Ask anybody you know what they think about post-modernism and they are likely to wince as if a bad smell suddenly assaulted their nostrils. Postmodern art is complex and requires an intense participation on the part of the reader or spectator. It also represents the moment we are living right now, and the spirit of the times we live in is often uncomfortable for many of us.
In his famous 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard said that the most important characteristic of our era (called the postmodern era) is an “incredulity towards metanarratives.” What this means is that we have abandoned the hope that there will be a system of belief that will be capable of explaining everything. There is no single ideology, Lyotard stated, that one can rely upon nowadays to serve as an exhaustive way of understanding the world.
Some of us will agree with this statement, while others are still clinging to religion, Marxism, neo-liberalism, etc. as a single overarching system of explaining how the world works. Those others are precisely the ones who feel uncomfortable around the highly ironic, self-referential and contradictory postmodern art.
If we turn to literature, it can be safely said that some linguistic environments do postmodernism better than others. American writers are notoriously bad with the postmodern. Of course, there are people who enjoy Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and even Cormack McCarthy. However, compared to the really phenomenal post-modern works created by writers from, say, the Spanish-speaking world, novels by the postmodernists from the US are nothing to write home about. I would probably be able to name only Toni Morrison as an example of a worthwhile postmodernist from the US. Her novel Beloved is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and reread.
For higher quality postmodern writing in English, you can always check out the amazingly talented British writer Zadie Smith whose overall literary production is uneven but interspersed with flashes of pure genius like the 2012 novel NW.
Of course, the best postmodern writing these days comes out of the former British colonies, and Salman Rushdie is the perfect example of a postmodern writer who has created works of unrivaled beauty and poignancy.
In the words of the famous Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, Spain jumped into the postmodern before fully processing the modern era. This is true, but the leap proved to be highly successful for Spain whose writers do the postmodern amazingly well. Muñoz Molina himself has written a string of outstanding works of fiction, including his chef d’oeuvre A Manuscript of Ashes, which is now available in a translation by the incomparable Edith Grossman.
The writers who are obsessed with the postmodern but who keep producing bizarrely bad postmodern literature belong to the Russian-speaking world. The Silver Age of the Russian literature that gave to the world absolutely stunning in their beauty works of modernist art was cut short by the Stalinist mandate that only works of socialist realism be written and published in the USSR. The fifty years of a forced break between literary generations made the postmodern mentality absolutely alien to the writers who write in Russian and to their readers. Still, the Russian artists keep trying to create postmodern literature because the need to be “just like the West” is profound. The only way out of this dead-end of parroting the Westerners is through searching for one’s own way of relating to the postmodern era.
Ultimately, a profound discomfort with the entirety of the postmodern artistic production reflects a deep-seated discomfort with the reality we are experiencing right now. If there is nothing that you find attractive about this art, then you have got to ask yourself why it is proving so difficult for you to relate to the sensibilities of the only era you are destined to experience personally.
Clarissa's Blog 
But the incredulity to metanarratives is a reaction to modernism. In a way, right here we have a metanarrative that says, “First we must pass through modernism and then we must react in some way, with some kind of incredulity.”
I don’t think this is always necessary. Perhaps it is in some situations not at all necessary.
But postmodernism is a kind of spirtuality that insists it is. We must engage in self-criticism concerning our supposedly deeply embedded modernist assumptions, and root them out, or rather, reflexively engage with them, since rooting out is too extreme and smacks of puritanism (a meta-narrative).
Yawn.
Anyway, it’s a nice narrow little worldview, casting its net very widely to capture everything in sight, but in the end of you’ve got to constantly engage with that narrow dialectic against the universal and in favor of the particular, but in such a way that the particular somehow dominates the universal and seems to have you temporarily puzzled.
You HAVE to do this. Or else. You’re just not sophisticated and you don’t know how they game is supposed to be played. Also you don’t get that nice sadomasochistic delight of bending yourself in half to see if you can reach regions that are both distant to you and familiar to you at the same time.
And if you don’t do this, well you only have yourself to blame for not facing up to the ONLY ONE reality that is available to you, because I say.
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Why do you associate metanarratives with modernism? The Modernist era is the time when metanarratives began to crack for the first time. The main metanarratives are not a product of the Modernist era.
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I think the whole point of Lyotard’s critique, or at least a large part of it, is that the modern reverence for technology and instrumental reason lead to the holocaust.
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Yes, I find the whole “OMG, Enlightenment caused the Holocaust” to be silly, reactionary, and boring. I wrote about this in my second month of blogging. And I’m still as annoyed about it as I was then.
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I read the article you linked to.
The thing with the po-mos, is that they basically get their notions indirectly from Nietzsche, but they don’t really understand his criticisms. For Nietzsche, shoots of Enlightenment start a historical march toward The Truth, which in turn lead us to the recognition of the Death of God. Thus it leads humanity to an existential crisis, in having to face what one does about one’s knowledge of reality when Truth starts to take on more and more of a negative stark quality, for instance by pointing to our mortality. The sacrifice of the fanciful illusions entailed in religiosity, at the altar of The Truth, seems pointless from a perspective that already admits God is Dead. So one has this quandary as to what to do about Truth, from an atheistic perspective. It’s a philosophical issue, bringing up issues of historical progress and aesthetics and what it means to live the good life, and what it means to be ethical. It is not wise, for instance, to be compulsively, brutally honest. Nietzsche eschewed such absolute dictates of behavior.
For Nietzsche, the advancement of Enlightenment thinking was inevitable, but it was also very important that one had to handle this inevitability in such a way that finer feelings and aesthetics and so on, that were part of the religious tradition, were not tossed out along the way.
But anyway, the French bring in their critique of instrumental reason in the 20th century, and it ties in quite well with Nietzsche’s modulated stance toward the Enlightenment. But the French do to philosophy what they do to a model on the catwalk, which is to dress [her] up in excessively exaggerated and sometimes shocking ways. It’s a cultural trope and I think it does not translate well into Anglo-Saxon culture, which takes everything too literally.
Anglo-Saxon postmodernists are idiots in my view. They are sophists who do not even know they are sophists. Above all, they are the victims of their own unclear thinking about issues.
Literary postmodernism is neither here nor there, but ‘philosophical’ postmodernism is a piece of nonsense, except in the case that you are French. Then you really ARE ironic and irony is your bread and butter.
And if you really fear progress, you need to look at it more closely to notice what it is you feel you fear. If I am too ‘enlightened’ it may not be that I start to kill people, but that I have to start acting more like an adult.
It really isn’t adult to insist, for instance, that we cannot comment on what happens in some very patriarchal societies because for all we know a woman being stoned to death for some sexual misdemeanor might actually enjoy her full cultural participation in that way and who are we to insist she shouldn’t. That is what I would call a childish lack of engagement of the imagination.
Overall, I don’t think sophistry is clever, not unless the people doing it have a much better idea of what they’re doing and their aims in going about it as they do. You can’t just rest assured that it is the right thing to do because you are combating the capital T in Truth.
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Lyotard himself makes this association. But of course, modernism for him is not literary modernism but something more like “modernity.” The metanarratives for him are things like Marxism, Freudiianism…
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“American writers are notoriously bad with the postmodern …”
Except when Charles Jencks comes to mind — he wrote a fairly decent critique of it from an architectural and artistic standpoint.
I have to concur with one of his side comments — the ironic form of post-modernism seems to be the common default use of post-modernism, and it usually comes as a “get it? get it?” kind of jab in the ribs.
There’s an infamous American library built in an active seismic zone that was designed by an even more infamous post-modern architect, albeit one that they imported. The “get it? get it?” joke is that the building was designed as if it were layers of building stacked on top of each other and then shaken, producing a twisted stacked post-earthquake look.
I’ve tired of the building and the joke — the building uses too much glass with inadequate filtration of UV and blue colours, so my eyes get baked after only an hour inside. The building itself is a monumental over-use of structural steel, among other architectural offences. It is one of my least favourite North American libraries to visit.
It does lend itself to another observation: the distance between in-jokes and meta-narratives turns out not to be huge at all, and both may turn out not to be all that durable …
I shall now chant Toyota Celica until you tire greatly of Don DeLillo, and I shall now jab you in the ribs with the visceral in-jokes/meta-narratives of Cormac McCarthy until your ribs are sore. 🙂
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