Before Postmodernism and After (part one) by Raymond Federman
You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am [...] would give you a better relish of the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity …
Laurence Sterne
I. A NOSTALGIC RECONSIDERATION
Culture is a machine that backtracks into time, and art –literature especially — creates the past by transforming the present into unforgettable circumstances, that is to say cir- cumstances that can be remembered, quoted, recited.
Preparing this presentation I faced an interesting decision:
Should I speak of Postmodernism (and more specifically Post- modern fiction, since that is my subject) in the present tense or in the past tense?
Soon after the great Samuel Beckett died on December 22, 1989, a friend of mine wrote me in a letter of condolence: Sam has now changed tense_
Yes, perhaps Postmodernism also changed tense on December 22, 1989, with the death of Samuel Beckett — the first and the last Postmodern writer. The first: for if anyone can be said to have invented Postmodern fiction, it was certainly Samuel Beckett. MURPHY & WATT are the first Postmodern novels. And Beckett was the last Postmodern writer because he was the last great artist of our time, the last of the Mohicans, as he was once called. STIRRINGS STILL (SOUBRESAUTS, in French), the final work of Beckett, is also the last gasp of Postmodern fiction.
I cannot resist quoting a few lines from STIRRINGS STILL, not only to prove what I have just said about Beckett, but espe-cially because these lines may be the best illustration of how Postmodern fiction functioned:
But soon weary of vainly delving in those remains
he moved on through the long hoar grass resigned
to not knowing where he was or how he got there
or where he was going or how to get back to whence
he knew not how he came.
As Beckett relentlessly demonstrated in his work, and once again at the end, with this remarkable piece of syntax: the search for the means to put an end to things — an end to language, an end to literature — is what enabled the Post-modern discourse to perpetuate itself.
There is in STIRRINGS STILL (inscribed in the title as well as in the entire text, and clearly demonstrated by the passage I just quoted) the simultaneous affirmation of two incompatible and contradictory conditions: movement and immobility. Yes, there is in this final Beckett text a moving immobility. To stir, of course, means to move. The term stirrings supposes that there is still movement. But the term still (ambiguous as it is here) implies immobility. On the one hand then, an affirmation of movement, on the other the declaration of non-movement.
This contradictory condition of movement and immobility, words and silence, wandering and internment, was the basis on which the entire oeuvre of Samuel Beckett was founded, but I would venture to affirm, that this contradictory condition of moving immobility (this aporia, as Beckett was fond of calling it) was fundamental to the making and the unmaking of Post-modernism.
If STIRRINGS STILL (Beckett’s last words) speaks of death, it is not, however, the type of death which transforms final words into a testament. It speaks, as Beckett did for fifty years, of this supreme indecision which gathers in itself all contradictions without deluding them. This, I believe, is what Postmodernism was all about: A Supreme Indecision_
I am writing today about The End of Postmodernism, which to me also means The Death of Postmodernism. In other words, I am in the process of burying Postmodernism …
But Postmodernism was an honorable activity. Many of us sur-vived on it, and so rather than rejoice because we finally got rid of this cumbersome term, we should perhaps deplore the end of Postmodernism. After all, for some of us, who at one time or another were involved in fabricating Postmodern fiction, it was fun while it lasted. And I have fond memories of some of the Postmodern gatherings to which I was invited. Ah the wild Postmodern evenings of wine tasting in Wurzburg, the wild Postmodern poker games in Milwaukee, the wild Postmodern intellectual and social orgies in Buffalo, and in so many other exotic places_ Yes, I have fond memories of all these wild Postmodern happenings. And so, before leaving Post-modernism behind, we should perhaps ask, for the last time: What was it? What made it possible? What political, social, aesthetic conditions so radically transformed the writing of fiction during the past four decades or so?
Yes, before exploring the aftermath of Postmodernism — the _New Directions_ of Postmodernism (as these are now the topics of many conferences in many parts of the world), we should perhaps talk about the before of Postmodernism.
However, even though my fiction has often been labeled Post-modern, and I have read many books written about Postmodernism (for I am vain enough to search in every book for the mention of my name, but sardonic enough to mock my own eagerness), quite frankly I have never understood what Postmodernism was.
Or as Beckett’s Unnamable once put it: To tell the truth, let us be honest at least, it is some considerable time now since I last knew what I was talking about.
In fact, I believe that no one really knew what Postmodernism was, except, perhaps, Ihab Hassan (who invented not only the term Postmodernism, in spite of what others may claim, but watched over it for many years, until Postmodernism took the wrong turn). Yes, I do not think that those writers who were labeled Postmodern ever understood what it was, what it meant, how it functioned, and yet continued to produce works of fiction which were truly Postmodern. But now that the entire world, the entire universe for that matter has become Post-modern, these writers can stand back and watch, with some degree of amusement, the consequences of what they set in motion some years ago.
Yes, the entire Universe has become Postmodern. A NEWSWEEK article about astronomy used the term Postmodern to describe the strange behavior of certain cosmic bodies in the galaxies, and recently I saw an advertisement in a glossy fashion maga-zine describing an evening gown as being Postmodern, and I understand that McDonald’s and Burger King are furiously competing to produce the first Postmodern Hamburger. And didn’t we watch just a year or so ago the first Postmodern War specially made for television, played in the present tense twenty-four hours a day, and now available for replay on video tape from CNN for $24.95? But that’s not all. Here is an inventory of cultural items which have been described as Postmodern. I found that list on page 139 of a collection of essays, just published in England, entitled POSTMODERNISM AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION (edited by Edmund J. Smyth).
POSTMODERN NOW:
The décor of a room, the design of a building, the diagesis of a film, the making of a Rock & Roll disk or a MTV video tape, a television commercial or a documentary, the inter-textutal relations between a television commercial and a docu-mentary, the lay-out of a page in a fashion magazine or a critical journal, space capsules, the anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, cold dark matter, the attack on the metaphysics of presence, the general attenuation of feelings in Mankind, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of the post-war generation of Baby-boomers confronting the disillusionment of middle-age, the predicament of reflexivity (but not mentioned the irritation of self-reflexiveness), the stubborness of rhetorical tropes, the proliferation of surfaces, the new phase in commodity fetishism, the fascination for images, codes and styles, political or existential fragmentation, the decentering of the subject, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power formations, the implosion of meaning, the collapse of cultural hierachies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear destruction, the decline of the university, endangered animal species, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturized technologies, the sense of placelessness or the abandonment of placelessness (depending on who you read), etc., etc.
I skipped a few, and added a few, but the one thing missing from this list is Postmodern fiction, and that is interesting. For now that Postmodernism has taken over all human and animal activities, and in the process those of us who inadvertently created Postmodern works of fiction have been forgotten, or relegated to the zone of non-being, it may be the right time for us to look back and consider, reconsider calmly what we did, how we did it, and why we did it?
II. THE MIGRATION OF POSTMODERN FICTION
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. These are, of course, the opening words of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW.
Indeed, like a screaming across the sky, Postmodern fiction came and went, and there is nothing to compare it to now. It passed by, overhead, and even by-passed us. But then that is true of all avant-garde movements: to by-pass and be by-passed. All great avant-garde movements never have time to finish what they set out to accomplish. Postmodern fiction was also interrupted.
It is true, though, that an avant-garde movement can never, and should never achieve its purpose, otherwise it ceases to be avant-garde. By its very nature, that of opposing or re-jecting established modes of creation, an avant-garde movement is destined to tentativeness and unfinishedness. That is the paradox of avant-gardism. Struggling within the confines of self-reflexive orientation, the avant-garde bears curious witness to an ambiguous state of mind. It displays a creative and critical vitality, yet raises only minimal expectations. Its most significant innovations involve the self-conscious exploration of the nature, limits, and possibilities of art. But the vision of the future that avant-garde art provides is always tentative and unclear, as if unable to see beyond doubt and distrust.
That was true of Postmodern fiction too: it could not see beyond doubt and distrust, but at the same time it made of doubt and distrust an occasion, and that was its strength.
Other movements (not necessarily avant-garde) always interrupt what is in progress. Cubism interrupted Impressionism, Cons-tructivism put an end to Cubism, Surrealism negated Dadaism,
Structuralism displaced Existentialism, and so on. What is not clear so far, however, is what interrupted Postmodernism? Certainly not the uninspired Minimalist K-Mart Fiction of the last decade, nor Cyberpunk Fiction, nor Hi-Tech Fiction, nor Sudden Fiction, nor Illuminated Fiction, nor Transfiction, or whatever term qualifies fiction these days on the covers of anthologies.
No, Postmodern fiction was not killed by any of these things, it simply came and went like a flock of migratory birds, and we followed its flight across the sky, and watched it disap-pear over the horizon. Out of a strange necessity, but above all because it carried in itself its own demise (epistemolo-gical and ontological doubt conveyed through disjointed formal structures) Postmodernism had to either die or go elsewhere and become something else, which is what it did, even though it continues to be called by the same name.
In this sense, by contemplating its own demise and its own im- possibility, Postmodern fiction may, after all, have met John Gardner’s criteria for Moral Fiction: true moral fiction, wrote John Gardner some years ago, is an experiment too difficult and dangerous to try in the World, but safe and important in the mirror image of reality in the writer’s mind.
Certainly death must be the example par excellence of some-thing too difficult and dangerous to try in the world. Post-modern fiction experimented with death, or rather with its own death. It won. Like a screaming … no, better yet, like a ghost it passed across the sky, for it is clear from all the discussion still going on today about Postmodernism that a pantheon is in the process of being constructed for it, how- ever reluctantly.
When I was a boy, in Paris, quite a few years ago, and a plane passed overhead in the sky, everyone would rush out into the street to follow its flight. Pointing to the sky with one finger we would all shout with a tone of wonderment: Regarde, regarde, un avion … Oh, comme c’est beau_ But I think we were also wondering: How the hell does it stay up there?
Postmodernism is (was) that plane_ How the hell did it manage to survive its own death for four decades?
In one of those so-called Postmodern novels, entitled THE TWO- FOLD VIBRATION, one of the characters tells an other: You have found a way to make your past live by pointing to its grave with your finger and of course we can’t catch you at it, it’s just a motion, a gesture, a clever substitution, and this way you put all your guilt on others, on us, but the fact that you choose to speak about it, even evasively, and write about it too, is that transcendence or escape?
To which, the other character replies: Yes, that’s exactly the problem, exactly what my life is all about, and my writing too, escape or transcendence, you’ve put your finger right on it, though I would say more escaping than transcending.
I think Postmodern fiction was exactly that: both an escape and a transcendence.
III. THE PREMATURE DEATH OF POSTMODERNISM
Did I say that Postmodernism died on December 22, 1989, when Samuel Beckett changed tense? That was only the final gasp. Postmodernism started dying at the very moment it was born (whatever date one ascribes to that moment) and continued dying when such figures as Vladimir Nabokov, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, George Pérec, Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, John Coltrane (I include that name to remind us that John Coltrane’s type of jazz was also Post-modern), Donald Barthelme, Thomas Bernhard, and not too long ago Jerzy Kosinski, and others, many others I have forgotten, also changed tense, most of them prematurely. Postmodernism was a long list of names — a great many now absent, though a few stubborn ones are still present.
But Postmodernism was also Abstract Expressionism, Le Nouveau Roman, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Semiotics, redisco-vered Russian Formalism, Conceptualism, Deconstruction, Meta-fiction, Anti-fiction, Surfiction, New Journalism, and even Rock & Roll as Larry McCaffery convincingly demonstrated in a recent essay, in THE AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW.
However, all these names, all these terms suddenly seem so dated — passé & dépassé — and yet, somehow I have a vague feeling that we never knew what happened. Yes, something happened, but we don’t know what. Postmodernism by-passed us in a flash, and we still have not come to terms with it.
Having come to The End of Postmodernism, and at the same time the end of Postmodern Fiction, at least we now have a chance for a new begining, and so in the spirit of perpetual begin-nings, it might be good to remember that story of Robert Coover that opens with a writer who in order to get started shoots himself. His blood hits the wall and spells out this message: It is important to begin when everything is already over.
This does not mean that I am proposing we all commit suicide immediately, but the death of Postmodernism may have given us the possibility of a new beginning, the chance for a rebirth.
Have we learned anything? Perhaps we should go back and reread that incredible passage near the end of MALONE DIES [yes, Beckett again] where Old Malone who earlier on had said, I shall die without enthusiasm, somehow manages to outwit and outlive his own death by being reborn (in a manner of speak-ing) into death. Here is that passage:
All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favorable presentation I trust. My head will be last to die. Haul in your hands. I can’t. The render rent. My story ended, I’ll be living yet. Promising lag. That is the end of me. I shall say I no more.
This was written circa 1949. But of course Malone, or what-ever name the Beckett creature invented for itself, continued to die for another forty years.
There may not be any New discernible Directions yet at The End of Postmodernism, but there is certainly the possibility of a new beginning. Let us take advantage of this opportunity.
And who knows, perhaps we are already in this new beginning. Or to paraphrase John Barth at the beginning of SABBATICAL (I’m sure he won’t mind the slight alteration): We would be happy to give it another go; we have fiddled [long enough] with our tale through this whole [postmodern] sabbatical voyage.
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Back in 1974, at a Postmodern conference, or rather I should say, a conference on Postmodern fiction, in Milwaukee by the way, an antagonistic critic drew a line on the blackboard and explained to the audience that this straight line represented the history of narrative from its beginning to its end …
DIGRESSION: Had Samuel Beckett been present, he would proba-bly have added, with a touch of irony, remembering The Lost Ones: from its unthinkable beginning to its impossible end.
Then the critic drew a small deviation in the line, a little loop, and turning to the captive audience that had assembled on that day either to accept or reject Postmodern fiction (in those days, one was for or against everything), he continued to explain that this deviation was the Postmodern moment, that for some unexplained reasons narrative had deviated from its course, from the norm, and that it was happening now (in No-vember 1974 — yes, I think it was November) … there was restlessness in the audience when he said that … but the professor-critic in question, whose name shall not be revealed here, quickly added: But do not worry, do not despair, soon the line will redress itself and continue on its straight course. He paused, stroked his academic beard, with obvious self-satisfaction, sneered, and added slowly, detaching each syllable: That-is i-ne-vi-ta-ble. I suppose he could have added, Because It is Written Above, as it is said again and again (but with irony, of course) in one of the great pre-postmodern novels of all times, JACQUES LE FATALISTE, by Denis Diderot.
A sigh of relief was heard and felt in the auditorium.
And indeed, the straight line of narrative may have found the right and righteous path again. But something did happen, something changed. What are left now are the traces of that strange and radical activity known as Postmodernism. Traces of a discourse (A Real Fictitious Discourse, I once called it) which took shape during the past four decades and then decon-structed itself. It is of this discourse, that I want to speak for a few moments. To do this I shall turn to what I know best, my own real fictitious discourse.
IV. THE ERA OF SUSPICION
When the Writer, the Penman, L’Homme de Plume, or to speak more openly and personally, when Federman sat down on October 1st, 1966 (he was in Paris then, spending the year thanks to a generous Guggenheim fellowship to write, supposedly, a scholarly book about New Trends in Contemporary French Poetry, of which there were none), when Federman sat down on October 1st, 1966, to write the first sentence of DOUBLE OR NOTHING (his first novel — first published novel) …
[That first sentence goes like this: Once upon a time (two or three weeks ago), a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity ... and so on] …
When, I was saying, Federman sat down to write that first sentence curious things were happening around him in the world, and especially in the world of letters.
Marshall McLuhan had just declared the end of the printed word. The French Structuralists had announced the death of the author. My late friend Jacques Ehrmann (who introduced Structuralism at Yale, with the controversial 1966 issues of YALE FRENCH STUDIES, and perhaps inadvertently started the whole Postmodern mess in America) published a book in Paris entitled LA MORT DE LA LITTERATURE. Still in France, Les Nouveaux Romanciers and Les Nouveaux Nouveaux Romanciers of the Tel Quel Group were caught in what Nathalie Sarraute called in a collection of essays by that title, L’ère du Soupçon (The Era of Suspicion). Meanwhile, back in America, Professor Ronald Sukenick then teaching at Cornell University was announcing to his students the death of the novel while writing at the same time a story entitled The Death of the novel, and in Buffalo, John Barth was finishing the first draft of his now famous essay, The Literature of Exhaustion, and trying to work his way out of the labyrinthine Funhouse of fiction. And many others in many other places (In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) at about the same time were also lamenting (in speaking or in writing) the death of the novel, the death of the author, the end of literature.
It was in this climate, this funerary climate, surrounded by such negative conditions, confronting all these apocalyptic predictions that the fiction writer, in the mid-sixties, con-sidered his task and began writing his new novel. Obviously, his work could only be marked by doubt and distrust, but espe-cially self-doubt, which, however, the stubborn but clever writer, who faced at the same time the impossibility and the necessity of writing, quickly turned to his advantage by transforming it into self-reflexiveness, which for a while, at least, helped him survive so he could continue to destroy the novel that he was in the process of writing.
It was by doubting history, society, politics, culture, as well as his own art, which of course also meant doubting the historical discourse, the political discourse, the literary discourse, and so on, that the writer somehow managed to do his work. That writer even went as far as doubting the reality of reality.
But then all great movements — philosophical, religious, po- litical or artistic — always begin with doubt. For instance:
There is no novelty to me in the reflection that, from my earlier years, I have accepted many false opinions as true, and that what I have concluded from such badly assured premises could not but be highly doubtful and uncertain. From the time that I first recognized this fact, I have realized that if I wished to have any firm and constant knowledge [...] I would have to undertake, once and for all, to set aside all the opinions which I had previously accepted among my beliefs and start again from the very beginning.
In this case, however, the writer did not shoot himself, as the writer in Robert Coover’s story did, in order to be able to begin, but instead he continued his meditation Concerning Things That Can Be Doubted.
What I have just quoted is not from a Postmodern novel, but the opening lines of the FIRST MEDITATION of René Descartes. Whom I now officially declare a Postmodern writer.
But let’s take a more recent example of a work of fiction launched by doubt — that of Ronald Sukenick who begins his story, THE DEATH OF THE NOVEL, this way:
The contemporary writer — the writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part — is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot, and since our reality lacks the sanction of a creator, there is no guarantee as to the authenticity of the received version.
Doubting the authenticity of the received version, whether factual or fictitious, it was with a deep sense of doubt and suspicion in what fiction was still capable of doing, that the writer (Federman, in this case) set out to write DOUBLE OR NOTHING on October 1st, 1966 — a novel which sustained it- self by conquering doubt on every page with typographical laughter (to use Ihab Hassan’s expression). But let me as-sure you, The Penman was not trying to write a Postmodern novel, or even an experimental novel, when he started DOUBLE OR NOTHING, he was just trying to write a novel out of a personal necessity, in the face of the impossibility of writing a novel.
Self-doubt, even fear that the game might be too difficult, might even be impossible, hovered over the postmodern nar-rative. But the self-doubt of the writer/gambler became an expression of the fiction’s own doubt. The game, for it was a game, in effect, was not just a device, a definition, or a celebration, it was also a necessity — the means to inch the story forward, page by page, to get the story told despite the fierce self-doubt that plagued the writer. In the end, the story did get told (The Death of the Novel engendered Other Stories), and the telling that digressed from the telling or that cancelled itself was in fact the triumph of Postmodern fiction. The anxiety of the telling, at least for the sus-tained moment of the book, had been overcome, even though along the way character, plot, setting, and all the other conventions of fiction were transformed or destroyed. The beginning had succeeded in reaching an ending, even though by miscalculation. Suddenly the Postmodern story was finished, ready to die, so that it could, however, be resurrected, in some other time and some other place.
What the new story will be, I cannot tell, yet, but perhaps others will be able to tell us. Meanwhile, as the first and last Postmodern writer once put it: I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. [Samuel Beckett, of course].
Meanwhile, at the same time in some other places (we are back in the mid-sixties), others were also writing books with doubt in their minds, and even panic in their bodies, books which eventually were published under these revealing titles: Killing Time, Death Kit, The Ticket That Exploded, Unspeakable Practices Unnatural Acts, Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife, Up, Lunar Landscapes, Slaughterhouse Five, Quake, Nuclear Love, Mumbo Jumbo, In Cold Blood, The Exagggeration of Peter Prince [yes, with three g's], The Last Gentleman, The Crying of Lot 49, Lost in the Funhouse …
The titles of these works of fiction, all of them published between 1966 and 1968, are indicative of the anxiety inscribed in the texts. Looking back at these books (novels, collec-tions of stories), all of them ultimately declared Postmodern, however different one from the other, they all seem to have been written with a deep sense of doubt and distrust — about where and when they were written, about themselves, and about what they were attempting to do.
DOUBT is indeed the term that best explains and defines Post- modern fiction. Founded on doubt and perpetuating itself with doubt, the fiction written in the 1960s and 1970s not only doubted itself, but it also doubted the historical and cultu- ral conditions in which it was created. The results were fascinating, though often irritating to many.
For it is true that in the past thirty years or so, literature went through a time of radical disturbances that totally over- turned the institution and its primary values.
In a world where the referential element itself was denounced as a mystifying electronic image, the old question of histo- rical (and literary) truth and credibility, as well as the question of the stability of the real, were no longer valid. These became impossible questions. Because the historical and the literary discourses were falsified by their own language, all referential coherence became irrelevant and even derisive. The institution of literature never recovered.
The repeated announcements of the death of literature during the sixties, and the way Postmodernism went about demonstra-ting that death, during the next two decades, led Leslie Fiedler, the great advocate of pop-lit who was delighted to see high-brow literature go under, to write, in the eighties, a book entitled WHAT WAS LITERATURE.
And it is also true that internally, the traditional romantic and modernist literary values were completely reversed during the Postmodern era. The author, whose creative imagination was said to be the source of literature, was declared dead or the mere assembler of various bits of language and culture into writings that were no longer works of art but simply cultural collages or texts. As a result Postmodern literature could no longer produce original works of art (masterpieces), nor could it have great artists (masters), it could only produce works which resembled one another, and writers who mostly imitated each other’s work. In fact, many authors themselves shamelessly admitted to being mere plagiarizers. The great historical tradition extending from Homer to the present was broken up in discontinuous fragments. The influence of earlier writers on their successors was declared no longer beneficial but the source of anxiety and weakness. Certain Postmodern writers even went as far as claiming to have influenced their predecessors. It was even said that DON QUIXOTE could not have been written without the influence of Postmodernism.
The literary canon was analyzed, debated, and eventually dis-mantled, while literary history itself was discarded as a diachronic illusion, to be replaced by a synchronic paradigm. Masterpieces of literature were now void of meaning, or, what comes to the same thing, filled with an excess of meaning, their language indeterminate, contradictory, without any foundation, their organization, structures, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, mere verbal performances. Whatever meaning these masterpieces may have had was simply provisional and conferred on them by the reader, not inherent in the text or set in place for all time by the writer’s craft. Rather than being near-sacred myths of human experience of the world and the self, the most prized possessions of culture, universal statements about an unchanging and essential human nature, literature was increasingly treated as authoritarian and destructive of human freedom, the ideology of patriarchy devised to serve white male supremacy over the female and lesser breeds. Criticism, which was once the scorned servant of literature, declared its independence and insisted that it too was literature.
Of course, not everyone accepted these new views — twisted views as they were called — but gradually they became the reality of the moment. It is clear now that these trans-formations were the results of what happened when (once upon a time, not too long ago) Postmodernism displaced Modernism. Those opposed to Postmodernism called that situation a crisis. For instance, George Steiner (in REAL PRESENCES, 1989), des- cribes the crisis of Western intellectual life of the past three decades or so as being fully inhabited by what he calls the nostalgia, pathos, and failure of consolation that consti-tutes modernity itself (but of course, by modernity he really means postmodernity).
That crisis, Steiner argues, is the unprecedented transfor-mation of the fecund confrontation of intelligence with the facticity of death, a facticity wholly resistant to reason, to metaphor, to revelatory representation. For Steiner (and others who think like him) aesthetic forms are inhabited by transcendental values — values that refer beyond the time and place of their articulations — and the crisis of our time is the failure to discern an intelligible order within temporal human existence. In an age of the instantaneous, such as the Postmodern age, the possibility of transcendental values seems to Steiner to be irrevocably lost. In such an age, the acceptance of ephemerality and self-dissolution embodies the underlying nihilistic findings of incomprehension.
Depending on which side of Postmodernism one stands, and how one feels about the intellectual situation of the past three decades or so, one can interpret Steiner’s views either nega-tively or positively.
For myself, being an incurable optimist, I will simply con-clude Part One of this presentation by repeating that even though some people might say that the Postmodern situation was not very encouraging one must reply that it was not meant to encourage those who say that.
[I cannot remember if I wrote this
or if I read it]
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Raymond Federman can be contacted via his website: www.federman.com
Photo credit: Simon Wilches
