Dare to be stupid. For a while.

So, you’ve just received your BA. Maybe your Masters. You’re a twenty-something young gun fresh off the campus. And you’re a writer. Or you want to be a writer. You want to make a name for yourself. You know it all. You’ve got the world by the balls. You have a plan. Or do you?

I’ve been banging around the underground lit scene for a while now. I’ve learned some shit, I’ve seen some shit, but I’m certainly no seasoned veteran, no expert. But what really irks me is seeing the young guns cut their own heads off, and quickly.

Or maybe they’re not cutting their own heads off, but they’re certainly not earning respect. Or maybe they are. But not mine. What am I talking about? I’ll get there. Just bear with me.

Forums. Blogs. There’s a million out there. For writers. Some are fun, some are stupid, some are just…I don’t know. Something else. Everyone wants to be seen, heard, read, what have you. Everyone wants to make a name for themselves. Is there a magic formula for success? No, none that I can see. But being patient is important. Being kind is important. Being supportive, active, consistent, and willing to listen is important.

Oh, wait. Let me say that again—being willing to listen is important, and for the young guns it’s vital. Well, for the old guns too, but more so for the young guns. The old guns should know better. Some do. Some don’t.

But why should I listen? The young gun might ask. I know everything. I’ve got my Masters degree in creative writing.

Exactly my point. As a young gun, you’re at a distinct disadvantage because you do know everything, which , when loosely translated, means you know nothing.  For those in their early twenties, you don’t even know who you are yet. You’ve got a head filled with ideas, but you’re a super-saturated sponge dripping all over the place. And it occurred to me this morning, as I was shoveling snow, just who these young guns are.

Teenagers. They’re teenagers who just got their license and think they can drive well. But let me tell you something—having a license doesn’t mean you can drive well. It just means you’ve passed a few tests and can now operate a motor vehicle legally. I see them driving around with their sunglasses on, backseat over-capacity with screeching cohorts, bumper nearly touching the road. I keep my distance.

Having a degree in your hands, fresh off the presses, gives you, in a sense, an intellectual license, but it doesn’t mean you can drive your brain well. Not yet. It takes years. It takes a lifetime. What you think you know now will be dashed apart in a year, maybe two, or maybe even tomorrow. Our brains will constantly be learning and unlearning and learning again, and as the years roll by, our sense of who we are and what we know will slowly take shape. It will forever be pliable, which is what makes it exciting. It’s the understanding of our ability to evolve.

Sigh.

I really shouldn’t care. Being outspoken in forums, or even behind the scenes, is a way. It’s a way to go about things. Maybe it works. In some cases I’m sure it does. But to what end? You get attention. Is it earned? I suppose, but is that the way you want to earn it? By being a caustic, confrontational douchebag?

But it’s all about the writing, says the young gun. I’m a sick writer.

Okay, maybe you are. Hooray for you. But you’ve already shown me your ass out in public. Eyes are everywhere. People remember. Objectivity is compromised. Editors are imperfect people too. Sometimes.

What’s my point here? I’m not sure. I guess it’s just a message to the young guns out there. Take it easy. Really try to think before you speak, and when you do speak, try to say something that makes sense. Something simple. Concision is the brother of wisdom. Or maybe the half-cousin.

And I’m not saying I’m a perfect person either. Far from it. But I do try to listen. Reading some of the blogs and forums out there is like watching an old episode of Cross Fire. The shout downs and the thick, twisted verbiage are laughable. News Flash: You’re not saying anything. And I’m actually dumber for having read it.

But thank you. I should end this note with a thank you. Thank you for being that person. Thank you for being that boisterous young gun with all the answers and all the experience. It makes me smile. You’ve filled that role with gusto, which means I don’t have to play it.

A Naked Opinion by Joe Smith

These are the end times. Not because North Korea and Iran will soon have the bomb; not because the partisan rancor in Congress and across the nation threatens to destroy our country; not because the popularity of Hannah Montana continues unabated. No, these are the end times of another sort. These are the final days of words on paper.

As much as I hate to admit it the writing is on the wall, and I’m not talking about the “wall” on your stupid Facebook page. In fact, to say that I “hate” to admit it barely does my sentiments on the matter justice. Too many of our everyday experiences are automated and virtual; so many, in fact, that I find myself suddenly interested in things that are “real” or doing things “the hard way.” For example, I recently started gardening, just to experience the trials, tribulations, and (occasional) joy of growing my own food.

I guess I’m naïve, but I never thought reading would become something I’d have to do the hard way. But thanks to human penchant for fixing things that aren’t broken, here I am. And where am I? The end of books as I know and love them. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the following:

In “The Future of Books Is Smartphones” (New York Times, June 23, 2009) Paul Boutin proclaims, “I’ve seen the future of portable book reading” with all the urgency and zeal of someone who’s been to the future and back. He goes on:

“I was hanging out at the bar at a Silicon Valley mixer when [some guy I’ve never heard of] whipped out the only Palm Pre in the room. He flipped it open to a shockingly easy-to-read copy of “Angels & Demons,” by Dan Brown.”

The significance of the moment was not lost on him.

“This is the future of book reading on the run. Instead of waiting for magic e-paper displays, we’ll pull out our smartphones—not because they’re the best reading device but because they’re there. Just as we took to doing everything else on a smartphone because it beat not doing it, we’ll end up downloading books that take only three seconds to load.”

This is all well and good, but who reads “on the run”? If he means reading while one is in a hurry, I’d argue that it can’t be done. If he means reading when traveling, what does that have to do with speed? I always read while I travel—I can’t even get on a plane or a subway without something to read—not because I can do it quickly, but because I find it calming. It is the perfect antidote to the chaos and stress of travel, the latter of which occurs because everyone is in a hurry. And by the way, traditional books take zero seconds to download. (N.B. Note how this techno-enamored writer is obsessed with speed and efficiency.)

I do, however, get his point. If we’re already carrying phones, why add an e-book reader into the mix? Then again, why not leave the phone in your pocket or purse and just carry a book. It’s a great place to hold your plane ticket while you’re waiting to board the plane.

But Maybe I should just “shut up” like Chris Dannen wants me to, as suggested by his article “Book Lovers: Stop Whining about the Wonderful ‘Feel of Paper’” (Fast Company, Feb 26, 2009). To be fair, Dannen wants book aficionados like me to “stop whining about the feel of paper,” or so the title of his article suggests. However, it’s clear that he reserves his ire for people who like books themselves, not just the paper on which they’re printed.

“[Book lovers] croon wistfully over the printed book’s demise, and express wariness of the digital book era. I am here to tell them to shut up.”

So let me get this straight: I don’t get an opinion because I don’t (enthusiastically) suckle at the giant techno-teat that nourishes our society and economy? (I’ll give you a hint as to what you can do with that Kindle of yours.) Anyway, assuming that bookworms like me will react negatively to his assertions, he tries to anticipate our criticisms.

“E-book readers, as these things are called, are not meant to replace books. They’re meant to render them anachronisms, much the way that cassette tapes did vinyl records.”

Okay, I’ll give him this one, partly because he’s reinforcing a point I made above. Once books attain this anachronistic status, we’ll all have to go out and buy e-book readers. Am I tilting at windmills? Probably, but what choice do I have? As he acknowledges, “As a consumer, you have surprisingly little to say about this transition.”

I do not agree with him, however, when he says that e-books will save the publishing Industry.

“Book publishers are drowning under the crushing legacy costs of producing printed books. Their only chance at profitability is an IP-only business model centered on digitized books. Without this transition, these companies can’t stay in the business of publishing their authors.”

Can’t you just hear the violins? If there’s a problem with the industry, it was created by the publishing houses themselves—Twenty-five dollars (or more) for a hardcover? No wonder the industry is in trouble.

I also don’t buy his argument that we ought to roll over and play dead because “devices like [the Kindle] will be—everywhere—within our lifetimes.” Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s any good. Anyone remember Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli? They were “everywhere,” too.

Worst of all, though, is his spurious attempt to portray e-book readers as “green.”

“If you have a green conscience, you should be that much more pleased to give up paper. While most of the paper used for books is farmed, not wild timber, the immense cost of producing and shipping heavy books across the world accounts for a massive carbon footprint that could be almost entirely eliminated. As the process works now, book publishers print thousands of books in their first print runs, and end up destroying the ones that don’t sell. This isn’t just an inefficient way to run a business; it’s a waste of valuable resources.”

Yes, there is an environmental cost to books—there is to everything. But to suggest the Kindle is some sort of “green” product is complete crap. That’s not cellulose it’s made of, it’s plastic, and the process of making its electronic innards involves all sorts of chemicals and creates plenty of pollution. And by the way, what happens to the first-generation e-book readers when the second an third-generation models come out? All of a sudden, books are looking rather environmentally friendly. And by the way, paper is a renewable resource.

Yet, after telling us to “shut up” and browbeating us into getting with the program, he makes a half-hearted effort toward peace and extends us bibliophiles the following wispy olive branch.

“So, book lovers, relax. No one will try to pry your beloved first editions from your hands. But look forward to the day when your prized copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is more like an antique and less like a commodity.”

Booklovers get this a lot. Suddenly, in the face of e-books, the traditional books that we love (first editions or not) become either museum pieces or worthless pieces of crap. Well I don’t know about you, but my books are neither worthless nor priceless heirlooms, and they don’t sit on shelves, getting dusty. I read and reread them. I dog-ear their pages. I underline passages. I lend them to friends.

Thus, when I read something like that last quote, I wonder if the people who are all ga-ga over e-books even know what it means to appreciate a book. I wonder if they are even capable of putting any stock in the tried and true methods of doing anything because they’re too busy following the herd to the next big thing. But most of all, I wonder if they’ve ever loved something that suddenly became “anachronistic” just because some idiot was hell bent on creating a market for something that wasn’t needed.

[This Naked Opinion comes courtesy of Joe Smith's new zine, The Aardvark. To order a copy, please send 1.00 to The Aardvark / Red Roach Press, PO Box 771, College Park, MD 20740]

a Naked Opinion by Bruce Hodder

I may get into it at some juncture, but right now the return of the football season bores me to tears. It only seems two seconds since the last one finished, for Heaven’s sake. And what is football, when all’s said and done? Twenty-two people trying to prevent each other from kicking a round thing between two posts. Blimey, no wonder nobody reads books anymore when they’ve got that to occupy their minds and spirits.

Which is snobbish and simplistic, of course. Who said that football has anything to do with the nation’s reading habits? (It doesn’t.) But equally who said a person proves his legitimacy as a human being by conspiring to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator? I get fed up of people asking me why I use long words when I could use short ones. Why do you buy an expensive flat screen television that can do crossword puzzles and make your breakfast for you when you could have one that just sits in the corner and plays a poor reproduction of “Emmerdale”?

I was sitting in the bus station the other day reading a book about Allen Dulles. I looked up from the page for a moment to give my eyes a rest and glancing around me I could see only one other person reading: an exceptionally old lady whose youth probably predated television. Everybody else–that is, if they weren’t talking or just staring off dull-eyed into the middle-distance–was staring at the tiny screens of their mobile phones.

Half of them accessing the internet, no doubt, which you can’t do on my mobile because it’s too antiquated. And that’s another reason why people don’t read books anymore. We have passed the age of books now that all this new communication technology has become available to most people. A lot of those who might have read books just don’t bother anymore because it’s too labour intensive and seems like yesterday’s diversion. Something you might do “on the beach” according to the lifestyle magazines we do still read because a magazine takes no effort and holding them tells other people we’re part of the club.

There are more complex reasons why nobody reads books these days, or why only an unappreciable minority read them, but I don’t want to get into them now. It’d take a huge volume to analyse the subject with any intelligence and we’ve already established that nobody would read it.

But it’s about having come to the end of something; the end of the forward momentum of intellectual and spiritual development that we’d been riding, unknowingly, for perhaps a couple of hundred years. The 1980s was where the wave, as Hunter Thompson put it, “broke and rolled back” leaving each generation since that terrible decade more intellectually backward and spiritually impoverished than the one that came before it.

I’m not talking about everybody, of course. Some of the worst atrocities in the history of human kind were committed in the middle of the last century, long before Margaret Thatcher was allowed to seize 10 Downing Street and wreck the country. And I know people half my age who are more advanced in every way than their parents or grandparents.

What I’m talking about is impoverishment that comes down from the places where opinion is made. Where ideas about the development of human society begin. There appears to be nothing happening in those places anymore. Now we’re just asked to see the art in the curve of a McDonald’s golden arch. Education, at least in England, is only the moribund arm of industry these days and the workplaces of the nation are filled with people who don’t even know where to put an apostrophe.

(this post was written by Bruce Hodder and uploaded by Naked Opinion editor Tim Hall)

I suppose there are people who fit that description, but they are not who I think of when I speak of outsiders.

Perhaps to Sanford, outsiders are like minor league baseball players, always trying to improve their game enough to get that call up to the majors. That could mean earning an MFA or PHD in English or Creative Writing, finding a teaching post, seeking tenure, searching for grants and stipends, and perhaps, eventually, being appointed to an endowed chair at a prestigious university.

Let me be so arrogant as to suggest that the above-described path may not appeal to everyone interested in writing. Let me be so bold as to infer that some writers might be independent minded enough that they’d rather work for an hourly wage than play the game of becoming a literary academic.

When it comes to the moniker “outsider” there are as many options as there are writers.

There may be multiple career paths for prose writers: Journalism, Technical Writing, Advertising, Travel Writing and so forth. A few persistent writers will pen a successful novel or play. But when one poet meets another, a first query is often “Where do you teach?” This is assumed, because not even the U.S. Poet Laureate can earn a living from writing poetry. But if there is no way around that, what difference does it make whether one teaches or builds houses? Whether one conducts writer’s workshops or works as a debt counselor, a welder, a waitress or a waste water treatment technician?

Now I’ve got nothing against people who have the time and money to pursue a degree in writing. Everyone has to learn certain things one way or another. A university education may be a short cut to that end. But paying tuition so that someone who can’t make a living writing can teach you how to not make a living writing doesn’t seem fiscally prudent in any economy.

The NCAA advertises that most college athletes plan to go pro in something besides their sport. Most have degrees in something besides the sport related fields of study.

I know many fine writers who have gone to school but majored in something besides English. I know many fine writers who went to school while they also worked at something else. And I know many fine writers who have never darkened the doorway of a college classroom. If I listed names I’d start something, either by inclusion or exclusion, so I’m going to refrain and hope you can come up with examples from your own reading.

When I read I’m looking for something that punches me in the face. I am not interested in tired, worn, boring lines. I am not looking for the author’s name, or where he published his last piece. When I write, I’m looking to do the same thing for someone else, punch him in the face. By the nature of our differences, I will not be able to write something that appeals to everyone without thinning it down to something so insipid it won’t inspire anyone. In the end, what we do to pay the bills doesn’t count for anything. Once we put them out there, the words must stand by themselves.

As I grow more critical I am most critical of myself. I find my production of poetry slowing to a trickle, and I’m fine with that. For all his flaws, Bukowski was certainly right about one thing, “Don’t Try.” I don’t. Things come when they’re ready. It’s not like I need it to keep the lights on.

In Latin America everyone is thought of as a poet. That doesn’t mean they think they’re Pablo Neruda or Octavio Paz though.

I will never be a Bukowski, or a Frost. But I’ll always be a poet. And I’m staying an outsider.

*Rank and Slush Pile
by Timothy Schaffert
Poets & Writers Magazine
Volume 37, Issue 3 (May/June 2009)

[This post written by David Blaine and posted by N.O. editor Tim Hall]

There are so many places I could go with this information I don’t know where to begin. I could say that creative writing doctorates are nothing but a market response to the deflation and devaluation of the MFA (way too much supply, way too little demand). I could point out that the luxury consumer education racket is just that, a racket, and that by accepting the legitimacy of it we are allowing big business to game the corporative of authorship itself. I could point out that the rise and dominance of MFA programs is no different from the rise of MBA programs through the 1980s; both are business degrees. I could also conjecture that the current MFA bubble has only been made possible by the MBA generation; that without those suits creating the conditions of a bull market, cheap debt and plentiful cash, there never would have been an MFA boom to begin with.

Don’t think I’m bashing MFAs or PhDs here. I like the trend, because a country that graduates more MFAs than MBAs (as we began doing around 2002) is a country that is deliriously rich and confident, and those are nothing to be ashamed of. But I have my reservations, and some caveats.

The rise of the MFA is a far more decadent development than the flood of MBAs of the Reagan decade, and just as the children of Betty Friedan’s problem-with-no-name grew up to explode the repression of Eisenhower America in the glorious 60s, so too will the MFA generation give rise to a far more savvy, rebellious, and hopefully creative generation. And just as with every previous rebellion, the hip parents will be shocked, scandalized, and outraged by the youth. We believe we have outsmarted and co-opted every avenue of possible rebellion, and history has shown us that is always when the time is ripe for another one. When it happens we will look back on the previous decades as a golden age, just as every other generation has done.

Getting back to my aspiring doctor, this brought up two immediate thoughts. First, who conferred the first creative writing PhD, and what were his/her credentials? This puzzles me. Who is qualified to teach the first doctorate in a particular field? The only truly qualified people would not have earned PhDs in writing, since none existed that I am aware of. Even among the greats–Vonnegut, Hemingway, Twain, Porter, Powell–who would have qualified? Who can confer a degree above his or her own? (That is not a rhetorical question, I really want to know.)
Second, I thought about the future. What comes next? Really, what comes after a doctorate in creative writing? I think I have the answer–as readers of this space know, whether it’s how to be authentic, or what to do about the problem of ambition, or how to save big publishers, Oprah, or the best accessories to pair with epaulets–I’m always trying to help. So here’s where I think we need to go after every MFA has been upsold to a PhD, and the market for luxury degrees has finally begun to stagnate.

In order to future-proof the writing degree we will have to break it into parts. In the future you will have doctors of grammar, doctors of metaphor and analogy, doctors of punctuation, doctors of dialog, etc. When those run out, schools can take a page from Freemasonry and develop degrees of aptitude; you could therefore be a 33rd Degree Grand Wizard of Hyphenation, for example. It’s like those characters on Star Trek: just put some blobs of latex at different spots–ridges over the eyebrows, horns on the chin–have them all speak perfect English and call them different species.

Schools could offer limited-edition degrees, co-branded and sponsored by various businesses. “Oooh, you got the Princeton-Random House-Eddie Bauer Deluxe Xtreme Off-Road Black Leather Doctorate of Intergalactic Grammatics with built-in GPS. Lucky bastard!” You get the idea.

From there, once all those options are exhausted, there will be only one choice left: to offer a doctorate program of the writing degrees themselves. You will be able to study the history and evolution of creative writing programs, and be conversant in all of them. And won’t you be the life of the party then.

—

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

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.

*****

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]

*****

***

*

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

So publishing’s dying, did you hear that one? This article at the NY Times talks about the “new austerity.” And there is much handwringing at Salon about the impending death of the industry. As the remainders pile higher and sales plummet, publishers suddenly feel about as popular as those new tract home subdivisions conveniently located only an hour outside Phoenix.

There’s one very creative solution to this mess, one that I haven’t seen suggested elsewhere (although if it has I’d like to know, so I can give credit). It’s also, unfortunately, not likely to happen any time soon. For it to work the publishing industry would have to radically change how it sees itself, books, and the very act of creating literature: they would have to change their thinking from a commodity mindset to a community one.

Right now the business works roughly like this: 1) would-be authors barrage agents with pitches; 2) agents hire interns to press the “delete” key on their computers all day, unless 3) you are a current or former student of Joyce Carol Oates, in which case you can skip steps 1 and 2 and go directly to a big publisher and receive a multi-million-dollar advance for your magical realist novel about the ghosts of two children–who, we learn near the end of act 2, are actually Holocaust victims–and who give a stirring speech together at the end, based on verses of the Talmud, that warns readers against the evils of tobacco. (In fact, you might not even have to mail in your manuscript at all–go down to your mailbox, I think there’s a check waiting for you.)

…while this update to the traditional safari shirt,with its netted underarms and vented epaulets, has echoes of the noble Guayabera so popular in latin cultures…what? Oh damn.

Yum yum, la di da…losers, agents, J.C. Oates, Holocaust ghost children…right. It’s really a clunky business when you think about it. Which is fine, I guess, and which the industry itself certainly revels in (or hides behind) when it’s convenient to do so–yah yah “serious culture” blah blah–but which doesn’t really compute when you consider they (the publishers) have already been chewed up many times over into a mergers-and-market-segment mash, siphoned through Rupert Murdoch’s dentures and drooled back into Wall Street’s gruel bowl before being slopped out into the laps of the Reading Public–with a fucking fake memoir, no less. And they wonder why people are stampeding out of bookstores as fast as their Rockports will take them!

No, no, my children, something must give. My proposal is so simple, so relatively inexpensive, and yet carries with it such monumental possibilities, that I’m sure to be laughed out of town, with blu-ray discs of The Sopranos whizzing past my ears.

Here it is: A publisher studies a city, neighborhood, or other viable area–it could be Williamsburg, Brooklyn or Savannah, Georgia–and sponsors a whole bunch of local talent. Offer ten up-and-coming authors in a particular scene–those preferably with some real connection to the area, rather than connections in the industry–and pay them retainers. Call it literary R&D, investing in the cultural infrastructure of the nation instead of just strip-mining it.

Let’s use Chicago as one example, since that’s where I live. You’ve got an amazing literary scene and nobody in New York cares. (And why should they? Do you know how many current and former students Joyce Carol Oates has?) But let’s say some smart publisher wanted to really capture a big local market like Chicago–they might come up to Amy Guth, Jonathan Messinger, Elizabeth Crane, Ben Tanzer, Nick Ostdick, Jill Summers, and–oh okay, what the hell, me–and offer each of us a one-year contract with a small monthly stipend of, say, $500–that’s a measly six grand a year, per writer. What would the publishers get? First look at any manuscripts, of course, and an option to renew or let the contract expire at the end of the term.

Under such a model, local authors would get some much-needed support, in the form of cash and editorial advice, and the publishers would have first dibs on a bunch of local authors who themselves are invested in their local communities, potentially creating a lot of goodwill and sustainable creative development (and how much advance buzz could a handful of local authors build by blogging and talking up the mothership?) Publishing, distribution, and marketing would be that much easier, since they would be concentrated in one area or region, while breakout books could be moved up the ladder to the national leagues. And if an author didn’t deliver within the 12 months of the contract, no harm no foul–and no renewal to his or her contract. But if he or she does deliver a publishable manuscript, then perhaps an additional year’s pay as a bonus, plus a 50-50 split of all profits.

Think about it! “Shit, Random House just locked up Portland! Get your ass over to San Francisco before fucking Penguin does!” Lit Wars! Uniforms! Home and Away games!

Such an approach, turning local literary scenes into essentially farm clubs–or perhaps I should say, changing the farm club model from the classroom to the community–would benefit people at every level. Agents would have to act more like record industry A&R men, or talent scouts for Hollywood. Local scenes would begin to thrive and flourish, bringing much-needed literary diversity to the landscape. Literature might–gasp–become exciting again. And local authors–I’m talking the authors who have invested in their own communities, who have worked to build local scenes and who know their turf–would finally be rewarded.

The biggest obstacle to such an approach would be the publishers themselves. For all their kvetching, big publishers like the current arrangement quite well, because it puts all the power into their hands: not only of who gets signed, but what literature itself is defined as. And if you think some huge multinational conglomerate wants some street urchins running around with money in their pockets–even if it’s chump change–possibly writing thoughts and ideas that have not been carefully vetted and/or washed out of them by the smooth grooming of the Luxury Consumer Education racket…well, let’s just say it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. The industry demands a stable, reliable, consistent product, which is what the writing schools provide for them. Students are permitted to be as flamboyant with their sentences and syntax as possible, because there is no danger any of them will step out of line and actually say something.

So let me put the idea out there to any angel investors who might be reading. Let’s say you’ve just lost a bunch in the market, and you’re beginning to wonder if your life means anything. Let’s say you’re looking for something meaningful to do with your life, besides shuffling electronic orders for nonexistent financial “instruments”. Let’s say you always had a dream of being in show business. Where others see crisis you can see the opportunity, can’t you? You lay out a few hundred grand, over a few years, and you could lock up the burgeoning literary talent of an entire city. You could even afford to buy a few of those bright MFA boys and girls to help edit the manuscripts and run the local field office. Get a couple of agents who are willing to buy some shiny suits and invest in some high-quality cocaine and have them start trolling the readings and local book fairs of the market they serve.

Holy shit…I just wrote “the market they serve.” When was the last time you heard a publisher use that phrase. Have they ever?

For years you have been one of the best friends that the publishing industry has ever had. You championed literature at a time when so many others in the media were beginning to abandon it, using the power of your show and book club to bring attention to deserving authors. Your recommendations sold millions of books, enriching many in the process. And what have you gotten in return? A series of punches to the head, kicks in the ass, over and over, from a miserable and ungrateful industry that hates your guts.

Sure, I don’t always agree with your choices, and at times I question your vetting process and/or judgment, but I never once failed to appreciate the amazing service you perform on behalf of the business in whose shadows I and so many like me labor–usually anonymously, often rejected, doing the hard and thankless work of writing books that might sell a few hundred copies if we’re lucky. And thankful every day for the ability to do so. Your support of literature has actually made it easier for people like me to keep going, even though we’ve never shared in the wealth or glory.

But this is getting ridiculous.

There was Pretty Boy Franzen, you remember, who humiliated you by not wanting the novel that you helped push into the stratosphere to be sullied by your imprimatur. Then there was the James Frey thing, which in itself wasn’t really so shocking (I could have warned you, honey, but I figured you and your staff would have been smart enough to figure it out by about, oh, the first page or so)—that is, until that creep Nan Talese came on your show and started doubling down on the bullshit (I would have thought she’d have been escorted out of her office by security after that little stunt, but an industry insider told me she got a standing ovation from her staff. Is that true? Either way, she—and James—still have jobs, which should tell you something about our industry.) Hell, didn’t you even catch some shit for Elie Weisel’s book?

Now I understand that there’s been another fake memoir exposed, another fake Holocaust story, and that you fell for that one too. And like before, there are those in the literary world who believe that this is only further proof of what a terrible person you are.

It’s time you faced the truth, Ms. Winfrey: the literary world hates your guts. They always have and always will. Oh, they’ll kiss your ass on camera, they’ll feel the grand rush of power as they scan the back page of the NY Times Book Review to see their books sitting on top of the charts–thanks to you–but privately they mock you, deny you, reject you. Because you’re a black woman? Because you’re “only” a talk show host? I have no idea. Did Joe Franklin get this same kind of grief? Did Phil Donahue?

I really don’t know what the fuck is wrong with these people, to be honest, but let’s be clear: the problem is with them. Why you inspire so much hatred and contempt from the literary world is a mystery to me. Personally I think you’re pretty damn okay. But from my own observations I can tell you first hand that the literary world is filled with really bad people at all levels—there are just as many lazy, scheming, greedy, self-promoting, no-account fuckwads as any hedge fund or street gang.

If it’s any consolation I don’t like them either.

The point is, you deserve better. And you certainly shouldn’t be feeding the hand that bites, over and over. Still, I can’t in good conscience recommend that you cancel your book club, because there just might be that one truly deserving author out there who you can still push into a better life. I’m sure that’s the only reason why you keep it going. It’s hard to stay upbeat and optimistic when you’re surrounded by such cynical, scheming shits like those in the publishing world, but I admire your stamina. And in case you’re interested, there are a lot of great writers right here, at Outsider Writers, who would be a hell of a lot more interesting than some of these fakers and freaks you’re currently promoting. We may be a little rough around the edges but I’d bet you good money that the rawest, most out-there, most wild and untrained voice in our community would be a better, more interesting, more appreciative guest than the creeps you’re dealing with now.

Let’s talk, Oprah. If you really want to uplift the positivicals then maybe it’s time you spent less time on the corporate publishers and bogus authors who trash-talk you at the Sag Harbor mansions they bought with the book proceeds you got for them, and started promoting the unsponsored writing that truly comes from the heart–not simply that which tries to manipulate it.

Sincerely yours,

Tim