Those Annoying Postmodernists

This morning I was excited to see an article in The Observer about David Mitchell, author of the captivating, polyvalent novel Cloud Atlas (link came via LargeheartedBoy).

While I'm all for anxiously awaiting Mitchell's new book The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (out this June from Random House), and for praising his "extraordinarily entertaining" style and his "extraordinarily nice and unassuming" personality (never met the guy, myself), I am a little bit tired of the way cultural commentators frame discussions about writers they label "experimental."  That is, "experimental" writers who (shockingly!) are good writers, despite their experimentation.

Don't worry, Skidelsky seems to be saying about Mitchell.  He might write big, challenging, sprawling books, but he's not one of those writers, one of those postmodernists known for their "achingly self-conscious and (probably) insufferably earnest" prose.  (I can just see the fingers pointing to David Foster Wallace as I'm writing this.)

I suppose I could go on a mini-tirade about why using experimental with air quotes is dumb, since we should, as writers, be trying out new ways to tell our stories or to write our lyrics all the time.  Writing is nothing less than experimentation, although we really notice this when writers move outside of established genres or forms or cross between them and then back again.  (Okay, so I fell for the mini-tirade.)

Skidelsky is also picking up on something interesting here, even as he dances around it to talk up Mitchell's strengths.  What makes us, as readers, feel annoyed by what we call a writer's "self-consciousness"?  What my old workshop teacher used to call "trying too hard"?  Sometimes I think it's something beyond the disappointment of seeing the puppetmaster pull the strings, of pulling back the curtain on the wizard of the emerald city, but maybe it's really as simple as that, too.  We don't want to be reminded that someone is doing actual work to put a novel or a poem together, in fact we praise artists more highly when we have no idea how they just did what they did.  Or we do know, but we can't explain it because our knowledge is just a happy, glowing recognition sitting in the back of our mind.  Regardless, we see this seamlessness as a sign of mastery.

I would hazard a guess that most, if not all, contemporary writers and readers, from cultural bloggers to academics, take some kind of weird pleasure in seeing and pointing out the seams that come from stitching a narrative together, or from dismissing a writer who seems to be "trying too hard."

Ah-ha! they cry.  I caught you!  And if I caught you, then you can't be very good.

(The new Penguin Great Ideas cover for Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

This is precisely the irony of what I call postmodernism lite (kind of what I imagine a WholeFoods generic brand knock-off of BudLite would look like).  Calling attention to form or narratorial authority is part of the project.  But the other irony here is that real postmodernism has irrevocably changed the way that we think in 2010.  We're all already postmodernists who are hyper-aware that someone is pulling the strings, who feel more than certain that we're all part of some larger "social construct," even if we don't know to talk about it using academese.  Calling something "postmodernist" with that implied sigh of contempt is really just like rolling our eyes at our mother for telling us how exciting the World Wide Web is.

The other problem is that postmodernism lite has filtered down through cultural criticism with an implied eye-roll for some thirty-odd years now, even though very few people have actually taken the time to study it and to sit with it for awhile.  And, for the newer generation of academics, a generation of which I am a part, all this postmodernism stuff starts to take on the blueish hue of déja vu.  It all sounds and seems strangely familiar, like a place I've been before but am not sure when or why.

I guess I'm really talking about two, interrelated problems--the way postmodernism lite has created a culture of dismissiveness and hubris that I find "achingly self-conscious" and "insufferably earnest" and, ultimately, pretty shallow.  Dismissing art out of hand because you think you can see the "seams," even though, admittedly, sometimes you really can, is easy.  Sitting with art and asking questions about it is hard.

That's why I like David Mitchell and David Foster Wallace and probably most other "postmodernist" writers whose names you can throw out.  They make me think.  I love that they play around with structure and voice.  Sometimes I might hate them for pulling my strings, but that's a knee-jerk reaction.  When I sit really still, I see other things worth sticking around for.

As a final caveat, I might add that narratorial awareness and calling attention to form is really nothing new at all--Denis Diderot, an eighteenth-century philosopher and writer, played around with these ideas in Jacques le fataliste, just to give one historical example.

So, really, we have seen all this "experimental" stuff before.  It was just French and wearing a powdered wig instead of American and sporting long hair and a colored bandana.