an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, May 2006, ISSN 1552-5112
Literature
and the Postmodern: A Conversation with Brian McHale
Brian McHale and
Adriana Neagu
Adriana Neagu: As we advance into
the twenty first century there has been less and less talk of postmodernism,
speculation of its death and after-life. Soon after crossing the millennial
threshold it became quite clear that there was life after postmodernism
after all. Could it be that indeed we are past the postmodern age altogether?
In Postmodernist Fiction you describe postmodernism as emerging from
modernism with ‘historical consequentiality’. What does postmodernism, with its
radical questioning of historicity, seem to be logically and consequentially
preparing the way for? Is it now possible to say with the benefit of hindsight,
what postmodernism is prior to, in order to discern a foreseeable posterity in
current tendencies? Or else, how different is your
take on the postmodernist experience today from that formulated in Postmodernist
Fiction?
Brian
McHale: The narrower question is
that of whether I do stand by my own poetics of postmodernism and I think I
do. I think I don’t have any regrets,
not important ones, about the position I stake out there. I still think it’s
tenable, given that it’s a limited position, i.e. its ambitions are limited to a
poetics of postmodern fiction, and given those parameters, poetics and fiction,
I think I am still able to stand by it. My position in the second book, Constructing
Postmodernism was that this after all is an entirely heuristic view of
postmodernism and it does not make strong claims about its own status. So it
organises, still pretty much to my satisfaction, a range of texts; it
establishes some family resemblances; it establishes a sort of range and some
umbrella concepts. As far as I’m concerned, as long as one accepts the
limitations of that project, I think it still works quite adequately. So, I’m
not very interested in going back and undoing that; I think that’s still
satisfactory, to me, anyway. If you wanted to challenge it at the level of its
failure to integrate postmodernist fiction in a larger whole, you might say
that it doesn’t have a very strong explanatory scheme, its explanatory scheme
is entirely internal to the literary-historical dynamics and does not respond
in any systematic way to larger historical developments. As long as you’re not
looking for that larger historical sequence or history, then I think the
poetics still stands. So that’s an answer at that level of the issue. At the level
of the fate of postmodernism altogether, here I have to plead agnosticism. I’m
actually not a futurologist -- I’m not in the business of predicting the
future, I’m in the business of literary history, which is to observe what has
happened, and to think to some degree historically, in the literary-historical
sense, about the present moment. But I
think I have too good a sense about how many variables you would have to be
thinking about, not to mention how many unexpected irruptions from elsewhere
you would have to be taking into account, to talk about the future, so I don’t
pretend to have anything useful to say about where we’re going. I’m sympathetic
to the idea, as I suggested in my
AN: Of a whole plethora of reference works on
postmodernism, Postmodernist Fiction and Constructing Postmodernism
are among the rare few that offer an actual poetics of its forms, a systemic
and periodical understanding of its articulations with Modernism. The formalist
method that you then applied to the analysis of postmodernist discourse proved
enormously enabling and productive, particularly in its valorisation of the
Jacobsonian notion of dominant. By resorting to a similar mindset, can we
distinguish a High Postmodernism, frozen, canonised, fossilised already, and is
that the unavoidable condition of all literary phenomena, the fate inscribed,
inevitably, as you put it in Postmodernist Fiction, in their
historicity?
Do you think that the obsolescence, the exhaustion
that may be profiling itself is to do with the becoming canonical of
postmodernist forms in literary discourse?
BM: I can see that view of the matter and it’s partly a
satisfying view. Yet, I never bought into the idea, which is a sort of another
apocalyptic idea, that postmodernism was a radical break, a leap into the
unknown, that there was no continuity and no way back from it to where we had
been before. I’m more of the view that postmodernist literary expression, and
maybe postmodernism in general, behaves like earlier cultural periods and
phenomena behaved, which is to say that precisely the mechanism you were
talking about is working, that a canonical version of it will be or is being or
has been crystallised now, which has its own life cycle, and that the dynamics
of change from the inside and change from the outside are going on all along. I
have no problem thinking about it in those terms, so I expect to see that being
played out. On the other hand, I’m also attracted to Lyotard’s view of a sort
of perpetual postmodernism, which is not I think at all incompatible with the
other view. Lyotard, as you know,
reserves the name ‘postmodernism’ for what cannot be accommodated by the
canonical system – it’s always what is left over for future recuperation.
Therefore, we can talk apparently paradoxically, to me not paradoxically at
all, about a postmodern that precedes the modern.
AN: An ingrained avant-garde nature, inbuilt in
postmodernism, preventing ossification, keeping the ‘ball’ rolling?
BM: Exactly. I’m quite reconciled to the idea that
that’s happening even as we speak, and that some excluded aspect or part or
range of postmodernism will be left for future generations to make something
of, to take up and shift to the centre – all those dynamics which derive from
the Russian formalists. I don’t see any incompatibility between Lyotard’s model
and what was essentially a formalist, in part structuralist view that I was
using in Postmodernist Fiction.
AN: In retrospect, if we step back, how much about
cultural postmodernism was media hype and vogue?
BM: I think a nuanced answer would be that, in the first
place, the general media embrace of postmodernism comes very late in the day.
Many of the things we recognise now as being postmodernist preceded the coinage
of the word altogether, and date from the ‘50s-‘60s. Even after the coinage of
the word in the 1970s – it had been coined earlier, but its de facto
coinage, its availability, dates from the seventies -- even in the course of
the ‘70s there is not much media interest in postmodernism. If you go back and
search mass media, the term hasn’t been taken up yet. So, even though the term is
already available in certain areas, to academics and architecture critics, it
still circulates in fairly limited circles, and really only gets taken up as a
media buzzword in the ‘80s sometime and into the ‘90s. So it’s certainly the case that it was a
media buzzword and a fashion statement, but all that comes rather late in the
cycle, really after the most interesting uses of the term had occurred in the
academy and art practice. In other words, of course there was exaggeration, of
course there was hype and of course there was a sort of media false
consciousness about the postmodern, but I don’t think it interfered with the
actual emergence of the term, or the actual creation of what we see as its most
distinctive works, or the works likely to have the longest shelf life,
literary-historically speaking, or art-historically speaking. I think those all
predate the use of the term in mass media.
AN: And implicitly any meta-thinking, any form of
self-representation somehow.
BM: That’s right.
AN: Outlooks too are subject to the cycle of
ideas hence bound to change. In rethinking your findings in Constructing
Postmodernism and the developments and refinements to the poetics of
postmodernist forms that the book contributes, is there anything that you would
do differently in methodological terms? And what prompted the work on The
Obligation toward the Difficult Whole?
BM: I think not radically different,
certainly not conceptually different. Rhetorically the book is not entirely
satisfactory now, there are ways that I could have made it a more integrated
book in particular, but conceptually I think I still stand by it, and when I
have had occasions to reread, especially the Introduction, I think on the whole
I’m satisfied with that. You asked about what prompted me to move to the third
book and it wasn’t actually dissatisfaction with the conceptual position of the
preceding books, but a sense that really there was a whole range of writing,
which is to say mainly poetry, that I didn’t accommodate and didn’t address in
the first two books and it was this that stimulated work on the third
book. Out of that I learnt something
valuable, I think, which is that there is no reason to assume that the model
holds across all genres or across all cultural practices, so that what I think
makes a pretty sound argument in the context of fiction, doesn’t look nearly as
sound in the case of poetry. Poetry from
certain points of view had been postmodern before the postmodern, or had always
already been postmodern.
AN: By definition
BM: Yes. And from other points of view,
perhaps never postmodernised. I’m able to entertain both of these
possibilities. What this says is that the model that allowed us to discern the transition
in the history of the novel doesn’t allow that kind of sharp transition in the
history of poetry; that poetry rather is a kind of range, the umbrella under
which you can group it is a much broader one, and on the whole, the account of
poetry has to be less integrated by the nature of the object.
AN: Comparatively, how did you find the
application of a formalist and structuralist method to verse or perhaps not
very productive given the plurality that you are describing?
BM: It’s not so much that it’s unproductive,
it’s just that when you do that, the results are much more various. You get a
much wider variety of findings. So, I think that’s a net gain actually. One comes away from this saying, well, after all,
there’s not a single unifying postmodernism across cultural practices. Of
course, there’s really no reason to imagine that there would’ve been. Despite Fredric Jameson’s very persuasive
attempts to make all postmodernism responsive to a single cultural logic, it’s
hard to do, and that probably has to do with the interference between, indeed
the intersection between, so to speak, exterior history and the interior
histories of each of these disciplines or practices, which are being driven by
their own internal dynamics, at the same time that they’re all subject and
responding to the cultural logic of late capitalism. And out of that come these
different chronologies, these different sequences, and different strands of
development. As I try to show in the Introduction to The Obligation toward the
Difficult Whole, if you looked at the postmodernisms of different
disciplines, you would immediately see that some have strong postmodernisms, in
the sense that it’s almost inconceivable to talk about the history of that
field without the use of the term, and some have weak postmodernisms, in the
sense that plenty of people get along just fine without talking in those terms.
And there’s some correlation between the strength of their postmodernism and
the strength of their modernism, so there is such a thing as modern dance in a
very sharply defined way, and consequently postmodern dance is a relatively
clear profile. Equally, modern architecture and postmodern architecture have
strong profiles, whereas it’s much less inevitable to talk about postmodern painting
-- some people do, but it’s not mandatory. You might talk about the postmodern
in the field of the visual arts, but even that is not as mandatory as it is in
the case of dance and architecture, and by the time you get to something like
postmodern music, then really it’s purely optional, and maybe useless. So rather than assuming uniformity, that
everything in lock step crossed the same threshold at the same time, we should
rather assume that there are different thresholds that are crossed at different
times.
AN: And this within what might be construed
as a plural, eclectic, yet cohesive dynamics?
BM: Right. And possibly weakly or strongly
cohesive at that.
AN: Speaking of degrees of internalisation,
do you ever worry that your paradigm for understanding postmodernism may be
taken too literally or appropriated in a reductionist, prescriptive even way?
BM: Sure and of course it has been. That
comes with the territory, it’s nothing to be worried about. And that happens
despite all the disclaimers that I did or might write -- it doesn’t make any
difference, people will still believe what they please. You can’t worry about
it, but when you get the chance, you complicate it for them, saying, ‘yes, but’
or ‘no, it can’t be as straightforward as that, can it’, and you just keep
reiterating, that this is a heuristic device, this is a construction, it’s not
something I’ve found out in the world, but I’ve made it in order to accommodate
the things that I found out there in the world. On the one hand, it’s very
flattering and it’s very affirming, because it means that people have found it
handy, but it also means that I have to be philosophical about the applications
of it that look misguided, or, as you say, reductive. I can’t have those
satisfactions without also having the dissatisfactions.
AN: 9-11 and the fateful validations of the
millennial anxieties that it brought, became a periodical term, indeed an
almost civilisational marker. Can we see its reverberations on the scene of the
contemporary as a sudden relapse into an epistemological order, in identity
terms and otherwise? A catch term with Postmodernism repeated like a mantra by
its theorists was its politics of plurality and multiculturalism. Did 9-11 mark
the foundering of the multiculturalism project?
BM: There are two things here. First, I’ve always been suspicious of the
conflation of postmodernism and postcolonialism. In fact, I’m suspicious of the
conflation of all the ‘posts’. I don’t
think poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism are all the same
‘posts’ -- quite the reverse, I’m fairly confident that they’re each responding
to different historical sequences, that they are the fruits of different
historical logics. Postcolonialism is coming out of its own logic, and even its
acknowledgement of, let alone its identity with, postmodernism, is fairly weak;
it doesn’t actually need postmodernism. There would have been a poscolonialism
even if there never were a postmodernism, I’m fairly confident of that. The
conflation of postmodernism and poststructuralism I think is also a mistake --
it’s a misunderstanding of intellectual history. The assumption that the
postmodernists were illustrating postructuralist theory, I think, is very
easily disproved just by virtue of the dates. Poststructuralism in
AN: As though the poem was inscribed with
readings of the event?
BM: Pre-inscribed, which is very bad history
in some sense, it’s pure anachronism, but, at this point, impossible not to
see. And so, as you now reread the twentieth century, it has all to be reread
retrospectively, in the light of this event, ironically and uncannily.
AN: I find it a master-irony as well to
think of an entire postmodern dystopian horizon, the notorious post-holocaust,
post-apocalyptic fictions and recontextualise these in light of their premonitory
value. Once charged with a defective historical consciousness, postmodern
authors may in retrospect appear historically prescient, postmodern readings of
the contemporary culture, almost prophetic.
AN: Or at any rate, it looks that way now.
It’s exactly the dynamics of Borges’ essay on Kafka’s precursors. Without
Kafka, the precursors are not related to each other, but as soon as there’s
Kafka, they are. Without that shock of 9-11, there is no recognisable history
that leads up to 9-11, and now there is, and hence it is impossible not to see
it in a certain way.
AN: Do you then think that ‘the fateful
day’, has inevitably triggered a sui generis radically different
understanding of the postmodernism’s relation with history, perhaps a ‘rehabilitation’
of its ethics even?
BM: I couldn’t say that. For one thing,
we’re too near to the event, and this is also part of my reluctance to be a
futurologist -- I don’t know how that’s going to turn out. As I was indicating
in my lecture at the University of Edinburgh, the other day, I do think there
is a waning of some postmodernist features around 9-11, or maybe it’s even more
correct to say that there’s a notable silence around 9-11, with regard to
matters that you would expect to be expressed. My account of the rise and fall of the angels
is partly motivated and also partly enhanced by the observable fact that around
9-11 there were relatively few manifestations of this angel imagery -- not that
there were none, but that, given how angel images proliferated throughout the
‘90s, you would think that on this occasion of all occasions the angels would
return in a big way. But in fact they’re
rather sparse, which suggests that in spite of 9-11 this sign of postmodernism,
the postmodern angel, is winding down of its own accord, that the life cycle of
postmodernism is coming to its end, as it must out of its own internal logic,
rather than having been brought to an abrupt end by 9-11. So, in the end, 9-11
is another fictitious boundary; it really is an irruption out of another order
of things and it will be used maybe as the marker of the end of a development,
but it hasn’t been experienced that way; it will be another fiction.
AN: The vision of postmodernism articulated
in your two poetics stood out also in the positive note it sounded on the
phenomenon, on its discursive and plural nature. Do you subscribe to fellow
theorist Ihab Hassan’s thesis that in part at least, the legacy of
postmodernism can be viewed as in fact ‘an aesthetic of trust’? Too easy………Do
you see that happening at all or being the case?
BM: Again, I’m reluctant to speculate, but I
see at least some signs of restriction of plurality, or I suspect that’s coming
into force -- a kind of retreat from the full multiculturalism to which we at
least gave lip-service once.
AN: At least from its frenzied,
celebrational dimension.
BM: Yes, and on the whole, I think it’s a
bad sign because it looks like it is in response to 9-11 and the threat of the
‘clash of civilisations’, and that what’s being installed in its place is a new
kind of dualism; at least in some quarters that’s sort of the desired outcome
of all this, that people are now going to be sobered up by this shock of
reality and will renounce the ‘luxury’ of indulging in pluralism, and that they
will now confront the reality principle of opposition and polarity. But there’s such a tone of relief in the
quarters where you’re hearing this from that it’s very suspicious. After all,
they’ve been waiting for this all along, they’ve been trying to undo the
plurality of the postmodern from the beginning; in North America, and I think
also in Europe, ‘plurality’ is often coded in the terms of the ‘60s and the
undoing of the ‘60s. The ‘60s really is only a figure of speech, it’s only a
synecdoche really, but the cultural warfare has been conducted in these
terms. It’s the ‘60s and a kind of
policing of the ‘60s that’s at stake, and a call to order after the excesses of
the ‘60s, which is then recapitulated as a call to order after the excesses of
the ‘80s, again and again a call to order, which in effect is simply the recoil
from pluralism and the nostalgia for the rather stable organisation of the Cold
War years. It’s really a nostalgia for
the clear-cut polarities and divisions of the Cold War, and now of course you
have to reorganise in order to have a different set of poles, and one can claim
the ‘New Europe’ as your allies against this other threat, but the structure is
the same -- the names have been changed but the structure is the same. So I think there’s more than a trace of that
going on. I don’t welcome it, and I hope it’s resisted. For all the kind of
centrifugal aspects of those episodes of pluralism, I think that’s preferable
and less dangerous in the long run. I’ve lately been teaching in a course on
science fiction a novel by Samuel Delany called Trouble on
Triton, which is from the midst of the ‘70s, a
book written in 1976, reflecting a sort of utopian projection of that
pluralisation, a world in which all kinds of identities, sexual and otherwise,
plural identities and consecutive identities are made available by
technological means, and life is hard because you always have to be making
these choices, always continuously renegotiating the parameters of identity,
and my students, looking at the text, found it actually a dystopia. It was a
very unsettling project to them. They certainly were able to see that it
belonged to its historical moment, not to the future but to 1975-6. But on the
whole I think Delany was right, this is a sort of version of utopia, living
among the multiplicity of choices and the pain of choice, rather than fleeing
into the security of that Manichean world view that the Cold War had provided
and that after all almost destroyed us many times over.
AN: Somehow I’ve always been suspicious of
postmodern plurality, thinking that it’s only a shallow form of plurality,
stemming precisely from the refusal to choose, the pathological condition of
liminality of the postmodern logic.
BM: Of course it can be a shallow plurality,
but why not, why not have a shallow plurality rather than none? And it’s not just a shallow plurality,
one that can be easily recuperated by consumer culture, that comes down to the
‘choice’ between Classic Coke and Diet, which amounts to nothing. But just because that’s one version of it
doesn’t mean that one wants to ban plurality altogether, and I think there are
deeper possibilities and potentialities. I could tolerate the shallow pluralism
of the marketplace if I felt confident that the other plurality was also
available and secure somehow. The fear is we’ll be left only with the
plurality of the marketplace and in other respects we’ll be locked back into
the Cold War, we’ll be back in what my friend Alan Nadel calls
the ‘culture of containment’.
AN: Which would be anomalous.
BM: Yes, but not unthinkable. The first time
around the culture of containment was about consumer choice and containment of
every other choice, and there’s no reason to think that it couldn’t be revived.
AN: You have worked with a broad range of
authors whose cataloguing as postmodern comes almost automatic these days. One
of the misconceptions in circulation for sometime in the ‘90s among consumers,
critics even of postmodern literature was that writers across the ocean have
done a lot more at the level of innovation and experimentation than on this
side of the
BM: I’m not sure I believe that. There are
different national chronologies, different national histories of postmodernism,
and then different national traditions which inflect it in different ways. So I think it might be arguable that the
Americans are first, chronologically, for reasons which have to do with the
internal dynamics of American literature, and therefore available as models for
imitation, but I don’t think that that means that they offer a greater range,
or that they exhaust the possibilities or anything like that. I think that’s
not true, and in fact there’s plenty of reasons to think that, in particular
French literature had what we are now willing to call a postmodernism –that’s
not a term that was available to them then, and to this day they’re not very
interested in the term—but it functioned for the American readers and the
American writers as a model of how to proceed in a postmodern direction. So I
think, given the different national histories and the different chronological
sequences, we can think of plenty of European examples that are not closely
related to American models; and even when they are related, there’s always a
crucial element of mutual miscomprehension which is absolutely essential to
literary history. Everyone is always,
systematically getting it wrong, and without that there would be no literary
history. Raymond Federman, for instance, has had an enormous career in Germany,
in German translation, and he is by now almost entirely unknown in the United
States, he’s pretty much disappeared from sight, and the reasons for it are
quite extrinsic to his reputation in the States, or to the progress, the cycle
of his career in the States, and has everything to do with the German reception
of a certain kind of Holocaust literature.
While it would be incorrect and naive to say the Germans have ‘misunderstood’
Raymond Federman, it’s true in a certain sense that Germans have a different
appreciation of his work compared to the Americans, but this is an entirely
productive misprision, and keeps happening all the time.
AN: Which brings us back to the larger cycle
and the old equation: literature-reality, and the postmodernist adventure in
it. What are to you the implications of the ‘waning’ of postmodernism upon the
adventure of mimesis? Are we contemplating a return to realism in
mutated forms, a ‘postmodern realism’?
BM: This is the sort of question that I
could evade rather than answer by saying, if you understand realism in the way
in which Jacobson talks about it, which is to say as a historical dynamic, where
what is regarded as realistic in one generation is subsequently regarded as
purely conventionalised, stylised in the next, and the violation of those
conventions then becomes a new realism – if that is the dynamics of realism,
which I think is arguably so, then, firstly, postmodernism was never unrealistic,
and secondly, the new realisms, whatever they will be, will follow the same
dynamic. They won’t be a return to some
imaginary originary realism, they will be realisms produced by the dynamic of
the response to the last realism, in this dialectical way. So, many of the
postmodernists that I’m aware of, and especially the ones that I knew
personally, always protested that they were strictly speaking realists, exactly
in this Jacobsonian sense -- that the realisms that were currently available
were inadequate to the experience of reality.
This is the John Barth or Ron Sukenick story; they would say, ‘well,
that’s not the way reality seems to me, that’s the kind of reality which you
would only get in a conventionalised fiction. Now I’m going to show you what
reality seems like to me and the only way to get there is by exploding the
forms of the old realism’. From that point of view, postmodernism was never
unrealistic or anti-realistic or irrealistic. It follows from this that the
next moves will be, structurally, the same sort of move, though the outcomes
are unforeseeable. People will say once again, as they do all the time, as they
are saying now, ‘the forms available to me don’t capture the reality that I
experience, therefore I must invent the new forms, violate the old ones, and
the distance from the old forms is the measure of my achieving my new realism’.
There is of course a historical form of realism, which, however, we can
describe in terms of a set of conventions, the historical realism that finally
reaches its crystallised form in the nineteenth century; we can point to that
and say, yes, that’s the historical form of realism, but that surely is not
what the postmodernists had in mind; they don’t do historical realism, they may
parody or pastiche it, but they certainly aren’t faithful to it, rather they
are flagrantly unfaithful to it, and it’s unlikely that any future
realism will merely return to that. If
it did, it would be a pastiche, an ironic rewriting of historical realism in
the way that some of those postmodernist versions were ironic rewritings.
AN: And yet we seem to witness an insatiable
appetite these days for various forms of life writing, autobiography, memoirs, as
well as biography. The question arises to what an extent this can be viewed as
an erosion of the postmodernist subversive potential?
BM: Indeed all kinds of documentary writing,
all kinds of grey-zone writing between fiction and other forms, all the forms
of life writing are emerging, but it’s unsurprising that they should arise. I
think this is not a retreat from postmodernism, but the response, in the same
spirit, to the awareness that there must be some other way to capture the
reality that I experience, and to complexify it. And those forms of biography
and life writing don’t look very much like classic autobiography, or classic
biography, or classic documentary genres of any kind, they look strange, and
they look strange in order to make it strange, make their experience strange.
AN: Back to Russian formalism. Professor
McHale, thank you for de-familiarising the postmodern again at this particular
juncture.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern
cultural sound, text and image
Volume 3, May 2006, ISSN 1552-5112