Before Postmodernism and After (Part 2) by Raymond Federman

I started part 1 of this paper in the middle of a quotation,  I will start part 2 also in the middle of a quotation, and I will probably finish this presentation in the middle of another quotation.  For, as we know from having lived and studied Postmodernism, quotations were central and essential to its existence.  It was by leaping from quotation to quotation (known as The Leap-Frog Technique — see Take It or Leave It, by Raymond Federman) and often even by quoting itself (known as inter-textuality, but which I prefer to call incest-tuality), that the Postmodern text progressed without really going anywhere, thus delaying or even at times canceling its own end — its own eventual death.

A quotation is, of course, the repetition of something already said or written.  As such it adds nothing new to what is in the process of being said or written.  It merely gives the illusion of amplification, of enlargement, of progress.

But in fact, a text built on quotations (regardless of whether these come from an external or an internal source) cannot go forward, cannot advance;  it can only backtrack into time or into itself.  Therefore, one could say of the Postmodern text, what Diderot once confessed about himself:  I listen only for the pleasure of repeating. And so, here is the quotation that will give the second part of this presentation the illusion of going somewhere.

These few general remarks to begin with.  What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed?  By aporia pure and simple?  Or by affir-mations and negations invalidated as uttered — or sooner or later?  Generally speaking.  There must be other    shifts?  Otherwise it would be quite hopeless.  But it is quite hopeless.  I should mention before going any     further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means.

These general remarks were pronounced by The Unnamable at the beginning of Beckett’s novel by that title.  [Yes, Beckett again, the first and last Postmodern writer, as I declared earlier].  These general remarks summarize, I believe, the dilemma of Postmodernism.  Or what I called in Part One:  the supreme indecision of Postmodernism.  From its beginning to its end — by affirmations and negations invalidated as utter-red– Postmodernism questioned itself as to how to proceed?  As a late Postmodernist (late in the sense of belonging to a
movement which has already departed), I seem to have a similar problem here.  How to proceed beyond Postmodernism, beyond what is in the process of finishing — of dying?  Well, obviously, by leaping from quotation to quotation.

Therefore, let us leap-frog to The End of Postmodernism_

Preparing this essay, some months ago, I wrote a letter to twenty of my friends (writers, critics, professors, enter-
tainers) asking them to answer these two questions:

1.  Do you think Postmodernism is dead?

2.  If so, what killed it?

To my great delight, all twenty correspondents replied, but all asked not to be identified.  These are the twenty answers I received:

1.    Postmodernism was an exercise in discontinuity, rupture, break, mutation, transformation, therefore doomed from the beginning …

2.   As with all new things, once absorbed by the economy Postmodernism was finished …

3.   Now that the effects of Postmodernism are evident in sectors as diverse as dress, food and lodging, and are in
those forms understood, the end is not far …

4.   Postmodernism began as a genuine if loose literary movement and ended as a department store curiosity …

5.   When the academy starts to take sides & quibbles about Postmodernism, it quickly kills what it discusses …

6.   In winning the day, Postmodernism, of course, loses …

7.   Because Postmodernism was viewed both as a movement and a perfume, and both as an intellectual disposition and a bowl of fruit, it had no chance to survive …

8.   Postmodernism as a literary notion was invented to deal with the Holocaust.  The prewar split between form and content was incapable of dealing with the moral crisis provoked by the Holocaust, and therefore writers like Beckett, Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, Primo Levi,    Raymond Federman, Jerzy Kosinski, and many others, invented Postmodernism to search among the dead, to dig     into the communal grave, in order to re-animate wasted     blood and wasted tears ….. or perhaps simply in order to create something more interesting than death (as Claude Lanzman did in SHOAH, for instance — one of the great Postmodern films).

9.   When something completes its intellectual and moral journey it is enshrined within sealed cases in the various Sorbonnes, like the relics of saints, and is venerated in much the same way and with the same use-less result, and so it is with Posmodernism …

10.    When among critics the tone of the debate shifts from intellectual to moral, then we know that Postmodernism is
dead …

11.  The death of anything is, of course, a trope not for its death but for its utility, its applicability.  Now Post-modernism no longer avails, no longer applies …

12.    When a movement becomes a choice and not a necessity, as Postmodernism has now become, it signifies its death.  But since one can never speak one’s death in the present– one’s death can only be spoken by others after it happens — the death of Postmodernism is now being spoken     by everyone, everywhere …

13.  The central, fundamental literary texts of Postmodernism: Texts For Nothing, The Library of Babel, Cosmicomics, Lost in the Funhouse, The Voice in the Closet.  These texts announced and performed the end of Postmodernism while pretending to serve as its beginning …

14.  The current reactionary literary climate dominated by works in received forms does not indicate the death of Postmodernism as much as the persistence of the power of market economies to define the arts …

15.  Literary fashions have more to do with the reception of literature than with its creation, and therefore more to do with its end than its beginning …

16.  While it is true that the current literary scene viewed from a certain perspective looks sterile, it is more true that it is extraordinarily fallow, ready to submit, ready to compromise, in a quiveringly receptive mode.   Post-modernism died because it refused to compromise …

17.  When the great painters of New York City (Stella, Johns, Rauchenberg, etc.) went to work for Women’s Wear Daily, as they did en masse in 1960, the end was at hand (the visual arts always lead, the literary arts follow).  The death of Postmodernism was sealed in 1960, the same year     it was born …

18.  The great works of any age always spring from a personal necessity that is only subsequently elaborated into this or that theory and chiefly as a means of publicizing said great works.  Theory killed Postmodernism, but the irony is that theory was also Postmodernism …

19.    Postmodernism was responding to the end — the end of Europe, after World War Two.  Just as Modernism, earlier, responded to the breakdown of self-evident truths (the consistency of truth, one might say) elaborated during  the 19th Century, Postmodernism cried and decried nothingness, nonsense, and death, and in so doing cried and decried its own nothingness, nonsense & death …

20.     It isn’t, to say it again, that Posmodernism is dead but like any other identifiable phenomenon of a certain value– such as impressionism, dadaism, surrealism, modernism, abstract expressionism, new criticism, feminism — after a fixed period of bubbling at the surface, it sinks and    recombines with other like elements to form again a part of the generative stew of art and culture, and that moment of rot is called the death of a movement …

The general sense one gets from these replies (some quite fascinating, I think) is that Postmodernism is indeed dead, finished: on the one hand because it was swallowed and digested by the economy and eventually excreted and disse-minated into the culture, on the other hand because it was stifled by academic bickering and consequently turned into a futile debate (especially in America).

Now some people might say that this situation is not very encouraging but one must reply that it is not meant to en- courage those who say that.

Oops, I think I’ve already said that, in Part One, and other places too.  Oh well, like all good Postmodernists, I suffer from intertextuality and repetition.

But one could ask, to continue in the questioning mode:  Why did Postmodernism allow itself to be swallowed and digested by the culture, or to be stifled by academic theorizing?  And the answer would be:  Because Postmodernism, and more specifically Postmodern fiction, moved from continuity, from fluidity, coherence, linearity (in history as well as in literature) to discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, plurality, metafictionality, intertextuality, decentering, dislocation, ludism, to become series of disconnected states, combinations of impulses, incoherent lists and verbal doodles, it eventually destroyed itself.

But, one could also ask, isn’t literature language?  And isn’t language always stable?  Yes, of course, literature is made of language, but language limited by the permutations of a res-tricted number of elements and functions.  However, what made Postmodern fiction interesting and important, and vulnerable too, is that it tried to escape these restrictions, it tried to say what is beyond language, that is why Postmodern fiction was doomed from the beginning.  Even though the unspeakable can never be spoken, Postmodernism attempted to speak the im-possibility of speaking the unspeakable.

But isn’t literature an invention, and as such can it not invent its own language?  [My imaginary questioner is very stubborn]. No, literature is always a re-invention, it never creates anything new, it simply re-invents the nothing new, in other words — just as the sun every day, having no alternative, rises on the nothing new.   Postmodern fiction only re-invented what had been banished, hidden, or expelled from individual or collec-tive memory, this is why it was accused of being plagiaristic, and of working Against Itself.

DIGRESSION: Allow me to clarify this last statement with an-other quotation, this time from L’ENTRETIEN INFINI by Maurice Blanchot:  To write is always first to rewrite, and to rewrite does not mean to revert to a previous form of writing, no more than to an anteriority of speech, or of presence, or of mean-ing.  To rewrite is a form of undoubling which always precedes unity, or suspends it while plagiarizing it. [My translation]  [End of Digression]

But isn’t literature independent of its author?  Literature may pretend to be independent of the personality of its author, but it is always about some profound (subconscious) obsession of the author and of the society in which he lives.  This was particularly true of Postmodern Fiction.

But isn’t literature always a form of orientation?  Literature either confirms, accepts, supports, defends the status quo, or else questions, challenges, denounces, rejects the status quo. Whatever the case, orientation presupposes a disorientation, and that is exactly what Postmodernism did:  it disoriented.

But isn’t the spirit in which one writes decisive in exerting a critical response?  The boundary between writing and reading is not always clearly marked.  The spirit in which one read Postmodern fiction was often decisive in exerting a negative critical response.  But as Roland Barthes pointed out in THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT.  The author cannot choose to write what will not be read in his book.

These are the reasons why the Postmodern writer was, in fact, different — different and therefore disorienting to most by that difference.  The Postmodern writer understood that at the heart of the heart of his otherness, he had a right to his difference, to his way of seeing and writing the world, how-ever confused and confusing that world may have been.

To write fiction during the Postmodern era [I would like to remind you that I am still speaking of Postmodernism in the past tense] was above all an effort to create a DIFFERENCE (or DIFFERANCE, with an A as Jacques Derrida spelled it), and not continue to pretend that fiction was the same — the same as reality.

If there seems to be a contradiction here in terms of what I said earlier about Postmodern fiction being mere repetition, or re-invention of the already said or written, it is because the Postmodern difference I am trying to point to here, was not a difference of subject or of subject-matter, but a dif-ference of process — process of telling, of presenting rather than re-presenting.  That is why the originality of convention in Postmodern fiction grew more and more absolute and arbi-trary, for invention consisted in devising new sets of rules by which the familiar pieces could be rearranged.  For to play the same old game by the same old rules would have been mere competence, rather than artistry.

If traditional realistic fiction was a representation of the same, Postmodern fiction was a presentation of difference –
a liberation of what was different.  And what was different was the difference.  Or as the Postmodern re-incarnation of Scheherazade explained in CHIMERA:  It’s as if — as if the key to the treasure is the treasure.

Reflecting on the contemporary discourse (circa 1970) Michel Foucault wrote:  In order to liberate difference we must have
a contradictory thought, free of dialectic, free of negation.  A thought which says yes to divergence;  an affirmative thought, whose instrument is disjunction;  a thought of the multiple;  a thought which does not obey a scholarly model, but which addresses insoluble problems with a play of repe- tition.  [My translation]

As good a definition of Postmodern fiction as any.  For pa- radoxically, by playing with repetition Postmodern fiction created a difference, a difference which negated all claims of adequacy to the natural or to the true.

As such Postmodern fiction offered itself as a playful object, and even as an object of pleasure, a toy, a game with which the reader was asked to play.  One needs only to reread Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Steve Katz’s Creamy & Delicious, Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid,and so on, to see, to feel, how Postmodern fiction offered itself as a toy, a game, an object of pleasure.  Or as Roland Barthes so joyfully demonstrated in the PLEASURE OF THE TEXT, Postmodern fiction found a way to speak pleasure — no_ even better than that, found a way to exult bliss.

Of course, not everyone is willing to be discomforted or un-settled by a Postmodern text of bliss.  Allan Bloom (a critic who has probably never known jouissance) in The Closing of the  American Mind dismisses Postmodernism when he tells us that Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around that movement.  According to him, the Postmodern writer was infected with relativism, believing that all values are only opinions, and one opinion as good as another, and there-fore this misguided writer lived in a daze of universal tolerance, apathy, blasphemy, and ignorance.  Whether or not Allan Bloom is correct is quite irrelevant.  A large and fascinating body of Postmodern fiction is still present today and still in need of serious evaluation.  What is disturbing to Allan Bloom is that Postmodern fiction depicted a reality that he prefers to deny — a confused reality, certainly, but a depiction of it that is a far more accurate delineation of quotidian existence than the illusions of reality devised by the writers of the thirties and forties, or the retreating neorealists of the eighties, or the virtual realists now emerging in the nineties.

It is the likes of Allan Bloom who put an end to Postmodern-ism, or displaced it to some other cultural region to become an inoffensive topic of cacademic debates.  By disguising his argument for the preservation of what one might term the comfortable familiar as a reference for an indisputable paradigm, Allan Bloom is able to dismiss four decades of astonishing radical literary activities.

And he is not alone in this.  There are many fools of all kinds, these days, who have decreed foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure [I am quoting Roland Barthes here], either by cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism or by political moralism or by criticism of the signifier or by stupid pragmatism or by snide vacuity or by destruction of the discourse, loss of verbal desire.

E. Donald Hirsch’s trivial list of requisites for a properly informed culture, Robert Richman’s desperate call for a revi-val of good old-fashioned literature, William Bennett’s demand for a return to the basics of education are all symptoms of a last-stand, a tightening of the circle of wagons against the attack of the Postmodern barbarians upon the comfortable familiar.  All these fools (as Roland Barthes calls them) are begging for the preservation of sameness against difference.

What Allan Bloom and all those who think like him want is to be told, re-told, what they already know.  In other words, they want to be comforted in their knowledge.  This is why they must oppose or dismiss all innovative activities, all experimentations which discomfort (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom).  Postmodern fiction certainly made many of its readers uncomfortable, as it unsettled their historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, by disrupting the com-fortable relationship of words and things, by bringing to a crisis their relation with language and with reality.

Michel Foucault called this linguisic disruption or displace-ment, an heterotopia, and in LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES he put  it this way:  Heterotopia disturbs, no doubt because it secretly undermines language, because it prevents this or that to be named, because it destroys or confuses the meaning of common words, because it ruins syntax in advance, not only the syntax that constructs sentences, but that less visible syntax that holds words and things together.  [My translation]

As the theoreticians of literature have demonstrated in the past few years, all works of literature can be viewed from two perspectives:  constructively or deconstructively.  To borrow two useful terms from Roland Barthes, all works of literature can be viewed as studium or as punctum.  The studium approach to a work of art determines its cultural, and even its social context.  The studium is the source of the viewer/reader’s usually mild, polite interest in a text, the same sort of vague, casual, irresponsible interest one takes in certain people, objects, clothes, various forms of entertainment which one finds to be simply all right.  In other words, an interest without excitement.  The punctum approach breaks through this complacency of response, thus provoking a more intense and personal (subjective) reaction in the reader.  Moreover, the studium sends the reader back to the predictable reference, back to the referential terms which made the work of fiction possible, but in which the reader, in fact, has little in-terest.  The punctum, on the contrary, locks the reader into the text and gives him both a sense of excitement and disco-very, but also a sense of discomfort and anxiety.  The studium gives statisfaction for recognizing what one already knows — it produces the comfort of easy recognition.  The punctum represents the encounter with the unknown, with the unpredic-table — it causes the agony of unrecognition.

However, if one must choose between easy recognition and the agony of unrecognition, the punctum approach is preferable, for as Postmodernism has clearly demonstrated, history is a fiction already told and cancelled, a bad dream already dreamt and forgotten, particularly in the Western World which, for centuries, has been seeking a form of agony worthy of its past.

The denial or dismissal of any avant-garde activity is, of course, the usual method of disposing of what discomforts, what unsettles, of what creates a crisis.

No doubt the end of Postmodernism, which of course corresponds to the end of the avant-garde, has changed considerably the conditions of labor in literature.  But I am not of those who believe that this situation brings an end to experimentation, or an end to the exigency of the new and the innovative.  I am not ready — and I am sure I speak now for many of my fellow Postmodernists or Surfictionists — to renounce the urgency of innovation, and simply abandon literature to neo-realistic forms, pre-digested by mass-media demands.  I do not think that literature can submit that easily to the possible.  On the contrary, I know that literature, today as always, faces the impossible, faces the inadequation of language and of thought to apprehend or even comprehend reality, and yet, always in quest of new forms, literature will succeed in giving life once again to the impossible.  Where, and when, and by whom?  That I am not ready to say, for we are today still in the same confused predicament which forced Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable to ask, some fifty years ago on the threshold of his own tale, and the threshold of Postmodernism:  Where Now?  Who Now?  When Now?

Still, one should ask:  does Postmodernism have any future?  And the answer could be both No and Yes, since by its very nature and definition it existed and performed in a kind of futurity, in the POST-(modern), even the POST-(contemporary).  In fact, one should no longer speak of Postmodernism, but of Post-futurism.  But leaving aside these useless verbal games,

perhaps it is time to discard such terms as Past, Present, Future, and replace these with Before, Now, After, with the understanding that the NOW is no longer a fixed point in time (the present, our present), but a moment in constant shift in relation to what happens before and what happens after.  In this sense the term Postmodernism may indeed disappear, though the ideas and innovations of Postmodernism may continue to have validity.  After all, isn’t it the fate of all ISMS to be already obsolete the moment they are articulated?

Nazism, Fascism, Communism, but also Futurism, Surrealism, Existentialism, and all the other Isms of recent history were based on a retroactive ideology or aesthetic, and whatever is retroactive can only inspire itself of a violence and a deca-dence already nostalgic when it happens.  All Isms are retro-active scenarios of power and of death already played out at the very moment when they appear in history.  And that was also the fate of Postmodernism which, in the last resort, was the sign of a simulation of a decaying movement, the sign of what had been, of what had already passed — that is to say Modernism.

That is why Postmodern fiction, even though called an avant-garde movement, was such a mystifying, and yet necessary historic retroversion.  But of course, one’s critical response to Postmodern fiction depends on whether one approaches it from the studium or the punctum.

It is true, however, that using terms such as Postmodern and Avant-garde in the same context immediately raises some com-plex and ambiguous issues, largely because certain events within Postmodern culture have tended to blur the distinction
between avant-garde and mainstream art.  This interaction of mainstream and avant-garde started during the 80′s when the traditional distinction between high-art and pop-art became a central defining feature of Postmodernism itself.  Today such distinction is, if anything, even more difficult to maintain.

For instance, should rock videos by Madonna, Peter Gabriel or Laurie Anderson be considered mainstrain simply because they are enormously popular, even though they employ visual and verbal techniques that twenty-five years ago would have cer-tainly been considered highly experimental, and therefore Postmodern?  Is William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel NEUROMANCER avant-garde and therefore Postmodern since it uses unusual formal techniques (collage, cut-ups, appropriation of other texts, bizarre new vocabulary and metaphors, temporal dis- placement, etc.)?  Or does its publication and success in the science-fiction domain establish it as a pop novel?  Are television shows like MAX HEADROOM, some of the early SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, or David Lynch’s recent TWIN PEAKS series to be categorized as avant-garde underground works because they utilize many features associated with Postmodern innovations, or as Popular Art because they are in fact merely television shows?

These are complex questions.  And facing such questions one should definitely abandon the term Postmodern to describe these activities.  Or else invent a new term such as POST-POMO or AVANT-POP, as someone has already proposed.

What makes such questions and distinctions increasingly meaningless has to do with the rise of the media culture and the changes in the way art (including literature) is manufac-tured, bought and sold.  Specifically, as the market economy (Capitalism in other words) has expanded its operations into previously untapped areas, or areas which at one time were considered unmarketable, it recognized (and of course took advantage of this situation) that there is a significant and potentially profitable audience-market for even the most in- novative, radical, shocking, disturbing, unsettling works of art, even those works of art whose avowed purpose is the demolition of the capitalist system itself.

Hence the seeming anomaly of The Sex Pistols’ dada-esque brand of enraged anarchy, utter nihilism, violence and pure noise being successfully marketed in England and in the U.S.  But there are many other equally unusual and revealing examples: Derek Pell’s darkly humorous and bitingly satiric collage-and-text works, Dr. Bey’s Suicide Handbook, Dr. Bey’s Book of Strange Curiosities, Dr. Bey’s Book of the Dead, all published by a major New York publisher, Avon Books;  the gradual rise to literary stardom of Kathy Acker, whose nightmarish punk novels (all derived from Postmodern techniques) such as Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, Empire of the Senseless, and In Memorium to Identity are among the angriest and most graphic treatments of sexuality and violence publi-shed in the United States in this century;  but there is also the commercial success enjoyed by movies like Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s surreal and disturbing portrayal of the violence and sadomasochism that lies, barely concealed, beneath the bland surfaces of America’s suburban dreams;  the equally unlikely success enjoyed by performance artist Laurie Anderson, whose quirky blend of experimental minimalist music, stand-up comedy, fragmented lyrics of found language, and the use of odd instruments (a violin that plays human voices, a vocoder that electronically alters human voices) became popular concert attractions and best-selling albums.

All of these in many ways can be considered Postmodern works.  But even the controversial novel, American Psycho, by Bret Eston Ellis, for better or for worse, is a product of Post-modernism.  As a decent citizen, reader and writer, were I to condescend to read such a book, I would fully expect to hate it, and to find it totally boring and not worthy of any intel-ligent reaction.  Yet, curiosity drove me to that novel, and  I read a good portion of it (I stopped before the end since I was not really interested to find out how such gruesome sto-ries are resolved).  Nevertheless, it turns out that Ellis has actually written a rather interesting novel, somewhat experi-mental in its narrative technique.  It is a funny, obsessive novel, full of memorable voices, and of course, extremely vicious, violent, disturbing, unsettling.  And yet, it may be the best book, or at least the most revealing book written about the 80′s Republican/Wall Street/Me Too/Rich & Famous/ Greed/Cheat/Gulf-War America.  No doubt Ellis, like the rest of the Brat-Pack, and most of the Cyberpunk Fiction writers (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Rudy Rucker) or the new young thugs of innovative fiction, Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Mark Amerika, William Vollmann, Eurudice, Criss Mazza, and several others newly arrived on the literary scene, grew up during the Postmodern era and learned their tricks from the old masters and makers of Postmodernism:  William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and many others.

But then, that Post-Pomo generation — these bright and risen angels, to play on the title of a recent and fascinating novel by one of these Post-Pomo writers, William T. Vollmann — has as much right to its vision of reality, however twisted or preposterous or virtual it may be, as the previous generation.

This anomaly of the popularity of an art which openly and de-fiantly denounces what makes it live, of an art that bites the hand that feeds it, is not only evident in literature, but in much of the visual arts too, and of course in the new Rock Music, in Rap, in MTV, which consists of non-sequential, rapid fire profusion of disjointed bits of images and informations thrown in the face of the capitalistic system.

But why shouldn’t these new writers and artists not live in their time and be shaped by their time:  the era of computer, fax, video, telecommunication — but also the era of greed and fraudulence.

The Postmodernists of the 1960s and 1970s reached the age of reason (or unreason) in the 1940s and 1950s, and their in-tellectual and aesthetic sensibilities were shaped by Exi-stentialism and Structuralism, by the Beats, Jazz (especially Bebop), Abstract Expressionism, and the appearance, at least in the U.S. of authors such as Kafka, Nabokov, Borges, Beckett.  Today, the cultural matrix that produced the first wave of Postmodern fiction seems as distant and old-fashioned to us as love-beads, incense, communes, flower-people, and phrases like: turn on, tune in, drop out.

Though no one ever really felt comfortable with the term Post-modern, nonetheless for several decades it served to define a
certain avant-garde activity played out on a high intellectual and artistic level, at times even accused of being elitist, until that activity was absorbed into mainstream culture by the economy and quickly turned into Pop-Art.  And so now it is time, perhaps, to abandon the term Postmodern.

Octavio Paz may have, in fact, put an end to all further dis-cussions of Postmodernism when in his acceptance speech for the 1990 Nobel Prize he reflected on the elusive meaning of the concept of modernity.

What is modernity?  It is, first of all, an ambiguous term:  there are as many types of modernity as there are societies.  Each society has its own.  The meaning of the word is as uncertain and arbitrary as the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle-Ages.  If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle-Ages of a future Modernity?   Is a name that changes with time a real name?  Modernity is a word in search of its meaning.  Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history?  Nobody knows for sure … In recent years there has been much talk of Postmodernism, but what is Postmodernism if not an even more modern modernity? [My emphasis]

Octavio Paz may be right.  Postmodernism has now become the Middle Ages of the next, as yet unnamed, era.  But while waiting for that era to be named, discussed, debated, argued, explained, dismissed, so that it may in turn become the Middle Ages of the subsequent era, let us admit that Postmodernism was a great fun adventure.  It is only too bad that all the explorers involved in that adventure could not have survived to see The End.

I began this essay by quoting from Beckett’s Stirrings Still, I would like to close with another few words from that last gasp of Postmodern fiction — a passage which seems to describe so well the present predicament of the Postmodern writer:

Head on hands half hoping when he disappeared again that he would not reappear again and half fearing that he would not.  Or merely wondering.  Or merely waiting.  Waiting to see if he would or would not.

What puzzles me about this presentation (part 1 as well as part 2) is that in attempting to explain how Postmodernism came to an end, I may have, in fact, written yet another postmodern text.  Oh well_  As Beckett’s Unnamable once put:

Here all is clear … No all is not clear … but the  discourse must go on … so one invents obscurities … RHETORIC.

Raymond Federman can be contacted via his website: www.federman.com
Photo credit: Simon Wilches