Making Modernism Work

How many writers have read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Many thousands. Maybe millions. Yet not one of these writers knows artistically what’s going on in it. They don’t understand what Fitzgerald as an artist is doing with the tale.

Oh, there have been professors who’ve broken down Fitzgerald’s use of time in the novel, showing its complexity. (Fitzgerald carefully studied Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”) The profs discovered Fitzgerald’s use of modernist technique. They had part of the picture, but not all of it.

As I’ve explained previously on my “Pop” blog, in The Great Gatsby Scott Fitzgerald became a pop writer—or at least half a pop writer. The elements of a genre tale are there. A gangster. A mysterious past. Money. Murder. Speeding cars. Quick violence. The protagonist possesses a dual identity: Jay Gatsby and James Gatz. Self-creation—which Fitzgerald took from the greatest and most influential pop novel, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

I advocate for the fusion of pop and literary writing. It’s been done. F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved it in his greatest work. Modernism fused with pop.

Curiously enough, his buddy Ernest Hemingway at times seemed to be on the same path. “The Killers” is close to pop. His in our time (the primitive version) with its fragments of experience is very modernist, yet Hemingway’s genre sensibility of action and violence is present at the same time.

Both writers were able to write basic prose of simple sentences to keep the narrative moving. For a modernist this is essential. It’s the only way literary modernism can work without losing its audience.

What happened to American literature? Why were these trails not followed?

Instead of combining its strands, American writing divided—until today we have opposite poles. The literary and popular inhabit different worlds.

There’s no incentive from either big publishing or academia to bridge the gap. The genre novel is expected to be as simple and formulaic as possible. The same thin product stamped out over and over with minute variations.

With the literary, we see the ideology of the well-written sentence, as perpetuated by presumed authorities like Heidi Pitlor or The New Yorker editors. Writers who follow this path create Xerox art—copies of copies of copies, no one trying to find a way out.

Meanwhile, modernism morphed into postmodernism. Extreme solipsism as practiced by the form’s presumed god, David Foster Wallace. In his fiction, Wallace escaped into his head and wouldn’t come out, describing experience in an acutely self-conscious manner. Describing his feelings instead of objectively examining the world. Self-consciousness and self-indulgence; run-on sentences representing run-on thought.

The trick for the writer, the artist, is to reverse the process. Instead of bringing the world into the mind, project the mind onto the world. Make plot and settings representations of the subconscious. This was done with the novel She by H. Rider Haggard a couple centuries ago. It’s what “Batman” in its various forms is about. It’s the essence of “pop.”

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In my coming ebooks I plan to leap ahead to where American literature should be artistically if it hadn’t been sidetracked by mediocrity and nonsense. The question is whether or not the literary world is too culturally regressed to recognize what I’m doing. We’ll see, I guess.

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In my spare time I’ve also been examining movies for clues about the nature of art. My latest study is “Body and Soul,” a 1947 boxing movie starring John Garfield, which is formulaic and fast moving, gritty and tough, yet at the same time amazingly complex. Clues, tricks, techniques, layers: meaning everyplace. Stay tuned for my thoughts.

Franzen's Farther Away

In browsing through Jonathan Franzen's new book of essays, Farther Away, it's occurred to me how different my way of thinking is from his. Utterly different ways of viewing literature. Different world views, even though we're from the same generation and even, roughly, the same part of the country.

Franzen's view is extremely interior. Which is why he enjoys writers of the personal and the interior like Alice Munro and David Foster Wallace. I find both of them virtually unreadable. Franzen will discuss society and the world, as he does-- not too well in my opinion-- in Freedom. But he views the outer world through the prism of the domestic and the interior.
This is the same way he views himself as a writer, and by extension other writers. I see Jonathan Franzen and other system writers as hamsters kept in a cage. They never question the cage itself. I'm not sure they see it. They don't see themselves as writers within the context of society. Everything for them is a given.

An example of this is the attitude toward David Foster Wallace. He's not seen as a product of our mad postmodern society. It's accepted that he was depressed, just because he was, and he didn't take his meds and if we have problems we should all take our meds and we never for a minute look at society; we don't glimpse at the cage. But DFW was mentally stressed and maybe we could possibly perhaps very gently ask why he was mentally stressed. Could it possibly have anything to do with how far he plunged himself into mass electronic media? His television viewing, as evidenced by some of his early essays, was so mammoth and intense it could be called legendary. He not only watched the nonstop stream of video garbage, he studied the garbage minutely. Hundreds and thousands of hours of it. All of that went into his brain. At the same time he was creating massive amounts of intense self-absorbed writing. Try reading one of his endless instant-by-instant novels and think about the hyper-aware brain creating it. A brain on fire. Can we think his writer lifestyle had no effect? I recently completed a much smaller novel, one not consumed in self and minutia, and yet found myself at night unable to sleep as the pieces of narrative and sentences circulated again and again through my brain. Why have so many writers self-medicated? David Foster Wallace was a creature of society and can be understood only within the context of society and lifestyle and within postmodern philosophy-- which I consider unsatisfying madness-- and through the postmodern style of thinking and writing. From Jonathan Franzen we get none of this.

The larger question is whether Franzen's own style of thinking and writing-- or Alice Munro's-- is the path down which contemporary American literature should be heading.

Coming Attractions Part I

I'll announce soon a new book review blog. It'll launch with reviews of (fairly) new books from three big names.

Joyce Carol Oates

Don DeLillo

David Foster Wallace

Three biggies. Can you guess which one receives a positive review?

Because I'll be writing it, it will be the best book review spot around. I'm the fastest and sharpest literary critic on the planet. Will I demonstrate this? Stay tuned.

About Jonathan Lethem and Postmodernism

Jonathan Lethem's "Postmodernism as Liberty Valance: Notes on an Execution" in the October issue of The Believer is bad writing backed by a ridiculous argument.

Lethem's objective isn't to write a clear and compelling essay. It's to present a facade of intellectualism, combined with trademark McSweeney's-style cutesiness added to show that, hey, he's one of us.

Behind his clog of words, Lethem has two points. He doesn't try to prove the points. They're assumed. The herd he writes for accepts the points on face value. The essay is affirmation. "Hallelujahs" in a praise-pomo church service. The purpose of the essay is showing off.

Lethem's two points:

1.) Literary postmodernism is under continual assault.

2.) Postmodernism is like the film character Liberty Valance.

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POINT ONE: Because literary postmodernism isn't under real attack, Lethem doesn't need to construct a real argument. His essay is a victory dance over pretend opponents. The idea is to make the unquestioning readership feel good: Rome replaying its wars with Carthage decades after the fact. A ritualistic dance.

Lethem writes,

"My version allegorizes the holding at bay, for the special province of literary fiction, of contemporary experience in all its dismaying or exhilarating particulars, as well as a weird, persistent denial of a terrific number of artistic strategies for illuminating that experience. The avoidance, that's to say, of any forthright address of what's called postmodernity, and what's lost in avoiding it (a sacrifice I see as at best pointless, an empty rehearsal of anxieties, and at worst hugely detrimental to fiction)."

What is he talking about?

Jonathan Lethem says of postmodernism:

"--the word is often used as finger-pointing to a really vast number of things that might be seen as threatening to canonical culture."

Really? By who?

Today, postmodernism IS canonical culture. The French critics Lethem defends in his essay are celebrated by the academy. They're part of the canon.

Lethem talks of the "collapsing of high and low cultural preserves--."

This sure isn't happening in Lethem's world! He's safely in the "high" end, along with metafiction, antinarrative, intertextuality, unreliable narration, "surrealism or magical realism or hysterical realism," irony, and the rest of the postmodern jumble. The academy does have values, of a sort. The intellectual jumble Lethem describes is its highest value.

The items Lethem lists and defends are now part of "high" culture. They've been around for fifty years. There's nothing threatening to "the literary community" about them. Go onto trendy lit-sites like HTML Giant and you see that these ideas and strategies ARE the literary community.

(To read this post in its entirety, click on http://kingwenclas.blogspot.com/p/jonathan-lethem-and-postmodernism.html )