a more of a mythical quality. So again, you can see where these are very postmodern themes, right? But again, it's not at the point where we have things like characters breaking the fourth wall. So it's more postmodern, certainly mechanical for Leibowitz, but less postmodern than what's coming next. So next on my list, even more spotern, I have If on a winner's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, also on my 10. So Coover was on my 10 Titans. Calvino is also on my 10 Titans, and the last book I'm going to show is also on my 10 Titans. So If on a Winners Night of Traveler, what happens here in this book is it starts out in the second person. It's talking about the word you, and I'm actually gonna read the very beginning of it. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night A Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door. The TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, no, I don't want to watch TV. Raise your voice. They won't hear you otherwise. I'm reading. I don't want to be disturbed. Maybe they haven't heard you with all that racket. Speak louder. Yell, I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel. Right? So, right away, it's written in the second person. It's you, you reading this novel that you're holding in your hand. Now, what happens is there's a little bit of preparation and stuff, and there's some some piano tuning that goes on, and then you actually start to read If on a winner's night a traveler. And you start to read if on a winner's night of Traveler, but what happens is you realize that there's something wrong with your copy of the book. And so now you have to go do things about it. You have to go get. go back to the bookstore and get a better copy of the book. So you go back to the bookstore and you replace your book, but the new book you have, even though it's under the cover, is an entirely different book. And this is the book outside the town of Malborg. And you start to read that book. And then you leave off that book and you have more adventures. And it's this interleaving structure of the you, second person you narrative, and then the beginning of a book. And then the second person you narrative, and then the beginning of a book, the second person you narrative, the beginning of book, over and over and over again. And you get the beginnings of all these books, and in between them, you have your adventure and your story. And at the end, by the end of your adventure, you have met somebody, you have fallen in love, you have married this person. And here's how the book ends. Now you are man and wife, reader and reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings. Ludmilla closes her book, turns off her light, puts her head back against the pillow and says Turn off your light too, aren't you tired of reading? And you say just a moment, I've almost finished If on a winter's night a traveller by Italo Calvina. So it's wonderfully clever, it's smart, it's all the things that Calvino's great about. He really shows off his writing chops. All of these different books are very different in their style. They're all gripping. Like every one of them, you start reading it, you say, Wow, I would read this book very happily. and this whole technique of the second person and you and the interleave of things is just so innovative. And so we see a lot of the postmodern qualities in this. It is definitely metafictional. It's not metafictional like characters are talking to the authors, but it's definitely metafictional. It is definitely interested in books as books and the structure of books. It shows a variety of different styles. It has a very rigorous, strong structure, which is one of the things that we frequently see from Calvino. it's got a lot of cleverness and play. And it's just it's you know, at this point we're like full on postmodernism. Like this is just postmodern, postmodern, postmodern. But the big kahuna. I could have gone with several big kahunas for this one. I chose Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. But I could have pulled out a bunch of books and I could have pulled out something from damn near any one of my ten titans. David Foster Wallace is one of the Ten Titans, and this is in many ways the postmodernist Uber text. Right? and so Infinite Just by David Foster Wallace. First of all, it's a mega novel, it's more than a hundred eleven hundred pages long. it's an open novel, which is something David Foster Wallace is famous for. It's very postmodern. It is has a clever and interesting structure, it's got kind of a loop structure or loops back on itself. there is a lot of irrealism in this book, although there's a lot of realism too. there is a lot of inclusion of documentation in this book. So there's sections of the book that are just about films. You know, it's a it's you know, that one of the characters is a filmmaker, and so there's a bunch of stuff about his bill films. There's various forms of how we communicate things, there's transcriptions in here, there's there's you know copies of other documents and then probably the most obviously postmodern part of the whole thing is the back of the book. So the last more than hundred pages of this book are all endnotes. So they're endnotes scattered throughout the book. And you have to if you don't read the endnotes in the back, you won't comprehend what's going on in the books. The end notes are essential. So I read this with two bookmarks, right? because I had to be able to know where I was in the endnotes in the other one at any intervention times. Some of the endnotes are very complicated. Some of the endnotes go on for pages and pages and pages. You might have a seven-page endnote, right? And all of this together makes this book extremely very, very postmodern. And so that's the idea, right? That Can I claim that all four of these books are postmodern? Yeah. We can have a little debate about a canical for Leibowitz, and you have to understand why I'm saying that, because it's a smidge postmodern. But all the other three, definitely postmodern. No question about that, right? But it's also about, well, how postmodern is it? Now the last thing, and this isn't necessarily a must-do. But one of the things I will point out is that these four books that I picked out, and I did not pick them for this reason, but these four books I picked out, the degree of postmodernism is also in chronological order. And I think this is a very valid to think about because this genre is evolving over time. And people are reading what came before, and they are changing. their own writing based on what they've seen, they're learning from techniques and ideas from previous writers. They're trying to build on and do something that's the next gen or the next thing after that previous writer. And so you get Canical for Leibowitz is in the 60s, Universal Baseball Association in the 70s, if on a winter's night a traveler is in the 80s, 90s, I think in the 80s, not 90, not the 90s. 1979. So late 70s, almost 1980s. And then DFW, Infant Jess, comes out. And so we're watching this trend over time as the the aspects of what we think of as postmodernism keep being being built on. by later and later authors. And I think this is definitely a trend. As we continue to go through the genre and I'm showing you some of the things that are more radical, you're gonna tend to find that the later it gets, the more radical the techniques become and and and the works become. And that makes perfect sense, right? Because they're reading what comes before. So think about that. Think about degrees of postmodernism And that something doesn't have to be like all in your face crazy, whoa, to be postmodern, right? But it certainly can be. And that if we look at, again, the saturation, how much of this kind of postmodern technique and attitude and approach do we get? What percentage of the book is that? How intense is it when it's there? all of those things together help us determine how postmodern a work is. Thank you.