The Post-Modern Aura

THE POST-MODERN AURA: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation
Author(s): CHARLES NEWMAN

Source: Salmagundi, No. 63/64 (Spring-Summer 1984), pp. 3-199
Published by: Skidmore College
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THE POST-MODERN AURA
The Act of Fiction in an Age of

Inflation
BY CHARLES NEWMAN
I feel very twentieth-century and not at all modern.
-Ortega y Gasset
Foreword
No longer is it, 'When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my
revolver, * We are permitted instead, 'Culture sits so well in my
pocket that whenever I hear the word "thought" I smile'.
-Philippe Sollers
As befits its subject, this will be a brief account of an incomplete

idea; nothing so juicy as a sensibility, only a dim pathology of the
contemporary, which amounts to Art is everywhere and Life is vague.
The "Post-Modern" is neither a canon of writers, nor a body of
criticism, though it is often applied to literature of, roughly, the last
twenty years. The very term signifies a simultaneous continuity and
renunciation, a generation strong enough to dissolve the old order, but
too weak to marshall the centrifugal forces it has released. This new
literature founders in its own hard won heterogeneity, and tends to lose
the sense of itself as a human institution. My account is accordingly
a survey of attitudes and tendencies, gestures and drifts, alibies and
advertisements, clichés and obfuscations, which comprise an institution
without a theory.
"Post-Modernism" in its positive form constitutes an intellectual
attack upon the atomized, passive and indifferent mass culture which,
through the saturation of electronic technology, has reached its zenith
in Post-War America. The reaction in the 1950's against the falsity and
meretriciousness of this culture was expressed through ironic
detachment, characterized by a contemplative indifference to politics,
the conservation of valued cultural objects in all their complexity, and
the missionary spirit associated with late Modernism. The critical faculty
was elevated as the saving remnant of civilization, implying that
experience could still be satisfying if ordered in literary terms.
The Sixties would of course emphasize the subversive rather than the
positive socializing function of literature, a resurrection, almost
6 CHARLES NEWMAN
exclusively, of early Mod

about this period is not
for all its rejection of
innovation in aesthetics,
politics were literary a
de siècle Vienna, which produced an extraordinary number of
"movements," but not a single major work of art, as well as a
hyperpluralistic social order which was only the prelude to total political
and cultural disarray.
What was unprecedented in the Sixties was the astonishingly rapid
shift made by intellectuals from the private sensibility of an "armed"
criticism to the politics and art of "immediacy and openness." The
period established a rotational dynamic which would be repeated in
different idioms but with similar lack of effect up to the present day.
It is the velocity of this change, in both art and criticism, rather than
its substantive merits, which is the distinctive feature of the "post-
modern." For it is a weary truism of literary physics that conventional
mechanics cannot explain phenomena in which motions of very high
velocity play a role. The concept of generation, that residue of
traditional evidence which undergoes a transformation coherent enough
to be periodized, has been gradually foreshortened from three score
to the decade, and even this new shorthand is probably too inclusive.
There is a more elemental way of regarding Post-Modernism,

however, and that is in terms of climax inflation - not only of wealth,
but of people, ideas, methods, and expectations - the increasing power
and pervasiveness of the communications industry, the reckless growth
of the academy, the incessant changing of hands and intrinsic
devaluation of all received ideas. The Post-Modern era represents only
the last phase in a century of inflation - when it becomes structurally
permanent in the longest sustained economic rocket ride since the
industrial revolution, arguably the most explosive period of sustained
growth in human history.
The effects are by now clear even to the most literary mind. Chronic
excess demand fosters irrational consumption; all goods, intellectual
as well as material, become nondurable, buying and selling take
precedence over production and investment. Rather than a genuinely
productive wealth, a patrimony which can be passed on, chronic
inflation increasingly produces only hedges against inflation and
distortions of the market, which is to say, it fosters cultural incoherence
The Post-Modern Aura 1
of the most destructive sort. As inflation affects members of the

community unequally, alienation is intensified, consensus unravels, the
trade unionist mentality permeates all levels of society, the social order
becomes a war of group against group for decreasing shares of the
national income, and the skepticism of all forms of governance
intensifies. Power flows to those institutions which can take on the
highest debt. The old saw, "everybody floats, nobody drowns," takes
on almost metaphysical quality. In a little more than a generation, our
population has almost doubled, per capita income has increased
1,000%, college enrollment has increased 7 times. Our total gross
national product is up more than 2,200%, as is personal spending, as
we have undergone an unprecedented global price revolution since
World War II of 300-600%, depending upon which commodity index
is used. The dollar, which was halved in value from 1946-1969, was
halved again in the last decade.
The fatalism of anticipated inflation which these statistics reflect,
the failure of prices to conform to past experience and the consequent
inability to determine any stable theory of value, can only be fully
grasped historically - particularly in a year in which we have seemingly
regained some control over prices. While wholesale prices have been
gradually rising since 1932, it is also true that their averaged index of
1932 had not risen substantially since 7#32. Indeed, the wholesale price
peak of 1796 was not consistently exceeded, except during the wars,
until 1947. In this context, the entire 19th Century was actually mildly
deflationary, and beginning in 1800, every deflation has been sharper
and briefer than the last, while each successive inflation has been sharper
and longer. The inflation we have experienced since our Asian War
(for which we will be paying for the rest of our lives) may justly recall
the 16th Century, when the influx of American "treasure" coincided
with the commercialization of trade to produce a devaluation of most
European currencies.
This is not, however, an argument based on economic determinism.
Inflation is a cultural malaise of genuinely moral dimensions, with
psychological causes and economic symptoms. It constitutes an
intractable and insidious social phenomenon which will not submit to
contemporary preference for solution by technique. Despite the fact
that inflation occurs historically in only brief bursts, it leaves an indelible
impression and creates incalculable uncertainty, a negative sum game
in which all participants ultimately lose. What is lost is not purchasing
power per se. The ever increasing price revolution only disturbed
8 CHARLES NEWMAN
confidence very recently, because it was not as severe as the

hyperinflations which followed total military disasters, as with the
Confederate States or Weimar Germany. America's memory of
economic chaos is one of unemployment rather than hyperinflation.
The causes of this are obviously manifold, but what is clear is that the
instabilities of the system which once produced depression now seem
to manifest themselves in inflation. The effect is that all the latent
disequilibriums of a market system which is allocatively efficient
precisely because it is devoid of values, are further exacerbated through
inflation, which weakens all reciprocal relationships in a society never
notable for cohesion. The trivialization of culture and the psychological
tensions which always attend a market economy reach new levels of
carelessness when no one dares to abate consumption. Neither the
competitive market nor the political process can operate with an
authority sufficient to clear the market or to reconcile its interests. In
late capitalism, inflation does not produce political havoc, but cultural
anomie. Elias Canetti has written:
The confusion inflation wreaks on the population is by no means

confined to the actual period of inflation . . . apart from wars
and revolutions, there is nothing in our modern civilizations which
compares in importance to it. The upheavals are so profound that
people prefer to hush them up and conceal them ... [it is]
infinitely shaming . . . growth negates itself; as the crowd grows,
its units become weaker and weaker . . . not only is everything
shaken . . . but each man, each person becomes less
. . . Everyone has a million and everyone is nothing ... No one
ever forgets a sudden depreciation of himself, for it is too
painful ... the natural tendency afterwards is to find something
which is worth even less than oneself, which one can even despise
as one was despised oneself . . . What is wanted is a dynamic
process of humiliation. . . . [Crowds and Power]
For Post-Moderns, inflation is our war and revolution, and art often
our humiliation.
Inflation affects the ideas exchange just as surely as it does

commercial markets. In those areas not completely railed by short term
supply and demand, such as Art, the velocity of change may be
compared to that in those "underdeveloped" nations, which in a
generation undergo historica

of years to accomplish. Thus
warfare and spasmodic chan
of all past styles in their in
circulation of diverse and cont
the reign of the cult of creativity in all areas of behavior, an
unprecedented non judgmental receptivity to Art, a tolerance which
finally amounts only to indifference. To put it in less theoretical terms,
one recalls with awe Edmund Wilson's seemingly telepathic sense in
choosing which of 8,000 annual new titles to review during his Thirties'
tenure at the New Republic, One wonders how he would have done
with the current 55,000 annual titles. In the last thirty years, more novels
have been published than in any comparable period of history, and yet,
quality aside, no age has been less sure about what a novel is, or more
skeptical of the value and function of "imaginative" literature.
The effect of this proliferation of knowledge has a longer tradition
than we generally admit. "Scarcely anyone in the 'educated classes,' "
writes Matthew Arnold, "seems to have any real opinions, or places
any faith in those which he professes to have ... it requires in these
times much more intellect to marshall so much greater a stock of ideas
and observations . . . Those who should be guides for the rest, see too
many sides to every question. They hear so much said, and find that
so much can be said, about everything, that they feel no assurance about
anything."
The overwhelming sense not merely of the relativity of ideas, but
of the sheer quantity and incoherence of information, a culture of
inextricable cross-currents and energies - such is the primary sensation
of our time. The majority of books in most libraries were published
in the last thirty years. Seldom has the mind been burdened by so many
competing claims, and never has Art taken place in so many spheres
amidst so many competing vested interests. We are dealing here not
with the fragmentation at first so lovingly approved and finally
despaired of by the Modernist Movement, but with presumptive special
interests (systems would be too dignified) which have no explicable
relation. The pluralism of contemporary art parallels the increasingly
sectarian divisions of society. There can be no triumph of a style, or
for that matter an interpretation, in a situation lacking any principle
of succession. The lens turned on contemporary art must allow for all
distortions. Art refuses to flow into the old channels, just as technology
simultaneously destroys and opens new ones, the consequences of which
10 CHARLES NEWMAN
no one fully comprehends

by the inflation of discours
the illusion that technique c
a concept of objective realit
and in criticism by the d
presumably ' demystify'" re
it. In such a situation, bot
often relinquish their tradit
imagine to be the richness
Modernism fully corrobo

be destructive as well as upli
that art can trivialize, ben
that precisely at the momen
than ever before, the artist
being refused access to a contemporary audience, a reciprocally
destructive inertia. Modernism kept alive the nostalgia for an art which
would retain the social and moral authority of religion and even
empire - an authority destroyed as artists became simply other
producers for the marketplace. But the relationship between producers
and consumers reaches a new level of irreducible complexity when the
artist must do battle on two fronts: against official mass culture as well
as Pseudo- Art. It is a central point of mine that whereas the Modern
and the Post-Modern share an unbroken (and largely unexamined)
aesthetic tradition, their differences in idiom are due essentially to the
differences of the institutions against which they are reacting. Which
is to say that Post-Modernism is defined by the confusion which comes
from bringing forth the dogmatic aesthetic techniques of Modernism
against an entirely unprecedented form of production, transmission and
administration of knowledge, a system no less binding because it is
unstructured (what Hans Enzensberger calls "the Consciousness
Industry"). Modernism in its heroic phase is a retrospective revolt
against a retrograde mechanical industrialism. Post-Modernism is an
ahistorical rebellion without heroes against a blindly innovative
information society.
Walter Benjamin anticipates the peculiar relentless fluidity of the roles

in our new writer/reader system. "With the increasing extension of the
press, an increasing number of readers became writers . . . thus the
distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic
character . . . The difference

from case to case, but at any m
a writer . . . literary license is
specialized training and thu
is summarily adumbrated by
the public since 1848 has cau
all readers . . . The fundamental conflict between the writer and the
reader is an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of literature."
This intransigence has been reflected most often in the notion of a
permanent crisis in art, sometimes treated as purifying, sometimes as
stultifying, but always as unending and eschatological. But if we have
learned anything from our forty year detente, it is that crisis is not
inherent in the moment itself, that our thinking is skewed by apocalyptic
rhetoric, no matter how irresolute and plastic our art may be, or how
undeniable the ongoing rot of our social, political and economic
institutions. Indeed, the inflated rhetoric of crisis more often than not
dovetails nicely with the commercial rhetoric of calculated obsolescence,
the continual tremors of the fashion world. Our society retains a
remarkable ability to absorb its severest critiques and even make a profit
on them. What the artist expresses as metaphysical or linguistic
alienation is often nothing more or less than his hypertrophied social
and economic isolation, or in the case of celebrity, his exploitation.
The artist is rarely an unpopular commodity in the abstract. It is only
when he must find a specific place in the productive relations of his
society that he tends to fall back upon the nostalgic and easily purchased
notions of Modernist Transcendence. The rhetoric of crisis tends to
release the artist from the constraints of history and revolution, and
is characteristically expressed in the style of Formalist involution. This
has in turn occasioned a recent return to a kind of neo-conservative
Realism, or Literal Revivalism. Post-Modernism has then come to
represent the final battle in the century's war of attrition between
Formalism and Realism, those totally aestheticized antinomies shorn
of their historical context - a violent adjacency of the idols of pure
expressivity and pure accessibility, which reflect more often than not
an atmosphere of intense demoralization.
After a century of ineluctable crisis, we dimly apprehend that the
emergency is not likely to resolve itself apocalyptically or even neatly;
we are at one of those historic junctures where we can only wonder
how our common sense was beaten out of us. Imagine a 20th century
without jargon! It is the very rhetoric of crisis itself which offends any
12 CHARLES NEWMAN
plausible sense of continuit

turn out to be genuinely
point that the Artist has f
defacto liberation has its ow
of assertion and denial does
of society, and that his v
Genre and Audience tend to
and experiencing of fiction
how bankrupt critical and h
how ingenuously the arti
empathy, remains a learn
solutions; his problems ar
is a social as much as liter
a universal condition as a
My biases and preferences
do not derive from any org
from any methodology, b
an unsystematic but alwa
contemporaries. I am a Fo
art to be first order phenom
but I am a Realist in the s
tendency to shrug off any reciprocal relations, so much the
contemporary fashion, to be a sham. And while technique is indeed
the crucial determinant of literary quality, I believe that if style is not
the man, precisely, it can only be achieved by a vivid and intensely
personal experience of life. This should seem less contradictory by the
end of this study.
I also tend to see cultural and aesthetic conflicts as explicably social
and economic, though in neither dialectical nor materialist terms. When
I refer to art, I am talking almost exclusively about literature. When
I speak of literature I am almost always talking about fiction. This is
complicated by the fact that there is no such thing as a Post-Modern
canon. Contemporary writers are uniquely different from one another,
and any exemplary paragraph in support of a generalization from one
could easily be countered with another. While there are many admirable
writers to whom my generalities will not apply, I have tried to sketch
a literary dynamic in which broad aesthetic choices can be understood
in a specific cultural circumstance. I have tried to avoid the partisan,
but I make no pretense at being fair. The argument is unapologetically
general; what I have left out is not inadvertant. In any case, true
exceptions will eventually turn

rule I presently manage. But
to constitute a true Zeitgeist
shared questions and feelings,
the imperfect digestion of wh
a number of questions are rais
tentative answer.
As this is a cultural history of recent attitudes, rather than a
specifically literary argument, there is little textual explication. I am
primarily interested in the concepts which hover around artistic
transactions, that mismatched intellectual baggage aboard every
imaginative flight, the weight of which is only subliminally
acknowledged. My point is not to defend contemporary literature as
much as to ask why we have made such a poor case for it.
The reader who delights in praise and blame, or who requires a
Scoreboard for the endless extra-innings of Post-Modernism, will be
doubly frustrated. I stick to theory not because I think it conspicuously
related to practice or even intrinsically interesting, but because I find
contemporary culture so willfully theoretical. This should not be
surprising in a culture which is disintegrating, for theory is the only
way we know to overcome static self-consciousness and to
recontextualize ourselves. An inflationary culture, because its
overlapping realities are not only proliferating but cancelling each other
out, tends to polarize theories as it recirculates them, and as content
itself is being continuously devalued, there is a strong tendency to treat
both art and life as abstract models. Accordingly, America has become
the new Germany of theory - from sexology to surprise-side
economics - promulgated by a corps of academics, preachers,
journalists and media hustlers, breathless with fatidic supposition. Even
so marginal a group as writers routinely acknowledge theoretical
problems which would not have even occurred to practitioners only a
generation ago. It requires an enormous effort to ignore, much less
refute this conjectural energy. What we have undergone, on the face
of it, is a temporary abandonment of traditional American aesthetic
pragmatism.
There are several reasons, at least, for this manic flirtation with
theory. The first is that after television, the dissemination of theory
in America is relatively cost-free, functioning as another market
commodity, without the price exacted by ideological conflict in most
other cultures. As a Russian friend once remarked to me, * 'America
14 CHARLES NEWMAN
is the only place left that

requires relative stability,
a culture is highly volatile
is undervalued. Theory be
ultimate inflation hedge
easily translated into H
o ver stimulated culture.
My impatience with spec

making a number of bli
example will suffice w
generalizations to his ow
limitations of my argument, I hope we will also appreciate the
considerable difficulties involved. Our frailties are never more on display
than when we give names to Time.
1 . Meditation on a Lost Nomenclature
We should define, should we not, what we mean by history?
- V. Nabokov
Ours is a richly confused and hugely verbal age, energized by a

multitude of competing discourses, the very proliferation and plasticity
of which increasingly determine what we defensively refer to as our
reality. We have become acutely aware of language not as a mediating
tool, but as an independent agency in its own right, a force which is not
an adjunct of perception, but a competitor. Never before in history
has so much of a literary heritage been available to so broadly based
an audience, yet never before has a culture drawn such apparently
meagre sustenance from its own literary activity. With a culture so
unsure of itself, the proclamation of endless, unnerving change and
insistent uniqueness has been a common response of both American
character and literature. This exceptionality is often neither earned nor
demonstrated, but, like the corollary of a "birthright," is viewed as
the artist's prerogative; perhaps his only one. When excellence is not
defined, much less rewarded, then to be "different" is the minimal
requisite.
Conservative critics often attribute this to pure venality, an
unwillingness to impose standards in a culture which wants nothing to
do with the business of meritocracy. All of which, of course, is true
on the face of it. What is frequently missed, however, is the fact that
increasingly over the last thirty years or so, all our literary antecedents
have become available to the American writer; he may draw upon a
genuine variety of intracultural modes; national character no longer
delimits genre; and the notion of genre itself has been radically
redefined.
It goes without saying that these are not unmixed blessings. If a
Martian were given the punitive task of reading any recent year's
16 CHARLES NEWMAN
American fiction, he m
produced by writers not o
planets. Whatever compar
literature of our age (an
judged), no one can disp
We live in a time when
inflation of both literar
restructuring of comm
Inflation affects literary
as it does financial scrip
refuge in quasi-philosophi
adopt a desperately invo
even a common public relations which can provide third party
coherence.
It is quite unlikely that the nature of literary enterprise has changed
radically, but it is nevertheless possible that our attitudes toward it
have - and Post-Modernism represents not so much formal innovation
in itself as a change in the dynamic between literature and what might
quaintly be described as the social order. It signifies a change in the
context into which texts are received, a recognition that institutions of
transmission substantially alter what is being conveyed, and that
institutions are defined in the contemporary world by their breaking
points. This embodies a very unpopular notion for American writers
in particular, for it suggests that culture, particularly one so "free,"
determines art in ways that the Modernist tradition of the autonomous
artist resists absolutely. In fact, the Post-Modern can be partially
understood as a shift in the choice of determinisms - a subtle but
inexorable movement within two generations from economic and
political determinisms, through a broader cultural determinism
emphasizing technology and mass psychology, to our recent obsession
with a determinism which is essentially linguistic. There is some evidence
that the cycle may be starting over, but it is clear that the concept of
what is literary at any one moment is linked to which determinism is
chosen.
And so we must deal with terminological fictions such as Post-
Modernism - and indeed, whatever happened to it? While we must
remain extremely skeptical of such terms as descriptive, we should
consider that a terminology can have considerable operative power quite
apart from the fact that it may be incoherent, contradictory, or even
self-serving. Such gropings, premonitions and perversions of both
The Post-Modern Àura 17
language and history often tell u

productions. Thus Post-Modernis
its more semantically febrile ver
and postponible - a nomenclat
band of vainglorious contempora
of Modernism with snow shovels.
The conventional model of Modernism is that of a quantum jump

in aesthetic perception - a discreet moment in which the existing
decaying culture is definitively thrown off with an explosion of
innovation: witness Virginia Woolf s most quoted remark, "on or about
December, 1910, human nature changed."
Against the langorous entropy of the Victorian Mind, the Modern
Canon stands in sharp summary relief, that ultimate fantasy metaphor
of the revolutionary, the spontaneous mutation of historical necessity.
According to its central mythology, Modernism was not an evolutionary
development, but a free radical departure, the evangelical myth of
rebirth by fiat. Therein lies its continuous source of appeal to a culture
impatient with its own sense of cyclical retrogression and déjà vw. While
metaphors of gradualism are commonplace in historical and scientific
inquiry, they have never been congenial to literary criticism. The fact
that the homo-sapiens 50,000 years ago were probably as brainy as we
are, is not a sentiment upon which to build an Avant-Garde.
Moreover, when a model of creative discontinuity is applied to an
historical period, one invites a species of Terroristic Terminology, the
sort of vocabulary of which - by contrast with French or German -
English was once relatively free. What you get is Para-criticism and
other fictive prefixes - Meta, Anti, Super, and Sur.
The explicit emphasis is on a literature which is not only "different,"
but also heightened in some way, as in the Surrealist invocation of a
destruction which adds to existence.
Against the botanized categories and closed canons of Modernism,
we are dealing with a non-durational history, the banality of endless
presentness, the seeing through one's own sight which is the ordering
of negative time. Post-Modern is something more than a dash
surrounded by a contradiction. It is one of those concepts which must
be pursued very deeply to discover how calculatingly superficial it is.
Neither pointed like an oxymoron nor soothing like a neologism, it
functions as a rhetorical trope, an aposiopic pause, in which the hyphen
is its most distinctive feature - a stutter step, a tenuous graft; the
bobbed tale of the hybrid.
18 CHARLES NEWMAN
How such terminology com

forms the rhetoric of the
celebratory and evasive. The
between the recent and the rigidly canonical. "Our age is
retrospective . . . The foregoing generations believed in God and nature
face to face; we through their eyes. Why should we not have a poetry
and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"
The impulse and trade-offs of such an enterprise can clearly be seen
in Roger Fry's coinage of the term "Post-Impressionism," in
introducing French Modernism to the British art world of 1910-11.
Virginia Woolf noted that Fry thought it quite easy to make the
transition from Watts to Picasso; there was no break, only a
continuation. "They were only pushing things a little further/' she
paraphrased him, echoing that respect for the evolutionary, in which
intonation is everything. Desmond McCarthy in his introduction to the
Grafton Exhibit sets the tone for such a transition in his usual half-
aggressive, half-apologetic manner.
. . . there is no denying that the work of the Post Impressionists

is sufficiently disconcerting. It may even appear ridiculous to those
who do well to recall the fact that a good rockinghorse has often
more of the true horse about it than an instantaneous photograph
of a derby winner.
This is the insistence of a man who hardly thinks of himself as a

revolutionary theorist, but against mindless conventional wisdom is
simply asserting the relatively obvious; i.e., that traditional pictorial
realism is not the only way to represent reality. We shall see how far
that commonplace can be pushed in small increments.
Fry's own position was even more tenuous. At first it seems he wanted
to characterize these painters as "Expressionists,"* but at the urging
of the press, he came up with a new name - "oh, let's call them Post-
Impressionists; at any rate they came after the Impressionists." In his
essay "Retrospect," Fry goes on:
♦The term "Expressionism" seems first to have appeared in 191 1, also in the Foreword
to a catalog, in this case the 22nd Exhibition of the Berliner Sezession. The term
characterized a group of young French painters (including Picasso, Braque and Dufy)
and was rapidly applied to any painter reacting against "Impressionism."
... for purposes of convenien

artists a name, and I chose, as being the vaguest and most
noncommittal, the name of Post Impressionists ... In
conformity with my own previous prejudices against
Impressionism, I think I underlined too much their divorce from
the parent stock. I see now more clearly their affiliation with it
but I was nonetheless right in recognizing their essential difference.
. . . The general public failed to see my position with regard to
this movement was capable of logical explanation, as the result
of a consistent sensibility. I tried in vain to explain what appeared
to me so clear, that the modern movement was essentially a return
to the ideas of formal design which had been almost lost sight
of in the fervent pursuit of naturalistic representation. I found
that the cultured public which had welcomed my expositions of
the works of the Italian renaissance now regarded me either as
incredibly flippant or, for the more charitable explanation which
was usually adopted, slightly insane.
In fact the reaction of the "audience" [in this case, "the press"] which
so persistently pushed Fry for a new headline nomenclature is more
than instructive. In the London Times of November 7, 1910, "The Post-
Impressionists" are received as follows:
... It is lawful to anticipate these critics and to declare our belief

that this art is itself a flagrant example of reaction. It professes
to simplify and to gain simplicity, it throws away all th3 long
developed skill past artists had acquired and bequeathed. It begins
all over again and stops where a child would stop - where is the
significance of gesture in the copper colored Tahitian woman lying
face downward on a bed and in her strange arms and fingers?
Really primitive art is attractive because it is unconscious, but this
is deliberate. It is the abandonment of what Goethe called the
Culture conquest' of the past. Like anarchism in politics, it is the
rejection of all that civilization has done, the good with the
bad . . . there is the Dutch painter Van Gogh with his roughly
modeled flowerpieces and his picture of a peasant girl in a green
dress so shocking to the normal eye that the effect is plainly meant
to recall some of the dissonances voulues of Modern music. . . .It
is an odd word to use in this gallery, for charm implies a sympathy
between themselves and their public and therefore some
20 CHARLES NEWMAN
concession to what the p

ideals which are never p
beautiful, significant, o
story ... the artist shou
is most completely real
Whether it is in any sens
to the decisions of tim
Remember that definiti

between the artist and h
Modernism and Post-Mode
just a little bit further, an
Herbert Read alludes to

what is painstakingly cal
the sense of consciously
deeply felt, at least un
recognizable "breakthrou
we can always measure a work against the ideas that
conceptualize/advertise it; what is more difficult is finally to see that
the concept may be more interesting than the work, or that the work
may have only the most tenuous relationship with its conceptualization.
We are all suckers for statements about culture - which is not
surprising when the culture, at first glance, seems so balefully
homogeneous, but upon closer inspection, is so unappealingly atomized.
A new "angle" is invariably more charismatic, more assimilable,
handier in every way than the work which presumably springs from
it. And it is no secret that the most honorific concepts are generated
after the fact.
Terroristic Terminology is coextensive with the rise of Journalism
and The Academy as the most powerful mediating institutions in the
culture. As Journalism becomes electronic and all-pervasive, it creates
Buzz- Words, litanies so open-ended as to defeat specificity, but whose
aura creates in the spectator a non-existent actuality. As the Academy
becomes peripheral, its terminology becomes hermetic and privatized,
gestures of autonomy without content, a loss of meaning long since
automatized into a formula. Like Spinoza's substance, Terminology
is the den from which no tracks return. Vocabulary becomes a substitute
for thought. Post-Modern man comes to live in relation to terms.
The etymology of Post-Mo

would expect. The earliest s
places, in Toynbee's The Stu
A post-Modern age of Wes

seventh and eighth decades
the rhythm of a modern W
in the course of its fourth be
following hard at the heels
25 years between the outbre
1792 from 1672.
Elsewhere Toynbee seems to associate Post-Modernism with the

displacement of the characteristic middle class Western moment by the
rise of an urban working class. But essentially what Toynbee calls Post-
modern is what cultural historians generally call Modern.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that Modernism itself
is hardly a clear term, though at least in hindsight we can in most
respects differentiate what is romantic from what is modern. The word
can be used with some precision to denote certain literary and painterly
techniques from, say, 1905 to 1925, but where it ends nobody knows.
Furthermore, as Claudio Guillen points out, "our vocabulary in the
area of literary history is extremely limited. Nine-tenths of the critical
historian's lexicon is of use to the critic but not the historian."
[Literature as System] Let us consider some examples.
Postmodernism grew out of modern architecture in much the same

way mannerist architecture grew out of the high Renaissance, as
a partial inversion and modification of the former language of
architecture . . . like its progenitor, the movement is committed
to engaging current issues, to changing the present, but unlike
the avant garde, it does away with the notion of continual
innovation or incessant revolution ... in its attention to historical
memory and local context, it also takes a positive approach
towards metaphorical buildings, the vernacular, and a new
ambiguous kind of space. (Charles Jencks)
' 'Kaddish" is a work of art in the modernist sense, with characters
and a plot; "Howl" is Postmodernist, a direct expression of the
writer's personality. (Louis Simpson)
22 CHARLES NEWMAN
Post modernist art continues the Modernist's critique of

traditional mimetic art and shares the Modernists' commitment
to innovation, but pursues these aims by methods of its own. It
tries to go beyond Modernism as it does Anti-Modernism ... it
tends to be very much a hit or miss affair. (David Lodge)
Finally I should point out that I shall use the term Postmodernism
as a convenient phrase for summarizing the poetry I study, even
if it leads to absurd consequences like the need to define a Post-
Postmodernism. I do so because the term already has some critical
weight, and because the poets I study define their enterprise as
essentially the creation of an alternative to high Modernism. (Joe
David Bellamy)
I end this ... by not letting you or myself forget what these
editors of Moby Dick have so outrageously neglected to mention,
that the man who more and more stands up as one man of this
century to be put with Melville, Dostoevsky, and Rimbaud (men
who engage themselves with modern reality in such fierceness and
pity as to be of real use to any of us who want to take on the
Postmodern) is D.H. Lawrence. (Charles Olsen)
Postmodern Literature moves in nihilistic play or mystic

transcendence, towards the vanishing point . . . the most
intriguing art of our time seems bent on 'unmaking' itself for the
sense of making itself anew. (Ihab Hassan)
It matters little who these writers are, only that each of their usages
is utterly different. One rarely finds the word Post-Modern used in
disciplines in which there is not a canonical structure to attack or
dismiss. One does not find it in economics because economists take
a more evolutionary view calling themselves either neo-conservatives
or even neo-liberals, and one never sees it in cinematic criticism, where
there is no overwhelming sense of history. It pervades art and dance
criticism because the specific hegemony of Abstract Expressionism and
Balanchine's Neo-classicism are so decisive that Post-Modern becomes
a neologism for what one is not talking about. Its use is restricted to
fields such as architecture where Modernism is understood to be a totally
canonized phenomenon; an indisputable and inescapable monument.
"Once a book is fathomed," Lawrence has said, "its meaning fixed
or established, it is dead." The problem of course with the dead is their
legacies, or as Allen Wanen Frie

is different from his predecesso
they are what he knows. Yet su
art is concerned, for in a sense,
own validity by implying that t
do not know." [Forms of Brit
Actually, by the turn of the
largely displaced by "isms," an
in the evolution of such term
forces must be named and def
which literary technicians ha
analysible, and consequently h
in the air ..." [I wan Goll]. The second is the stage when the
vocabulary becomes aimed at the press: "I really don't care any more
than you do about the word 'Naturalism' . . . however, I repeat it over
and over again because things need to be baptized so that the public
will regard them as new ..." [Emile Zola]. The third is when the term
becomes part of common usage, vapid intellectualization, and individual
artists begin to disassociate themselves from a history which is
"owned".
We are now somewhere between the second and third stages.
* * * *
For present practical purposes, we ma

on a still afternoon in 1852 as Flaubert
at length:
If I haven't written sooner in reply

discouraged-sounding letter, it is bec
fit of work. The day before yesterday
morning and yesterday at three. Sin
everything else aside, and have done n
over my Bovary, disgruntled at making
now reached my ball, which I will beg
may go better. Since you last saw me
all (25 pages in six weeks). They are tou
them to Bouillhet. As for myself, I hav
recopied them, changed them, handle
being I can't make head or tail of them.
24 CHARLES NEWMAN
up. You speak of your d

Sometimes I don't unders
body with fatigue, why m
a stern existence, stri
sustained only by a kin
makes me weep tears of i
my work with a love tha
loves the hair shirt that
am empty, when words d
a single sentence after s
couch and lie there daze
myself and blaming myse
me pant after a chimera
changes; my heart is po
to get up and fetch my h
my face. I had been mo
had conceived, the phra
of having found the phr
this emotion, which af
nerves. There exist even h
which are devoid of the
moral beauty, to virtue -
factor, of any human
moments of illumination
enthusiasm that made me
of mind, superior to life
nothing and even happine
us, instead of permanen
of mud, contributed rath
tell whether we might no
did for morals? .... Gree
constitution of an entir
The time for Beauty is o

has no use for it at pre
scientific it will be, just
in their early stages, th
reach their culmination.
today to foresee in wha
of the future will flower.
The Post-Modem Aura 25
groping in the dark. We are

under our feet; we all lack
we are. What's the good of
any need? Between the crow
for the crowd; alas for us,
for everything, and since th
just as valid as the appetite
equal place in the world, we
and of mankind, which disa
into our ivory tower, and
doubts that taunt me at my
yet I would not exchange
conscience tells me that I am
of fate - that I am doing what is Good, that I am in the
Right . . .
Clearly all the basic assumptions and contradictions of Modernism are

already in place:
The certitude of despair.
Aesthetic (and ascetic) moralism.

The idea that one can have a revolutionary art without an
evolutionary society.
Art as a sanctuary (perhaps the only one) for the individual. The
imagination transcendent as it becomes depersonalized, though
not yet abstract.
Self absorption in the grand manner: Elitism.
The ambivalence of a transitional age. Romanticized notion of

Classicism.
The simultaneous expression of supreme, even ethereal self-

confidence, coextensive with the agony of self-loathing.
The idea of art as an increasingly technical, even scientific process;

the autonomy of technique.
The artist both propelled and repelled by vague obligations,

exacerbated by the loss of audience, and the potential irrelevance
of art.
26 CHARLES NEWMAN
The task of art, therefor

beyond the established
Wordsworth's injunctio
that he "carry sensation
itself ..." [the defensive
individual consciousness
society]; thus the basic str
aesthetics to create a ne
scientific age." However
be said that it recreates this conscience with much enthusiasm or effect.
When consciousness itself is under extreme modification, and when
science is generally viewed as dehumanizing, the momentum of
knowledge tends to make the moral sense seem a retrograde imperative,
associated with discredited realist aesthetics. It is the lack of any moral
grounding which makes contemporary work so unpalatable to those
who revere the Modernists, and yet their critique, no matter how
pretentious or provincial, cannot be finally ignored, much less explained
away by art which denies all prerogatives as a matter of course.
"History," said Zola, "is not a wastebasket." He didn't know the half
of it.
2. The Second Revolution
/ think this is the great sin of the intellectual: that he never really
tests his ideas by what it would mean to him if he were to undergo
the experience that he is recommending.
- Lionel Trilling
It is astonishing to observe, in America . . . to what extent the

literary atmosphere is a non-conductor of criticism . . .
-Edmund Wilson
The Post-Modernist mentality can only be understood as the product

of two revolutions. The first revolution is that remarkable explosio
of artistic talent and high skepticism, so broadly based yet
chronologically concentrated, which wrenched us forever from 19th
Century Positivism and whose accomplishments were in place by
the First World War. The Second is the revolution in pedagogy and
criticism which interpreted, canonized and capitalized the Modernist
industry, making "the contemporary" the indubitable cultural reference
point. Indeed, we now have a new audience, rather like the 17th century
audience for music, which has never been exposed to anything that isn't
contemporary. But the point is that the Second Revolution, insofar as
literature is concerned, is the focus of artistic reaction; the First
Revolution comes to us as a reconstituted dream of the Second.
Modernism is transmitted through criticism, to the extent that the two
revolutions have become indistinguishable.
When we talk about the Modern, we are at this point talking about
Interpretation- how literature enters the social context. And authority
in criticism is social, not logical. If one wants a real lesson in culture
shock, it isn't necessary to reread the Surrealists, but simply compare
28 CHARLES NEWMAN
the literary curricula of an

of the last two decades. Sin
it exists at all) is almost
Today, the fact that the M
in many ways noble battle
scholars, is largely forgo
of transmission which date from 1938 at the earliest.*
Post-Modernism does not begin on its own, but when the Modernist
canon is pronounced closed. Hugh Kenner, for one, is not timid about
drawing the line.
Since Faulkner's death,. . . the American novel has been yielding
to that sense of arbitrariness of language that provided the poets'
opportunity in the 1920's... Certainly, something has altered since
the 1920's. When the poets took over the terrain of the arbitrary,
it was never with such lab-coated reasonableness, such courteous
explanations that if there was no place to go but the moon, still
it was better than nothing. Transported there, the nature of fiction
seems to change more disconcertingly than does that of poetry.
What does the infinite possibility that stretched before Williams
signify in the imagination of John Barth's "the Literature of
Exhaustion?" [A Home Made World]
"If something has altered since the 1920's," Kenner isn't telling, nor
is it clear how a "sense of arbitrariness" yields "infinite possibility"
for anyone except the explicator; nevertheless, his gut feeling cannot
be easily dismissed.
Post-Modern consciousness, insofar as it can be said to be acute,
is profoundly aware that the first revolution is filtered through the
second, and while the activity of interpretation, codification and
certification is routinely scorned, it is nevertheless incorporated with
begrudging élan into The Post-Modern aesthetic. History is criticism;
it resembles nothing so much as a Final Examination. The essence of
the Post Modern strategy is to assimilate voraciously (though rarely
systematically) while simultaneously repudiating assimilation. This
creates the illusion of working in a vacuum, which becomes the late
20th century sense of frontier, playing off a grandiose and highly
structured Modernism against a chaotic endless present. It is a reaction
to a history which is "owned" by the Second Revolution.
♦Hitler invades Poland. Brooks and Warren publish Understanding Poetry.
The professionalization of lit

Second Revolution is certain
Trilling sensed the contradic
ago." . . . Nothing is more ch
discovery and canonization o
at the very moment this liter
in the context of Trilling's hu
young person . . . can never
is being communicated to him
[Beyond Culture] It is this t
of Avant-Garde Literature
which Trilling confronted thr
should his students have rea
for them was already at third
knows full well, the ability
and arbitrarily arrange "ter
American phenomenon) can
yelling "no more masterpie
Trilling complains of the disa
(he got a third-rate one, brief
entire enterprise of which he
the middle class has learned
Kafka to Wouk - at least on Examinations. It is the middle class's
historical destiny to have it both ways. (There is of course another
intriguing possibility - which does not occur to Trilling or any other
theorist of the "free-floating intellectual," and that is that the middle
class is shrewder, more resilient, more unified and pragmatically
perceptive than the vanguard intellectual; which is why they are the
middle class, and why intellectuals, through the university, have made
an unspoken alliance with them.)
As for that "Adversary culture" - those hypothetical refugees from
the Bourgeoisie whose self-image is one of autonomy and independence
yet whose function is a mediating one between classes - Gramsci notes,
"The mode of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence,
which is an exterior and momentary mover of passions, but in active
participation in practical life . . . a permanent persuader ..." [Prison
Notebooks] Yet, from Carlyle's Hero to the present indefinite, the
Humanist intellectual has clearly become one of our least important
modern persons, much less a "permanent persuader."
30 CHARLES NEWMAN
This business of an "Adv

the contemporary writer o
with the smugness of the S
plurality of the Bourgeoi
institutions. The self-style
that Bourgeois culture m
any critique of Bourgeois
criticism.
In this context, there is
Modernism seriously enoug
then does it not seriously challenge the traditional view of ¿he
hierarchical humanities, and does not the imagination seem anything
but liberal? Humanism in such a context becomes merely another stance,
concealing an attachment to various class formations, and a wearisome
rhetoric no more prescient than the perennial promise to balance the
budget. There is no evidence of Professor Trilling ever having been
terrorized by Modern Art, and one can understand the suspicion of
those whom he chastizes for so effortlessly absorbing the radical breaks
of Modernism. If Trilling himself does not express discomfort in the
presence of a bruising and outrageous work of art, what then could
he expect from his students? Here we have another instance in which
"The Audience" can give you a pithy paragraph on Einstein's relativistic
physics from Modernism's card catalog, but continues to live their daily
lives by Newtonian physics. If it took fifty years for the middle class
to absorb Modernism, it is testimony to the exponential effect of social
inflation that it took it less than half as long to digest and begin to
discard Post-Modernism. One could say that a culture which has so
effortlessly assimilated the cultural habadashery of Freud, Marx and
Einstein, should have no problem with a few literary fireworks; our
century has accustomed us to art which takes off like a rocket and comes
down like a stick. But the more interesting possibility is that we are
dealing with an audience which is more learned and less attentive at
the same time, an audience which has been taught how to absorb terror
through terminology.
Howevermuch Post-Modernism puts itself at odds with the energies
of interpretation, it must also promote its own interpretive schema as
a way of creating a context for itself - and it is precisely such activity
which the culture rewards. The audience no longer asks to be moved,
even entertained; but rather to be situated, interpreted, diagnosed; an
instant mediation which provid

vocabulary gains ascendancy. Th
the superficial response mocked
is often a genuine attempt to
judgments, an accommodation w
vulnerability which Post-Moderni
offered and taken away simult
audience an identity by establishin
purity and aplomb against so
prejudices. Post-Modernism, by un
identifies with its defensive audien
the self-abnegating refusal to c
attack. As opposed to the Moder
the Post-Modernist often seem
everybody off the hook.
Is it over? Can't you read betw

One more step. Goodbye suspe
Blank.
[John Barth, "Title"]
Given Post-Modernism's own central ambivalence and scattershot

historical sense, it is not surprising that reactions among more sober
critics tend to run the gamut - from Irving Howe who feels that Post-
Modernism is some kind of mass culture phenomenon, "impatient with
mind," and Harry Levin who finds it "anti-intellectual," to John
Gardner who finds it Ay/w-intellectual;
not very interested in the truth . . . aesthetic game players . . .

juggling, obscenely giggling and gesturing in the wings while the
play of life goes on ... [On Moral Fiction]
and Robert Alter who is more to the point:
... in this vehemently contemporary fiction, there is a cultivated

quality of rapid improvization, often a looseness of form; love
of pastiche, parody, slapdash invention; a willful neglect of
psychological depth and subtlety or consecutiveness of
characterization; a cavalier attitude toward consistency of
32 CHARLES NEWMAN
incident, plot unity, detai

kind of despairing skeptic
of hysteria, about the val
of fiction. [Partial Magi
And if that seems peremp

whether a fully assimilated
Stephen Spender's words
The Moderns did not go

it forward as an instrume
there was a way of being
so because they felt that t
about the conditioning of
relations of the individual to his environment. The characteristic
gesture of modern genius was to produce vast all-inclusive works,
mansions without foundations. Stein produced her stuttering
language which was meant to sustain a 'continuous present.' The
great modern achievements were wagers which made gestures,
invented methods, but laid no foundations for a future literature*
They led in the direction of an immensity from which there was
bound to be a turning back because to go further would lead to
a new and compléter fragmentation, utter obscurity, formlessness
without end. [The Struggle for the Modern]
But if a revision of the Modern canon is to be based upon the

recognition of its "daemonic" potential for utter formlessness, it must
always nevertheless contend with the Second Revolution's interest in
making Modernism the reigning cultural orthodoxy. Without this
"managerial revolution," Modernism would not play the major role
in our consciousness that it does. Such interpretive certification becomes
the dominant reality, not that pure terror (or awe) for which Trilling
looked in vain in his students.
It is very tempting to apply the sociological model of Buddenbrooks
here. The first generation makes the money; the second achieves social
respectability; the third (you know who) descends into a malaise which
it thinks is aesthetic. The Second Revolution socializes and integrates
art through an inflationary explosion of discourse, generating secular
literary contexts which "look" scientific and philosophical as they once
♦Emphasis added.
"looked" historical and relig

20th century disciplines, try
knowledge, guarding the lim
the consciousness of the world.
This results in a very odd series of relations. Contemporary society
is highly fragmented by infinite sub-divisions of groups based on skills,
occupation, class, lifestyle, religion, ethnicity and special interests almost
too staggering to imagine. Literary art too, in its unprecedented
multiplicity of voice, is equally fragmented. But there is no one-to-one
or mimetic relationship between the social and literary fragments; they
are merely contiguous in some fashion. Add to this a profusion of
discourse which also denies any reciprocal relations. The hyper-
pluralism of the social order is exceeded only by multiple versions of
art, which in turn are exceeded only by the multiplicity of
interpretations. As hyper-pluralism destroys the continuity of the
legislative process in the political order, so hyper-pluralism in art and
criticism destroys the possibility of eponomy. In such a situation the
contemporary consumer of art is in the position of the Weimar burgher
who paid for his dinner before he ate it, as there was no telling how
it would be revalued if he waited until he was finished to see how he
liked it.
The Second Revolution cannot be understood only in terms of a

simple reduction of a first enthusiasm to the routine, or the charismatic
to the institutional. Modern criticism, for all its elitist tone, represents
in toto a democratization of access to the literary world, making its
own market through pedagogy and by presumably exemplifying extra-
literary values which were once thought of as civilizing. If the thrust
of Modern art is towards formlessness, then the thrust of Modern
criticism is towards formal gestures of autonomy without content.
Yet hyper-pluralism qualifies the very existence of extra-literary values
as interpretation seems to become an almost accidental response to
literature. In Roland Barthes's hyperbole, contrary to creating
something 'original', " . . . writing is the destruction of every voice,
every point of view; literature is a multidimensional space in which a
variety of writings, none of them original, blend and crash ..." This
dissipates any creative tension which might naturally grow out of a true
adversary relation.
For the lay observer, in this case both the reader and the "creative
writer," the final verdict on the Second Revolution is that it does not
34 CHARLES NEWMAN
aim for a stable culture at all, but revels in the stock market of
vocabularies of self-description, in the mutually exclusive methods and
half-lived ideas, indistinguishable in their velocity from those of the
commercial world which functions as a unifying scapegoat. The Second
Revolution comes to exemplify a profusion of methodologies without
a methodenstreit (a conflict of rival methodologies). Not only are all
methods and subject matters incorporated into the acquisitions program
of the Humanities, but once the market for criticism is saturated,
"creative" writing is also absorbed into the Pantheon, and by opening
new jobs, if not careers, avoids what would have provoked in almost
any other culture a contest between opposed disciplines, if not
ideologies. In such a vacuum, the triumph of Modernist orthodoxy is
complete - to use Time magazine's words, "Modernism is our
institutional culture!" The critical establishment neither usurps nor
reasserts authority - it simply trades off intellectual hierarchy while
retaining institutional tenure, defaulting like the good manager with
his golden parachute, while retaining the smugness of privileged access.
This is what Adorno called 'progressive half-culture', "invented for
those who feel that they have been judged by history, or at least that
they are falling, but who still strut in front of their peers as if they were
an interior elite." [The Jargon of Authenticity]
"This second (literary) environment," Trilling tells us, astonishingly
enough, "must always have some ethical and spiritual advantage over
the first (the general culture of reality) if only because, even thdhgh
its influence and its personnel grow apace, it will never have actual rule
of the world." [Beyond Culture]
In the Second Revolution, criticism forfeits its Adversary role by
denying that it is fundamentally rooted in the Bourgeois being it
pretends to criticize; on the other hand, it forfeits its Conservatory role
by refusing to confront the false homogeneity and devalued standards
within its own congery of disciplines. The Second Revolution makes
all art potentially respectable and accessible by making literary criticism
a primary appanage of the middle class. The Post-Modern era is given
both its energizing and enervating force by the inflation of discourse,
a market which does not reach equilibrium, but only that satiety
common to all systems clogged with transactions, leaving all major
questions unresolved.
It is the poignant and central confusion of the Post-Modern writer
that he rarely gets down to seriously questioning the assumptions of
the First Revolution, but relieves his frustration and conceals his hopes
in his antipathy to the Seco

his only potential audience.
confrontation and nonjudgm
literary culture with its pred
3. Exploiting the Dead Issue
I recognized something more than the melancholy of a lost cause.
The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have been
gained.
- Henry James, The American Scene
We have become used to terms being beaten into blankness - ■ but

what do we do with a term that never had any meaning to begin withj?
Labels for the ongoing are invariably sloppy, which is one reason most
critics sensibly eschew the present entirely. In the efforts to propound
a Post-Modernism, there is an air of melodrama which suggests either
that something is happening far beyond the establishment's powers to
recognize it, or that nothing of moment is occurring - which is all the
more terrifying.
Note that we have not as yet mentioned a single specific author, yet
already there are attitudes, antipathies, historical views and even
aesthetic choices which are marshalled on behalf of this black hole in
the present. We are dealing with a particularly sensitive and elusive
Geist, a cluster of dead ends which are nevertheless accumulatively
pertinent.
To take one example, some fourteen years ago John Barth wrote a
modest essay, essentially an homage to Borges, in which he used the
phrase, "The Literature of Exhaustion," echoing George Kubler's
mechanistic notion that "every new form limits the succeeding
innovations in the same series." Whether this is at all true in a medium
as plasmatic as literature, and even if it is true, whether it is a good
idea to take as a basis for one's own work, is not the point here. The
term has certainly haunted Barth, and he has recently chosen to
elaborate it in a sequel essay, yet another echo of Fry's t( pushing things
a little further. . . ."What Barth wants now for literatureis "the next
best thing . . . what I hope mig

of replenishment . . . ", which
very helpful or ambitious progr
not have found unpalatable.
Exactly what was enfeebled f
now to discover our provender
very diligently, despite the fact
in retrospect) as a kind of ben
of strategies. This remains an
piece, seized upon in a cultur
reference into a fake orismol
Robert Scholes, in reviewing
motive here. "For some time, w
the training* given to us by t
we were really meant to expend
estimable but unexciting writ
"hard earned training" contin
writing with little success. If
contemporary fiction writers
the Second Revolution, at bei
movement. There is very little i
help us to understand living
Rather, we still have a landscape populated by Wastelanders,
Absurdists, Black Humourists, Fabulists, et alia.
But if one does take Barth's argument seriously, then why did no
one bother to apply a bit of common sense to it? Perhaps because
institutional Modernism had to be deconstructed by any means
available? The proclamation that "it's all been done" certainly demands
some circumspect ridicule. But the basic idea which underlies both of
Barth's essays is a profoundly unexamined one. When he says, "There's
no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens & Co.," he is saying essentially
that because of what we've become in the 20th century, both as artists
and people, we cannot go back to the past - particularly a past in
which writers commanded a central respect in the culture. But these
are two very different questions, and we ought not confuse holistic
cultural assertions with literary strategies. "The worst and most
corrupting lies," says Bernanos, "are problems wrongly stated." Just
what is it about the 20th century experience which makes us so unable
♦Emphasis added.
38 CHARLES NEWMAN
to utilize the past? The

dateness, certainly had n
If Barth himself can "g
then why not to Tolstoy
authority or sensibility bu
assimilable for us than the
from preselected portions
of history as traditional
amnesiac's ante.
Modernism is a ditch which we must crawl through or leap over to
experience the history which is also ours. Post-Modernism is a period
characterized by an absolute failure of theory, a plethora of dead
issues - which is not to say a dead issue cannot be exploited. What
Barth seems to be insisting upon is that the only way to come to terms
with the discrepancy between Art and the Real Thing is to affirm the
artificial element in art, make it part of the work, as there is no getting
rid of it in any case. But the absence of coherent theory is not as
significant as is the willed absence of any historical sense, save an
ambivalent antipathy to the "owned history" of the Second Revolution.
History becomes merely the history of artifice. The only usable past
is aesthetics.
Nevertheless, the absence of history conceals its own historical theory,
both aesthetic and cultural, a theory which resists stasis on principle,
and views progress (or entropy) in art as utterly linear. Exhaustion as
a theory is just as unitary in its way as was 19th century realism, in
which art was a steady accumulator rather than a divestor of experience.
Slipshod theory, it must be said, doesn't seem to have made much
of a difference in the quality or variety of American fiction during its
contemporary ascendancy. The American prose novel, after all, is one
of our few national aesthetic projects which can make exhilarating
claims within an international context. Dead issues are not necessarily
dead ends. How long fiction can continue to exploit its abandonment
of historical sense, and perhaps more importantly, the absence of a
coherent constituency, is the more interesting question. It may very well
be that we have entered a period in which literature will stubbornly
persist without either internal coherence or enthusiastic response. It
would not be the first time. Indeed, it is preeminently in the Modernist
period that the European sense of recreant and reciprocal culture was
felt to be within our grasp; which accounts for the peculiar combination
of nostalgia and embitterment

past.
"Can't go backness" is its own theory and as such provides whatever
intellectual currency literature has at present. But liberation from history
exacts its own boredom and determinism. It exaggerates antecedents
only as obstacles. It apportions historical experience without any
principle of selection, and aestheticizes experience without question.
While mimicking philosophy rather than history, it nevertheless
sidesteps the question of origins, which is to say, it refuses to take final
responsibility for its own strategies, and formalizes desperation as a
virtue of necessity.
The "historical sense" is not slavishly reverent of the past, nor is
it necessarily associated with a return to Realism. It emphasizes only
that absurdity is an historical and not an ontological condition, and
thus grants a perspective to the appropriateness of techniques which
trade off total self-absorption, the tendency of internal analysis to rush
in where social consciousness is weak.
The 19th century was the first century without an identifiable period
style and a single repertory of opinions. Modernism was the first period
which did not predicate a state by which it could be judged complete.
And Post-Modernism is the first period which does not idealize some
specific historical period as an emulative model, or attempt to recapture
the purity, however illusory, of some vanished age.
4. The Threnody of Solipsism
/ am weary of my individuality and simply nauseated by other
people's.
- D.H. Lawrence
Those who take up the notion that Post-Modernist art has suddenly
become self-referential commit the grossest ahistoricism, and confuse
whatever claims might be made on behalf of the present. Clearly, th
inward seeking motif is not only fully exploited in works as early and
obvious as Tristram Shandy or Jacques the Fatalist, but also crops up
continually where one wouldn't expect it. Even in literatures as naive
as, say, Rumanian Fairy tales, one frequently senses an active
impatience with the arbitrariness of narrative conventions.
Once upon a time something happened. If it had not happened,

it would not be told . . . when the girl reached her sixteenth year,
the same thing befell her that happens to all beautiful maidens -
a dragon came, stole her, and carried her far away ... we won't
linger over the story any longer, we know what always happens
when dragons and princes meet . . .
['The Poor Boy", circa 1885]
More importantly, as Erich Kahler, among others, shows

conclusively, the internalization of narrative is part of a general inward
movement of human consciousness as a whole. "Consciousness expands
as man constantly redraws outer space, the contents of a more and more
complex world, into what Rilke called Weltinnenraum , 'World inner
space.' " [The Inward Turn of Narrative] What Kahler demonstrates
is that in one important sense the entire course of history has been
advancing to the self consciousness of the actual, which tradition had
previously accepted only as a philosophical postulate. The

internalization of narrative is the movement from external action and
epic adventure to the ever deeper and more intense exploration of
character and personality.
Post-Modernism can hardly be defined as unique in its self
consciousness. There is, of course, the "I can't go on, I'll go on" school,
and Beckett has certainly taken this notion as far as it can go in any
sustainable narrative; whether he is the last of the Modernists or the
first of the Post-Modernists is a question of a low order of importance.
Rather what is distinguishing about Post-Modernist self-consciousness
is its aggressivity; the dynamic in which the author both involves and
skeptifies the reader - almost as if the reader were not really there -
evoking the audience as cultural enemy. There is no "Ah, gentle
reader," but rather: "now that I've got you alone down here you
bastard don't think I'm letting you get away easily, no sir, not you
brother; anyway, how do you think you are going to get out, down
here where it is dark and oily like an alley, meaningless as Plato's cave?
Do you think you know the way? Well, you don't know anything, do
you?" [William Gass, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife]
We are dealing here with what might be called a heightened sense
of the unreality of the audience, which is more than a philosophical
problem. In Nabokov and Borges, for example, there is acute self-
consciousness, unambiguous dédoublement, an awareness that the
cultural transaction itself may be snatched away by historical
catastrophe at any moment, and that at best the audience mistranslates
everything. Yet at the same time there remains the belief that history
is audience. To believe in the possibility of creative imagination is to
presuppose an audience which not only changes, but can be changed.
If reality is unalterable, then human activity, much less literature, is
robbed of meaning. For all their old world elitism, these writers never
treat their readers as roughly or contemptuously as our contemporaries.
One must obviously believe in potential reciprocity before one can
afford to be manipulative, and in this sense, Nabokov and Borges are
/jre-Modernist.
The involution of Post-Modern consciousness does not concern the
psychological Self so much as the increasingly problematic relationship
between the writer and the reader. Of all the structural certitudes which
purport to explain human behavior, psychology has certainly suffered
more than any. The Humanist notion that you must go to literature
for any detailed understanding of human character has been essentially
42 CHARLES NEWMAN
discarded in Post-Modern w
you see is what you get.'
the Carpet,' "is just . . . carpet." The attack on the very idea of
explicable motivation does not necessarily demean the complexity of
human nature, but rather the easy reductions of the psychoanalytic
system which gives a predetermined shape to personality and action.
Such recalcitrance nevertheless plays hell with any traditional notion
of plot, to the extent that all cause and effect is intrinsically suspicious.
But if we adopt Kahler's formulation, Post-Modern self-consciousness
aborts the progressively intense exploration of "character and
personality" which is the sine qua non of Humanist psychology.
Ahistoricism reveals itself in contemporary literary strategy as, above
all, anti-psychological. Post-Modernist literature attacks cause and
effect in psychology just as surely as Einstein attacked the concept of
before and after in nature.
On the face of it, metaphors of "usedupness" and randomness are
not only convenient ways of challenging what remains of conventional
notions of progress and linearity, but also remind us that while
movements, nations, and cultures get used up with increasing regularity,
there remains a striking continuity in the persistent and endless verbal
innovation of man. What is striking, in fact, is precisely the opposite
of Barth's notion of hapless finitude, namely, the astonishing durability
and inexhaustibility of literature as its own institution. What we are
experiencing in Post-Modern involution is the private mind asserting
itself, not against a well organized conspiracy of taste, nor totalitarian
propaganda, but against what it perceives as an increasingly
homogenized, passive and inaccessible public mind. The intensity of
this self-assertion is something new; its querulousness goes far beyond
the necessity of reacting against the falsity of antecedent literature. Its
aggressivity employs self-doubt as a means of arousing interest, if not
precisely sympathy. This is a Narcissism mobilized at a new level of
defensive rather than celebratory expression, in which the object
(audience) is blamed in advance for a failure in communication. It
recalls those ritualistic dedications of the minor 16th century nobility
whose authors often prefaced their treatises by humbling themselves
before the symbol of their audience, offering a "poor book" against
the vast knowledge of the "Lord" even as it became thoroughly clear
as the text progressed that the writer regarded the object of his
dedication as a craven idiot.
It was Modernism's obligation

entertainment and art which ch
Post-Modernism, the euphemi
are at categorical odds with one
culture, Post-Modernism erects
irony functions as the intellec
It is a strange world, at any r
is considered "realistic" rather t
lets us on to the fact that it i
conscious." What is more intere
catalogue of our contemporaries
about the writers as "selves."
no longer in vogue. Television
And there is the further presum
the imagination, that the com
While this represents an alto
attempt to eliminate the cele
eventually delimit possibilities
surely as Hemingway's or Mailer
they might take aesthetically an
of open self-aggrandizement,
about the forfeiture of pleasure
Increasingly, throughout the c
to be a precious legacy, is see
historical consciousness which is
the next present. Experience i
of date; both the ongoing mome
dramatically. It is not surpri
characters, only situations.
This suggests two things. First, that we have idealized or
immemorialized the immediate past - Modernism - and second, that
if an artist is to deal with what he perceives to be his historical
inferiority, he has other options than inferiorizing his own work. One
of the faults of our age is to be emblematic of a situation rather than
descriptive of it.
By dismissing self-consciousness as the bench mark of the present,
we can move on to question whether in fact we are distinguished by
anything, save for an ambivalent reaction to high Modernism. But one
thing ought to be clear by now. The new literary aggressivity assaults
not only the reader's bourgeois moralism, his bourgeois notions of
44 CHARLES NEWMAN
entertainment and inst

transaction. The author
illusion, forsaken the olympian omniscient stance of the High
Modernist, but has become, through aggressive indifference to
conventional psychology, interlocutor, intermediary, and auditor. This
incessant shifting of authority is not merely an aesthetic choice, but
reflects a deeply embedded uneasiness permeating all literary affairs.
What is most indicative of Post-Modern self-consciousness is the
extent to which it eschews the psychological for the compositional self.
And coextensively, the only tendency all Post-Modern arts hold in
common is the sense, as a post-historical enterprise, that art is a
commentary on the aesthetic history of whatever genre it adopts.
Self-reflexivity is nothing new, and in any case does not hold within
itself a new image of man. It is nothing more or less than another
subordinated technique. The journey into the interior is not quite the
assembly line we have made it.
5. The Sublation of the Avant-Garde
/ can truly say that I am not in the world, and this is not a mere
mental attitude . . . / prefer to show myself as I am, in my
inexistence and uprootedness . . . but, the reader must believe that
it is a matter of an actual sickness and not a phenomenon of the
age, of a sickness which is related to the essence of the human
being and his central possibility of expression . . .
- Antonin Artaud
To use the term with any historical precision (that is, to use European
literary movements as some kind of analogue for American literary
experience) we can only conclude that there never existed a genuine
Avant-Garde in this country, and if one wishes to study a continuing
Avant-Garde at the present time, one must look to a few totalitarian
societies. The Avant-Garde defines itself historically by the rigidity of
the official culture to which it opposes itself, tout court. Where rigidity
does not exist, it is hypothesized so that attacks upon it can be
vindicated.
If our self-consciousness is less comprehensive than it appears, the
orthodoxy of the Avant-Garde posture also requires some
circumspection. To throw off the provincialism of a William Dean
Howells, for example, or to start Poetry Magazine by soliciting door-
to-door - these are not inconsiderable achievements. But to compare
the indifference of Chicago entrepreneurs to the total control of
European Academic Classicism is to miss the point: that the European
Avant-Garde consisted of extremely well organized and well funded
movements, politicized parties more coherent than many of the "real"
political parties in their national parliaments. Where else but in
Secessionist Vienna could one find the Avant-Garde building a museum
for itself?
46 CHARLES NEWMAN
In retrospect, it would s
European Humanism by t
profound and catastrophic
American emigres, for wh
from a sidewalk cafe. Ev
seemed to have a genius for
of the European movemen
It cannot be emphasized en
a profoundly cultural and p
the very first, it was esse
reform of syntax, vocab
Modernism's stylistic innov
of the Avant-Garde, but th
of culture so fully assimila
moral or political authori
energies have been directed
Garde, the romantic belief
by positioning himself wel
but instructive aspect of Po
literary artist to fight his
That many of our best w
of their time. "Suffering
says, "it embitters." So w
sense - the group of New Y
battle to keep democratic
idea of a true adversary com
point of view (much less
foregone conclusion but which manifests and enforces its own
standards) is pure myth.
Culturally Conservative critics (Rosenberg, Kramer, Howe, et al.)
have attacked such pretenses brilliantly, but even in their fury, there
remains a nostalgia for a community in which artists and intellectuals
might share something beyond an antipathy to Richard Nixon. Their
analysis falls short precisely in not recognizing that the Avant-Garde
is compromised not so much by Bourgeois acceptance as by absorption
into the intelligentsia - at a time when the artist requires publicity more
than direct financial patronage.
For these critics, the very idea of Post-Modernism muddles an already
confused situation, and they are undoubtedly right. To be a cultural
conservative in this day and age is to puncture grandiosity, and avoid
making a fool of oneself, but it is to also ignore the confusing

multiplicity of experience, which though it may be currently overrated,
is nevertheless a fact of contemporary life - one which no
judgmentalism, however shrewd, can adequately convey.
Nevertheless, the suspicion that our social and artistic inflation is
incapable of producing the kind of high art which we associate
historically with the single-minded has a nagging legitimacy. How such
art could be recognized, if in fact it was produced in such diversity,
is an even more interesting question - and the conservatives' argument
is invariably weakened by its definition of culture as something which
has failed them. For all its pertinacious and appropriate ridicule of the
American Avant-Garde, the conservative critique is still grounded in
a theory of Art in which a culture bearing class confers distinctions
and sets norms, a critique which is finally a lament for the conservatives'
own waning influence. Conservative intellectuals remain the only
fraction of the middle class which indentifies its own survival with the
survival of high culture, which in this case is Modernism, and their
pessimism is conditioned by the fact that the culture is no longer in
their control.
Or to put it another way: in the context of proliferating subcultures
it is extremely difficult to gain an identity as a summarizer or overseer
of culture. As the analect's professional concerns become more
specialized, the more generalized and vague his theory of culture
becomes. What we get are significant changes of style within
subcultures, which signal nothing about a change in the larger culture.
In effect we are dealing with a new Regionalism whose definition is
not geographical but aesthetic (and regionalism is the most scorned of
the older notions of criticism). We invariably cast aspersions on an age
which cannot be defined by a great mind, a mind which can at least
exemplify the larger pattern. The critics' job is made immeasurably more
difficult by the lack of truly authoritative figures. In fact, we cannot
imagine an age which has some merit but no distinguishing monuments
of mind.
Moreover, we have no adequate theory to explain the indifference
of market economics; the artists' lot can hardly be characterized as the
result of a conspiracy in any conventional sense of the word. Despite
the most pointed of attacks [' paranoia resolves," Freud said, in an
ultimate instance of 19th century optimism] the only thing that can be
said against the publishing establishment is that it is basically timid,
quick to exploit fashion, and averse to losing money. No heroes or real
48 CHARLES NEWMAN
villains there. Since it is g

which staffs it, it really h
operate authoritatively.
market share is essentially
of oligopoly by default,
analysis here» To quote a
too ignorant for anything to happen to us on a high plane of
degeneracy." In our time, it is petty venality and mushheadedness, not
tyranny, which characterize high capitalist bottomline authority. Ortega
reminds us th^t mass-man flourishes as profusely among the upper
classes as the proletariat. He rarely presents himself as a conventional
adversary. He has read his Nietzsche and knows that no truth shall bind
him.
The fact remains that no Avant-Garde can exist when the
Establishment is not coherent enough to attack. If there is an American
Avant-Garde it can only be described as an overlapping succession
an historically unprecedented number of Avant-Gardes, none of which
has captured an enduring authority.
We should not be surprised that the Avant-Garde has ended up where
it has, i.e., everywhere. As Renato Poggioli points out:
In a democratic society, the tyranny of opinion easily dominates

in moral as in cultural matters; but such tyranny is incapable of
exercising decisive sanctions and establishing absolute conformity.
That society ends up by tolerating, in a limited but not restricted
sphere of action, displays of eccentricity and non-conformity,
tolerating individuals and groups who transgress rather than
follow the norm. In the cultural field, too, democratic society is
therefore forced to admit, beyond the official and normative art,
precisely that other art which has been called, as a synonym for
avant-garde art, the art of exception. Avant-garde art cannot help
paying involuntary homage to democratic and liberal-bourgeois
society in the very act of proclaiming itself antidemocratic and
antibourgeois; nor does it realize that it expresses the evolutionary
and progressive principle of that social order in the very act of
abandoning itself to the opposite chimeras of involution and
revolution . . . [The Theory of the Avant Garde]
Ours is certainly not a time of rest and recreation, nor does it seem
to be a period of consolidation, lacking as it does a great master t
give it tone or label. In some sense, Post-Modernism is a holding action,
a mood which appropriates all th

gripped in the fear of stasis. To
'the noise of emptiness in the frol
decay when it is not imitative no
to resist the atmosphere of manu
pluralism as evasion.
The most damaging hangover of
the concept of technical breakth
adjunct of scientific methodology,
submit - experiment as bluff. The
in the mind of critics. Hans Mag
The historic avant-garde perished by its aporias. It was

questionable, but it was not craven. Never did it try to play it
safe with the excuse that what it was doing was nothing more than
an 'experiment'; it never cloaked itself in science in order to be
absolved of its results. That distinguishes it from the company
of limited responsibility that is its successor; therein lies its
greatness. . . . The path of modern arts is not reversible. Let
others harbor hopes for the end of modernity, for conversions
and 'réintégrations.' What is to be chalked up against today's
avant-garde is not that it has gone too far but that it keeps the
back doors open for itself, that it seeks support in doctrines and
collectives, and that it does not become aware of its own aporias,
long since disposed of by history. It deals in a future that does
not belong to it. Its movement is regression. The avant-garde has
become its opposite: anachronism. That inconspicuous, limitless
risk, in which the artists' future lives - it cannot sustain
it ... with the designation experiment , the avant-garde excuses
its results, takes back, as it were, its "actions", and unloads all
responsibility on the receiver . . . [Die Aponen du Avantgarde]
The fact of the matter is that no one knows what it means to be

Avant-Garde these days, aside from a certain dress or peremptory
manner. From a sociological point of view there are indeed two
distributive cultures, and they can hardly be reduced to a conflict
between Science and Humanism. One culture is the conventional
communications industry, increasingly an adjunct of the kinetic media,
a planetary system of increasingly mergered bodies which conform to
an increasingly inexorable set of mundane laws. This culture is
50 CHARLES NEWMAN
surrounded by a secondar
journals, university anim
mostly hapless energy wh
apparent force of its own,
same equivalent light, an
shooting star.
The rigid compartmentaliz
counterpart and is totally
happens when the diversi
Modernism loses its elitist t
relation with the official
inflated, and spread random
conventional historical analy
become more and more co
style become even more fra
amounts to radical eclecti
with a number of independ
These are the contradiction
to resurrect the dissipated
outsiders storm the Temp
laughter. We will never a
culture is simply not manip
tactician.
One suspects that energy expended upon attacking an audience which

does not exist and an establishment which will not acknowledge itself
is as misspent as that expended on pandering to the lowest common
denominator. It is this innocent fact, of a real non-existent audience
and a genuine indifference to Art, which the Post-Modern artist
confronts if not always honestly, at least consciously. To maintain the
militant posture of a Modernistic rebel is not only historically perverse
but refuses contemporary experience. We are not, unfortunately
perhaps, simply the sum total of Western European ways. Nor have
we defined our exceptionality with more precision.
If a "post-industrial" society, as Daniel Bell defines it, is an
"information society" - even one of "alternative" information -it
is a rule of life that such information will tend to become equivalent
and undifferentiated, except insofar as it is given marketing labels,
whether intellectual or commercial. J.H. Huizinga made a precise stab
at this fact when he noted that:
The Post-Modern A ura 5 1
All art is a striving and our over con

striving be given a name ... art
mechanization and fashion than sci
the -ism terms are chiefly limited
Monism, vitalism, idealism are term
of view . . . only when it comes to
of knowledge to a universal princ
part ... It is a pre-eminently modern
with proclaiming a movement which
only then attempts to make the corr
the Shadow of Tomorrow]
But Huizinga's analysis is perhaps

with Fry's coinage, and in a more min
may not in fact be generative - even t
no one knows, least of all the few who
present day can be best understood as
change which are neither myth nor
disparaging sense - the writer allud
If the traditional Avant-Garde was characterized by incessant

innovation and the forced consumption of cultural goods, then a good
case can be made for capitalist consumer culture as the Avant-Garde
of our time. As Gerald Graff puts it, "advanced capitalism needs to
destroy all vestiges of tradition, all orthodox ideologies, all continuous
and stable forms of reality in order to stimulate higher levels of
consumption." Crisis becomes not a revolutionary but the ultimate
capitalist metaphor. The American Avant-Garde never confronted the
dominant cultural and political institutions of its society. Its linguistic
transformations are nothing to be sneezed at, but its orientation would
play too easily into the hands of a new linguistic determinism, and,
as we shall see, made it that much easier for its attitudes to be integrated
into both mass culture and literary theory.
The idea of being willingly cut off from History by aesthetics is a
distinctly new idea, and one which was Western European before it
was American; but only America found the idea, on the whole, salutary.
In our recent desuetude, however, we note an increasing weariness with
the warlike atonalities and radical confrontation which are the legacy
of a European consciousness which was genuinely embattled and whose
enemies were obvious and omnipresent. Abstract art, in this sense, was
52 CHARLES NEWMAN
an attack upon the cultural

was its vanguard. Post-Mod
invokes the spectre of a n
Consumer capitalism may be
We have enormous nostalg
because historically it is easie
European Modernism and its
social and political moveme
emphasis on the aesthetics o
see our literary movements a
just as our few attempts at
literary. The missing soci
Modernism, and it was missing from the first, cannot be
overemphasized.
If we miss the point that self-consciousness is simply one subordinated
technique among others, we tend also to refuse to see the Avant-Garde
as one of many traditions, a tradition which requires a specifically
defined adversary. True experimentation uses tradition ruthlessly; it
does not expend its major energies in making the past appear old. We
live with the knowledge that we are not nearly as advanced as our
vitalistic predecessors predicted we would be. It is only recently that
we have come to terms with that fact, and have seen our adjustment
as having some merit, not simply as another occasion for ritual self-
abnegation. The American audience has developed an unbridled
affection for the artist who is dumb, self-destructive, isolated and
basically crazy. The "Avant-Garde" now deserves the horns of its
quotation marks just as much as the "Bourgeois reality" it presumably
subverts.
The Avant-Garde, in fact, has become nothing more or less than
bourgeois self-criticism.
6. Speculations in Lieu of a Transition
In truth, parody was here the proud expedient of a great fight

threatened with sterility by a combination of skepticism,
intellectual reserve, and a sense of the deadly extension of the
Kingdom of the banal.
- Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus
If Modernism attempted to recapture in the world of art the

traditional coherences once associated with religion and social order,
then is it not perfectly logical for Post-Modernism to challenge and
even ridicule this last gasp of Absolutism (and Absolution), to lay bare
the means of attaining such a "transcendent" position, and to involve
the reader not as an acolyte, but as an accomplice, willing or not, in
the destruction of this most complex and perdurable of all illusions?
Art can no longer be a sanctuary, when questioning the "classic"
formulations of art is central to the artistic transaction. And art as
sanctuary is really quite a minor idea, possible only in a period of
extreme pessimism and disruption.
Every writer insists that the imagination is the writer's source of
authority, that he was not put on the earth to deal with a reality which
is already complete. Moreover, even those with no imagination know
that the imagination does not operate in a sensory vacuum. Yet the
fashionable illusion is that the imagination is validated to the extent
to which it eschews external evidence. This is a contradiction very much
worth pursuing, because confronting it makes it possible to distinguish
between substantial and trivial forms of the imagination, between vision
and lies. It is after all the Modernists' high seriousness of purpose, the
pretension of art as a sanctuary (when the evidence suggests that it can
be clearly a maze, a prison, a battlefield, a gladiola, or anything else
54 CHARLES NEWMAN
one wants to make of it), t

remaining refuge, which is so
reflexive work.
We should bear in mind that the privileged notion of art as the
energizer of discourse still holds - only that art is now seen as a
destroyer, not an incidence of sublime power, nugatory of the
established reality even as it depicts it. To understand this voluntary
aspect of literature is absolutely crucial. It is not transcendence which
differentiates art from science; it is the very lack of external compulsion
and absolute imperative which effects its internal dynamics. The creative
impulse of modern art is centered in the will, and it is ruminative
willfulness precisely which is both the catalyst and catalepsy of the Post-
modern temper.
In such a situation even despair no longer has the lofty ring of
certainty; true despair, like true cheerfulness, becomes finally untenable,
an overrated purgative, too lofty for the skeptical personality.
Apocalyptic posturing tends only to make despair abstract and finally
unconvincing; its old bittersweet quality becomes manic and obtrusive.
When Hemingway's Frederick Henry walks out of the hotel into the
rain after losing his lover and child, the peremptory flatness of the
ending is meant to counter the melodramatic and sentimental Victorian
convention. This kind of silent stoic forebearance tends to crumble
under Post-modern levity; it is the single impossible reaction for the
Post-modern protagonist. Terminal melancholy is too absolute and high
minded to be sustainable. Even silence is robbed of utter despondency
and reified. Melancholy is permitted, as long as it too is leavened with
irony. Irony is to the contemporary intellectual what self-absolution
is to the modern politician. It certifies a certain necessary seriousness
of purpose, it implies secret knowledge which cannot be made entirely
public for everyone's good; it forms a reality principle unto itself, the
verbal animal's deflection not of alienation but of the terrible
straightforward. Irony is no longer a dynamic principle, but the inert
substance of the matter. One becomes ironic about irony - infinite
reduction becomes the engine of narrative momentum.
Just how commonplace the concept of irony has become can be seen
in Brooks and Warren's "Letter to the Teacher" in 1959:
. . . one of the objections which may be brought against the

emphasis on irony [is that] it ends in the celebration of a smug
and futile skepticism which is at variance with actual effort which
most successful literary compositi

[We] would not endorse any irony
would endorse an irony which for
of as full a context as possible.
How ironical that irony is seen as

or that it requires a "full contex
in some time, and the most insu
another's intelligence is that it is n
irony "precedes resolution" by a
This is the elitism of the isolated
no other choice: Flaubert's ambivale
supreme self-confidence and self
Elitism cannot function as mere
than a coterie to find expression
response to Mass Culture, and as
system. Elitism requires a communi
Modernism, despite the nostalgia
chaotic, when compared to the c
Revolution in America, where, enfo
a professional class takes up wo
relationship to society. Coherence
but by curricula. We should nev
whatever theoretical order it has
Is it so difficult to understand our
self-parody, with the metaphors of
the rhetoric of terminalityl The my
on an intense, almost baffling q
mythology of history, the Trans
every American generation of the 2
its peculiar myth of deprivation
god that failed, nada, darkness at
the sand, silence, apathy, involution, apocalypse, entropy - the
catalogue is as endless as it is banal. We should note how these terms
are invariably united about a single recurrent theme: an existence
between realities.
As Whitman had it, echoing Matthew Arnold, "society waits
unformed, and is for awhile between things ended and things begun,"
which is after all the quintessential American sense of history and our
dubious gift to the devolution of western thought. Is it really surprising
56 CHARLES NEWMAN
after a century of this meta

or pessimistic forms, that a
apocalypses, we should s
desuetude?
It was not only the bomb shelter mentality of the fifties which
provided us with the fashionable Apocalypse, but the Black Humor
whose central tactic was, after all, to ridicule the pretensions of
Existentialism by mocking the lavish redundancy of its own despair.
In the sixties we hedged our bets with Entropy. Stasis seems to be in
favor now. Only the degree of degradation here is different - they are
all commencement exercises. "Universal History," Borges says
somewhere, "is the history of the different intonations given a handful
of metaphors." And now that we have scandalized ourselves in every
possible way, inhabiting an incredulous world where the slightest slip
of consumership can kill you, is it not appropriate to finish off these
metaphors by literally beating them to death? The Apocalypse is over.
Not because it didn't happen, but because it happens every day.
The eclectic, once the selection of the best from various systems,
becomes atomized, free-radicalized - not even antagonistic as in
dialectical thought, but a vast plurality, in which it seems each book
must invent a context for itself before it can proceed. We may not be
the first eclectic age; but we may be the first who knew it.
It is one thing to consider all the old rules anachronistic; it is quite
another to have to invent rules as one goes along. The issue becomes
very complicated here. There are those who push epistemology past
Bishop Berkeley: "a kind of writing, a kind of discourse whose shape
will be an interrogation, an endless interrogation of what it is doing
while doing it, an endless denunciation of its fraudulence, of what it
really is: an illusion (fiction) just as life is an illusion (of fiction)."
(Raymond Federman)
If we make a concession to the affected view that life is only a series
of endless fictions, we can also assert that the artist may - precisely
because he is what he is, precisely because his willfulness is arbitrary -
choose to reverse such a fashionable notion, and simply ignore the fact
that "life" is patternless, while imposing coherence and order upon
his narratives. No doubt he will be accused of manipulation (another
word like "style" which has achieved pejorative status recently), but
if Modernism proved to be over-optimistic in its attempts to reformulate
the world through aesthetics, perhaps we take our own debased
condition a bit too gravely. For example, from his notebooks it seems
perfectly clear that Dostoevsky

of the illusory and indetermina
him from trying to impose, as
in this regard), both an inne
Dostoevsky knew he was slig
society was changing, probably
mass of people with which
relationship didn't give a dam
invited to Stockholm to have hi
one might argue that he didn't
that "life has changed"; but i
life seemed less chaotic to D
intellectual's despair and exhau
for example, our fatigue s
shopworn. And to believe that
our life is more bizarre and dif
Paris, Mayhew's London, or B
We are at the point where we

historical outline. We know th
with historical thinking, and
way upon a preoccupation with
cultural coherence. R.P. Blackm
of economic, political and cu
between 1900 and 1920 they ha
Paris made a division of human
consequence very nearly fata
The Modernists felt themselves to be "true ancients" in the classical
sense. What is unique about Post-Modernism is not its ambivalent
quarrel with predecessors, which all movements share, but its refusal
to resurrect and emulate a former "golden" age. Apart from the
"Second Revolution," History has collapsed. It is easy to dismiss Post-
Modernism's almost risible ahistoricism - seeing history primarily in
terms of the evolution of aesthetic form. But we should note that the
counter argument of those who seek a return to realism is severely
weakened by a similar lack of historical grounding, both in their moral
and philosophical precepts, as well as by virtue of the nostalgic delusion
that our progenitors spent most of their leisure among books, that
literature, in Emerson's words, permeated "the kitchen, the parlour,
58 CHARLES NEWMAN
and the nursery." What is

of a society which is no lon
centered. This recognition
by dissecting a metropolis
resists taking a period o
Nevertheless, to live in a t
"New Novel" is introduce
discarded in something l
previously thought to be
period comes to dominate i
that eclecticism is not without its rewards.
To see the contemporary as simply a rejection of the aesthetic

moralism of Modernism is only to confuse the question. There is simply
no art which does not claim, even at its most perverse, a moral
dimension insofar as it is an act of free will. Even when the narrator
shows his face and strings above the puppet theatre, that is a moral
act, just as in the case of the narrator who announces he's going to
show you how to live the second half of your life. Those who most
recently rail against the Nihilism of the Post-Modern imply that we must
return to conventional literary techniques to get at the truth. When
Joseph Wood Krutch first complained that tragedy as we knew it is
impossible in the modern world, he was above all complaining that the
shape of Tragedy is gone. A little neo-Aristotelianism is not going to
get us out of the mess we are in; the simple refusal to innovate does
not produce realism, the antidote to ahistoricism is not the historical
romance. In a mass society, almost any individualized resistance to the
crowd, any studied articulateness, automatically confers a mild aura
of counterforce, if not distinction. Even in totalitarian societies, where
resistance is actually risky, to be anti-establishment, as Joseph Brodsky
has pointed out, is in itself a moral and poetic credential, and as such
encourages complacency. Cynicism, we ought to recall, exerts the most
profound thought control.
The terms revolutionary and evolutionary, in their historical and
scientific sense, no longer have any meaning for literary culture. The
concepts of a definitive break and that of an orderly development are
both equally foreign to us. We are dealing with rites, forms, dynamics
and classifications of change for which we have no extant humanistic
models. On the face of it, this would seem like a made-to-order
prescription for Ford's traditional "intensive novelist," who pursues
a deep inquiry into the behavior

milieu, in which the individu
circumstance. Yet, the contemp
is surely to resist this kind of co
has never been more suspect, and
which does not require experien
What is required is a revisionis
have the following saliencies
revolution, but a devolution - an
of European aesthetic conventi
the purgation of any historical
place in the context of the mo
European history: during the fifty
output per head grew more rap
the technological foundation for
increased the scope of the artis
this Pre-Modernist period represe
Bourgeois values of privacy and le
In hindsight, we have this extrao
attacked as "rotten to the core
period of relative security and su
memory. It is unlikely that the
wished pre-1914 Europe to disapp
perception that none of the rev
from the rubble. The most startl
is the ferocity with which it w
National Socialist regimes. No
revolution without the most prof
lesson of Modernism that anta
cultural arrogance always seems
We ought not minimize the ext
expansionist impulse of its histori
in 19th century evolutionary
breakthrough. To presuppose a
deeper, richer and more complex,
for self-destruction. This inflatio
inextricably in our time to the
goal - the oppressive demand
Lawrence meant when he said
on and on and on." The German
oneself to death."
60 CHARLES NEWMAN
Modernism does not hum

know. Sometimes it seem
remains essentially dialect
holds that anarchy can be distilled by the single aesthetic
consciousness - and in this sense, contradictions remain aesthetically
resolvable. It remains relatively self-policing - until, of course, the real
police move in.
The exaggerations of Modernist expansionism seem almost quaint
to us now. Pound's green slacks and earring are now favored by those
who sell tax shelters; Stevens' blue guitar that does not play things as
they are no longer seems bizarre in the hands of suburban high school
girls; the most outrageous thing that could be said about crazy Marinetti
was that he was the caffeine of Europe.
Post-Modernism is also the product of another unprecedented

economic growth, American style. It is not insignificant that a graph
of the consumer price index from 1930 to the present resembles exactly
that of the movement of conflict, resolution and denouement of
Aristotelean tragedy. As opposed to the 19th century European
economic expansion, which was characterized by seventy-five years of
relatively stable prices, the fluctuations in the value of money since 1914,
as Keynes said, "have been on a scale so great as to constitute one of
the most significant events of the modern world." These fluctuations
were paralleled by an alarming expansion of the intellectual class. As
Gramsci wrote, "The Democratic-Bureaucratic system has given rise
to a great mass of functions which are not at all justified by the social
necessities of production . . . quantity cannot be separated from
quality ... to give a democratic structure to high culture and top-level
technology creates vast crises of unemployment for the middle
intellectual strata. ..."
It is all well and good to propose art as multidimensional, requir
multichannels of communication, with process replacing analys
but not at the expense of understanding that a multicentric culture
not only the product of aesthetic choice but of a strenuous competit
between intellectuals, in which elasticity of mind, and contradict
which are more than tolerated, can be just as self-serving as the m
rigid hierarchical expansionism. When the dialectic between art
history is rejected, what is also often lost is a dialectic between
contemporaneous movements - which is to say, any principle o
ongoing self-criticism. If every option is a mode and every mod
option, the sense of watchin

judgment. When an institution
can be certain it is on the per
in a period of non-judgmental
The multicentricity of culture
that there are many centers d
any of them. Post-Modernism
only unpleasant choices; that
has to offer.
It should now be possible to move, if only crabwise, to a consideration

of what may be culturally and aesthetically distinctive about Post-
Modernist writing. The purpose of this is hardly to recommend a
program, for it is precisely the programmatic nature of the "rhetoric
of uniqueness" which is insufficient. It is very tiresome always to be
talking about uniqueness when the issue is really one of survival. De
Tocqueville saw that democratic society was at once "exciting and
monotonous," for behind "every insistence upon uniqueness" there
lay the "terror of stasis and of missed opportunity." Or, as Jacques
Riviere pointed out to Antonin Artaud - there is a "vast contrast
between the extraordinary precision of your self-diagnosis, and the
vagueness of what you are endeavoring to achieve."
7. Opacity as Reality
Philosophy is a noble and arduous discipline. Fiction is equally
severe. But literary philosophy is shit. Literary Sociology is shit.
Literary Psychology is shit. What would a literary physics
be? . . . I tried to write a book that would not be like all the books
I despise.
- William Gass, a letter
William Gass is the only contemporary American writer who has

given us a coherent philosophy of fiction, an aesthetics which he actually
practices, and a criticism coextensive with his art. His approach is
apparently Formalist - tough-minded, polemical, proceeding through
the entire panoply of relativism to purge the sentimental impulse - so
that in the end the performance can be reaffirmed in impassioned
holistic assertion:
A consciousness electrified by beauty - is that not the aim and

emblem of the ending of all finely made love?
Are you Afraid? [Fiction and the Figures of Life]
It requires considerable contrariness to use such words unself-

consciously, and a summary of Gass's concerns illustrates an
operational, if still largely unspoken, consensus among a great many
contemporary writers.
Fiction does not render the world but makes its own world. Fiction
is not history because history itself cannot be understood in itself as
a language, as history does not consist of signs. Further, history is not
intelligible without an extra-historical essence as a matter of principle.
Therefore, fiction presumes an epistemologicallyp/vv/Veged position as
a matter of course. It operates

in this sense, fiction always ch
is a world which can be enter
oneself. In such a world, plot
("mostly canvas*') of historic
momentum than we suppose.
the sentence, and it is the dram
than eye, closer to poetry th
momentum of narrative, a seri
of language, "a world insepar
is significance.
The reader is not a passive pa
than the narrator is a passiv
commonly received notion, th
purpose of a literary work i
consequent creation in you, o
operative here. Demands are pla
exist in the traditional literary
justify his own existence.
There is nothing here that wo
Critics. But the Formalist pro
aspects.
First of all, what the New C
does for fiction. Whereas the traditional Formalists were more
concerned with laying out an idealistic charter to preserve conservative
values, liberate the idea of coherence from historical scholars, and
oppose the nihilistic experimentation and futurism of the Avant-Garde,
Gass 's idealism takes a much more aggressive form, where the reader
is not merely asked to lay aside certain preconceptions, but to put
himself on the line, to overcome the fear of the strange "other life"
which language offers. The implication is, simply, why would anyone
want fiction to be synchronous with the real world?
With Gass, early Modernism has been fully assimilated, and as such
formalism is no longer predicated upon a doctrinal sense of loss, but
rather upon a new set of contractual relations. This takes traditional
formalism beyond its own compulsive dualism to insist upon a true
reciprocity not between word and thing, but between reader and writer.
Fiction is a simulacrum of reality at some point, but it is not achieved
through a system of value, or a formula for feelings; it is a process
of signification which does not unify experiences but is its own
64 CHARLES NEWMAN
experience. The work of a

representative. This is quite the opposite of Barth. Rather than
"exposing" artifice, the writer must overcome the reader's suspicion
of the "artificial," recapture him in an absolute reorganization.
Philosophically, this may be very old hat; it is original only in the
lyricism of its presentation and its spirit of affirmation.* Rather than
lamenting the departure of good readers (and reality itself) , Gass insists
that if the writer is true to his privileged position, then the reader can
be recaptured. Rather than merely insult the reader, Gass urges him
on a very exacting journey - which in our time may amount to the
same thing. To make such demands on the reader is, in one sense, to
make a virtue of necessity, which is the essential formalist anomaly.
The reader, like the book itself, is idealized - beyond history.
The unspoken enemy of fiction throughout Gass's work is not
Realism per se but what André Gide's Edouard called the "tyranny
of resemblance":
It is because the novel of all literary genres is the freest, the most
lawless, ... it is for that very reason, for fear of that very liberty
(the artists who are always sighing after liberty are often the most
bewildered when they get it), that the novel has always clung to
reality with such timidity. And I am not speaking only of the
French novel. It is the same with the English novel; and the
Russian novel, for all its throwing off of constraints, is a slave
to resemblance. The only progress it looks to is to get still nearer
to nature. A novel has never known that 'formidable erosion of
contours' as Nietzsche calls it; that deliberate avoidance of life,
which gave style to the works of the Greek dramatists, for
instance, or to the tragedies of the French 17th Century. Is there
anything more perfectly and deeply human than these works? But
that's just it - they are human only in their depth; they don't
pride themselves on appearing so - or, at any rate, on appearing
real. [The Counterfeiters]
*One of the problems with Gass's argument is that it is so easily vulgarized; e.g.:
"Superfiction does not represent reality. It does not recreate reality . . . Instead it creates
a whole life of its own . . . with all the energy, playfulness, and exuberance that we
associate with the best times of living, here under the control of a master creator, the
fictionist. It's the difference between watching the neighbors and having your own
fun. . . . " [J. Klinkowitz, The Life of Fiction]
Mark Schorer amplified this cont
When we speak of technique, we

difference between content, or
for art, is technique. For techn
writer's experience, which is hi
attend to it: technique is the on
exploring, developing his subjec
finally of evaluating it.
Technique alone objectifies the m

alone evaluates those materials. This is the axiom which
demonstrates itself so devastatingly whenever a writer declares
under the urgent sense of the importance of his materials -
whether these are autobiography, or social ideas or personal
passions - whenever such a writer declares that he cannot linger
with technical refinements. [Technique as Discovery]
While the theoreticians' view of art is nominally one of constraint

and conventions, the writer always has a choice, a choice that he do
not have as a mere man, for only as a writer can he become the totally
self-referential narrator of Willie Master's Lonesome Wife, or th
abstract third balcony baritone of Omensetter's Luck, who chooses
speak to us in a patois of midwestern rural vernacular, often cast i
iambic pentameter. It is this matter of genuine, if arbitrary choice, so
crucial to the artist, that critics so often miss, what Gass describes
the "kindly imprisonment" of the literary. The constraints of this prison
are far different than those of the Structuralist penitentiary, whe
Language is seen as a vicious circle, literally signifying nothing except
itself, the exaggeration pro forma of man's condition - all speech
hyperbole, all prose rhetorical, all poetry prosedemic, all thought
proleptic.
While it is true that we are circumscribed by language, it is simply
a matter of rhetoric - not as a series of devices, but a spectrum of
choices - whether we choose to describe that circle as vicious or
magical. It is here that we must either confess with Pascal and Rousseau
that we are trapped within language and dignify silence as the only
nobility, or reassert a faith in the plasticity of life, in its linguistic
possibilities, as did Nietzsche and William James. There are those who
choose to be lost, locked into an "ontology of nothingness," though
66 CHARLES NEWMAN
we ought not forget that r

as those from safer region
ourselves does not mean
of "nothingness" is one t
that "nothing is there"
nothingness any more than
process. One cannot mak
a hypothetical vantage po
to postulate an "entrapmen
from which anyone coul
sensorily certain about lan
of it; and when we're ou
For Gass, the crisis of cul
is neither silence nor the
exploitation of the natu
precisely because languag
to mastery. Gass can mak
the oldest and most diffic
No one knows how langu
off the hook by pronoun
don't know, doesn't mea
solution par excellence; a p
compensated for by an a
that this trade off is sal
finally dispel our doubts
There is an epistemologica
ought not to be overlook
reveals its own preference of perspective, often influenced by
technology. The 18th century, for example, was extremely fond of the
telescope and its imagery, but ridiculed the microscope. The 20th
century has its own ambivalent obsession with the camera, which ends
up in our time dividing works into those written primarily to be adapted
for film, and those whose primary status seems utterly to resist visual
translation. At any rate, if we simply imagine, in Ortega's figure, a
man looking out of his window at a garden, it doesn't take a genius
to note the shift from the objective integrity of the 18th century framed
landscape - through the implosion of the frame in the 19th century
in which the reality of the garden is sharply attenuated as the focus
of the observer comes to the fore - to the present, in which the
"window" is neither transparent nor mirrored, but a membrane
simultaneously separating and

with authorial breath as muc
metaphor for language is a co
garden are not only in reduced
independently of the process.
fact a window, but its own a
No one knows why each his
emphasis of the equation, but t
of epistemology, for it is jus
so, than the prepackaged social
significance (genre) which he f
if classical periods can be said
19th century upon the me
ideologized the epistemological.
Gass's achievement is the recog
feature of human behavior, and
arbitrary, then one can take a
view of language, by asserting
for creating knowledge of the
to incorporate that experience
"It is the sentence which confe
also controls one's estimation
This is a compelling notion b
determinism nor the concept
that the work of art is a syst
a perpetual present, no matter
its past and future. A story
is a fiction with a life of its own. This is a crucial distinction because
it does not deny reality to objects which have an ontological status
outside of language. Indeed, Gass is typically indifferent to this
question. He is simply lyrically and aggressively reaffirming Fry's
♦This philosophical debate is not amplified by advances in neurophysiology. The animal

retina is clearly not a passive transmitter of information, but a highly discriminatory
faculty, which means the most elementary act of perception is inextricably tied up with
learning and memory - evidence certainly for the Formalist contention that reality is
conditioned by technique. Yet the Realist can point out that the reorganization by the
optic nerve involves a mere three synapses, that any degeneration of precision is quite
minor, and the statistical reliability of the process is intact and purposive. We are not
much advanced in this regard since Poe noted that "we always see too little, but we
always see too much."
68 CHARLES NEWMAN
distinction between the ro

while dismissing the kind o
culture - a literature which
them up as reality, with lit
Be that as it may, one ca
elaborate and fully pressed
a problem? The nagging sus
so conspicuously on guard a
so conscious of avoiding t
into another version of *
temporal reality as Barth ap
which sanctifies risk, yet
judgment, has in fact not
adversaries it locates in th
and its rhetoric of autono
over-administered hierarc
For if the artist is as free a
energy in subliminally fen
he says, "and to see the glas
operations." Yet if the artis
position, this problem sho
artist can erase, renegoti
assurance he draws them.
It is characteristic of the Formalist impulse, and typical of so much
contemporary art, that we can admire it without being finally convinced
of its necessity. For here we have a system without leaks or levers;
literature as a closed organism, a factory in which curiosity about what
is fabricated and what is the goal of its labor, are apparently questions
outside its design.
Gass raises the question whether an aesthetic so fully and
systematically engaged against Pseudo-art allows itself the amplitude
to authenticate itself. It exudes that uneasiness peculiar to all movements
which attempt to fulfill heroic cultural models independent of society,
an art which presents itselfthrough pure expressivity as an idealized
form in which content is secondary.
8. To Drain A Lake
"If you drain a lake, the water must run somewhere. If it is no
longer where it used to be, where has it gone? Where can it go
-Saul Bellow
If William Gass insists upon the primacy of language in its mo

idealistic form, then Saul Bellow is certainly our most consistent
advocate of the realistic tradition; indeed, his view of society as a noet
domain fully available to conventional literary embodiment approaches
something of an obsession. Nowhere in contemporary literature is t
uneasy and anomic relationship between the writer and his critic
audience, between the artist and his antecedents, more apparent th
in the career of Saul Bellow. No other writer has so fully exploited the
type of the modern intellectual, with such attendant scorn for th
implications of the type.
Bellow's uniqueness and strength has always been that he, practically
alone, focuses on the continuity of the 19th century novel, rather tha
on the Grand Caesura of Modernism. While his work is often concerned
with the most up-to date ideas and preoccupations, never is there a single
concession to Modernist aesthetic experimentation - nowhere else is
Modernism discoursed upon in such an amodernist mode. In fact, most
of Bellow's work may be seen as a threnody on the disappearance of
homogeneous cultural quality and unity, the attenuation of the actual.
Bellow's realism is not so much an aesthetic program as a habit of mind,
an implicit value system of bourgeois individualism which will not
accede to the individual's diminishment. "It is the Self, the person to
whom things happen, who is perhaps not acceptable to the difficult
and fastidious Modern consciousness."
And clearly, insofar as Bellow's protagonists are victims, it is not
as a result of an uxorious fate or existential dilemma, but because they
70 CHARLES NEWMAN
spend so much time rehashing

fashionable vocabularies of sel
of them. Here the self, as w
intellectual baggage, the irony
to be the substance of the wo
one forgets all the books on
There are two historical fact
Bellow for his "serious inte
for his old fashioned, plotte
First is Bellow's acute awar
central to the creation of m
modernist elitism can entirely
like Gass's, roughly spans t
Modernist culture, those writ
by insisting that only art end
printed word has been inexo
culture, where the writer is
any particular celebrity. In th
must deal with the dark side
he has somehow lost not on
inherited forms of communica
attempts to smuggle 19th cen
while always skeptical of ske
is no mean feat. His work is
time by simply refusing to
This view of the lost 19th ce

poring over narratives by lam
must be contrasted with G
audience. But who is to blam
author? If Gass locates the cri
generally - very generally:
Art must be understood as

the things to be purged are
the sophisticated media. Ca
By ordinary means? I don't k
some very powerful comman
this invasion of foreign bo
What I am trying to indicate is th

confused with genuine understan
understanding has few representativ
to have hundreds of thousands. ["Literature in the Age of
Technology"]
This then is the situation. Critics and professors have declared

themselves the true heirs and successors of the modern classic
writers. They have obscured the connection between the
contemporary writer and his predecessors. They have not shaped
the opinions of the educated classes. They have miseducated the
young. ["Cloister Culture"]
Elsewhere he complains that Dickens didn't try to be John Stuart

Mill, though Bellow is painfully aware of how much closer Dickens
and Mill were than, say, Bellow and Harold Bloom. It is no accident
that Mr. Sammler's Planet is by far Bellow's most fully realized work,
because we have a narrator who is finally comfortable with himself,
a figure who has always lurked in the heart of Bellow's
characterizations, the Professor Manqué.
We can have no more dissimilar reactions to contemporary experience
and its potential literary embodiment than those of Bellow and Donald
Barthelme. Compare Barthelme's parody of Henry James:
Try to be a man about whom nothing is known, our father said,

when we were young. Our father said several other interesting
things, but we have forgotten what they were . . . Our father was
a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about
him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very interesting. A
tree is more interesting. A sentence is more interesting. A canned
good is more interesting . . . [Snow White]
with the solemnity of Sammler:
He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet -through all
the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which
we are speeding - he did meet the terms of his contract. The
terms of which in his inmost heart, each man knows, as I know
mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it - that we all know,
God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.
72 CHARLES NEWMAN
The total divergence, in e

same time and place, is w
Sammler's complaint repre

Bellow's expository occas
Sammler-like rhetorical qu
It is rather as if Bellow as
novelist.
Perhaps some power withi

the old misconceptions ha
being is not what he co
question nevertheless re
["Recent American Ficti
Now realism in literature is convention and this convention

postulates that human beings are not what everyone for long
centuries conceived them to be. They are something different, and
they live in a disenchanted world that exists for no particular
purpose that science can show. ["Machines & Storybooks"]
At the moment, however, the writer feels a certain inferiority.

He inherits a realistic tradition in which the writer deals in facts
and seems to know. But what sort of knowledge does he actually
have? . . . Writers cannot simply continue in the old way. ["The
Writer as Moralist"]
I cannot agree with recent writers who have told us that we are
nothing. We are indeed not what The Golden Ages boasted us
to be. But we are something. ["Fiction of the Fifties"]
Something was being done to put in question the meaning of

survival, the meaning of pity, the meaning of justice and of the
importance of being oneself. ["Literature in the Age of
Technology"]
The novel can't be compared to the epic, or to the monuments

of poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now. It is sort
♦Emphasis added.
of a latterday lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes

shelter ... it tells us that for every human being there is a diversity
of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part,
and that these many existences signify something, fulfill
something . . . [Nobel Speech]
One's reaction to this is comparable to Tolstoy's response to a poem

of Maeterlinck's he couldn't fathom. "Who went out? Who came in?
Who is speaking? Who died?"
The acknowledgement that something has happened is circumscribed
by the more frightening notion that something hasn't happened - that
there have been substantive changes in human character which are not
expressed in theories of aesthetic innovation, that there are continuities
in the human condition and the realist's perception of it, which have
not been spelled out, much less reaffirmed. In both its vagueness and
assertiveness, this constitutes an all too familiar contemporary view of
History - culminating in the writer who through some unparticularized
conspiracy of intellectuals has been denied not only his audience but
his very tradition; that Lake which has dried up, but is still somewherel
How does one attack intellectual inauthenticity if one's own means and
materials are indistinguishable from those of the intellectuals one is
attacking? How does one account for the recent changes in the human
condition, and also imply that the radical aesthetic procedures which
paralleled them are irrelevant? If we can't continue "in the same old
way," then why does Bellow do it?
The suspicion persists that what Bellow is attempting to recapture
is not Realism, nor a newly efficacious method, but rather the centrality
of the realist writer in an integrated and properly honorific culture.
What is being expressed is the fear that no matter how relentlessly
serious one is, that no matter how forcefully one resists the gimmickry
of Modernism, History itself - that sedimentary outline of the great
lake - has denied him the possibility of being taken seriously. It is
this fear, the fear of the Epigonentum - of living in a totally derivative
age - which makes Bellow's work, at first glance so aesthetically timid,
so quintessentially Post-Modern: the last thing he ever wanted.
Against Bellow's obsessions with lost audience, shattered authority,
corrupt intermediaries, and that redundant, ineffable "something," the
loss of which is all the more poignant in its lack of specificity, we may
place Gass's idea of art as its own independent reality, a form which
is neither ahistorical nor rehearsed history, a willed achievement
74 CHARLES NEWMAN
apparently as indifferen
be surprising that both wr
or that the strategy in
is to take the aesthetics
conclusion: Technique as
transcends and transfor
In his suspicion of Form
this question, for his ow
repository of history can
locate the "lost content
that lost content which
Gass's argument is more
simply lacks Bellow's re
problem as one of the la
would make every reader an intellectual, Bellow sees his own
middlebrow audience as compromised by a conspiracy of intellectuals.
(It is a commonplace of Post-Modernism that the barbarism once
attributed to the provincial middle-class is shifted to intellectuals as their
status becomes increasingly respectable.) Bellow sees himself (correctly
in this case) as denied both the mantle of the Modernist giants as well
as the imprimatur of the Vanguard, which, infuriatingly enough, puts
him in the company of practically everyone else.
When all is said and done, this is not a proper philosophical debate
at all. At the most basic level of analysis, Bellow simply prefers a
narrative style closer to human speech, while Gass relies on more
sonorous and poetic devices, style as both a mask and admission. What
it boils down to is Gass's absorption of the late Modernist aesthetic -
the peripherality of the artist is precisely what gives him his leverage -
set alongside of Bellow's sense that "something" has pushed the writer
out of his centrality, and that the resultant distancing amounts only
to a dissipation of power. They are both right, as far as it goes.
But if Gass is occasionally ethereal, Bellow is from the first evasive,
ranting against those intellectuals who have done art a disservice. 'The
fact is that modern art has tried very hard to please its intellectual
judges. . . . Art in the 20th century is more greatly appreciated if it
is directly translatable into intellectual interests, if it lends itself to
discourse. Because intellectuals do not like to suspend themselves in
works of the imagination. They prefer to talk." ["Machines and
Storybooks"] There could not be a more withering indictment of his
own work.
Bellow's poignancy is charact

officially Modernist culture.
predominance of technique
technique, that it is necessary t
is subordinated, he can neverthe
above the level of the man in
its clear limitations, can no lon
admissable content.
9. Rouse the Stupid
and Damp the Pert
"I had been plotting arch romance without knowing it. "
-Henry James
"The absolute killer is not to have a sense of humor. "
- Johnny Carson
What most obviously distinguishes recent American fiction not only

from its predecessors but also from its world counterparts is the
relentless seriousness and protoplasmic energy of its humor. As Sinclair
Lewis says of his dear Babbitt, "he had felt that he had been cast into
that very net from which he had with such fury escaped, and supremest
jest of all, had been made to rejoice in the trapping," a comment which
might be applied equally to contemporary narrators. We know that we
lack the light vein - the gentle wit of the English, the acerbity of the
French, the allegorical irony of the central European. We know how
much of a dead end is our tradition of the tall tale, which is simply
the vernacular gone hyperbolic. How then to account for the
potentiating levity of our current literature? Certainly our times are
not as vaudevillian as our novels make out; we have an extraordinarily
difficult time with our politics, puerile as they may be. And certainly
one of Classic Modernism's central features is its quintessential
humorlessness, particularly as regards its own procedures. It will be
very difficult for the next generation to understand the measure of
hatred directed at the Bourgeoisie of Europe in the first decades of this
century. The reaction will seem as overblown and remote as the
repentant manners of the Russian aristocracy. The very reading aloud
of the stentorian Eliot and Pound these days is often enough to elicit
a guffaw. This is not the tr

culture, weatherwoman rib
deprecation which seems to be
conditional and often cheer
Witzelsucht, a pathological c
situations at the expense of
Coextensive with Modernis
to the apotheosis of Existent
"the next addition to the collection of fashionable words will be
'existential'." "Black humor" functioned chiefly as a parody and
counterweight to apocalyptic existentialism, as if someone had put
sunglasses and jogging shoes on Camus' Sisyphus. As Ronald Tavel
put it in the Sixties, to label his wacky theatrics, "our position is no
longer absurd; it is simply ridiculous."
In this sense Post-Modernism exploits the gap (crevasse is perhaps
a better word) between the abstraction of literary discourse and what's
left of the felt life. The incongruities here are so often bloated that they
make the old word-is-not-the-thing argument almost trivial in its
obviousness, and a perfect subject for comic exploitation. The
oxymoronic of the everyday, which used to be confined chiefly to
politicians and corporate Public Relations men, has evolved a jargon
(better yet, a meta-language) for every profession and lifestyle -
adolescent, businessman, street person, intellectual, housewife, militant,
druggie, new woman, country boy, et. al., dialects which are
immediately encrypted by the media, and thus circulate through the
culture by reverse loop so that the stereotype, linguistically speaking,
is "real people" - dialects so circumscribed as to make those of the
old European class system seem rich, strange and exotic. When such
a "real person" is encountered in real life, the first reaction is parody,
and to the objection that we miss the old fashioned rounded fictional
character standing four square between the narrator and the reader,
one can only reply that from the contemporary perspective the
contemporary character's one-dimensionality is precisely what is most
real about him. We have here a people whose social identity and
psychology is not something to be inferred from their speech but is their
speech.
Of this new humor there are many variations:
Humor that fails deliberately: 1,300 one liners as an excuse for

a narrative. The strategy here is redundancy; making a bad joke,
78 CHARLES NEWMAN
then deprecating the audience for not realizing it was an

intentional bad joke, hence, finally getting an embarrassed laugh.
The put on: In Jacob Brackman's phrase: "neither parody nor

satire which are rigorous demanding forms ... by not holding
any real position, one is invulnerable to attack. . . . aggressive
ambiguity, the strategy of which is not to be ironic but confusing
in a faintly amusing way." It limits the good nature of the
perpetrator as well as the distrust and skepticism of the beholder.
Humor as evasion: Terror of reality. Mockery as avoidance of

concrete confrontation or analysis. Wisecrack as the refuge of the
powerless.
Humor as wit: Replacing strength as the primary means of

impressing another. Everybody his own comedian. "I may not
be authentic, but I'm a good listener."
Pathos: To be truly sad and silly at the same time; not as easy
as it sounds. "Seriously though. . . let's stop kidding around. . ."
Humor as sublimated aggression: attacking the epistemological

ground of the reader, venality attacking vacuity, intimidating the
reader with his own sense of instability.
Humor as defiance: anti-pietistic, and even occasionally heroic.

As the Viennese jokesmith who pronouced America "a misake.
A big mistake," notes: "one refuses to go under suffering,
activates the ego against the real world, and victoriously upholds
the pleasure principle, yet all without quitting the grounds of
mental sanity. "[Freud, On Humor, 1920]
It is a commonplace that humor in America has moved from that

based on innocence to a savage sophistication, a culture in which
everyone knows too much. Even writers as recent as Hemingway and
Fitzgerald in retrospect seem utterly innocent beings in their romances,
and Twain's sarcasm positively good-hearted. Richard Poirier has noted
the advent of parody parodying itself as it goes along, calling into
question "the activity itself

World Elsewhere]
But there is more to it than
for example, whatever its qual
Think of the consequences o
its very rhythms, a work of a
Within its own context it can
nor challenged; the ne plus ult
of interiority.
Constance Rourke in her cla
saw even then- when Ameri
literature - this obsession w
a "fashioning instrument. . . h
of national life." Also, "the Am
characters. . . the comic upset
have been more significant if
to wear away under a prolo
humor has often become a jaded formula, the comic rebound
automatic- 'laff that off- so that only the uneasy habit of laughter
appears with acute sensitivity and insecurity beneath it, as though too
much had been laughed away. . . The Comic rejoinder has become
every man's tool." She goes on to say that "the epical promise has
never been completely fulfilled. Though extravagance has been a major
element in all American comedy, though extravagance may have its
incomparable uses with flights and inclusions denied the more equable
view, the extravagant vein in American humor has reached no ultimate
expression."
It is clear that with the Post-Modern, the "extravagant vein" has
certainly reached a kind of "ultimate expression." While increasingly
puerile in many forms, such humor nevertheless represents an
astonishing aesthetic response to modern life. Twain himself noted that
English comedy and French wit were dependent upon their subject
matter, while American humor relied upon the manner of its telling.
Barthelme has largely succeeded in parodying both the Holy Technique
of Gass as well as the Humanist Verbalism of Bellow, standing High
Modernism on its head.
Such a clear culmination of national humor, in its melancholy
travesty, underscores a culture on the knife edge. "The comic comes
into being," Henri Bergson notes, "when society and the individual,
freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves
80 CHARLES NEWMAN
as works of art." And ir

aesthetic behavior come
equally plagued by self-d
burlesque of all real thin
10. The Indeterminist Fallacy
lam capable of conceiving of a writer of today, who simply cannot

understand, and who has never been able to understand, what
his fellow writers are driving at . . .
- Malcolm Lowry
The contemporary assertion that language is not only constitutive

of reality but is its own reality continues to go unquestioned, even as
it leaves the philosophical question begging. For how are we to
comprehend something which is totally autonomous? A truly
autonomous language could convey no human relations whatsoever.
There are, at the least, two extreme versions of this assertion. The
first is the all too familiar one, which textualists have taken over with
a vengeance, that is, the démythification and deconstruction of art,
usually accompanied by the rhetoric of insurrection: "Since literature's
own viable status is a subversion, its function can only be a terrorizing
one ... of burning/consuming meaning. By this act, the
reading/writing process makes manifest the possibility of meaning."
(Jacques Ehrmann) One can only suggest that anyone who has ever
set pen to paper knows that this is not empirically descriptive of
anyone's cognitive process, no matter how burned out he may be. It
is never clear in such pyrotechnics just who is being subverted.
Or what is one to make of this state of affairs?
Since it is true that man is a semiotic structure and since language

and man are essentially reified refractions of images endlessly
succeeding each other in textuality, one might say that "man"
is perplexed, puzzled, by the "tyrannical feed back system" of
his knowledge, which hints that he and his actions might be only
82 CHARLES NEWMAN
a set of reflecting and

infinitude of the parallax,
[Spanos, Bove and O'Ha
Perplexed and puzzled in

inflate the riskiness of t
literature's diminishing influence; a quite peculiar but very
contemporary combination of simultaneous hubris and abjection.
The theoretical appeal of Structuralism or Textualism is undeniably

powerful, as it proposes to relocate in language those structures which
the realist tradition located (and somehow lost) in the objective world.
The presumption is that we are dealing with an unconscious which is
not only collective, but can be collected because it is structured like
a language. In this sense, it is difficult to imagine a method which has
promised more and whose results have been more inconclusive. Given
the regularity with which structures have failed to emerge, the response
is predictable - the culture is a conspiracy which refuses to reveal itself,
and art is nothing more than windowless epidemia.
In this sense, Textualism throws onto language all those determinisms
which Marx and Freud sought to locate in history or the psyche -
language being a symbolic net which cuts us off from our origins, a
series of analogies with no instrumental relation to the world. Language
is what veils the truth, and our only hope is that it veils it systematically.
Textualism betrays both an incurable nostalgia for some kind of
prelinguistic paradise and an apocalyptic view of the future. We can
agree that language can be reduced to formal models which have no
universal or synthetic consequences. Further, we can agree that words
cut us off from our origins and have no direct instrumental relation
to the world. But we can also insist that professional detachment,
literary or otherwise, is no cure for alienation. Exposing one's ignorance
and limitations cannot be justified as either scientific or therapeutic.
The split between sensation and thinking is not a "frame of reference"
to be solved by "interdisciplinary studies." It is actually quite painful.
The absurd is not the amusing theatre we have made it.
Just as ethical action cannot be deduced from any situation without
some value beyond reason, why describe a world of signifiers as
malignant rather than magical, in the terminology of circumscription
rather than access? "For them the block which language piles up before
the expression of undiminished experience becomes an altar," Adorno
tells us. "The disproportion

society drives the authentics
on, through greater sharpn
ambitious and sophisticated th
the world through linguistics,
mystery, not to mention the
An ancillary argument gon

writers, is the insistence that
a particularly readable one
appear in quotes. This is all
notoriously (and necessarily) l
than not, the result sidesteps
in texts - an act which is n
author's, the moment he be
many "texts" actually captiva
remade through them. This
presence is one which the T
reasons which are not entir
the "equality" of texts, lite
others, testifies to the bank
the matter succinctly:
The degeneration of public la

of propaganda, advertising
consequences for modern li
of this situation - in whic
deprived of uncontaminat
literature either depends ex
structures of the "mythic
myth, becomes anti-literat
of punishment for its cont
and discredited language. [
While it isn't necessary to

pointing out that one way to deal with the problem is to make
deteriorated language the subject of one's writing; the incorporation
of dreck in order to expose it. Like any one-track strategy, however,
this one obviously has severe intrinsic limitations, degenerating into
mere disenchantment with forms, the inability to produce anything but
84 CHARLES NEWMAN
purely static works of a

called that "cynical laugh
everything and effects
Realism"]
Nevertheless, if we are
"immanent" in history or
but the fruit of an ongoin
the mind and the world, t
only meaning it can poss
aims for in its extra-histo
assertiveness.
In such a situation, the reader is challenged to be sure, but the idea

is to captivate the reader by whatever means necessary. The writer
through the assertion of epistemologically privileged authority invites
the reader to become a dilettante - not in the current pejorative sense,
but in the sense of the original Latin root, delectare, "to take delight
in." This is a far cry from the pessimistic, deterministic vision of
language as entrapment - though that vision can also be derived from
the same argumentative principles of language as the ultimate reality.
The power of speech can affirm and expand the existence of the
language animal; the necessity to write "in order," as Le Clezio says,
"to conquer the silence of other languages." Indeed, the Textualist
ideology actually refuses this kind of meaning, since the metaphor for
its own activity is dispersal, the impossibility of unity. It is a short step
from the notion of discredited languages to the idea of language itself
as exhausted, from a plurality of meanings to the absence of meaning,
but this logic ignores the quite unphilosophical fact that most writers
necessarily believe, unsystematically and unskeptically, in a language
which is forever in process; language as activity, not doctrine.
It is easy to forget just how much precision and pleasure literary
language can afford; at any rate such a notion is apparently nothing
upon which to build a career. It used to be that writers fought for access
to privileged ground. The competition now seems to be for that terrain
which is the swampiest. Textualism takes the disjunction between
ordinary and literary discourse - - a phony contrast between an
unmediated vision of the real, and the way we actually speak - and
inflates it to the status of a universal metaphor. Textualism refuses the
essential pragmatism of the creative process, and subjects it to an
impossible redemption. There is no going back to a prelinguistic
paradise, to a supremacy
stupidity, any more than we
of undifferentiated conscio
can treat our wordlessness as
is that he should know this
isolation he stands for all men.
Textualism, in effect, marks the end of the Second Revolution, in
which the secondary languages developed to counter Bourgeois
subjectivity become irrelevant to the analysis of actual conditions, the
obsession with paradigm obscuring both art and experience. Textualism
not only forfeits its mimetic function, but also its shock value, reflecting
not merely the disenfranchisement of the intellectual but the alienation
of consciousness itself. It is a perspective achieved not through the
imposition of false values, but by a continuous process of devaluation
which can only finally encounter Adiaphora - matters of indifference.
In its unquestioning acceptance of Modernist assumptions of
innovation and novelty rather than truthfulness to experience,
Textualism adopts the platitudinous superiority of the Avant-Garde,
trading in the sanctity of critical distance for a heroic individualism,
no less pious, and no less pathetic than that of the most pretentious
artist - with a resulting vocabulary no less subjective and even more
obscure than the "Bourgeois" criticism it affects to oppose.
II. The Anxiety of Non-Influence
The scientists were saying that by science Man was learning more
and more about himself as an organism, and more and more about
the world as an environment, and that accordingly the
environment could be changed and man made to feel more and
more at home. The Humanists were saying that by the application
of ethical principles of Christianity man fs lot was certain to
improve. But the poets and artists and novelists were saying
something else: that at a time when according to the theory of
the age, men should feel most at home, they felt most homeless.
- Walker Percy
One of the most fashionable contemporary critical theories involves

a highly exaggerated notion of the necessity for the Artist to rid himself
of his progenitors - a Freudian version of Marx's nightmare of history
weighing upon all generations. The broad appeal of this Oedipal fantasy
can only be explained by the fact that it is so satisfying in the graduate
school environment, vindicating generational aggression. By inflating
the agonistic drama of the artist, the fantasy tends to erase his concrete
accomplishments - only the most recent example of the intelligentsia
absorbing art.
Let us hypothesize that with Post-Modernism we are dealing with

a literature without primary influences, and for that matter, without
satisfying primordial combat. First of all, if there is an obsession with
paternalistic influence, it is above all directed at the * 'Second
Revolution," and so we are dealing with a surrogate father at best.
Secondly, there is little evidence that there has been much active
repudiation of the dominant native strain of American fiction - the
Hemingway/Fitzgerald/Faulkner axis. American fiction simply turned
its back on these influences w

there has been no powerful
implies a literature which la
a salutary event is not the p
of the last thirty years have b
languages and non-literary d
and their reaction has more of
selective assimilation rather
Post-Modernism opposes the nationalist literary traditions
institutionalized by the Academy, as well as the reductive filial
relationships they presuppose. There is no father, dead or alive; and
that, of course, constitutes a complex of a special kind.
However the detachment from national models is ultimately
accounted for, we are dealing with a movement of inner proliferation
rather than a reaction against authority. It may well be that we are worse
off without the hostility to previous generations which gave a sense of
significance and continuity to literary combat, but to see recent literary
history as a bitter struggle, subliminal or otherwise, with cultural
authoritarianism is simply wishful thinking.
The most salient fact about the literary innovation of the last thirty
years is that it has had such little effect upon the critical establishment.
If this was a revolution, it was a revolution with no counter-reaction
whatsoever. Inflation mutes confrontation. We lack, unfortunately or
no, any direct dialectical relationship with our immediate historical
precursors, or between contemporaneous writers and critics. We are
dealing with the anxiety of rtOAi-influence.
* * * *
The irrelevance of precursors is most notable i

for the genre of the novel, unlike any other, car
twin - the entertainment novel - which is e
formally indistinguishable from its literary cou
to escape one's influences, quite another to have
the differentiation of one's efforts from a common but inferior
denominator. Any serious contemporary fiction sets out with a
vengeance to be unlike those books it disparages. Even beginning writers
now start by parodying rather than imitating. In an effort to ironize
the entertainment novel or the "classic", they aim to create a
diametrically opposed work which builds its identity not upon the
88 CHARLES NEWMAN
wreckage of something it
success of its twin. This ac
a self-conscious repudiatio
genre has become the do
Genre is as much the en
All this is to say that y
as wrenching fiction fro
called the "Clog of the Mim
predicted, towards an ab
poetry, it must always con
of its popular counterpar
it cannot deflect conventi
itself, as hard as it tries,
is always an excess of m
become autonomous by ch
so fundamentally deny its
result of setting out to div
produces extremely tend
books. There may not be m
but there is a stifling au
for advanced cognition of
forms, in the process igno
which derives much of its
John Fowles confronts th
a coward by writing insid
panicked into avant-gar
To understand the phenom
the gap between various lit
David Grossvogel exempl
The writer who finds the

try as an initial tactic to
speculation by making
being . . . admitting in
mere pattern - a recogn
novel can no longer tell
notes the indifference of
of its fiction in the relat
the object between them. [Limits of the Novel]
The counter-genre is essentia

initially against the romance, its
era against the pretensions of the High Modernism. As Realism
burlesqued Romance, as the Bourgeois came to receive ironic treatment
in the Bourgeois novel, so the Post-Modernist subjects the Modernists'
exclusive emphasis on the protean to parody, ironizing the conventions
of fragmentation, simultaneity, and formlessness without end, attacking
the dogma of individualized style. But just as the critical languages of
the Second Revolution tend to cancel one another out, so the counter-
genre is also attenuated as it becomes increasingly formulaic. Irony is
no longer, in J.A.K. Thompson's words, "a trembling equipoise
between jest and earnest," but a series of reductions in stature.
Once others' aesthetic claims are fully ironized, the only thing the
artist has left to undercut are his own claims to authority - an
enterprise in which the culture will prove a most willing partner.
12. In The Wake of The Wake
The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious
of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading
a book.
-Ford Madox Ford
Effecting a siege without an enemy, contemporary fiction defensively

attempts to reassert its old imperatives, but without mimetic pretension
This produces not so much the imperial novel, but a full appropriation
of a verbal universe which one might uncharitably call hysterification,
or the overwrought novel - what we will call absolutist fiction.
Nevertheless, it is epistemologically as absurd to think that one ca
create a novel from words alone as it is to suppose that one can
journalistically slice up a life and pass it off as a triumph of the
imagination. It is also psychologically absurd to think of a work o
art as completely self-contained. Fiction is always in a primary sens
derivative, reciprocally evocative in spite of itself. Whatever one
imagines one has added to creation, one is only giving back in contrived
form what one has already received.
But it is nevertheless the strategy of many Post-Modern works t
memorialize in every sentence that what is going on is filtered, th
product of a sensibility which requires your duration; indeed it is th
central premise of such work to constantly remind you, lest you have
somehow forgotten, just who is in charge. This is quite different from
the traditional omniscient narrator, who, through his pro-forma power
effectively makes the reader forget he is being manipulated - the
amnesia we call "getting swept up in the story." While such novel
appeal to the exegetical mind, they disclaim external evidence, esche
the reciprocal, the reportorial, the historical, and at times even th
felt - but all with a prodigious

are creating everything they te
Obvious recent examples wou
Public Burning, Gaddis's J.R., McElroy's Lookout Cartridge and
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (to choose the extremely frustrated
efforts of extremely talented people). Even Norman Mailer has recently
tried his hand at it in Ancient Evenings, and there are no doubt more
to come. Such books possess a complexity of surface, a kind of verbal
hermetic seal which holds them together, irrespective of linear pattern
or narrative momentum. They lack both the depth and momentum
which we associate with traditional narratives, but their verbal density
gives them weight and palpability. While they may fail to give consistent
pleasure, they are sophisticated precisely because they function very
much like the primitive brain, eschewing every familiar sentiment and
facility of absorption. They are absolutist in their insistence that
objective reference is not merely impossible, but irrelevant. It is always
wrong to apply painterly terms to literature, but it must be said that
if there is a true Abstract Expressionism in American literary art, it
can be found most palpably in the extravagant and aesthetically Utopian
prose fiction of the last decade, which insists that literature ought to
be appreciated for the elements of its composition; an arrangement in
which the possibility of any parallel reality is usurped not by the veracity
but the voracity of language. However these efforts are
ultimately judged, the form of such fiction is what used to be called
content.
The problem, of course, is that even the most intelligent reader resists
such books, which continue nevertheless to come at us as if objections
were irrelevant. Here it is useful to consider the imperialism of a new
Managerial class, the tendency to disregard the resistance of traditional
phenomena, to overmanage - based on a belief that technological
innovation can free itself from history, a tinkering which nevertheless
requires large theories to defend it. It was these writers' political and
intellectual contemporaries, after all, who believed for the first time
in history that you could fine tune and smooth out the natural
fluctuations of the business cycle, which heretofore no one thought
subject to human control; that a limitless supply of organizational
92 CHARLES NEWMAN
techniques would automat

productivity. The idea is, t
to work harder, to work
else would take care of itse
by experience or circums
course an inflation which t
is powerless to reverse. It u
generated limits, unreaso
down by conventional wisd
books, for inflation starts
motion machine without
progresses, we come to not
so for the first time in the
of: "It's terrific. But I wish it were over." We are thus surrounded
by unfinished masterpieces - - unfinished by the reader. He is put off
not by the length or depth, but by an attitude of the writer who insists
upon revealing not his resolution, but his determinants. Consciousness
does not progress infinitely any more than profits, productivity, or
moral betterment. An advance in cognition is not necessarily an
epistemological advance. A wisdom based solely upon technical
leverage, no matter how ingenious, is not sustainable without irrational
anticipation by its consumer. Absolutism ignores the existence of natural
obstacles at its peril, and thus cannot lend itself to maturation, in either
the works themselves or the careers they imply.
This impulse does not, incidentally, leave the reader out of the literary
equation. In fact what these books presuppose is the cooperation of
an ideal reader, an elite which will preserve new works until they come
to constitute a real canon beyond category. And there is nothing so
naive in this view as the assumption that the Academy, even more
susceptible to changes in fashion than the commercial world, will
provide this function. The one thing we know for certain about Post-
Modernism, is that it will not be followed by an enthusiastic army of
second generation interpreters.
These are perhaps the first works consciously written, not for
posterity - but only for posterity - a true future fiction for an
audience which not only does not exist, but cannot exist unless it
progresses with the same Utopian technical advancement of expertise,
the same accelerating value, which informs the verbal dynamic of the
novels written for them. This represents an act of ultimate aggression
against the contemporary audience.
The cul de sac of such an

Burroughs' division of narr
in mimicking the newspape
operates simultaneously on m
that even the most advanced
columns simultaneously, so
peripheral perception is defea
reader. We may have a liter
but we nevertheless still expe
and more or less one at a ti
divided. In other words, thi
for a species which has yet
As should be clear by now, m
If compromise is what we are
Modernism which is identifia
"special effects" of Moderni
ironical caveat, cinematic frag
market code word is the "acce
is a kind of double nostalgia
and 19th century narration
Hampshire, and Thomas's W
paucity of this compromise is
all write much better when
The most obvious example o
the recent reaction against th
which through its willful und
of the most questionable fea
the deflationary mode of Lite
response to inflation - und
inventory, and verbal joble
Barthelme, whose omissions are based on the circumspect
demonstration that he knows what he is leaving out. These are the
elisions of inadvertancy and circumscription, an obdurate unsurprised
and unsurprising plainstyle which takes that famous "meaning between
the lines" to its absurd conclusion, and makes the middle ground
mimesis of an Updike or Cheever seem rococo by comparison. (Ann
Beattie and Raymond Carver are the obvious aristocracy of this genre.)
Against the exploitative chaos of Absolutism, its spurious complexity
and contradiction, an addiction which subverts an author's maturity,
a supermannerism which cannot be sustained, we get in this Neo-
94 CHARLES NEWMAN
Realism a funky tranquil

simplemindedness based o
analgesic worse than the ad
of literariness to sharpen o
the hard won dead end A
knowing it.
Against a pathological prot
a passivity which refuses re
we get a low grade infec
misappropriation of the
concrete in the form of t
over the head. Against a co
vernacular. Against the a
names, we get brand nam
congested cloverleaf of spa
present as straight and e
tyranny of originality, we get the story as mass produced and
interchangeable part. Against the refusal to convince and represent,
we get the self-evident which is never demonstrated. Against the airless
self-referential, we get the singular claustrophobia of place. Against
the hysterical rantings of over-verbalized abstractions, we get the drama
of the spacey domestic in reduced emotional circumstances. Against
the author whom we would like to throttle, we get characters who we
can only hope we'll never meet again. Against the zany overblown
disembodied voices we could never trust, we get a "real people"
narrator whose trust is restored at the price of our interest in him.
Against a profligate wisdom pissed away in endless interrogation, we
get stupidity and dullness passed off as indigenous American virtues.
Against Grandiose Hyperbole, we get the Sententious Laconic. For arch
complicity, the humble sly. For logorrhea, a logo.
Susan combs her hair. She leaves her black mittens on, and
Charles thinks that she looks like some weird animal with big
paws. She's a nice sister. He wishes he could think of something
to do with her.
"If you stop at a store, I'll buy something to fix for dinner,"
she says.
"You feel like fixing dinner?"
She shrugs. Laura likes to cook. Laura and the Ox are probably
eating a late dinner together in their cold A-frame. Tomorrow
he will see Laura. Laura's hair is

perfume. She wears Vol de Nuit
first wife for a present ....
[Ann Beattie, Chilly Sc
If you don't care for entropicalam

of Vol de Nuit!
This pronounced division of labor, a kind of static double helix, in

which the velocity of two rotating aesthetic traditions shorn of historical
context simultaneously cancel each other out, testifying to the absence
of any experience strong enough to modify habits of mind, could only
happen in Post-Modern America.
13. The End Game Strategy
The important point I tried to argue with Henry James was that
the novel of completely consistent characterization, arranged
beautifully in a story and painted deep, round and solid, no more
exhausts the possibilities of the novel than the art of Velasquez
exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture.
H.G. Wells
Absolutist fiction in its extreme Formalism may be as dubious as it

is ambitious, but we should recall that fiction always exists in a double
sense: as reports on changing patterns of human behavior, as well as
on the evolution of forms. Modernism held out the hope that while
industrialism and science were increasingly out of control, we could
nevertheless through art create an edifice of the imagination appropriate
to a scientific age. Once we began to query our aesthetic means and
materials, however, questioning them as much as the world, then the
mythology of art as compensation would no longer do. To
exemplify - as absolutist fiction does - the problematical nature of
art demeans neither the artist nor his function, but simply unburdens
literature from having to function as a secular religion, an illusory
preserve within the ravages of technology and the absurdity of our
politics. To agree that art alone cannot give a complete image of man's
self is to potentially reaffirm both the richness of our humanity and
the possibilities of artistic enterprise. In an age when we have, at the
same moment, dismissed both our Utopian notions of the future and
any continuity with the past, the new mythology is that we have none.
"I have killed the last myth" - that is the narrative imposture of our
times. Yet it is not an entirely inappropriate aesthetic strategy. Literature
is not religion, or philosophy, or psychology, it is not a political act,
or intrinsically virtuous, neither weapon nor sanctuary; least of all is
it therapy. Literature attends pr

vocabularies of self-description
that these vocabularies are not national treasures or even genre
properties.
While retracting earlier claims for literature may be to some extent
self-cancelling (and not a little self-righteous), it is not, on the whole,
self-deceptive. For those writers and critics who would write off writing
with writing, who proclaim the terminus of language, are in fact making,
however obliquely, the highest claims for their own use of it. [The
language is dead. Long live my lingo!] The same gesture which proclaims
the extinction of the language animal affirms the power of the writer's
own speech, and this is a paradox which is finally, even at times
marvelously, unassimilable. In this situation, it is of distinct benefit
to adopt the pose of the Last Artist, to play dead, to have, in fancy,
the last word.
And while the tone of much of this literature is both self-parodic
and contemptuous of the reader, its very limitations often intensify its
claim on our attention. For the presumption here is roughly this: that,
for better or worse, language is our first and primary human institution.
The recovery of our primordial origins is no more possible than any
projected utopia of undifferentiated consciousness; and literature,
insofar as it challenges the established language of the moment, may
be understood as a basic survival mechanism rather than a form of
transcendence. Language is a given, a phenomenon which is neither
autonomous nor coextensive with our lives. And literature, thus, is a
gift - not the property of a class or even an individual prophet - a
present, which, like all exemplary endowments, creates its own terms
of acceptance. This view of literature, although stripped of the older
sanctions of High Art, nevertheless reasserts in a hardheaded way the
primacy of language as a reorientive enterprise, and in so doing
proclaims the continuity of the Modernist impulse by taking its
assumptions to logical if unsettling conclusions.
A matter of Tactics, remember. If one poses as the "last" writer,
if one writes the "last" novel, one is also the beginning as well. One
has one's tale firmly in one's mouth. Being last, after all, is a good
way to be first and a good way of being visible. Also, posing as terminal
redirects our attention, by sleight of hand, to how we became -
reinventing history by tearing it from encrusted genre and stale
metaphor.
98 CHARLES NEWMAN
Fiction has become a vehi

and verbal innovation rath
to rely upon its own lingu
character development,
moment we have begun
reflexive, the impulse s
already past. Barthelme i
country today - fully as
(One index of genius is t
lesser talents.)
Nevertheless, our best k
letters - have preferred to
a lack of continuity is a
whom Bellow has been t
so threatened by youth c
cannot see how pitiable an
in fact, they owe to their
too "play dead," insist that
of received meaning repr
accomplishment the fina
After all, what is "exhau
terms are defined not by
last buyer has executed h
interesting metaphor than
made it impossible for us
from literature, Post-Mo
evolution alone can definit
an audience which through
has discounted in advance a
who is often left holding
aggressivity is in direct
Contemporary writing ex
sees Finnegans Wake as
adolescent culture which se
the void: "we are the ot
Clearly we have a conside
possibilities for narrative
writing which cannot be e
or assimilated by a literar
But just as clearly, most claims

ahistorical and obscurantist, me
might be made for contempora
young should see themselves
surprising that established cr
contemporary consequences. I
has a major mutation been abso
More likely, our extreme rhe
significant change is occurrin
what is happening to us by w
strategy of dying, of feigne
urgency. For by posing as las
itself as ^historical, you gain
who can only see themselves
forever yet to be. The End G
the extreme, may prove in re
up the game again.
14. Neo-Conservatism and the
Unrevolutionization of Literature
Strictly speaking . . . readers aren *t what they used to be ... so

being a writer isn 't what it used to be. But the demands of art
are the same.
-J. F. Powers
To the extent that Absolutist Fiction is abstract, it is problema

To the extent that it is problematic, it risks indifference. To the ex
that it takes that risk, it is highly defensive in stance. Such defensive
is not simply some Nietzschean effluvium settled in the century's cr
but a social fact exacerbated over the last two decades by an increasin
shrill series of intellectually vengeful attacks upon the literary
particularly the fictional transaction itself.
Recall, for example, the recent avalanche of critical speculation
which have assigned literature to the marginal. One may as well b
with Norman Podhoretz's claim that the "best and brightest" sh
switch to the documentary essay as the only suitable way to ana
society's problems. Tom Wolfe upped the ante with the "new
journalism" as replacement for a fatigued fiction. (Curious that
journalism now increasingly encroaches upon the precincts of fiction,
the oldest plagiary.) Tálese claimed his characters were better than
imagined ones because you could call them up on the telephone. Roth
proclaimed American society so bizarre it was impossible for any fiction
to equal it. Howe dismissed the contemporary as Avant-Garde manqué.
Barzun sang a requiem for high art, while Trilling was merely diffident.
Youth culture off ed literature as the dying privatized irrelevancy of a
privileged class, only codifying existing forms of establishment power,
inviting cultural repression, pat

the passing of standards and th
to do its severe and obvious duty.
quality. Laing and Brown saw li
repressive as well as sublimative
asserted that language as differentiation bears no necessary
correspondence to reality, with the ultimate result that any truth claim
made by art was simply another non-claim - throwing out significance
itself with the mimetic bath water. It was of course McLuhan who
provided the coup de grace by suggesting that the poor "print-oriented
bastards" had been locked into the wrong technology.
There was, of course, also simple fatigue. Joseph Epstein writes the
epitaph of a man whose library has failed him:
... as the years go by [he] finds himself reading less and less
fiction, or more precisely less contemporary fiction. The big ticket
items [sic] he does read ... the story itself has indubitably lost
ground, probably since Joyce; and since Joyce too, it can probably
be said that most fiction [can be divided into that] which relies
on style and that which relies on story - though the two need
not always be incompatible - with those that rely on story, I
should say, the better ... ["Is Fiction Necessary?" The Hudson
Review, no. 4, 1976]
Is it any wonder that writers might be put on the defensive by such

a chorus of intellectual negations? The single most damaging blow to
fiction is its lack of intellectual cachet, for an audience which has been
reduced to intellectuals. At any rate, we have not heard very much
recently about the ability of the literary imagination to illuminate history
and social fact, challenge our complacency, force us to recognize the
distance between values and acts; never mind the business about the
enduring and prevailing of man.
We are faced with a curious syndrome here. Contemporary literature
tends to browbeat the passive general reader while being browbeaten
in turn by an intellectual class which finds fiction an insufficient weapon
for cultural analysis. The fact of the matter is that the middle distance
strategy of fictional narrative cannot satisfy claims for Hard News any
more than for True Mysticism. It cannot transcend its hybrid origins,
nor should it try. It is by now a cliché that literature, and American
literature in particular, has defaulted upon concrete social analysis, the
102 CHARLES NEWMAN
interaction of character and

fictions offer less congruen
by behaviorism in socio
positivism in philosophy,
painting, or structuralism
in common is their marvelo
to nothing more than the a
public polity. Autonomy i
process of progressive self
The most interesting thin
they begin by questioning t
end with a common attem
of western rationalism. F
uncoopted sentiment; but r
been so cerebral, rarely ha
been couched in so antisep
alternative to scholastic ana
finds it sufficient simply t
No where is this better i

relationship between the ol
as between Neo-Conservatism and Literal Revivalism. For the Neo-
Conservative attacks the Post-Modernist with a vehemence which only
two rival inauthentic neologisms could engender, and what we often
end up with is a contest between the passively malignant and the
gratuitously vicious. Indeed the contemporary realist/formalist debate
lacks symmetry because the associated political terminology has become
so meaningless. It is confusing enough to divide writers into realists
and non-realists; to assign them positions on the right and left,
respectively, is to totally trivialize the debate. There could be no art
less political, much less * 'leftist, " than contemporary formalism, and
those Americans who purport to take their leftist ideology seriously
are invariably conservative, if not totally reactionary in their aesthetic
techniques.
Nevertheless, the most discouraging feature of contemporary
intellectual life is not the continuing irrelevance of orthodox leftist
pieties, but the failure of the Neo-Conservative revisionism to offer any
alternative to the Modernist canon. For Post-Modernist irony and
deflection require straightmen who defend realism - and to the extent
that tradition has become cowed, to the extent Modernism has lacked
adventitious obstacles, it comes to

an excess of strength, becoming
an immense contingency.
The Neo-Conservati ve critique
Modernism is our only vital tra
only by its success, but by the
Anarcho-Leftist sensibility which
from the culture's basic values wh
an "adversary" culture continu
neither the élan nor écart of Hi
without taking responsibility for
is the Socialist who evinces an
renounces simultaneously the po
well as the aesthetics of High Mod
intellectuals to complain about a
haven from totalitarianism as w
living for intellectuals as a class
essentially a spoiled brat, and cr
eroded by his posturings.
There is nothing much wrong w
it exposes the most unattractive
that conspicuous lack of gratit
"cool" but masks a singular lack
the destruction of European societ
of American culture. We tend to forget that brief flush of
enthusiasm - so different from the initial European appropriation of
Modernism - that uniquely American projection of a large spirited,
full-handed, and even beneficent culture; one which never really got
off the ground. Recall that when the Museum of Modern Art moved
into its present quarters in 1939, its inventory was collected not from
Bohemian ateliers but from the basement of the Time-Life Building,
and that the President of the Republic himself could welcome this event
in a radio address:
In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things,

we are furthering democracy itself . . .
No politician would claim such cause and effect today.

There is even less reciprocity between language and power than
between "beauty" and "democracy." In the 1950's when the C.I.A.
104 CHARLES NEWMAN
was establishing close links w

action staff could testify
Books differ from all othe

book can significantly ch
an extent unmatched by
most important weapon
No one believes that print

literary modernism might
other politics.
The Neo-Conservative critique ignores the extent to which Modernism
played itself out through its own institutionalized success; it also
exaggerates the Post-Modern reaction, which in fact collapses from its
own weightlessness. It sidesteps the possibility that Post-Modernism
might be understood as a peculiar amalgam of high and popular culture,
which does not find its place either in habitual adversary or commercial
categories, much less in those of Realism and Formalism. The Neo-
Conservative makes the fatal mistake of believing that only his values
have been threatened. Thus, he is generally intimidated by the
impenitent humor of the era, baffled by those who seem to take pride
in being cheerful historians of collapse - testimony only to the fact
that the moral conscience of Modernism cannot be restored by solemnity
or scolding.
As with all 20th century ideologies, the Neo-Conservative brings forth
a new ' 'realism' ' with which to attack a decadent "formalism," but
it is a realism in this case which has fully absorbed the Modernist canon.
Nevertheless, every writer, as Robbe-Grillet says, "thinks he is a
realist," and it is a little late (and requires little courage) to call the
Avant-Garde's bluff, as they themselves have for some time managed
their own self-destruction quite as well as the bourgeoisie before them.
As the Avant Garde kept twitting the bourgeois of the Fifties for thirty
years, the Neo-Conservative generation apparently cannot give up its
obsession with the Avant-Garde of the Sixties, reflecting the American
preference for the vanished enemy. The myth of the doomed creative
artist fighting the smug philistine has been replaced by the myth of the
parasitical artist living off the public trust. This, alas, is as far as we
have managed to come.
In fact, the Neo-Conservative offers only a penultimate version of

the Avant Garde/Bourgeois drama. The vanguard is scorned to the
extent that he exploits the bour

to the extent that he absorbs t
bad - to the degree that he adop
or Post-Modernist art smacks of
This lack of skepticism regard
astonishing thing about Neo-Co
conservative fascination with te
effort to overcome the "old fog
fear of being "out of date" which
liberals by their own left wing
to the extent that they both lo
Whatever the case, there has b
Conservative politics with Mod
indigenous Americanism. Atten
National Review audience:
The average American is a modernist in his bones. Americans

believe in possibility, in "making it new," as Ezra Pound once
urged. If conservatism is to be truly American, it must embrace
that sense of possibility. We like to say that conservatism is the
politics of reality. Well, that is the cultural reality. A truly popular
American conservatism must be modern, because most Americans
are modern. They do not live on ducal estates. They don't even
go to Groton. And because they are modernizers they are also
anti-Communists . . . The modern artist is concerned to assert
his freedom, and that involves an adversary relationship to past
conventions ... a modern work creates its own conventions . . .
If you look at other areas of life, you will see immediately that
freedom advances inexorably . . . We must learn to live amidst
discontinuities, whose discontinuousness is transcended only by
love. Art has entirely separated itself from morality, even from
"content" as traditionally understood. The Newtonian universe
is gone. The universe is a mathematical equation. The holistic
world view expressed in natural law is fading; at the very least,
the "natural law" will have to be reformulated.
*It is fascinating to ponder how Modernism in America provided a home for groups
as diverse as the Jewish immigrant intelligentsia (who saw in it revolutionary potential),
and that element of the WASP Artistocracy who saw it as civilizing and conservatory.
They are together now, in the retirement condominium of the axial
Foundation/University/Museum world, which was not, presumably, their heart's desire.
106 CHARLES NEWMAN
This breezy formulation, i

left-wing Modernist Manq
servative in its bland accepta
only reinforces Trilling's m
flourishing conservative inte
modernism. In any other context, the conservative would have
marshalled an argument against the homo aestheticus of a self-contained
Modernist utopianism, rather than breathlessly testifying to the fact
that High Modernism has become the ruling culture of the Haut-
Bourgeoisie. "No artist of any kind," T.S. Eliot reminds us, "has his
complete meaning alone . . . tradition cannot be inherited; if you want
it, you must attain it by great labor ... the historical sense has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."
Like the Avant-Garde before it, Neo-Conservatism is a narrow and

immature interpretation of its own grand tradition - which is to say,
rather than bringing forth the past to grant the future a perspective,
it brings forth the recently canonized past to attack the overly
categorized present, pausing only to occasionally "draw the line" as
Kenner does with Faulkner, or Epstein with Joyce. Perhaps an
ahistorical conservatism is what an ahistorical liberalism deserves.
The Neo-Conservative aesthetic is confused, for it is at once curatorial
in its bland acceptance of Modernism, and populist in indifference to
the effects of technology. On the one hand it attacks the mass media
for glorifying violence, for its lack of cohesive spiritual and social values;
on the other it defends an unrestricted acquisitiveness as the ruling social
passion, a "free" market which functions precisely because it is devoid
of values. The unsolved confusion of the Neo-Conservative intellectual
is that while he professes to despise mass culture (and the "liberal"
media which propagate it) he defends to the death the socio-economic
system which insures its hegemony. He simply refuses to recognize the
enormous disproportion (contradiction would be too dignified) between
the multiformity of American art, the protean nature of American social
life, and the unprecedented power of the "market maker" in the culture.
It is no wonder that this invariably results in a highly sublimated
personality.
Moreover, if the Avant Garde is wedded to a sclerotic Socialism or
pseudo-Anarchism, the Neo-Conservative argument is self-limiting by
its conventional economic liberalism. If the Avant-Garde requires a
coherent enemy, the conservative needs something to defend. So while
it is perfectly appropriate to ridicule the radical who takes refuge in
non-profit institutions, the conserv

of the vaunted private sector, and t
regulating "free market." The con
the cultural Neo-Conservative is t
to the commercial free market, whi
industry cannot be said to be dist
action or economic welfarism. If the Neo-Conservative is to offer
anything beyond a redistribution of wealth to the affluent, he must
question the hegemony of Modernism, those secularized, cerebrized and
distorted perceptions which take such a grossly individuated form
(culture as aesthetic swindle). The achules heel of the Neo-Conservative
is not his quaint faith in a rawer capitalism, but his excessively pious
acceptance of Modernism, the failure to ask that art be accountable
and not simply another self-justifying enterprise detached from all other
values. What is to be chalked up against this conservatism is that in
its confusion of a free-market of commodities with a stock exchange
of received ideas, it exerts in culture, no less than in foreign policy,
a profoundly destabilizing force - refusing the test of its own tradition,
which is the restoration of faith in institutions.
As for the "private sector," that euphemism for deregulated

oligopoly, it is difficult to see how cultural resources would be allocated
more effectively by a corporate vice president for public affairs than
a government bureaucrat, and given the fact that corporate gifts result
in a massive loss of tax revenues, it is doubtful they are even cost-
effective. If there is to be a new ethical force marshalled against social
and cultural disintegration, it is unlikely that supply side economics
will provide it. It was Adam Smith who projected a Utopian state in
which human activity would be totally "atomized."
This is compounded by the hypocrisy of a conservative movement
which cries out for a return to the "free market" but funds its own
"anti-establishment" activities through massive internal subsidy. If the
Neo-Conservati ves had to depend on the "free market" for the
dissemination of its ideology, no one would have ever heard of them.
The Conservative tradition is, after all, supremely relevant to the
present moment. For its strength has always been in producing a more
historically oriented view of evolution and a more tragic and complex
view of life, a world-view which emphasizes the interdependence of
human and artistic limitation, the necessity for functioning institutions,
and a skepticism about sacrificing human life in the service of any
theory. Yet rather than revivifying institutions, the Neo-Conservatives
108 CHARLES NEWMAN
have managed only to cre

ideological as that of the An
emphasize a consensual int
and a conservatory discipl
psychology, it has aime
individualism (a kind of s
incommensurable in Amer
security and identity have
aggrandizement without
revolution, the empty rheto
with authority, but can c
with the possible exception
to simply point out the am
on the beach. It offers no n
minor tonality which only
It would be mistaken to think of the recent Neo-Conservative

ascendancy as a political victory. It is a victory, as with the New Deal
before it, by default. The liberal polity simply could no longer provide
a unifying context for the plural transformations within the culture.
Like all liberalisms throughout the century, it was strong enough to
dissolve the old political order but not strong enough to control the
centrifugal cultural forces it released - particularly in an inflationary
context.
But the strength of the Neo-Conservative movement should not be

underestimated because the media chooses to advertise its lunatic fringe.
For this is the first generation of American intellectuals since the Thirties
with a will to power beyond their own constituency. Theirs is no liberal
request for a larger share of the pie. They know the age of redistributed
affluence is over. They have achieved a community to capitalize on that
fact, and to effect what Trilling so distastefully referred to as "actual
rule of the world."
The trappings of the "Outsider" have become as shabby as they are
uniform. To their credit, Neo-Conservative intellectuals are sick and
tired of being self-disenfranchised by a routine disenchantment; as a
result they have made an unambivalent alliance with the new class*
which has profited most from inflation.
♦A new wealth based largely on electronics, petroleum products, government contracts,
franchises, subsidies and tax write-offs, which rapidly diversified into mass
communications, and promptly rationalized and legitimized the art of governmental
lobbying to secure politically determined market privileges.
15. Formalist Bedrock
and the Footbridge of Realism
. . . in the world as it is, there is no way to get a mastery of a
subject except in the aesthetic experience . . . and if our account
of it is correct, we also discover what our culture is.
-R.P. Blackmur
Formalism may be dead as a theory, but shorn of both its melodrama

and historical context, it remains the basic underlying force in Post
Modern work. Formalism retains its operative power because in the
face of mounting indifference, it holds firm in its stubborn allegiance
to the intrinsically literary, stressing the autonomy of the language arts,
which cannot be explained (or for that matter, produced) by reference
to philosophical content, biographical sources, or a single techniqu
or psychologicl impulse. It stresses above all the multiplicity of literary
experience, and the necessity of breaking up deadening and mechanical
habits- in this sense, it is most congenial to an age which lacks a period
style.
Moreover, the undeniable attraction of Formalism lies in its self-
appointed ideal reader, a claim given increased significance in a culture
dominated by Mass Communications and its passive audience. After
all, what more could a writer want than a reader who could care less
about his actual history, or the history of his composition, his
psychology or his market standing, who believes that form and content
are inseparable, who does not shrink from confusion, yet who assumes
you mean what you say? A reader who theoretically excludes all the
uncontrollable elements of reality is irresistable, and while Post-
Modernists may not even know what Formalism is, they are invariably
writing for Formalists. The irony (what else) is that while the original
Formalist impulse was willfully to isolate the specifically literary for
1 1 0 CHARLES NEWMAN
its own good, such isolation

fact of life.
This does not take into accou
Formalism are so weak. For
influence, it is in the perce
at times even entirely transfo
left there without severe ae
is untypically wonderful on
Please write about anythin

art is, to a certain and ver
artist who creates form, and
not empty machines, one
appreciating it. [Literatur
Formalism requires a second

language of human relation
Formalism in its most unyi
return to Literal Revivalism
attempt to overcome auton
The natural constituency
provincial right wing with th
cannot engage Formalism, a
of Modernism, quite as much
If a member of the Moral Ma
habits at the local library he
interested in William Gaddi
have no idea how much trou
real threat to the Formalist. The extreme version of Textualist
indeterminism, that all texts are equally meaningless, is far more
damaging to literature than any Fundamentalist boobery.
The sophisticated cultural conservative, particularly one who feels
the critic's job is to draw lines rather than erase them, is in something
of a double bind. His job is to ensure the continuity of tradition, yet
the official culture of which he is presumably spokesperson is one which
programmatically celebrates discontinuity. His job is immeasurably
complicated by the lack of an authoritative figure. On the one hand,
Formalism in its methodology opens up new careers for the interpreter;
on the other, it dilutes what Tolstoy called "the transmission of
feelings" and received wisdom. While the conservative believes that art
should provide an understandin

art should be life enhancing, the
remains nevertheless highly te
must finally resist the superstit
simply no longer lends itself to
eccentric and experimental fict
towards experimental work, th
analysis upon attacking it, rath
contemporary realism.
It is rare that the critic attack
Barzun:
... in the contemporary arts we respond to technique, to

technical innovation beyond any other appeal ... the increasingly
technical interest that our century takes in works of art means
that the artist and his public meet on new ground, no longer of
personality but of method. The beholder's approach is friendly
and conscientious rather than passionate . . . The Interesting as
an aesthetic category . . . has replaced the Beautiful, The
Profound, The Moving . . . [The Use and Abuse of Art]
Formalism has already been forced to retreat from its own aggressive
attitudinizing and bad company, as all dissenting movements must when
they become routinized and when destruction by incessant novelty turns
upon itself. Historically it is not infrequent that the artist comes to
despise the very audience he most insisted upon.
It is no secret that Realism wanes as the idea of objective history
is lost, because valid models of imitation and the continuity of certain
truths require a confident historical sense. It is also clear that one does
not become a Realist simply by refusing to rethink literary conventions.
When John Gardner asserts that "moral art and moral criticism are
necessary, and in a democracy, essential," [On Moral Fiction] we have
a notion just as arbitrary as the one that all life is a series of fictions.
But literature is no more a moral science than a natural science. The
only thing we can try to do is to understand the social context of the
assertion. Tolstoy's question, "What is art- if we put aside the question
of beauty?" is just as apt if we substitute "Form" for Beauty- to which
the Formalist would undoubtedly reply: "not much." The problem is
that within Tolstoy's argument - which is Gardner's - there is not a
single compelling demonstra

achieved, or why Realism cont
a society characterized not so
The reason is obvious: commitm
despite the belief that some
perceptions of value can onl
action; only afterwards can the
often makes them appear deli
so slovenly in other respects, i
and it does so not by saluting r
the artist's attitude towards h
itself too easily to a lazy dise
in Gardner's case, by self-puf
realism contains its own narc
yet another screening of com
What both Tolstoy and Gardn
of utility and social change -
was in fact built upon servitud
which believed for a long time
that aesthetic values equalled
was good for all of us. One c
notions - those of a repenta
unrepentant American melioris
no matter how much we may
dangerous situation in which
enthusiasm for Democracy of
so much upon a perceived cont
the world, as on the belief tha
to a civilization, and that the
whether he approves of them
One would be hard put to find
tht his best efforts will increa
great animating idea of Liberal
as it has in Post-Modern society
requires more than avoiding the
of contemporary art. It requ
Authority, with an unblushi
appropriated by both Statist
Until then, we are stuck with Samuel Butler's reduction: "Art is
interesting only insofar as it reveals an artist."
16. Writing Without Genre
"Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton
epical, lyrical or dramatic?"
-James Joyce
The fragmentation of language and the destruction of genre are

Modernism's official clichés. Its characteristic works resist classification
by genre and by any anticipatory truth associated with formal
conventions and patterned behavior. Genre is a way of signifying
meaning in advance, and there is no concession in Modernism to an
audience that wants signification in advance.
In Post-Modernism, genre continues to be botanized, subindexed (100
kinds of Formalism, 43 kinds of Impressionism), and commercial
nomenclature - Health, Women, Travel, Occult, Self, Sports - may
now be more efficacious categories than novel, story or poem.
Marketing devices tend to reinforce the fragmentation initiated by
aesthetic innovation by further segmenting the audience. As models of
description, genres evolve, fade or are replaced; they blur as they resist
their own taxonomy, refusing to be 'common carriers.' The market
responds with sub-genres which recommodify consciousness. It is no
accident that traditional genre fiction - gothics, mysteries, sci-fi -
increases its share of the fiction market each year. Inflation increases
the emphasis on the presold commodity, which is the market's version
of anticipatory truth.
To reconstitute itself, fiction often incorporates sub-genres as a matter
of principle. This often results in hybrids of a certain psychological
absurdity. When Norman Mailer, in Armies of the Night, offers
"History as a Novel, the Novel as History," he is essentially disavowing
the expectations and responsibilities traditionally associated with either
discipline.
As genre disintegrates, the t

contract between the author
As late as 1939, Virginia W
London shop window, in w
rather like lonely seamstr
sullenly. ["Reviewing"] It was
laborer's work might be w
that the distinction betwee
principles" - and the review
books as they fall from the
reviewer who emerged from the economic reorganization and
professionalization of literature which took place in Goldsmith's
century, reenforced by the enormous expansion of the reading public,
wielded considerable power; but Woolf notes that this power was
destroyed almost entirely by the multiplicity of reviews. It is instructive
that she does not go a step further and note not only the multiplicity
of books necessary to review, but also the emerging multiple modes
of writing.
Woolf further speculated that the "reviewer's consciousness," which
over two centuries had developed a formidable and not altogether
unhealthy presence, coinciding with the novel's greatest period of
development, no longer retained its force, and in fact had become, on
the eve of the Second World War, increasingly truncated and trivial.
In such a situation, she suggested, the only hope for an author to
get any genuine response was to restore the one-to-one relationship
between the true critic and the author, a non-academic reinstitution
of one of the most overrated forms of education in history, the Oxbridge
tutorial: "Let the reviewers abolish themselves and resurrect themselves
as doctors . . . the writer would then submit his work to the judge of
his choice . . . " The quaintness of this simple relationship can hardly
be surpassed. Ms. Woolf wished to smash the neat symmetry of the
shop window, reinstituting a kind of pre-industrial discourse; she did
not anticipate that the entire frame of reference would explode.
There is little evidence that the writer is stronger or less self-conscious
in the absence of a powerful reviewing consciousness than he was.
Reviewers have become "doctors" with a vengeance, and the critic's
return to "first principles" - regarding literature as instances of
experimental linguistics - breeds an aloofness from the work itself as
well as from its potential public. As for those "tutorials," we have had
in America, in the last generation, the longest ongoing pedagogic literary
conversation amongst the large

mankind. No constraints of sp
said to have obtruded upon this
it has produced an increase of
This is one failure that cannot be laid at the door of commercialism
or mass culture. What we have witnessed, epitomized by this never
ending ecumenical conversation for credit, is the double irony of an
institutionalized respect for literature which disguises a diminished
interest, except as transactional therapy and careerist certification. The
social context and unspoken contracts of literary discourse have been
modified to an extent that Woolf could not imagine; these terms are
now moot.
Writing without genre is a potentially exciting prospect, one of the

few legacies of Modernism upon which the contemporary has been able
to capitalize. Yet it is folly to ignore the extent to which writers' roles
and voices have been both displaced and coalesced by the loss of th
identity which genre provided.
17. The Novelist as Poet/Critic
I am is not a question of existence, but of grammar.
-E.M. Cioran
It goes without saying that the novelist has encroached out of neces
upon territory once thought to be the exclusive domain of other ge
And it is clear over the past fifty years that the sentence as a synaest
unit can accomplish anything a line of poetry can - in terms of rhy
heightened metaphor or metonymy - ,that prosody has becom
the province of prose, and that the structure of the contemporary
certainly reflects more poetic internal logic than serial plotted narra
Or to put it another way, there is not a single poetic convention or ef
including closure, which has not been reconstituted and amplifi
contemporary fictional technique.
Fiction has also encroached upon criticism in its recently obses
concern with cognitive growth. The very act of fiction now implies
act of criticism, insofar as fiction is seen as a series of transformat
in modes of thinking. While poetry assumes unities which no lo
exist, and criticism ponders its own aetiology, the novel struggles w
its own epistemological shakiness to create an authority beyond gen
to lay grounds to be believed in, while at the same time resistin
conventional plausibility it disparages in journalism. Why poetry
traditionally attracted more systematic minds than fiction is not an
question to answer. But it is worth remembering that no fiction wr
has ever been able, through his own criticism, to effect a revolu
of taste which would provide a home for his own work, in the trad
of a Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Eliot. This only tends to confirm
suspicion that fiction, by definition, lacks an ontology.
Just as much as criticism, fiction has become increasingly concern
with the debasement of language, and represents an assault upon
hierarchies of literary types- a coming to terms with a tempo
experience which cannot be de

other way. As such, it remain
construction which somehow m
steady accumulation of half-w
processes which in every other
exclusive. To the extent that con
even admirable, it tends to incor
with poetry's traditional techn
As our apprehension of the wo
fiction becomes an adjunct of all
as "actually'' fictional becomes
to think about our fictions w
distinctiveness which always set i
is to say, its aura of commerce
mass culture. To the precise d
narrative, fiction eschews its m
fiction dispenses with 19th cen
up gracefully, as poetry and crit
audience as customer; that somew
with reality.
18. The Critic as Artist
Boundless the Deep, because
I am who fills Infinitude, nor
vacuous the space.
-Paradise Lost
Contemporary fiction has been variously described as self-reflexive,

involuted, solipsistic, cerebral, hermetic, privatized and cut off fro
the sources of life - yet is it not odd that we find these qualities even
more profoundly illustrated in recent critical discourse? In 1924, 1. A.
Richards could write that "critics have as yet hardly begun to as
themselves what they are doing or under what conditions they work'*;
they can hardly be accused of ignoring such questions recently.
Contemporary criticism has chosen to adopt the novelistic assumptions
of the inseparability of form and content, the strategies of the sel
referential voice, in order to erect a framework and radical rhetor
to legitimize the sources of its own waning authority. While the
contemporary novelist is certainly bewildered about his lay audienc
the critic is far more affected in his role by the destructive effects of
the media. The artist's relationship to audience has always been
historically problematic, indeed the subject of much of his work; but
the "man of letters" has always been professionally defined by a literate
lay audience, for which he in truth exists. He cannot court indifference
without the severest consequences. The one absolutely intelligible event
of Post-Modernism is the eradication of the Man of Letters by the
professional academic.
The inability of the critic to find a usable language - beyond those
codes which pass for professional accreditation - does not express
mere contempt or elitism. What it reflects is that the critical function
is becoming socially useless - - we are seeing nothing less than the
relinquishment of the facilitati

have come a long way from t
what might be called a "tyra
Robert Scholes has written w
Once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about
fiction - and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction
is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction. And
we know that criticism is about the impossibility of anything being
about life, really, or even about fiction, or finally, about anything.
Criticism has taken away the very idea of 'aboutness' from us.
It has taught us that language is tautological, if it is not nonsense,
and to the extent that it is about anything, it is about itself.
Mathematics is about mathematics, poetry is about poetry, and
criticism is about the impossibility of its own existence. [The
Fictional Criticism of the Future]
If fiction has somewhat clumsily but persistently moved to appro-

priate its own critical space, nothing could be more revealing of the
critical faculty than that it advertises itself as seamless, arbitrary and
indeed as mysterious as the works of art it proposes to examine. This
assertiveness reminds us that, true to its etymology, the essay is in fact
the freest and most personal of all literary forms; no fiction can have
the localized power or the allusiveness of critical discourse, for the
simple reason that criticism can incorporate any mind, idea or voice
without converting it to a credible dramatis personae. Yet never before
has criticism been so hermetic and highly personalized. At the same
time that artists subject art to critical strategies, criticism incorporates
the prerogatives of artistic self-glorification and megalomania. At the
very moment the artist has lost his traditional prestige and privilege,
the critic arrogates them to himself. If innovations in criticism have
taught us anything over the last two decades, it's that the deepest
tautology still leaves something to be desired, that irony alone, no matter
how sophisticated, can only take you so far, and that nothing is quite
so tired as a tired novelty.
To put it another way, there is something about the relentlessness
of radical epistemological doubt in so much contemporary criticism
which suggests not a deliberate restructuring, but a rehash of the
conventions of cultural relativism and linguistic determinism long ago
exhausted by avant-garde literature, a criticism circumscribed not by
120 CHARLES NEWMAN
its own ingenious tautologie

Bloom: "Criticism is the
solipsist who knows that w
is wrong." This is not just a
theme, "I know what I lik
of Finnegans Wake. "Only
justify this circumnambi
Where critics find manic
playing games by one's ow
and then go on to imply th
criticism must be accountab
upon art; i.e., clarity, symm
and the qualities of feeling
prefer and honor any Bar
the parodie status it deser
It is a fascinating thing
incommensurable monolog
but only by another text
that criticism ought to se
certainly we can argue with
upon its autonomous hege
the world than the most sur
act as secondary, as Barth and Bellow do. Indeed we have many
examples of criticism rising above the art it proposes to examine. Roland
Barthes' argument for the "new novel" is more exciting and incisive
than any of Robbe-Grillet's attempts at it.
But we must nevertheless ask some simple-minded questions. Is there

not some difference between a "fine book" and a "text among others"
and is not that a legitimate question for criticism? What is our proper
reaction to be when in the name of "démystification" a text becomes
totally obscured by its interpretation? When Bloom says that "the
meaning of a poem can only be another poem," [The Anxiety of
Influence] would he apply that principle to his own essay? And if "all
literary criticism is prose poetry" and "prose poetry is verse criticism,"
how are prose and poetry to be distinguished from literary criticism?
This is neither deep nor tautological; it is simply unclear. Criticism is
artistic in that it ought to intensify and clarify perception - not make
it impossible.
What has happened is that the aggressive bluff and bravado

associated historically with the Avant-Garde attitudinizing, which so
many contemporary writers are at pains to avoid, is now a stance
available to the critic - the critic as cultural desperado. It brings to
mind Stendhal's definition of a decadent: "one who sacrifices himself
to passions which he does not possess."
From a social view point, it is clear that a criticism which is "pure,"
unreferenced, and above all unprecedented is dictated by the need to
open up new means of professional accreditation and advancement,
and that it betrays the same unconscious fear experienced by the
artist - that one is free precisely because no one cares.
The attempt to assert literary criticism as the presiding and
autonomous discipline, to usurp the prerogatives of both art and
philosophy, only accentuates the fact that the culture now operates well
beyond any literary frame of reference. Lest the "creative" writer
dismiss these critical impulses as Mandarin delusion, he should be
reminded that they are precisely the same psycho-cultural characteristics
that are to be found in current fiction - the same fear of isolation
masked by an insistence upon autonomy, the same nagging notion that
everything has been done, the same hatred of the journalistic and
rejection of humanistic values, the same absolutist aggressivity of the
reader turned writer with a vengeance, and the same self-indulgence
evident when the normal constraints of justifying one's work to any
audience are removed.
If the artist in these circumstances takes refuge in aestheticism, the
critic retreats to philosophy, thinking he may free himself of the
"bewitchment of intelligence by the means of language." It should not
be surprising that this enterprise should prove so circumlocutory. As
Leszek Kolakowski has pointed out, "Even if the society of knowledge
should succeed in showing how the complete freedom of the knowing
mind from the impact of particular group interests is possible, and what
freedom should mean, it would leave the epistemological question
precisely where it was. A hypothetical 'purified' mind could go on
indefinitely asking itself the question whether, now that it is free of
the distortions incurred by the social milieu, it lives in conditions of
'essential rationality' - and it would be powerless to resolve this
question."
But there is also a more serious or at least a more dramatic question
here. Far from providing an equilibrium of objective relations, the
contemporary critical impulse pushes one beyond a consideration of
122 CHARLES NEWMAN
transmitting culture, to bre

image - hence the semi-hysterical attempts to erase whatever
distinctions remain between criticism and literature.
While fascinating in itself, criticism simply does not create the
aesthetic consciousness which it proposes to examine. Yet when criticism
does penetrate j ustfar enough into non-discursive experience, there is
often the realization that there are language acts which place the critic's
honest worry, restraint and scrupulousness in a severely reduced
perspective. It remains an unquestionable and sobering historical fact
that no significant fiction writer of recent memory has turned to any
theorist for any kind of reciprocal relationship, and no theorist of any
real force has taken the writing of his contemporary fiction writers as
a departure point for his own work. So much for autonomy.
We have educated ourselves thoroughly in the psychotic pathology
of contemporary art, but we will not understand our time until a mind
appears which can demonstrate the phenomenon of the critical mind
turning upon itself, frequently producing a truly hallucinatory quality,
freakish posturings directly at odds with the very processes (if we can
no longer speak of values) it sees itself as promoting. The ideal reader
has become, like the ideal artist before him, a kind of monster. No
other intellectual discipline would be permitted to deploy its own
vulnerability in such a strategic fashion. Nor would such outrageous
talk be countenanced from anyone with less obvious self-hatred. Yet
in its bizarre displacement of intellectual energy, its linguistic delirium,
criticism remains a cracked mirror of the culture.
19. The Poet as Person
Wherever I am, I am what is missing.
- Mark Strand
If through the mutual expropriation of each other's territory, fiction

and criticism have expanded their available repertoires, contemporary
poetry has, by disacquainting itself with all its progenitive forms save
the low short lyric, ceased to struggle for its own aesthetic.
If fiction and criticism have, often with a spectacular lack of success,
attempted to have repercussions beyond their own traditional linguistic
areas, poetry has managed a startling retrogression to the prosaic.
And if fiction and criticism can be legitimately disparaged for veering
towards the abstract and even unreadable, poetry has seemed content
to settle for idle conversation.
Against the strident willfulness of contemporary prose, poetry effects
an atmospheric aimlessness. The archetypical Post-Modern poem may
sound like myth, and look like a dream, but adds up to an enumeration
of non-propositions, giving a new meaning to the word "automatic,"
which began in the glory of unconscious association and has ended up
as mere preprocessed designation.
In poetry's technically diffuse and intellectually insipid diction, a
failed Transcendence constitutes a deliberate code in which the most
conventional statements are given portent by simply dissolving their
most obvious narrative rendering. If fiction has had to contend with
a caricatural twin based on popular clichés, poetry has constructed
formulae almost entirely upon intellectual clichés - an aesthetic mode
acceptable by the conspicuousness of its anti-conventions. Neither lyric
nor narrative, poetry has come to insist upon its occasional quality as
an aspect of literature commissioned expressly for the margin.
124 CHARLES NEWMAN
'Tree verse has been the great equalizer," Mary Kinzie notes,
"liberating poetic speech to utter the small impression in homely
language, but at the same time creating its own built-in obstacle to the
registering of the leisurely and complex idea. ..." And what Mark
Van Doren remarked twenty years ago seems all the more applicable
now.
The possible importance of poetry is immense at any time.

why not now? I would make no exception of our time tho
there are those who do. They are the ones who persist in
identifying poetry with short poems, and who even then do not
remember how great a short poem can be - for it can be
dramatic, too, and somehow narrative; it can imply careers, for
ideas and for men. The short poem is better in those ages when
the long poem is better; or, at the minimum, when it exists. The
forms of literature reinforce one another, as tragedy and comedy
do, which are the forms of thought. When fiction is good, then
poetry can be good; and vice versa. Fiction indeed is poetry; or
as I have put it here, poetry is story. This is not my idea, as you
very well know; it is at least as old as Aristotle, and it has prevailed
whenever poetry has been important to people. . . . But when I
say fiction do I mean merely narratives or dramas in verse? Not
necessarily. The ancient categories of lyric, epic, and dramatic
poetry were not conceived in terms of verse alone, and it is fatal
for us to suppose so. What we call prose fiction today is in fact
the most interesting poetry we have. [The Happy Critic]
Once defining itself by rarity and purity, poetry has become the most
democratic of literary art forms, an antidote, it is true, to the social
resignation reflected in fiction and criticism. As such, with the possible
exception of science fiction, poetry claims the only coherent audience
in literary culture, an audience held together by the appropriation of
non- verse as a performing art, a medium which belongs to the group.
When you have embraced minima, when closure is the only definitive
effect, when the reader must draw all implicit conclusions for himself,
when metaphor is not elaborated but only signified by a dropped definite
article, and when marginal space becomes the major organizing
principle, then one is left with an appeal to the pretextual
communication of a "reading," the dramaturgy of a "personality"
in a tribal situation. This is hardly a resuscitation of a participatory,
mnemonic "oral tradition' 'but the m

child; the recitation of a written te
rapport with the audience through p
of homeless orality is only the fina
primitivism taken up by academic ter
"The writers of today feel this," R
the search for a non-style or an oral
level of writing is, all things considered, the anticipation of a
homogeneous social state . . .(!)"
Whereas fiction has exploded its personae and criticism has
deregulated itself, poetry has found itself disappearing into the page
in its quest for the essential, and rather than accepting the fate of this
project of exhaustion, it has translated itself into a minor media event
which provides, if not community, at least a kind of corporate
engagement: immediacy as false intimacy in a grotesquely artificial
extended family.
Post-Modern poetry is neither concrete nor mystical, but has become
the least allusive and most predictable form of contemporary literature;
a true shorthand based not upon compression but the contemporary
preference for abbreviation - a scenario for untransmitted feelings,
exemplifying above all a time which exceeds the artist's understanding.
It remains the vanguard of the arts only in the sense that disintegration
shows up there first.
20. Banal Antagonists:
From Campus to Television
The bourgeois production and publication apparatus can
assimilate, even propagate, an astonishing mass of revolutionary
themes without putting its own existence into serious
doubt. . . . The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be
applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is
reversed.
- Walter Benjamin
It was not so long ago that Malraux remarked that American

literature was the only literature not written by intellectuals, echoing
the stupefying preference of the French for our most brainless writers,
from Poe to Hammet. To say that Post-Modernism is an intellectual's
art is dubious, for it is no longer possible to distinguish between
intellectuals and those who are just going through the motions in this
strangest, most recent and rapidly growing class. What is clear is that
the Post-Moderns are the first generation of American writers with the
common denominator of a college education, which only means they
came of age as Art was becoming simply another province of opinion
in the intellectualization of modern life. They overlap an era which
carried Modernism's program of retraining all of the senses to a
bureaucratic conclusion, finally rendering the idea of any curriculum
as suspect. Rich in procedures, it is a generation which lacks a subject
matter.
Perhaps it is more specific to say that there are fewer writers than
ever before who can claim to be ignorant of literary history. Most have
been exposed to the idea of writing as intellectual vocation as well as
romantic inclination, and they take ideas and procedures as seriously
as emotions. ("Don't think," Fitzg

"Anybody can think.") At the sam
total estrangement between pract
perhaps by their superficial proximi
that they echo one another's conc
other.
The serious charge which Bellow fa
into universities for the last thirty
life"; indeed that Post- Modernism i
derivative of the academization of
has some merit. Nevertheless, it sh
for Hollywood, or the WPA, or ex
culture is no less destructive than
also apparent that there is no mor
and literary academicians than bet
Perhaps this is inevitable, as what
practitioner always remains (and p
theorist. The codification process
"living authors" now absorbs them
and the demand for "creative" or
wants to annotate the uncollected reviews of Yeats when one can "mark
a water shed in the history of modern sensibility as an imaginative
political and ultimately spiritual reality ... the history not only of
writing, but of the indispensable subtext and pretext of writing, the
way we live our lives and attempt to make sense of those lives ... !"
(Frank McConnell)
At any rate, given the heterogeneity of current writing, it would be
pretty difficult to deduce a "school" of influence from an employment
situation. We know that patronage like parentage exacts its
dependencies, and that no satisfactory patronage system has ever been
devised. But when looking for literary cause and effect it is often fruitful
to ask a simple social question. Our culture has chosen to subsidize
writers by employing them to teach the young, hardly an ignoble or
antihumanistic impulse. And the proper question is not whether this
has affected writers, but whether this is the best way to make use of
writers. How does their academic involvement relate, for example, to
the historically unprecedented decline in general literary and educational
proficiency? The fact remains that writers have been included in faculties
only since general education standards were chucked. The issue is not
whether writers have been somehow circumscribed, but whether society
128 CHARLES NEWMAN
can afford to have its most

of protracted adolescence1
why the American writer i
relations of his society, fur
in any other western cult
Just as publishing compan
of scale, contemporary liter
of its relative market share in the loss-leading industry of the
Humanities. As a commodity in a mixed economy, it was acquired not
as an asset, but as a product line, designed to enhance a curriculum
which had reflected, more than anything, absolute indifference to an
extra-professional market. It now constitutes a new service industry in
an enterprise benumbed by a quarter century of reckless growth. If
commercial fiction is marketed increasingly as Opinion, in the university
it became marketed precisely as Technique. Needless to say, it could
only happen in America.
The transition from Literary Modernism to Post-Modernism is
accomplished by the determination to spread elitist art through populist
assumptions and intensive capitalist methods. It is no wonder that the
Post-Modern writer cannot understand himself as the product of an
ameliorative evolution.
The university is like any other corporate entity; it can ignore, censor,
or facilitate artistic enterprise. It can certainly neither create nor defeat
it. The only charge that can be fairly brought against the modern
university is also the severest - a genuine lack of curiosity and purpose
as regards the reintegration of knowledge, and a professional structure
which makes any intellectual reform impossible.lt will remain notable
primarily for producing the first generation in American history less
skilled than their parents.
* * *
The opening of genre, which is

legacy to the contemporary, be
are absorbed into those of m
self-willed rearrangement of in
the electronic media, in which the producers of art are totally
dispossessed. With television, both history and fiction as aesthetic
categories become increasingly meaningless, as their traditionally uneasy
relations and irregular contours are flattened out. It is precisely the
byplay between the temporal and the historical which provides fiction
with its peculiar perspective, a cross-

also undergo, and which television
Modern fiction emphasizes the flux
order to intensify the process of sele
signification as it proceeds, televi
possible to think about as it is occurr
everything in advance. If fiction is c
and compound instability, television
homogeneity of content. When
"superficiality," what we are reall
deliberately empties reconstituted e
not necessarily, we should add, a b
reconstitutes the very narrative conv
every major writer since Flaubert
"made for television" production is
narrative conventions bypassed by
exploit the techniques anticipated b
with a vengeance the inflationary tradition of the romance, a
Romanesque world of idealized types, the basic formulae of Literal
Revivalism. It is almost as if television were invented to smooth out
the cognitive dissonances which Modernism celebrated.
It is the adaptation, the scenario, which has become the primary
literary convention of the age, one that invades all disciplines, from
cybernetics to psychoanalysis. This will be our legacy, this filmic
shorthand where narrative is moved appropriately to the margin as
lighting instructions; here also description is reduced to a single
bracketed adjective, characterization to role, the common vernacular
to a series of ellipses, and dialogue to its most attenuated and
formulaic - an abbreviated reality shaped above all by a concept of
time which is money, adapting symbolic (literary) language to machine
(market) language.
This development should not be reduced to a question of "high"
versus "low" art. With the scenario and the adaptation, we are simply
dealing with a willfully inferior form of cognition.
The Electronic media fear nothing so much as the historical sense:

its contemplati veness, its revisionism, its circumlocution, the inevitable
corrections and abrasions of contrasting perspective. Commodity values
are threatened by the historical reflection which has always represented
the beginning of fiction's territory - memory resuscitated by the
130 CHARLES NEWMAN
imagination. This is hardly

the effects of the institution
any other institution in the
isnot that it serves up vulga
it functions as a mass sedat
even that it fires 25,000 vol
our endocrine systems; it i
total Aristotle, and it is st
becomes the characteristic
society.
This idiotic and endless storification of experience ignores not only
the complexity of language but the plasticity of life. The chief complaint
of a trial football game without "commentary" (December 20, 1980)
was that the viewer lacking commentary "needed too much
concentration to enjoy the game. Even then he or she received too little
story line ..." If Post-Modern fiction can be characterized by any
single movement, it is precisely the movement away from the
exaggeration of dramatic conflict, skeletal events as history, the focus
upon a single stimulus or metaphor as the index to reality; away from
the easily purchased analogies which storification affords.
The appropriation of the most superficial of narrative conventions
by the media means that the Post-Modernist affection for the counter-
genre will only intensify. Already at several removes, the autonomous
writer will continue to take as his point of departure the shattering of
the official narrative line. To be "literary" in such a context is to choose
disassociation ajid disaffection as the primary values. "There was a
rankling indignity," Scott Fitzgerald writes in The Crack-up, "that to
me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written
word subordinated to another power, a more glittering, grosser
power . . . whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian
idealists [it] was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most
obvious emotion." It is obvious that a sense of indignity is not sufficient
to sustain any integrated literary career.
If concept can transform reality, so can lack of concept, absence of

any perspective. If Modernism insisted that cognition can grow
independently, television has demonstrated that it can also decrease
collectively. When Walter Benjamin said that storytelling in the 20th
century was moribund, in an age in which man is "increasingly unable
to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience,"
he could not envision the replicatory

the supreme ironies of contemporary l
by Modernism, mocked by Joyce as
been moved closer to "experience" by
neither requires nor develops any sk
such a context it is not surprising that
itself to non-fiction, or to a theory
conventions of storytelling formaliz
Insofar as literature ever provided a s
been obliterated by the two growth
era - the democratized academy and the
The academy absorbs literature as a s
which assets are not redeployed but o
on a newly consolidated balance sheet. I
integrated into the curriculum, an id
The media, on the other hand, throug
narrative conventions Modernism dis
content, to produce an aura which m
equally non-existent reality, employin
in the distortion of real life.
Both of these pseudo-integrations, oligopolistic centralizations of
technology and certification which pass themselves off as unified
repositories of culture, relinquish the idea of an audience which is
alterable, as both refuse to take responsibility for what is taught. Here
is the final expression of an inflationary commodity culture which
assigns to content only exchange - rather than use-value.
The situation no longer reflects the Modernist one-on-one
confrontation between the reader and writer. Modernism still operates
within the classical supply and demand dialectic of buyer and seller;
the Post-Modern adds an incalculable third dimension to the equation
in the predominance of the media and the academy as market-makers.
The trajectory of intellectual "despair", which began when the historical
optimism associated with New Deal and the struggle against Nazism
broke down, cannot be fully explained by the political disillusionment
of the left, some existential malaise, or linguistic alienation. A more
straightforward view is that despite the mythologies of autonomy,
intellectuals cannot function without institutions of communication,
and the fact remains that the two institutions which constitute the
"consciousness industry" have become not only progressively sterile
and debased by any external standard, but have refused, almost as a
132 CHARLES NEWMAN
matter of principle, to mak

saying that there is very litt
us to deal with either of these two "Post-Modern" establishments.
In the Post-Modern era, just as the consumer is bathed in information
which has no principle of differentiation, so art is bathed in intellectual
speculation - the result in both cases being the cynical bewilderment
of a populace initially perplexed by jargon, then finally condemned to
repeat it.
21. Of The Future [Sic]
"You see, literature is not so bad. "
- Brooks and Warren,

Understanding Fiction
The legacy of interiority becomes for the writer an increasingly

defensive antidote to the external media, while for the theorist it
becomes a bastion to be defended from bourgeois homogeneity. This
adds a new element to the writer's quandary, for on the one hand he
is dismissed by the media (as insufficiently translatable), and on the
other, by indeterminist critics, who deprive his arbitrary language of
any evidential basis. He is caught ultimately between the market which
fixes a formulaic meaning in advance, and a theory which, also in
advance, denies his work any potential meaning. The greatest danger
to the contemporary writer is not that he will "sell out" to the media,
but that he will write merely against it - to destroy the clichés of
storification by an uncritical obsession with the deflationary counter-
genre.
Even if we began now to reverse the culture's indifference to thought
processes associated with reading and writing, no one writing today
would live to see the results. The trends, insofar as a minority literate
culture are concerned, appear irreversible. The argument that the novel
is itself a product of technological change, and that, given its head,
technology will respond to minority culture, ignores the fact that it is
not production but transmission costs which are finally décisive, and
the fact that contemporary literature has only two arenas - the tax
sheltered university or high-roller show business. The audience for
serious writing is, as the market jargon has it, a mature audience, one
whose growth is severely limited, and whose interests are therefore
negligible. Late capitalism and climax inflation cannot respond to
134 CHARLES NEWMAN
mature markets. Inflation c

to hide.
The final stage of Post-Modern inflation sees the reallocation of all
cultural resources to the big ticket items, for no consensus exists as to
which cultural activities have value. This tendency is given a final bizarre
fillip with stagflation, when prices continue to rise while demand
actually decreases. In such a situation, only the largest borrowers can
continue to play the game immoderately, so that any response to short
term opportunity can only be made at another's expense. Such is
the disruptive anomie of drastically shortened horizons and
unprecedented uncertainty, when capital cannot be allocated to any long
term undertakings.
The cultural pluralism which was Modernism's special promise has
been destroyed to the extent that technology is not responsive to a
developed political and social will. Technology has replaced
industrialism in modern pessimism as the metaphor for a failure of
nerve.
It is easy in such frustrating circumstances to fall into technoph

cant. The liberal progressive ideal maintains after all that advan
technology will ultimately make available increased choice at a red
cost to the consumer. But it is now clear that in an inflationary con
the audience is not so much specialized as fragmented, so that the
of quality become overwhelming. Every advance in hardware r
in a further standardization of software. Even the richest corpora
cannot sustain the costs of reaching a minority audience, as the re
fiasco in cable TV demonstrates. Rather than a cornucopia of
specialized services, we have an increasingly limited number of
alternatives, all aimed at a mass audience. For what happens in
American-style inflation is that, lacking social coherence or political
leadership, the management of mass psychology is turned over to the
Media and Academy. These institutions are capable of absorbing
hostilities and resentments by appearing to appeal to all competing
groups simultaneously, but to accuse them of censorship or repression
is to miss the point, for neither institution has a coherent social or
political viewpoint other than to respond in terms of their "measurable"
audience responses. Thus the Academy dilates content as the media
dilutes it, putting into question any inherent value in "education" or
"entertainment," a process in which the only common denominator is
a vague collective helplessness.
Such a system does not require tot

mechanisms because the system
output - which is why its proph
criticism of it, circular. As oppos
of control, it appears benign, beca
pride and feeds on its absence. Th
the intelligentsia, the alliance of th
and the loss of control of the Bou
If the academy has made the * 'exp
anyone regardless of talent or in
expression of a culture which intrin
of entry, masquerading as a dem
"experience" it. In both cases, the
maker, becomes the dominant re
solely by markets for culture. Fo
find than audiences. Or put it an
pluralistic culture is that it is not v
mean an appropriate response to
appropriate to each. It is the basi
that its well advertised pluralism of
of cultural transmission.
As inflation hyperpluralizes the social and political order, it
progressively negates cultural pluralism. And it is one of the preeminent
lessons of the post-war period that cultural control does not require
a political hegemony.
22. Fiction as Forgetting
. . . The Demand of that Species of Writing is over, or nearly

so. Other Booksellers have declared The same thing. There was
a Time, when every Man of that Trade published a Novel, 'till
The Public became tired of them.
-A Bookseller to Samuel Richardson, 1759
If we are to take much recent literary criticism seriously, the novel

appears to be the most short-lived, abortive art form in the history of
narrative literature: historically, only a holding action of the bourgeois
mind between the demise of epic poetry and the rise of modern cinema;
methodologically, simply a convenient device for those social scientists
of the last century, who, lacking statistical technique and electronic
communication, had to content themselves with what Goethe called
"mere narrative." And mere is still the adjective most appropriate to
the novel's condition.
It was some fifty years ago, in Madrid [within the year that The Great
Gatsby, In Our Time, An American Tragedy, The Magic Mountain,
The Counterfeiters and Passage to India were published elsewhere] that
we were first told with any assurance that the novel was dying. For
Jose Ortega y Gasset, the genre seemed no longer "an exploitable
mine," but rather "a stock of objective possibilities" which were being
exhausted. As is so often the case, the critic's own terminology furthered
the very dehumanization of art he described. To see the novel as a non-
renewable resource is, in itself, the basis for discovery that it is running
down. The aporia has become just as deterministic as any unitary theory
of art.
Nevertheless, Ortega was prescient in locating the crisis of the modern
novel in the question of admissable content itself. If the artist must
"care about his imaginary world more than any possible

world . . . where shall we find new material to reconstruct the world?"
In retrospect, it is not so important that we became incapable of
believing in the Epic hero and his ranted recitations; but if we could
no longer believe in Him, how could we possibly believe in any
omniscient narrator? It is at such a point that art could no longer claim
the sanction of religion, magic, even history; in other words, it could
not be trusted simply because it appeared within a recognizable "frame"
or was related by a putatively "authoritative" voice from the third
balcony.
The very idea of the novel often elicits a response of desperation.
Do we believe in the characters? Do we trust the narrator? What do
these questions have to do with art? Do we ask whether we trust a
composer, a painter? Do we believe in Marvell's coy mistress? No other
art form elicits reactions which are ordinarily applied to human
relationships. Yet this is the ultimate source of fiction's power: that
it relies, often in spite of itself, upon powers not strictly linguistic -
"the mere force," in Walter Scott's words, "of the excited imagination
without material objects." Fiction is both theological and
psychoanalytic at the same moment, in that it invokes a series of
ritualistic unities simultaneously within a process by which they can
be broken down and reassembled. No other art form betrays such a
procedural uneasiness about its aesthetic existence. Yet in its cross-
processing of abstract speculation and common sense revisionism, the
pressure of the human upon the cerebral, lies the reason why the novel
has been the dominant form of narrative for two centuries.
Nevertheless, as might be expected of a genre intrinsically related to
middle class liberalism, the novel has constantly struggled to retain an
authority it never had, to lay nostalgic grounds to be believed in, not
only to take its place in art, but to insinuate itself into discourse about
society. The history of the 19th century novel might then be viewed
as a series of masks or stratagems compensating for the genre's
questionable lineage. In this context, the romance emerges as the
characteristic bourgeois response to the loss of omniscience - for the
narrator, in directing himself to the idealizing tendencies of his audience,
as well as to an attention span (genre) of its convenience, provides the
illusion of authority regained. The reader becomes, in Ortega's words,
a "temporal provincial"; the narrator's defects are disguised insofar
as the reader adopts them for himself.
Naturalism, while its pretensions are anti-romantic, asserts its own
authority just as surely to justify its scientific ways to man. "Is it not
138 CHARLES NEWMAN
time to make justice a pa

attain the majesty of the
his work, the romance an
autonomy of technique. N
the apogée of the genre. A
form if it is both romantic
It was Joyce who broke
between the romance and n
speaking to the villager.
Flaubert that the personalit
existence, the effect of his
view of the audience is to i
himself - beyond any fram
of the "intellectual" in the arts.
Joyce did not exhaust the novel. He "merely" exhausted Omniscience
as a point of view. The narrator could never again claim his form ex
hypothesi in terms of audience needs or scientific method. Nor could
the Bourgeois reader ever again dignify the romance as scientific. Next
to Bloom, the epic hero is epicene. Next to Joyce, God comes off as
simply a poor linguist and a monologist at that. And certainly the reader
can no longer make it as a "temporal provincial."
There is some justification in treating the novel as dated, since it is,
in fact, the oldest of abstract art forms, the first mixed-media. Its thrust
from the beginning has been aleatorie - syncretic, not synthetic -
held together by the tension of its own formal contradictions, testimony
both to the interpenetrability of experience and the necessity for
recombinant expression. The novel has always exemplified an uneasy
cohabitation between the empirical and the fictional impulses, which
Ortega defined as the conflict between "scientific psychology" and
"imaginary psychology."* The empirical grants the appearance of
actuality, while the fictional indulges in the appearance of ideal system.
There are authors, in retrospect, for whom the conflict seems less
overt: Flaubert, because he worked in a time when the romance was
still venerable and science not yet suspect, and Joyce because he worked
in a time when the destruction of every literary convention was still
♦The terminology is as endless as it is clumsy. The Positivist draws the distinction between
' 'verifiable" and "non-verifiable*' experience, Proust between "involuntary" memory
and "voluntary" memory, which is in service of the intellect. They are all Platonist
throwbacks, and serve only to remind us, in Frank Kermode's words, that we always
seem to prefer "an enigma to a muddle."
exciting, and not the working

class. In the present time, both c
are often simply brushed aside a
There is no necessary clash be
epistemologist, because history
history, not an investigation of
reality. His narrator does not a
we see events. As every man ha
narrator has become his own e
Be that as it may, the narrato
for granted, as well as the narra
of his own perception, no longe
Both primitive realism and
contemporary viewpoints, wh
ideological versions of both Lit
open to serious question. A pu
imagined, or a strict presentatio
cannot be pursued autonomous
For after all, just as one cannot
to take into account one's one
access to history without at som
perception. As Ortega says, "fict
he means that one cannot make
denouncing some projected equ
This is the most difficult thin
because it is a process which cann
an intellectual relinquishment
To produce, to create ... is to

perceive the lie of diversity,
multiple ... to produce a work is to espouse all those
incompatibilities, all those fictive oppositions so dear to restless
minds. More than anyone the writer knows what he owes to those
semblances, these deceptions, and should be aware of becoming
indifferent to them. If he neglects or denounces them, he cuts the
ground from under his own feet ... if he turns to the absolute,
what he finds there will be, at best, a delectation in
stupor . . . Anyone who is carried away by his reasoning forgets
that he is using reason, and this forgetting is the condition of all
creative thought. [The Fall Into Time]
140 CHARLES NEWMAN
But what if one rejects both t

and history as epistemology? T
the most distinctive approach
journalists have come to call
comedy."
The essence of the method can
which purports to offer an an
society. And while it may be n
Begins is certainly a novel:
W.A.S.P. within the archety
both our national experience
of it.
As in Nabokov, whom Purd
a false crisis
met in life is the
does not suffer from encapsu
by his wife/muse Carrie Mo
of the hero/rapist, Cabot Wrig
to "tell Cabot's story." Cabo
hopes will give his otherwise u
some verisimilitude. Bernie d
find out about Cabot in spite
modernity if nothing else. Act
wife of another failed noveli
with Princeton Keith, editor
it is rejected in the end by
Princeton is banished to his
cuckolded in his absence by Jo
Zoe Bickle ends the book wit
post-modern literature:
/ won't be a writer in a pla
Cabot's character developme

represents the novelist's answe
an imaginary world more th
Cabot's fall from normalcy
"supposition" or illegitimate
fact of his background, but
academic, and literary - whi
his background. The question is not so much one of Cabot's
unsuitability as heir to the t

insufficiency as protagonist to
problem is that the "backgrou
(and more importantly, the m
when we discover that he did n
until after he was released fr
rampage (more than 300 rapes
be attributed to that. Indeed,
Cabot can recall is that he st
his wife and employer urged hi
after diagnosing his sickness as
him from a padded meathook and liberated his libido. Thus
unrepressed, Cabot "gets deadly" and attempts to satisfy his new found
sexual strength, first through his wife who eventually can't keep up
with him, and then upon the female population at large. While this
is going on, his wife is committed to "the nut-hatch," his parents are
killed in the "revolutionary Carribean," and these "tragic events" are
once again enlisted by his village explainers as causal agents in his
demise, except that again, Cabot discovers them ex post facto. It is clear
that Purdy is trying to give the lie to any kind of conventional
rationale - in terms of plot or psychology - that would claim to
explain Cabot's behavior. As soon as any one narrator smacks of
omniscience, he is struck down by conventional wisdom.
What is being rejected, however, is not only the scientific pretension
to explain human behavior discursively, but also the literary
presumption of Aristotelian complication and denouement. Purdy's
vision consists of an autonomous, inexplicable action enveloped by a
series of commentators who cumulatively pervert it. And the "tragedy"
is that in the inexorable operation to define his "flaw," Cabot is
gradually deprived of any identity whatsoever. His personality is
overdigested until it becomes suitably surreal to others and unreal to
him. Indeed, in the end, the only explanation he can offer is that he
raped out of "boredom," which is, of course, both more plausible and
dramatic than the other alternatives. As Cabot says:
/ have lost my memory for consecutive events . . . / have read

so many variations of what I did I forgot myself . . . / have heard
my life so many times, I am a stranger to the story itself
And there we leave the Post-Modern story teller.
142 CHARLES NEWMAN
Purdy is at pains to avoi

psychological motivation
"good narrator" as Cabot
told nothing about his form
American Dream, nor are w
just how the psychoanaly
accomplishes his rapes, or
accompished them "easily
Such absence of characte
traced to the nouvelle vag
not merely at a philosoph
American literary experi
suspicious of language an
mistrusts modern life and
above all is the paranoia we
the feeling that the extens
medium is the message" m
matter what the message.
understood as a preconceived phenomenon, or even a writer's
prerogative. It becomes rather a recognition of a medium, alienated
first by those who sell it and then by those who buy it - intellectual
and commercial agencies alike. Like Cabot's "suppositiousness," the
entire question of form becomes ex post facto, germane to consumers
and critics only. The artist is viscerally suspicious of any signification
in advance, of any explanation acceptable to the marketplace.
In many respects, Purdy is the last novelist. He carries Gide's ideas
of the "pure" novel - one which would leave the greatest amount
possible to the reader's imagination - to its logical if absurd
conclusion. He exemplifies Joyce's implicit assumption that originality
in literature derives from waiving all literary conventions. He is
Tolstoy's noble narrator who can "explain" nothing of what he has
seen. He exemplifies the "new novelist's" concern with art not only
as creation but as negative critique. And he is Ortega's ultimate novelist,
for certainly he has forgotten enough, though the critic might well point
out that the narrator simply didn't know enough to begin with - an
essential Post-Modern apprehension.
The ambivalence of such a stance need not be elaborated. For Purdy
is as close to Camp as a serious writer can get without being its
apologist - Camp being defined as the parody of that which is no
longer worth parodying. After

metaphor for the aesthetic whi
by infibulating them with th
* * *
The continuous attempt to

impulses within the novel ou
conflict between idealized form
a pragmatic evolution of hist
behavior is contextualized in accordance with whatever determinism
is currently fashionable.
In short, the novel possesses no inherent equilibrium, or rather
inherently disrupts the very equilibrium it seems to constitute. This is
why criticism tends to treat all fiction as a mystery to be solved, and
why negative critiques of any novel are almost always based upon
underutilization of capacity.
Equilibrium in fiction is achieved only through the hindsight of
canonization or the less hierarchic judgementalism of category. The
New Critics, for example, could demonstrate equilibrium in any genre
or period, because their analytic mode was grounded in an organic,
integral world-view. As the Second Revolution progresses, however,
the explicatory method is preserved without any unifying world-view
and thus tends to produce endless demonstrations of dissolving
equilibriums.
The Avant-Garde tends to make such dissolution into a credo,
creating a consensual adversary style the toxicity of which is mitigated
only by its vagueness, while the Literal Revivalist hypothesizes a
restorative force to get things back into line, ignoring the fact that once
an equilibrium is broken, it cannot be restored simply by the repetition
of old habits and customs.
The Formalist posits an "inner" equilibrium within the work of art,
just as the Realist posits an equilibrium based on reciprocity and
objective truth; both, it would seem, are equally arbitrary and tenuous
assertions.
Against the equilibriums once defined by genre, style and period,
the Modern then becomes characterized by an equilibrium which fails
to hold, a model which originally glories in distortion, but which
eventually becomes only a routinized disturbance available to any
144 CHARLES NEWMAN
middle-class terrorist, fina

to employ even its destru
The Post-Modern subjects t
embellishment, for in destr
it parodies both resolutio
reflected in an indisputable
and the variables of the m
than not, such creative dise
technique which anticipate
was once anticipated by g
there is no truth to get at
but a working hypothesis
What happens all too often

is justified by reference t
powerful reduction which e
to time. The Post-Modern Artist becomes a specialist in
pseudomorphosis, as he refuses, as a matter of principle, the appearance
of a new equilibrium. Such a stance obviously lacks the heroism of the
Modernist model, because it appears merely as an involuntary hedge
against the volatility of the system.
This is not merely an aesthetically generated response. All of our
experience tends to reinforce the notion that an equilibrium is destroyed
and restored by external forces, and the entire thrust of Modernism
presupposes a dynamic art mocking the static social order of Bourgeois
stability. But what happens then to the novel, an art form with no
inherent stability, when it encounters a culture which itself displays the
inherent disequilibrium of inflation, a society in which it appears no
stability is possible within existing institutions? In such a situation, the
artist can no longer capitalize upon a temporary disequilibrium, because
it is the norm; hence the redundancy of the Adversary style. In inflation
all apparent gains are, more or less, due to disequilibrium. Both
character and milieux are equally fluid. Operating in such an
environment the artist, no less than the citizen, gives up trying to
optimize his position, and all formulations, whether couched in
revolutionary or conservative rhetoric, become subject to diminishing
marginal control: i.e. each time a new method of control is used, it
has diminishing effectiveness the next time. This produces a chronic
malaise of which literary pessimism is only a minor aspect. In both art
and society, inflation insures tha

practical and psychological orie
The only antidote to such def
inexactitudes by the culture's c
precisely because of its mixed c
medium for fusing the imagin
reminds us that though fiction m
it is a necessary response to the e
claim legitimacy by association
method of inquiry. Literary f
ineffably amateur, opposed to
permeates the popular genre, as w
of literary criticism, insofar as
makes use of the entire range of
the crudest personal experienc
trades pragmatically with all in
deinstitutionalizes them undida
which responsible interpreters
limiting its scope and thus mak
novelist remains in Montaigne
knowledge, a magistrate witho
its rare and occasional superior
unprecedented failure rate, is du
in advance, that it remains an ar
any theory of continuity. This sl
believing that all consciousness is
by the terrible arbitrariness of s
our age. Fiction remains the
apprenticeship, but the most e
maker. And the novel's "form"
resolution, of that impure stru
what's left of our consciousness.
constitute its own subject matter
that holds our attention in the
Insofar as the recombinant pr
it is only because the equilibriu
of the adjustment process whic
finally impervious to decoding be
the tedium which would be nec
of the process. In a dynamic fram
146 CHARLES NEWMAN
to the equilibrium must

cannot finally accomplish t
its own heuristic descript
formal modeling, which i
The fictive nature of fictio
The problem is not inhere
Platonist terminology whic
of cross-processing within
contented themselves with
and response, we would stil
was located in the pancreas.
life that the complexity
reverence and awe in the sc
part for the high morale
lamentation in the literar
philosophical often complain
nervous system and the s
mathematical relation; nev
one did exist. "It is not urg
Santayana says, "yet some
not being things, and wit
reasonably clear is that th
structured differently fr
experience refers, that in fa
specific mental functions in
reveal upon further inve
throughout the system - a
dialectical categorization.
components, and literary
for pursuing their interr
end some time ago. If cri
linguistics, then it appear
alliance with neurobiology a
pursuing these questions.
take us further into the te
system. There is very little
it more attractive than co
It is only with the develo

have a set of metaphors w
what Ortega called the "imagin

about the nervous system and its
repeatedly changes character
processing between genetic det
as a series of organizing techn
actual conditions - or to put it
of the fictional and empirical
simply insufficient to explain
network. In this regard, most
instruction book for operating
Fiction, then, might be underst
elements which can neverthel
arbitrarily high reliability, i.e., t
"a deterioration in arithmetics h
in logics" [John Von Neuman,
another positivism amplified
unquantifiable human behavio
When this habitual cross-processing is put in the context of
comparative cultural history, fiction can be seen as neither
transcendental project nor autonomous technique, but as the natural
evolution of an intelligence which has had to deal with the antinomy
between Realism - the imperviousness of things on the one hand -
and the Formalist, idealistic tendency to locate everything in the mind.
This most certainly does not mean that "everything is a fiction," or
even that our apprehension of the world is primarily fictional - for
that is to confuse fiction with mere storytelling and the increasingly
empty and grandiose promises of art. It only serves to remind us that
this antinomy represents an arrangement of knowledge not more than
two hundred years old - that it is no accident that the concept of
Modern Man parallels the development of the novel.
As fiction lacks an ontology, it has historically tended to advertise

itself as something more procedurally deterministic than it is, "looking
like" some kind of history or science in which every detailed occurrence
can be correlated with its antecedents. Modernism, of course, is in
♦"Human beings communicate both digitally and analogically. Digital language has
a highly complex and powerful logical syntax but lacks adequate semantics in the field
of relationship, while analogic language possesses the semantics but has no adequate
syntax for the unambiguous definition of the nature of relationships." (Watzlawick,
The Pragmatics of Human Communications)
148 CHARLES NEWMAN
essence a revolt against s

Modernism, as we can see w
of a law of Nature.
Moreover, literature can be read as a kind of barometer of the default
of other disciplines; its strategy can often be best understood by
considering what other more formalized discipline it is attacking,
mimicking, or negotiating with. Even in its most defensive mode, for
example, fiction expresses its sense of superiority to the Social Sciences,
which tend to treat human experience in terms of grossly molar
macroevents, whereas fiction tends to concentrate on the myriads of
micro-events which even the most sophisticated theorist hardly ever
perceives individually. With Purdy, we see the novelist's profound
aversion to Psychology, that scientism most deeply embedded in mass
consciousness, and it may well be this resolute if contemptuous
indifference to simplistic psychological cause and effect which will be
fiction's most enduring contribution to whatever revision of
consciousness the contemporary eventually manages. It of course
remains a surly fact of art that such anti-cause-and-effect often amounts
to nothing more than a mere shrugging off of any pattern.
On the other hand, Post-Modern fiction's tendency to "look like"
Philosophy, as it once looked like History, is a more questionable
strategy. It is highly unlikely, because of its unsystematic character,
that literature (or literary criticism) can ever provide starting points of
inquiry, much less illuminate the generative base of its own procedures.
As a matter of fact, it can be argued that fiction succeeds as a mediating
experience only to the extent that it accepts its fate as an inherent
disequilibrium, that it exercises its power in escaping its origins; in
Merleau-Ponty's words, that "noble form of forget fulness."
Fiction constitutes a jungle of ad hoc assumptions, abstract
speculation and mere hunches, as well as mediation of direct experience.
In this sense, the novel is a barely epistemological act, and at base is
not even literary. The durability and uniqueness of fiction is above all
due to the fact that the materialistic and the linguistic, the historical
and the temporal, the real and the fabricated, tend not only to conflict,
but also to perpetuate and reinforce one another. This making of a home
for the temporality of all experience, for all anticoincidental mental
processes, explains why almost everyone believes he has this particular
art form, and only this one, the novel, within him.
23. The Use and Abuse of Death
"Do you know, Mr. Yule, that you have suggested a capital idea
to me? If I were to take up your views, I think it isn 't at all unlikely
that I might make a good thing of writing against writing. It
should be my literary specialty to rail against literature. The
reading public should pay me for telling them that they oughtn't
to read. I must think it over. "
"Carlyle has anticipated you, " threw in Alfred.
"Yes, but in an antiquated way. I would base my polemic on
the newest philosophy. "
-George Gissing, New Grub Street, 1891
The most unpleasant aspect of contemporary alienation is that no

one bothers to examine its aspects. As a metaphysical concept, it is
diluted by high agnosticism; as a social concept, by the absorption of
intellectuals into the middle class. It has now the currency of a major
idea, which in our time means that it can be generally accepted without
logical or personal consequences.
To dismiss apocalyptic criticism as a self-contained enterprise with
little relation to the energies which actually produce and disseminate
literature is fair enough; it is also easy enough to attribute the decreasing
interest in serious literature to a conspiracy of greedy publishers and
a distracted, mindless reading public. But those who have been
preoccupied with literary culture during the age of the Death of
Language, and with fiction during the Death of the Novel, owe such
dismissals some specific scrutiny.
As any Trade Editor will confirm, serious fiction as a commercially
viable item in the mass market is now undeniably moribund. To say,
of course, that an art form which cannot pay its own way is also
generically defunct is a respectable American argument; happily it is
1 50 CHARLES NEWMAN
no longer applied to any other

bombardment. It is somewhat
impossible to raise money to cap
obvious reason being that liter
in private; thus it is difficult to
performing arts, where an audience can, if not appreciate the
production, at least achieve a collective sense of itself. What is worth
pursuing is how the End-of-the-Genre Criticism dovetails so nicely and
curiously with corporate apologetics about the lack of demand for
fiction.
Let us pursue three assertions. (1) At the moment when America has
an unusually diverse amount of compelling fiction, and (2) the novel
and short story are undergoing significant innovation, (3) the response
of the conventional market to fiction is as low as it ever has been. Now
(1) cannot be proven - only exemplified - though it's available to
any publisher who's willing to lose money. Item (2) remains in the
domain of close textual analysis. But let us examine (3) in a rather
simple-minded way - literature as a commodity. So we might regard
writers, not as artists engaged in some vaguely transcendental project,
but rather as artisans who have absolutely no control over the forces
which produce and distribute what they make.
Literary Law #1: Literature is the only art form in our generation
whose technology and dissemination has not been radically challenged
by its practitioners.
Both the European tradition of art as a secular religion and the

American predilection for artists as heroic or at least stoic isolatos have
made it very difficult for American writers to question the mechanisms
of publishing. It seems, if not hopeless, then beneath them, a vulgar
materialism with which no serious artist should concern himself. This
attitude denies community, we know; it also denies what even most
established American writers have almost always done without: a sense
of audience. I think it's fair to say that no serious fiction writer in
America today can tell you whom he is writing for. We simply do not
have the kind of reciprocity which Keynes spoke of when he said that
H.G. Wells's mind "seemed to grow along with his readers." This is
not death, but it is narcosis. It doesn't finally affect genius or human
will, it can never be used as an excuse for failed experiments, but it
does have serious cumulative

well as the health of a culture,
or a cynicism which is not ea
Over the last two decades, o
characterized by the extent of
itself is continually described a
an increasingly nonverbal so
individualism in a world which
links to language, through so
symbol and sign. We have ra
craftsmen, and the refusal to
or eremites is not exactly new
for the damage they do themse
with the pain they inflict, has
narrative voice of the era is pa
mode of our most popular poets. Our sense of self has been so
diminished that fiction - whose traditional domain is the relation of
the private self to its public contexts - was preempted by the
confessional shriek, a cry so intense and deafening that it hardly requires
narrative momentum. One feels a little nostalgic to recall that early in
the sixties, we were told that what was "out there" was so fascinating
that only documentary reportage could be equal to it, and this was cause
enough for ignoring a fictional imagination which had somehow not
kept pace with a magical reality. But in the end, that decade was
chronicled in poetic fragments, in suicidal dreams, not by our essayistes.
If fiction could not keep pace with the "relevance" of the New
Journalism, neither, it would seem, could it be adequate for a "counter
culture" in which Reality became totally privatized. Its middle distance
strategy was not serviceable for either the Think Piece or the
Hallucination. And being told one is anachronistic is, after all, better
than being told one is untalented or unpopular - it absolves everyone
of responsibility. To be sure, such speculations do not confront the
argument which proposes an intrinsic devolution of a genre. But that
argument in turn fails to consider the extent to which we are determined
not by genre, but by a hopelessly anachronistic technology and failed
cultural agency. In other words, the cost of producing and marketing
literature has simply exceeded its industry's profit margin, and this
particular disease has been masked long enough by theories of dying
forms and metaphors of terminal illness.
152 CHARLES NEWMAN
It doesn't take a Marxist

mergers in trade publishing
writers should not expect
else.* But if we are absorb
must understand that busin
expiration. In other wor
capitalization needs, their s
through constant expansi
marketing and technology
ownership automatically reduces the options of a publisher.
Nonetheless, there seem to be some inexorable laws which affect what
we call "serious" literature.
A conglomerate's products are measured by their "spin-off value."
That is, products must replicate other products within interlocking
systems. Hence the book, and the novel in particular, becomes defined
by its subsidiary functions almost totally, movie and television rights
being the typical example.
Lit. Law #2: The commercial life of a novel is exactly proportional to

the extent to which it is translated into media other than its own.
The flexibility as well as competitiveness of conglomerates was

historically determined, in America particularly, by successive
breakthroughs in technology. As artisans, we have a situation where
there has been no advance in the science of making books since offset
printing, and no advance in distribution whatsoever. As always, the
weakness of the system is revealed most clearly in a hiatus of growth.
The real costs of making this thing we call a book have more than
♦The numbers are instructive. As of 1982, more than 50% of all mass market sales were
accounted for by five publishers, and ten publishing firms accounted for more than
85%. Nine firms accounted for more than 50% of "general interest" book sales. The
largest publishers in the country are Time, Inc., Gulf and Western, M.C.A., Times
Mirror, Inc., The Hearst Corp., C.B.S. and Newhouse publications, conglomerates which
all have heavy stakes in mass-market entertainment media, such as radio, book clubs,
cable TV, pay TV, motion pictures, video discs, and paperback books. All of them
have become significant factors only in the last ten years. (The general definition of
oligopoly is an industry in which the eight largest firms have a 50 percent share of sales,
and the largest 20 firms have at least 75 percent.)
Similar conglomeration can be noted in bookselling. In 1958, one store "independent"
book firms sold 72% of all books sold by booksellers. By 1981, the four largest bookstore
chains approached 40 percent of sales, and it appears almost certain that this figure
will have increased to 50 percent by the beginning of this year.
trebled in less than a generation.

@ $4-5.00 of a first novel to bre
15,000 @ $11-15.00 (numbers wh
sees print). The effect of this i
discretionary dollar devalued, so t
books.
Lit Law #3: This audience simply has not increased exponentially
with the increase in the cost of producing serious literature. Literature,
in more than one sense, is a handmade art in a mass-production
economy.
This doesn't have the stink of a true conspiracy, only that of another
technological system which doesn't work under pressure. Yet it is
interesting how rather simple economic priorities gather unto themselves
the most metaphysical of justifications. We are, of course, no longer
talking about books but properties. But rarely do we hear this refreshing
materialism any more. I have heard a vice-president of a large publishing
house justify his reluctance to publish fiction by quoting George Steiner
on the death of tragedy, Adorno on the impossibility of poetry in a
world of concentration camps, McLuhan on the anality of print culture,
and, finally, that crusher: TV has preempted the function of fiction.
Of course it's quite true that fiction has lost its monopoly on middle-
class consumer information - it lost that to the newspaper long before
electricity. We are not being told that fiction is trying to tell us something
different from the Evening News. We are being told that fiction
represents an insufficient profit for those who also own the Evening
News, that to survive at all it must be marketed like the Evening News,
and that at any rate, the Evening News doesn't make much money
either.
Lit Law #4: // is perhaps a little early to pronounce on the death

of literature. What is certain is that publishing is less and less responsive
to a pluralistic culture. Which can eventually amount to the same thing.
For the moment, one ought to avoid drawing the obvious political
implications from this analysis. We know that centralization of power
will eventually involve censorship. But what is more important is that
these corporate decisions are not wrong in terms of some high-flown
aesthetics, so much as confused within their own logic, their own
mythology of consumption.
154 CHARLES NEWMAN
Consider, for example, the

American Institute of Graph
There are many ways ... in

the appeal of books - gift-wra
types of groupings or sets, re
and constructions, improve
before such ideas can be tried on a realistic scale . . . attitudes
of publishers toward the design and manufacture of their books
must change. . . .
They must learn to regard the book as a product to be packaged
and sold as are other products, and they must develop, along with
their manufacturers, a system of standardized alternatives to
control today's undisciplined proliferation of physical variables.
In applying to publishing the types of packaging thinking that
takes place in other industries, the book must be viewed crassly
as a product to be sold. Much as I respect literary merit and fine
bookmaking, as a packager I must evaluate books in much the
same way I evaluate a can of soup or a bottle of wine - as items
which vie for consumer acceptance in order to make it in the
marketplace. . . .
There is, for instance, the matter of selling books in multiple
units. I know that we have sets of Dickens or George Eliot or
Winnie the Pooh, but what about grouping various books on one
subject to develop multiple sales? Might not a travel guide to Spain
be packaged with a road map, street maps of principal cities, a
money changer, a tipping guide? Could not simultaneous
publishing dates on Civil War books from different publishers
be turned into enticing offerings - through joint packaging -
to Civil War buffs, instead of competing for sales ... ?
And what about special-occasion packaging? We know that if
you're looking for a Bible as a confirmation gift, there is a
convenient choice between a white slipcover for girls and a
simulated morocco for boys. But what about appealing covers
encasing appropriate books for Mother's Day? Hearty barbecue
books for Father's Day? Love poems for Valentine's Day?
Graduation dictionaries?
Still another packaging design staple that might be adapted to
specialized books is the re-use container. The package for a book
on birds might ultimately convert into a bird feeder. A cookbook's
binding might be doubled and hinge

easel.
We must find out more about people's attitudes toward books.
Do they retain jackets or toss them away? If so, when? Do they
dust books or leave them on shelves? Do they, in fact, keep them
at all? Do they regard books as objects, as status symbols, or do
they consider having read them the most important thing. . . .
[Publisher's Weekly]
What's objectionable here is hardly Mr. Fink's indifference to intrinsic

value. Indeed, he has struck an unwitting blow for concretism and
paraliterature. The resistance of publishers to anything but the most
standardized format has discouraged not only Mr. Fink but a good deal
of innovative fiction, in the same way that the format of commercial
magazines has had an undeniable if as yet unexamined effect not only
on the content but the very structure of the American short story.
Quality short fiction abounds. But whatever happened to the magazines
which printed it? Again, the genre's évolution/reconstitution is confused
with the demise of its traditional package or "vehicle." What is both
saddening and hilarious is the desperate decision to submit all problems
to repackaging. With so complex a product as books, packaging is the
least efficacious way to solve a distribution problem. The failed solution
of every commercial magazine to its structural economic problems in
the last twenty years has been: (1) redesign format, (2) reduce trimsize,
(3) cut back on fiction. Literature must retain considerable power if
all those little stories are dragging entire corporations to fiscal ruin.
As long as the publishing industry subjects all of its products to the
same promotional techniques, as long as serious books must compete
not only with other books but with TV and gimmicks, and as long as
literature remains undifferentiated from Confirmation gifts, its costs
allocated according to the same overhead formulae, then of course its
piececost will continue to rise and its claims on ordinary attention will
continue to decrease.
Nevertheless, simple anti-commercialism can no longer be a unifying

scapegoat. The university press, as self-advertised countervailing
institution, has failed utterly to provide a genuine alternative press or
distribution system. It has favored exegesis over art and generally
ignored the culture of its time. It has not created a single innovation
in production or distribution technology, despite massive subsidies and
156 CHARLES NEWMAN
proximity to all the rese

editorially, conservative aes
to-day educational needs of
academic hiring and prom
beyond its narrowest const
of outrageous prices, on t
turn has passed them on t
crunch comes, for the sam
counterpart, the university
in which commercial pub
countervailing institution -
as marginal, so that the firs
reviews, the search for t
constituency is never repr
situation: information whic
which is of use only to a
dollar limited editions; wh
potential audience, and w
ignored. The university pre
sale of specialist nonfic
guaranteed sale on Greyh
results - the failure to cultivate an audience.
The first university press which puts its dissertations and statistical
abstracts on microfilm, rethinks what ought to be printed, and devotes
itself to the literature and the art of its time and place will make an
indelible mark on this century, and perhaps even regain a measure of
the respect for continuity and independent judgment which the
university has forfeited.
Any assessment of the present literary situation must begin with the
redefinition of "censorship" and "relevance," those sub-indices of free
speech and intellectual freedom. It's quite clear, for example, that a
commercial publisher can absorb criticism by pointing out its youth
list, its woman's list, its black list. Indeed, when social issues are most
polarized, it is perhaps easiest for the establishment to compartmentalize
its market and to diffuse criticism with the illusion of contemporaneity.
But the alacrity to cash in the literary chips on issues pre-glamorized
by the media in no sense represents a more venturesome commitment
to serious analysis or to the issues - a fact which Youth and Black
culture have already found out, an

start coming in. Nor does it have an
relevance or literary innovation, wh
tenuous relationship with each oth
Further, literary freedom has beco
license to use explicit language to
the spread of pornography is seen
fight for freedom of expression
freedom to read or write "fuck" i
of the volume market than either the maximization of erotic desire or
the elimination of constraint. Explicit sex, like explicit politics, has little
to do with releasing the energies of serious literature. (Alas.) And such
increased tolerance constitutes no avant garde, only a middle-class
acceptance of colloquial speech once limited to rare book and locker
rooms.
In such a context, freedom of expression has come to mean

than saying in public what was once formerly said or read
without frosty consequences. Most Americans understan
censorship as nothing more than bleeping talk shows, an
censorship as a mouldering court battle won before they
(You don't, after all, need a Justice Brandeis when Playboy is
apparently taking the fight right into the kitchenettes of America.)
Lit Law #5: It doesn't matter what you say, or how you say it, but
where. A classical totalitarian society censors at the production point.
An oligopolistic democracy censors at the distribution point.
A Modern government can kill off objectionable ideas with prurience

or sedition laws, just as commercial publishing companies, by applying
the same general overhead formulae to all its products, can limit
minority reports. It is an instructive observation that countries with
much more rigid official censorship laws - France and England,
say - offer a better selection of serious literature to their consumers
than the U.S.
What we are really talking about here are basic minority rights -
the right to see one's efforts reach their widest possible audience. Serious
fiction's constituency is not large - perhaps 100,000, at the very most,
with 25,000 hard core. It is a minority which is at present nameless,
and cannot organize beyond the ghostly images of electronic
communication.
158 CHARLES NEWMAN
If a book deserves to be prin

10,000, that is censorship. If
because it is not reviewed, p
It hardly matters whether thi
ignorance, a conspiracy of in
market, it has the same effe
the loss of community. If w
establishment novel in Polan
unpromoted and unreviewed
of print and pulped, we would
every day, if for different r
is no fundamental difference
and making utterly unreaso
where censorship has a more b
for example, a controversial p
performed, while a similar n
at a club but not printed and
by denying the medium best s
There are several reasons w
coherent theory of how Am
political options. The first i
European model of repressio
American tactic of absorptio
way just as much as the min
bothered to understand markets.
But even more importantly, the escalation of rhetoric - all sides
accusing each other of being "dead" - has so banalized polemic that
it is rare to see a telling attack upon the establishment, much less a
genuine expression of agony. As Gerald Graff notes, "it used to be
that one tried to prove one's enemies wrong. But now that right and
wrong are 'meaningless' categories, it is better to identify the opposition
as 'dead.' The Death Argument saves a lot of trouble because reasons
are irrelevant; it is basically unanswerable, and it implies that the
prosecutors are 'the lively ones.'"
The Leftist critique is even more irrelevant than usual. It tends to
romanticize the older paternalistic, individualistic publishers, who in
fact were gamblers because they had no other choice. To see the conflict
as one between "workers" and "bosses," to be solved by
"unionization", is totally to miss the uniqueness of conglomerate
control, as well as the fact that th

the most powerful political and e
a sudden concentration of power
those who controlled it. To believe t
censors those who attack it, is sim
class absorbs Avant-Garde style, it is precisely the cheap anti-
establishment product which is most promotable. The Left remains
ineffective to the extent that it relies upon a classical theory of
repression. It sees calculation and conspiracy where in fact there is only
an open cynical indifference. To illustrate, consider this press release:
In response to an invitation to write a piece on "The Joy of Writing,"
James Purdy came up with the following put-on, which he obviously
believed would never see the light of day.
In Observance of International Book Year

Observations
of American Writers
prepared by the Publishers Publicity

Association for reprint use in
newspapers and magazines
In observance of International Book Year

James Purdy, Author of "Elijah Thrush"
published by Doubleday & Company, has
written this personal observation on the
American literary scene.
Writing from Inner Compulsion
I became a writer because there was no way for me to avoid

writing, and I am in the same unchanged situation today. My early
writings had to be privately printed because my work then as today
violated the taboos and crotchets of the U.S. Publishing
Monopoly (the taboos seem to change as the System goes on
crumbling, but the main character of the monopoly remains -
its outlawing of native vision and speech, its assassination of pure
talent, and its denigration of integrity). Although over the years,
beginning with my privately printed books on down to those of
my writings which commercial publishers have condescended to
publish, my readers may have increased by numbers, I am still
writing from inner not outer compulsion, and my work is truly
reaching only those few who can accept vision and voice
160 CHARLES NEWMAN
unconnected with the do

which constitutes Ameri
I think that to be ignored
which today control pub
prizes, etc., to be swept,
structure, to be denigrat
from being 'hard luck' is
happen to me or any oth
and tongue. Either one i
York, or he is out of it,
If one writes from inner p
his own voice on paper, h
from the most meretrici
unreal civilization the world has ever seen.
This was of course printed and circulated as a fit "observation,"

despite its obvious disdain for the entire process, and it surely reached
a wider audience than Purdy's books. But there are several things in
the text worth remarking on. First, it is the writer placed in the position
of "cultural critic" once again, and note the extremity and rigidity of
the rhetoric - something Purdy would never permit himself in his
fiction. Also, whatever his indifference to "fame," there is an
underlying poignancy, the yearning for an audience. He knows very
well that what has happened to him is not the "best" thing; it is simply
preferable to being a clique's cutie or a hack. Indeed, like many
rebellious writers, he accepts the either/or criterion of success
promulgated by the industry; he simply reverses their valuation. But
Purdy's contradictions are less manifest than those of the industry which
can offer this wholesale condemnation of publishing as "publishers'
publicity," complete with a phone number to Time-Life Books. What
possible follow-up could they offer? What other culture would bother
to absorb the most vitriolic attack, repackage it, and cynically throw
it back in the face of the writer as an instance of his indifference? This
sort of strangulated fury is what is expected from the writer, this is
what comes of "writing from inner compulsion," this is the writer's
real role because it can be written off to the rhetoric of the alienated -
specialists in the last gasp. And because Purdy has nothing to fall back
on save the dubious integrity of his isolation, the Publishers' Publicity
Association knows that these words, no matter how true or sick, are
no threat to them. Or perhaps - and this is the most terrifying aspect
of this artifact - perhaps we

rhetoric that it is impossible
a mirror image of somnambular Time/Speak: nil admiran, nil
desperandum.
What we are dealing with here is the preemption by the media of
the writer as celebrity. The talk show is, after all, an attempt to create
through instantaneous exposure what was once mythology or at least
romantic rumor. At least people could genuinely envy Hemingway or
sympathize with Fitzgerald, for these writers' self-promotion was related
directly to the authentication of their art; their posturing was a way
of testing the reality of their narrators as well as their audience, and
we should suffer little nostalgia over this. After all, it's demonstrably
destructive for writers to live out the attenuated fantasies of the public;
they should rather be read than recognized. We have grown up to the
extent that we can see that artists might have other serious social roles
besides that of the celebrity functionaire. In this sense, literature has
certainly become de-prophetized, and the only societies in which a writer
can still claim traditional charisma are those in which the government
either officially honors its writers or punishes them publicly with 19th
century authoritarian élan. It is hard to imagine an American
government getting around to doing either.
But the key determinant in understanding the uneasy relationship of
literary culture to the general culture is the failure to make the
technology of bookmaking responsive to a pluralistic culture. The most
powerful idea to come out of the 20th century American experiment
was the transfer of an Enlightenment view of political life to culture
itself. For if our politics have been basically conservative, it is in the
operation of our cultural and artistic life that our more radical ideals
have had their greatest expression. Against the European notion of
culture as standards enforced by an elite, we have come to see culture
as a series of unexpected alternatives, and the greatest legacy of the
otherwise dissipated radical politics of the sixties (as well as the greatest
oversight of the liberal mind) was the realization that the
communications structure must be challenged before you can hope to
alter, much less bind, thought and action.
When the economy of scale appropriate to mass culture is applied
to a more selective and complex print culture, inelastic contradictions
between the production and transmission of art emerge. In an
inflationary era, the conglomerate requires larger and larger rates of
return to justify its risk in a volatile market, and, more importantly,
162 CHARLES NEWMAN
only the conglomerate ca

distorted. Power in an infla
to short term credit at wha
with impunity.
Modernism hitched its st
which self-destructed lon
increased its sway. In this s
the extent to which they
relations which they wer
Modernism intellectually
easily - between high and
with the processes of capita
Its intellectual spokesmen
a practical and historical ba
the intelligentsia and the
affect the transmission of art are no different from those which affect
the political economy as a whole. In this sense the struggle of the
publishing industry is a convenient social metaphor. When it became
efficacious for individual firms to sell out to conglomerates, the
conventional inflationary wisdom was to maximize and releverage short
term cash flow, reduce marginal enterprises, maximize income from
"blockbusters/' and pass on ever-increasing costs to the consumer. This
had the effect of only intensifying the secular trend of downgrading
long term planning and reinvestment. Inflation exacerbated the situation
in the by now familiar pattern: the bureaucratic structure is expanded,
long term contracts and relationships are invalidated, editors and writers
change affiliation almost randomly, increasingly shoddy merchandise
proliferates, and keeping "marginal" books in print, or printing them
in the first place, becomes highly unprofitable. As a result, serious
literature disappears from the mass market.
Lit Law #6: The audience for serious literature cannot be consistently
reached by conventional marketing devices, no matter how intensively
applied.
In other words, the present system cannot cater to the reflective,

selective buyer who is most likely to be primarily impressed by word
of mouth, occasionally a review, and the actual physical presence of
the book. The answer to this - as with all such problems of quality
items in competition with the m

and proximity to minority con
a wider spectrum of books in
outlets - exactly the reverse of
The intellectual tends to see c

traditional centralized power, w
motivation and coherence (the
understand, because it is the o
also assumes that corporate dev
not understand how insidiously
the most self-interested and ec
takes market excesses to self-co
in inflation finance develops in
only tenuously connected to th
little concerned conglomerate ma
of its various subsidiaries. Post-Modern finance constitutes the
Formalism of the Real World.
The fact of the matter is that the trade book industry was never
efficient to the extent that it was subsidized by paperback subsidiary
rights. The success of the mass market paperback only proved one
thing - that the capacity of the market to absorb a large variety of
books is there. Seduced by unprecedented subsidiary income, trade book
publishing experienced the distorted valuation and volume of an
inflationary explosion - overselling, overpaying, overprinting and
overpricing. When these excesses were magnified by a sluggish economy,
paperback houses found that they could no longer cover advances much
less increase profits. The process of mechanical replication which Walter
Benjamin thought infinitely sustainable had its market limitations. What
appeared to be cyclical change was in fact structural change, and
capitalists are no better at distinguishing between the two than anyone
else.
If corporate self-interest were really as efficient as intellectuals think
it is, it would not have lost its control over its own mechanisms of
distribution. By allowing its traditional independent outlets to die out,
the publishing conglomerates in fact created the bookchains as well as
their present business relationship with them, which is essentially one
of unspoken blackmail.
The irony of the conglomerates' takeover is of course that they moved
into publishing, cut the heart out of it, and are now trying to unload
164 CHARLES NEWMAN
the firms as fast as they

conglomerates brought an
marketing skills to their n
retrenchment can only h
structural crisis. There seem to be some modest lessons here:
Print media cannot compete with television by making books into

"total entertainment" packages with innumerable tie-ins and
spinoffs. The market will not prosper unless the intrinsic
properties of the product are respected.
Trade book publishing must seek its own threshold. This means
reinvestment in product so that backlist accounts for a much larger
percentage of income. (In the last decade, backlist income has
fallen from 70% to 30% as a percentage of net income.)
Risk cannot be reduced in the long run by cutting back on the

quality of product. It probably makes good business sense to
respect the pluralism of the culture with a greater diversity of
product.
Whether publishing will be able to readjust to these realities in an

era of disinflation remains an open question. It will be interesting to
see what happens to publishing when it concedes that it simply cannot
manage a rate of return comparable to parallel industries. A return to
a smaller scale is not out of the question. The problem with publishing
is not that it is autarchic but that it has become in the context of its
corporate ownership a peripheral and even risky investment.
It is nevertheless possible that literature may require what every other
surviving mode of creative expression has had in any culture under any
system, namely subsidy - its own house in which it can cultivate its
audience. In a country as large and diverse as ours, where both talent
and need are rarely concentrated, this would seem a necessity even if
the economics were less deterministic and did not threaten to get worse.
What happened to serious fiction only happened to it first. As the
art form with the least organized constituency, it was the first to feel
the effects of inflation and the fragmentation of audience. The repertory
theatre has met the same fate, as has the general-interest magazine.
There remains not a single quality periodical or repertory theatre in
America which is not massively subsidized. This shift in priorities which
began with the reallocation of

affects even the most deeply
humanities and quality daily
the last twenty years, we have
in the agencies which transm
rhetoric of linguistic alienati
Last Lit Law: Just as publish

recognize the shift in emph
economy, so literature remains
pretensions about paying its
Now it may be legitimately as

happens to some unworldly je
as a whole? And how is it that
its costs and prices keep rising
dictates that inflation is cau
reasons are crushingly simpl
equivalent to that which led t
why the standard Adversary
longer taken seriously by an
Intellectuals, Marxist or no, ar
and conspiracy, good Modern
the lack of power, they envisio
secret agreement, subject to r
markets.
But every seller constitutes a
power to increase prices wit
institutions are not on the who
would be totally disruptive of
inflation is caused by the temporary predominance of a seller's
monopoly, and the fact that inflationary assumptions are so deeply
embedded in the social fabric that collusion is unnecessary. The
confusion arises because the liberal intellectual uncritically accepts the
deterministic supply and demand theory of competitive markets as an
accurate description of actual conditions; his caveat is only that "actual
conditions" do not take into account aspects of the culture which cannot
be measured in monetary terms, and thus intervention is required.
His critique, in other words, is based upon the assumption of truly
competitive markets and complete monopoly. So the question is not
one of whether or not the model provides social justice, but what, in
actual fact, prevents the market from clearing itself. Nothing influences
1 66 CHARLES NEWMAN
social and political behavior

equilibrium.
Modernist social and political assumptions are simply irrelevant to
understanding oligopolistic markets in an inflationary age. For what
defines an oligopoly is not so much its unconstrained power, but the
impossibility of determining a theory of price from its operation. And
price theory is precisely where the interventionist takes issue, since any
theory of value and its implicit moral and social concerns is directly
derived from a notion that there exists a mechanism for determining
fair price.
Oligopoly has historically prevented prices from falling by not passing
on the savings technologically attainable cost reductions ordinarily
permit; it responds to inflation by reducing output. Indeed, falling
demand in such a system may result in price increases, if by
underutilization of capacity it raises unit costs; in other words, an
oligopoly may raise prices simply to avoid incurring a loss. In the past,
inflation was controlled because underutilization of resources would
eventually force prices down. But in contemporary inflation,
underutilization is a constant factor; it cannot be "used up," because
every time excess capacity is reduced, inflation flares up.
Further, to the extent that the Adversary argument is based upon
the presumption of acquisitiveness and affluence, it loses its force if
an oligopoly's profits can be concealed in paper transfers, or if they
are in fact non-existent. If there are no profits, the question of their
redistribution or reinvestment becomes irrelevant. The Left is in disarray
for precisely the same reasons the Avant Garde has become diffused -
the nature of the "enemy" has changed. Having based its opposition
upon the rapacity of single-minded self-interest and effective
exploitation, it is difficult for the Left to suddenly shift and accuse
"them" of timidity, confusion and downright incompetence.
The conventional Adversary stance not only confuses older
monopolistic manipulation with the more subtle and effective oligopoly;
it refuses to see how the mentality of the seller's monopoly suffuses
the entire culture, not by some secret agreement, but through tacit
emulation and sheer ignorance. To take the most obvious example, in
an economy increasingly oriented to services, the manner in which
college tuitions are set differs in no important way from the manner
in which corporate law firms set their fees. "Professionals" enter the
field and practice in subordinate relationships to those already
established, rather than competing with them, handing over a large
portion of the general fees for the privilege of practicing through an
established outlet. The result is that the consumer cannot judge either
the quality of services or the appropriateness of the fees charged. If
you want a metaphor for Post-M

up existential plaints or lingu
that the audience in an inflati
determining the value of anyth
obsolete the very notion of volu
are under the pressure of an an
can measure the complexity
damage inflicted by such colle
In short, supply and demand
is no longer an adequate mode
which no longer attempts to st
As W. David Slawson, among o
inflation is primarily caused not by excess demand or lessened
competition, monetary policy or government spending (though these
all may contribute) but by inflationary assumptions anticipated by the
entire culture. The social order becomes engaged in a vast competitive
battle of group against group for a share of the aggregate income, a
war in which prices are set by non-price competition, which include
advertising, barriers to entry, and new product development. This gives
the illusion that demand is not slackening because everybody's prices
are creeping upward together, and accounts for the fact that in the later
stages of inflation, the emphasis of necessity is to concentrate primarily
on the "upscale" market. The first audience lost to booksellers is blue
collar. In a single generation, we have seen the book transformed back
into a cultural luxury.
The important thing here is not to be deluded that we have a situation

amenable to a little good will and technical correction. The question
is how to reassert the pride of independent artisans, which has up to
now been the false pride (resentment) of metaphysical or linguistic
isolation, and to demand a reorganization of priorities without adopting
some facile paranoia. This is asking, obviously, for a lot more sour
grapes, but nothing could be worse than the present combination of
alienation and smugness which attends the activity of making books.
It is about time the American writer ceased confusing his peripherality
with freedom of expression, and began to find out where he fits into
productive and social relations of the world which most affects him.
He will undoubtedly be told that the price of his concern will be his
imagination; that his job is to stay in his room and write, write, write;
that his "time will come." If a twelve-year-old Puerto Rican kid in a
168 CHARLES NEWMAN
ghetto can understand thi

literate adult might.
This argument is embarr

with it and no one knows w
it lacks deep theory and det
change in the financial mar
writers or their audience ca
it merely takes into accou
material and intracultural c
by some vague aesthetic m
sensation and language, bu
4 'communications" industr
culture is passively disgus
make the system respons
overthrow the Viennese Aca
garde posturing will not suf
are ways of producing an
immense and pleasurable s
market hype.
It is easy enough, after a
no monopoly on uncertaint
nothing in American intelle
the problem. There is an
apparatus through which th
can so ill-perceive the single
affects him professionally
political nature? The fact of
have not behaved like dis
persons, but rather as an
increasingly little service.
other substratum of the mi
term occupational and life
attitude which is nothing
protect its present position
Any partial solution will
the culture, recognizing t
be considered just another
what is most important to
survive, much less advance,
and financial stakes of the high-r

term return. Nothing will be acco
of short term profit is redefined
If the literary community is to s
in terms of a stylized adversary
integrity. No act of isolated ind
or unitary theory of culture, ca
intellectualization of a society
bureaucratization of culture, and
alternative to commercialism,
scapegoat, it is difficult for an
reinstitutionalization of literature.
Literary and even print culture is now a minority culture, not by some
elitist manifesto but by economic and social definition. An adversary
culture, even a hypocritical one, requires a periphery in which to
operate, and that periphery becomes squeezed to the vanishing point
in the climax stages of inflation. The advances of literacy are behind
us, and literary art, which has ridden the bowed back of education since
World War II, will have to find other forms of perpetuation. It is
obvious that no one has thought very seriously about what forms this
will take.
We have barely survived the two organizational myths of the 20th

century: that entrepreneurial impulse will solve all problems if only left
unfettered, and that the failure of the market utopia can be solved by
turning all planning over to the state. No one can argue any longer that
capitalism is synonymous with freedom of expression, or that state
ownership would be more humanizing. In one sense, the corporate
conglomerate has been a pragmatic compromise between these extremes,
and we should not be surprised that it has been vulnerable to the same
confusion, smugness and self-aggrandizement which beset other
institutions (political and academic, for instance) not so thoroughly
committed to the bottom line. In this situation, the kind of institution
in which literary art might again flourish suggests a form of organization
which might well serve other aspects of social value.
Perhaps some new breakthrough in technology will relegate our
complaints to insipidity, or perhaps disinflation will restore a fresh if
circumscribed meaning to literary culture. Perhaps a new politics will
produce men who see language as having a more precisely instrumental
relationship to behavior. Or perhaps we will become totally habituated
170 CHARLES NEWMAN
to the media and allowed

least the pleasure of "heari
extremities."
But even then would we be considered Mandarins, a minority clinging
to a sincere if exhausted impulse? Or simply part of the voting majority
who panicked in the face of a clogged horizon?
24. The Permanent Crisis Unsprung
Until now, philosophers kept the solution of all mysteries inside
their desks, and the stupid uneducated world merely had to open
its mouth and the fried dove of Absolute knowledge would fly
in. Philosophy is now secular, for which the best proof is that
philosophical consciousness itself feels the pain of the struggle
not merely externally, but also internally. It is not our task to
construct the future and to deal with everything once and for all,
but it is clear what we have to do at present - I am thinking of
the merciless criticism of everything that exists - merciless
criticism in the sense that it is not afraid of its findings, and just
as little afraid of conflict with the existing powers . . . It will be
found that what is involved is not to draw a large dash between
past and future, but to realize the ideas of the past . . . it will
be found that humanity does not start a new task, but consciously
carries through the old.
-Marx to Ruge, 1843

/
It's perhaps best simply to conclude with some assertions and take
the consequences.
For reasons which are not abundantly clear, there have evolved two
currently opposed notions about what narrative literature ought to be.
These cannot profitably be associated with individual writers, any more
than with seminal idea structures - they constitute collective and
largely unconscious mental habits, reactions which appear unique to
our age, but are nevertheless historically conditioned. The first and
presumably "new" notion is that fiction can no longer be concerned
with processing and disseminating information about "how we live,"
particularly for its traditional audience, the middle class, that its subject
matter is essentially the endless interrogation of its own artifice, that
172 CHARLES NEWMAN
it cannot but be acutely a

going activity. Curiously
reflects itself in the self-e
the author may constant
autobiographical or con
underlying momentum of
reader that the work is pu
antecedents, an obligatory
the past, in particular
"Modernism." This histor
fiction's effort to differen
concession to mass appea
Such writing is highly pol
the weight of each sentenc
it claims every province
cultivating a critical obse
acknowledges any audienc
and metaphysical sense: o
merely as an act of contemp
(or perhaps the absence o
suspicion of its audience, it
and evolves a curiously ant
more powerful than the
recognizable narrative c
hierarchical, intellectual wi
its opponents accuse of la
The humor of this fiction
trades on fable or instant m
archness almost always st
to the integrity of autonom
against the extra-literary p
as a genre. It recognizes t
without apology, literary
language, if not as the cr
of consciousness. It is neve
it thus tends eventually t
exemplifying both tempo
aesthetically, largely apol
even the most terrifying m
When this writing works, it r

Saxon prose can be, how relen
the last twenty years has be
wonderfully hybrid tradition w
it is really good we are remin
hands is somehow more alive th
beside the point.
When it doesn't work we are reminded that innovation in and of itself
is not only tedious but ultimately self-cancelling, that what we finally
want from literature is neither amusement nor edification, but the
demonstration of a real authority which is not to be confused with
sincerity, and of an understanding which is not gratuitous. We are
reminded how easy it is for writers to imitate themselves, how cleverness
can get you out of almost any contemporary confrontation; how
tempting it is to write a book that is teachable rather than memorable
without prosthetic devices. We are reminded that irony, no matter how
many-layered, is not inherently sufficient to get any book through its
night - any more than those great crosshatched loaves of "manners"
were, or those sententious psychological certainties which once fully
assimilated human character. Finally, it appears that it is not the best
strategy to have as a central premise of one's book that better books
exist.
Another very different kind of contemporary fiction is frequently

written by people who view the established culture as something more
than a set of aesthetic conventions to be called in for questioning. What
is most obvious here is that while this writing is overtly political,
historical in a revisionist sense, unabashedly concerned with how we
ought to live, it is conventional and often even boorish in its aesthetics.
It certainly assigns technical virtuosity and sophistication a lower
priority in its procedures. It is not under the obligation to dispense with
historically certified aesthetic baggage - indeed, its ideology often
dismisses the Modernist tradition as either obscurantist or irrelevant.
It sees no contradiction in trading upon the formulae of popular fiction
while putatively opposing its content, often creating an art
indistinguishable from those bourgeois forms it ideologically despises,
without irony or self-consciousness. It attacks the reader's social
prejudices but not his linguistic competence. It refuses both poetic effect
and critical theorizing, tends to equate anti-elitism with realism, and
rejects any pose of autonomy. It grants fewer aesthetic margins yet
174 CHARLES NEWMAN
presupposes a greater int

commitments are constan
The opposing and energizin
is new information whic
information which does no
or aimed, because such su
neglected or distorted. Mor
presupposes a receptive a
information, a collective
As opposed to the writers
and isolation, advertising r
life consists largely of amn
offer themselves as "spokespersons," often in an unabashedly
autobiographical manner. Indeed, they often claim access to experience
presumably unavailable to the imagination in vacuo, a socially specific
experience which cannot be understood (or judged) by those outside
the constituency they appeal to.
When this sort of writing works, we are reminded how difficult it
is to do that basic thing, to move a reader in this strange unvisceral
transaction, how small are the advances that have been achieved in the
brief and anomalous history of fiction, how no literature of any age
has ever lived up to its own extra-literary rhetoric.
When it is bad we are reminded how often what seemed "secret"
information is nothing more than conventional wisdom unworthy of
relation, how easy it is to confuse our own desperate lives with the
disparate history of our time; that the fact that we are suffering
unspeakably does not have in it the shape of a book, that simple justice
has unfortunately not much to do with art, and that the impulse to
write has nothing intrinsically noble about it whatsoever. It reminds
us, finally, that it is questionable strategy to consciously construct a
work of literature with indifference to its literary elements.
It is no secret that the first kind of writing often takes a more

academically acceptable form, while the latter tends to be communal
and even commercial, at least in fits and starts. But it is worth noting
that both groups tend to view themselves as rebellious, if not
revolutionary. Both pose as the vanguard, and both present themselves
in aggressively absolutist rhetoric. It would not be surprising if our
literary era were labelled by future critics as The Age of Overkill. Here
we have a dim echo of the contest between speech and the written word.
Against the Formalism of a s

invitation to the audience, is o
"people," who are dispossessed
superiority of a written lang
fantasy. It is as if the only way
is to politicize everything, so th
is lost when writing opens itsel
What we end up with is a dic
against technique, or vision agai
Nothing could be more indica
hysterical alternation between t
some solid moral or psychologic
art from servitude to those ver
superlatively vague false dual
alarms, which indicates only a
art and life. And if one wishe
either side with equal authority,
on Tuesday and particle theo
And yet, and yet, for all the b
dialectic, those contemporary w
struggle with it seem to have
This false hypostatizing of t

Realism further degenerates int
be called the 'right to live' peo
régurgitation of the "cooked
during the fifties, which has h
culinary industries. If it is impo
who insist that what we need is more deliberate incoherence in our
literature in order to remind us that reality is made up as we go along
(a perception which is hardly new, and is in fact the literary basis of
The Declaration of Independence)', neither can we go along with those
who declare as a professional matter that literature exists to remind
us that the world is made up of "mere" words, and that life had better
understand this elemental matter, or else.
A case can certainly be made against the easily purchased surrealism,
willful randomness and cheap narrative collage so characteristic of Post-
Modern literature. There is no such thing as randomness in literature;
randomness is simply a sequence which is predetermined to be
undetermined. But such a case has not yet been made by those who
176 CHARLES NEWMAN
pronounce themselves in
a Realist didacticism as per
of the Avant-Garde. Argu
context, invariably self-serving and transparent apologies for
popularization, just as self-concerned as the most logocentric of authors.
Why is it that books which purport to tell us "how to live" bring out
our most homicidal instincts? And why is it that claims for a "magic"
realism are invariably couched in such insolently unpolished mush? It
is because in literature, the power of the unrepressed is not achieved
through the refusal to make elementary revisions.
Realism of course always presents a tougher philosophical problem
than the most scholastic Formalism. Technique can be shared more
easily than reality, since every time you try to step back from realism
in any historical era, you only insure that "reality" steps forward. Such
are the breaks of mediation.
The present situation suggests a few behavioristic rules which ought

to be viewed not as cynicism but as genuine and healthy limitations
of intelligence.
1. If a writer thinks of himself as an experimentalist he is

responsible to the scientific sense of that metaphor, is
accountable for his findings, and must not simply throw the
results of his investigations into the face of the audience. "How
long," Breton asked, "are such idiots worth working over?"
2. If a writer proclaims himself as avant garde he cannot rely on
the tautological argument that the avant garde is what's
happening now, and since we're what's happening now,
therefore we're the avant garde. He is responsible for
delineating that race of which he claims to be the antennae.
He is also probably mistaken to take the periphery so much
for granted, or to think of the Void as a fat pitch over the inside
corner.
3. If a writer announces the Death of Literature and the

Debasement of Language in the Reign of Silence, he should
have the good sense to practice what he preaches and re-evaluate
his career objectives.
4. If a writer lays claim to a tradition of the Universal Verities
of human experience, he has the responsibility to give them
concrete particularizai ion, an

the eternal bears repeating. T
he is enjoined to rely upon
or dramaturgy to create a "traditional" voice. Human
experience is not Humanism and Humanism is not those
disciplines certified by the Academy.
5. If a writer proclaims himself as isolated, uninfluenced and
responsible to no one, he should not be surprised if he is
ignored, uninfluential and perceived as irresponsible.
6. And, finally, if a writer presumes to speak from within a new
collective consciousness, a reconstructed language and
specialized experience, he has the responsibility to distinguish
what is really first-rate in this emerging community. Nothing
kills a legitimate movement faster than the failure to develop
a principle of rigorous internal self-criticism, which is the first
lesson of 20th century revolutionism.
The unexceptional debate between those whose message is form and

those for whom form has distorted message, testifies to an art in
extremis: so does the entire ludic litany of the Death of Art and Absence
of Meaning which is only underscored by the appeal to a rebirth of
the real in its most sentimental and shopworn guise: the restoration
of the currency by counterrevolution, Formalist sovereignty refurbished
with Literal Revivalism.
We tend to forget how much Bourgeois realism the Modernists were
able to incorporate into their activity of attacking it, and more
importantly how inadequate is the adversarial stance of Modernism
towards a culture dominated not by petit Bourgeois Academic
Classicism, but by the mass entertainment industry and the
democratized university, two powerful mediating institutions, neither
of which is anticipated in the Modernist tradition.
The real irony of Modernism blindly carried forward is that it
continues to attack the pretensions of a conservative, print-oriented
culture, the kind of plodding, judgemental, sequentially and
standardized interpretive manners which, in fact, have disappeared.
Ours is the Age of Narration, but it is based upon instantaneous pattern
recognition, not delayed analytic decoding.
Post-Modernism carries out the aesthetics of anti-realism in an
external fashion, while rejecting the varieties of Modernism in both its
extreme Transcendent and Nihilistic modes. Its peculiar tone is dictated
178 CHARLES NEWMAN
by the conflict between th

Bourgeois epistemology -
the ultimate formulation
of autonomy, but it is an a
without content. To para
before one can strike.
Is there an antidote to the complacent and sacerdotal Post-Modern

irony, this smug and snug slipperyness which trades upon ambivalence
and chiliasm and sells it back at cost plus 10%? History is an
accumulative process which does not allow strategic retreats to simpler
ways, but if an aesthetic structure no longer serves its original purpose,
is it necessary to rip it out entire? One can perhaps do this with peasant
economies, but not with art forms. Our current rhetoric almost always
prefers the analaptic to the polysémie - we think in terms of
"restoring" value rather than acquiring new meaning which amplifies
the old. This is the crisis mentality fostered by cultural inflation at its
most damaging; the value of all real goods is discounted in advance.
There is indeed a place for a realistic impulse directed to a traditional
concern with the secrets embedded in the social fabric. We live in a
time of unprecedented multiple overlapping ideologies and vocabularies;
special regional, psycho-social and even biological gender interests, as
compartmentalized and concrete as the class system upon which the
19th century novel capitalized. Technological society calls forth a new
Balkanized social order and specialized short-lived languages which
require decoding. It is Post-Modernism's special default that it generally
parodies these languages and leaves it at that. Jargon is too important
to be left to the Comic. As Adorno says, "History does intrude on every
word and withholds each word from the recovery of some alleged
original meaning, that meaning which the jargon is always trying to
track down." This particular challenge is always with the artist whether
he likes it or not. As James Baldwin puts it: "nothing, I submit, nothing
is more difficult than deciphering what the citizens of this time and
place actually feel and think." "One is always faced with the difficulty,"
Henry James concludes, "of collecting evidence which is so far from
being purely literary."
The phony dualism between Formalism and Realism, and the
tortuous idolatries of style it inspires, are only the most boring and
insidious of the collective confusions of the age, to which no one is
immune. With Bellow, Barthelme, and Gass, the dialectic still retains
tension. As the epigoni succee

gesture. How to account, for ex
autonomy, which denies any re
literature and society, or the
Formalist bias which still so po
endeavor. Certainly "commo
vulgarized, to the extent tha
in our lives as "learning ex
oversimplifies ideas; what is oft
has one iota of legitimacy is
reflects not so much a superab
which no theory of repressio
dare begin a serious work of
at all costs going to venture
Formalism in such a circumstance often retreats not so much to the
fantastic, but to the compositional. It becomes suspect when it refuses
the experience of knowing. It comes to reflect, not the superiority of
the technically refined, but a wounded and weakened ego, the guilt and
rage of withdrawal, a cloudbank from which issues the S.O.S.: Fiction
Sinking, Sentence Saved.
There is more to fiction than fiction. To discover that there is no
experience without language is not to blithely assume that language is
divorced from experience. When Formalism becomes self-ironic and
facetious, masquerading as "pure style," the hypocrisy of mimeticism
is cancelled out by the fatuity of form as final consolation.
An uncontested formalism, then, has pushed the truly original in our
time into the clichés of a hopelessly derivative innovation, every man
able to acquire his piece of chaos, sold off as remnants of figureless
carpet from the great discount warehouse of classic European
Modernism. These are the clichés codified by the Second Revolution,
parrotted by every theoretician who, running out of categories and
dumbfounded by the redundancy of dialectical methods, piously falls
back on the "modern virtues" of dislocation and indeterminacy. What
is overlooked of course is that in an inflationary culture the center is
always dispersed; more, it is popular culture which has achieved the
monopoly on iconoclasm, with the result that serious art is engaged
in the constant annexation of a "new territory," whether suitable for
development or not. Milieu moves at mature mach speeds, with
character following like a peasant on a bicycle. It may well be, as any
Arts and Leisure section in the morning newspaper will tell us, that
180 CHARLES NEWMAN
we are stimulated not by art

but by that which "challenge
experience is not that the
"challenge," but that no one
our sense of the world."
In short, art has become indexed to cultural inflation, and the only
risky thing about art in such a context is to possess an asset which is
not subject to irrational speculative bidding. It is no accident, then,
that the deterministic clichés of our time are above all perceptual, the
most impermeable ideology yet devised, in which the artist must always
provide "new ways of seeing," and that such "sight" dominates and
determines the external world. Taken far enough, this exempts artists
from having to produce ideas, values, methods, or judgment. And it
is equally handy for the consumer, for it provides him with an all-
purpose rejoinder: "it all depends on your point of view"; meaning,
of course, that he has no point of view.
This enthronement of the perceiver is of course only the most
egregious Humanist misreading of Modern physics, which ignores not
only the elegant and excruciating step by step methodology which
characterizes the true scientific method, but also the horror which always
accompanies the discovery of new evidence which cannot be explained
in an old context. The point of course is that when Werner Heisenberg
told us that the nature of phenomena is affected by the bias of the
perceiver, he did not mean that the perceiver creates the world, but that
a new angle of perception always conceals as much as it reveals. In this
context, it is instructive to listen to the father of the "uncertainty
principle" on the history of his discovery.
... at no time during the history of the quantum theory was there
a physicist or a group of physicists seeking to bring about an
overthrow of physics. . . . Our experiences in science have taught
us that nothing is more unfruitful than the maxim that at all costs
one must produce something new ... it would be still more
unreasonable to suppose that we ought to destroy all the old
forms, and that the new will then already emerge of its own
accord. . . . For only where the novel is forced upon us by the
problem itself, where it comes in a sense from outside ourselves,
does it later have the power to transform. . . . [Across the
Frontiers]
The idea of revolution in art

Romanticism is incorporated into Modernism. But it loses its
generativity as Modernism comes to serve the productive logic of the
industrial system it initially repudiated, attempting to establish itself
as a permanent tradition with its secret weapon, change for change's
sake. When this dynamic is incorporated into creative capitalism it
becomes further suspect, and when integrated into the context of climax
inflation, it is positively fatal.
This ambivalence of revolutionism puts the inner contradictions of

Post-Modernism into an intriguing perspective. For to the extent that
the artist is to remain faithful to the revolution he meets no resistance,
no authentic conservative or even official tradition which would define
his challenge. Hence he ends up neither praised nor punished, neither
engagé nor degagé. After all, how does one change something which
is always in flux? Insofar as the artist subverts reality, it is only that
of commercial reality screened by historicist facades, which in its
contemporary multiplicity and transformational energy suggests a
consciousness far more dominant than those textbook unities which
Modernism presumably dispelled. The object of revolt is not some false
unity or palpable reality, but the hypocritical screening process itself,
a highbrow aesthetic dismemberment of lowbrow corporate convention.
The anachronism inherent in this revolutionism tends to throw the entire
central nervous system of Post-Modernism out of whack.
In this context, it would seem obvious that a more conservative,
historically oriented approach, might modify a mindlessly protean
Modernism. Modernism's distinction was, after all, to unsettle a
historicist culture and clear away the remaining remnants of
ecclesiastical and aristocratic establishments. It goes without saying that
the Post-Modern must transcend an ahistorical culture and an audience
whose presentness is given such a limited identity by mass
communications and the Academy. This is already evident in the
tendency of all Post-Modern arts to become historical commentaries
on whatever genre they adopt. But this antidote has not achieved its
predicted effect. What the textualists do to texts, rendering them
"equal" in a historical vacuum of internalistic analysis, the conservative
post-modernist tends to do to historical periods and styles. What we
invariably end up with is a gesture of historical pathos without content,
the restoration of historical images with no coordinates - a
romanesque arch which holds up nothing, a Greek pilaster in mid air,
182 CHARLES NEWMAN
a trapezoidal window in a ne
of which is a superimpositio
time. What we have recent
no less than in literature, in
past [can't go backness] - i
nostalgia, in which all histor
history as gesture to a * 'pas
and struggle for knowledg
the ideology of making it
respectable culture, "tradi
This is the real crux of th
demeaning this reconsidera
would be a simple matter t
Modernism by merely poi
overmediated technique, calc
as refuge. In any event, li
wonderful possibilities of th
a pure ventriloquism withou
here is in the tendency of
jocularity; for to lay claim to and juxtapose all historical styles
simultaneously is to rely, intentionally or not, on parody- a jest which
conceals the problem. It is almost impossible to avoid such humour
if the Post-Modern is in fact an uneasy amalgam of high modernism
and popular culture, but what is required is not the easy playing off
of a puritanical formalism against the comic strip images of Commercial
Realism, but a continuity based on something more than intellectual
revenge.
It is very 20th century to see the world in terms of systems. It is quite
Modern to see all systems as prone to breakdown. It is the essence of
Post-Modernism to define the system by its breaking point, to see the
world as a humanly imposed system of distortion. This view confirms
an art which increasingly denies any context of the actual, and a criticism
whose jargon masks concrete conditions - both avoiding situations
which normally elicit human response.
For all our anticipatory theories of change and mindless

openendedness, there in fact remains a deadening slowness in the
movement of ideas. Inflationary Post-Modernism chooses to be
ignorant of a palpable extra-literary inertia. For what we have achieved
is a culture bustling with activi

static. In one sense, this is n
American society * Appears
constantly changing; it is mo
alike." But a new level of inc
arts are brought so willfully to
of emptiness which suggests no
sense of the Post-Modern is q
immobility. In cultural matte
judgement, multiplies inter
standards, dissipates energy
institutions, subordinates tec
dilutes content, hyper plur a
homologizing culture. Above
If we so heartily dismiss Realis
world view, why do we then
incorporates the pretensions
associated with closed heat ma
made obsolete by biochemistry and microprocessing? For every
traditional enemy of plot, theme, character and story, we have a
hackneyed anti-version of destabilization, indeterminism, defamiliarity
and the artifice of knowledge. In one sense we are experiencing a new
Primitivism; just as the caveman naively believed he was drawing
something as it is, we accept and codify the distortions presumably
determined by the structures of the mind.
The appeal of this autonomy appears incommensurable. Just as art
as sanctuary was the final illusion of the Modernists, art as autonomy
is the last gasp of Bourgeois individualism for the Post-Modernists .
It vaguely ennobles, it assuages failure; it absolves everyone of
accountability. In the guise of pure style, it masks an enormous deflation
of aesthetic ego. It is an oddment of 20th century rhetoric that literary
art should insist upon the absolution of autonomy at the very moment
that its existence is most problematic. The vaunted fragmentation of
art is no longer an aesthetic choice; it is simply a cultural aspect of the
economic and social fabric. The artist who desires exemption from
history finds himself merely crowded out. And in the Post-Modern
world, it is not the artist but the audience which is fugitive.
Henri Matisse insisted that our senses have a "developmental

age . . . not that of the immediate environment, but that of the period
184 CHARLES NEWMAN
into which we were born . .

learning can give us." That
age; indeed the lack of it is w
fear fulness. We are convinc
differently from that even o
that difference in the mos
notion that our period has d
history, it will have to de
transmission, and administ
institutions. It will have to
well as the use of literatur
literary diagnosis. Quite as m
will have to modify its Mode
an art which is evolving in p
of rapid and quirky mutatio
at the same time. And abov
to confront the possibility
are dealing in Post-Modern
a large tree which has been
resulting in a profusion of l
stock, the most interesting o
to lack any adaptive function
the fact that genetic structu
material often undergoes s
no longer implies static clu
What is most singular about

not their profusion, but the
Gass's pseudo-artists, Bel
Gardner's immoralistes; or
ascribes to History and the
which predicates a conserva
the Conservative who sees a
all testify to the dealignmen
an "official" culture, in whic
or verbal suasion is only on
are real punks. Our real ene
ones: concentrations of ec
become inflexible; careerism
of cultural goods, and the ge
Post-Modern cannot blame its lac

resistance, but rather upon an
scattered resources. This constitu
truly deserves a new name - a
We are dealing here with som
happened to that newly sophist
created within distinct memory
the new pedagogy,
enthu and the
The one characteristic of all nat
the relative pauperization of the
the point to say they probably
Further, no one has adequatel
voice, the multiplicity of mode a
years. It cannot be accounted f
values, any more than by "the
Explanations which are not pleasa
nihilism begets an unrestricted
unprecedented proliferation in
total indifference; and (3), mo
expression seems to lack pow
otherwise.
In short, there seems to be a relationship between the inflation and
proliferation of artistic modes, a culture which places so many
modalities at the consumer's disposal that none of them have more
importance than another, and agencies of transmission of knowledge
which emphasize intellectual activity so conventional that it can have
no decisive value. Whoever comes to grips with this will be a great fiction
writer, and tangentially testify to the fact that the traditions of
Formalism and Realism do not make much sense when invoked as mere
"first principles."
To comprehend the Post-Modern is to sense a striking reversal of

energy. The velocities of change inherent in institutional agencies of
transmission, whether critical or commercial, have become culturally
dominant. In short, attitudes towards art change more dynamically than
art itself: we move from History of Ideas to Hermeneutics in little more
than a generation. Post-Modern means the first culture in history totally
under the control of 20th century technology, and the first in five
hundred years in which information is codified in ways which do not
depend on literacy. All we have discovered, thanks largely to mass
186 CHARLES NEWMAN
communication, is that "r

configuration, and that m
There seems to be no question that the central dynamics of
Modernism provide a diminishing return. The Avant-Garde has lost
any sense of historical relation, the solipsistic impulse has frittered away
its detachment and pathos, eclecticism has become timid and defensive,
and the cutting edge of Nihilistic perplexity is increasingly translated
as mere articles of bad faith, spawning only yet another of America's
mindless religious revivals. The prevailing mood is a nice negativism,
a sweet nihilism which not only forbids itself any faith in progress, but
in negation itself, since that would require a firmly held position. In
its nostalgia for the rock solid alienation of Modernism, it views the
universe as a relative pudding.
This often reflects the belief that we are becoming more conservative.
Not exactly. We are simply losing our faith in irony as the primary
convention of aesthetic behavior. We are, in other words, just beginning
to develop an emotional revision of Modernism's faith in the technology
of art, a uniquely difficult task, since Modernism's seignory resembles
nothing so much as that of American Empire - extending its hegemony
in the apparently sincere belief that it does not constitute one, because
it is open-ended.
* * *
With the insouciance of a Virginia Woolf, let u

Modernism within the velocity of the money supply
in the spring of 1946, accelerated in the late fifties,
the Great Society demanded both a foreign war and
party, continued out of control throughout the s
to subside only in the summer of 1981, as, one by
inflation began to be brutally dismantled. It is no acc
of intellectuals traces this trajectory perfectly. Even
rate, our governing metaphor of prices, now stabiliz
been defined far into the immediate future by the
the last twenty years. What "ripples," what "tric
process is not patrimony but futility. And despit
the metaphor, I expect the dates will hold well en
Consider: the false productivity of inflation co
exaggerated dynamism of art, the notion of ever
the dominant cultural illusion, masking the progress
successive intellectual tenders; ar

industry dependent upon constant i
the weight of its capriciously accu
it ends up expressing only the loss o
Is there not something in the cavalie
and anxious ambition of Post-Moder
of printing currency you don't have
from all values, whatever their ca
child's play; and the transfer of wea
reflecting what Keynes quaintly call
of the debtor class."
Modernism begins in opposition to this class, but reaches its
apotheosis in the context of European Totalitarianism, where the
fragmentation of the "official" narrative becomes obligatory as the
primary act of human resistance. But the Modernism which began as
the destruction of the Bourgeois worldview becomes the Bourgeois
idiom par excellence, a kind of mass produced and ready made
surrealism - familiar images in unfamiliar contexts - images which
are not juxtaposed as much as they are simply disconnected from their
source: the Avant-Garde as spectator sport, the Picasso in the corporate
courtyard, Modernism as the new Bourgeois Realism.
This most recent false consciousness is given its tone not by the
arrogance of blind progress, but by the arrogance of a démystification
which is Everyman's prerogative - casual subversion as false
sophistication and short term legitimation. Both social and literary
revolt are dissipated as they find association in movements and fashions
which are integrated as techniques into the social order - a trade
unionization of intellect no less self deluding because it calls itself an
e/7/5/éme.And as the anarchic impulse is diffused through technique,
all revolutionary gestures take on the element of burlesque - which
accounts for the peculiar humour of contemporary literature. We seem
incapable of making the simple distinction between Modernism as one
of many available traditions, and pure ecstatic response. Through its
obsession with counter-genre, preferring parody to confrontation, Post-
Modernism tends to change all politics into mystiques, and increasingly
substitutes the idea of posterity for that of engagement. It purifies the
future as Modernism tried to decontaminate the past.
From the man so rooted in the actual as to be "provincial," the
Bourgeois by ingesting Modernism is able to turn all experience, no
matter how unsettling, into a form of consumption, so that the aesthetic
1 88 CHARLES NEWMAN
experiment is the social exp

oppose because it is the norm.
generis by default. The first
thenecessity of somehow fig
Technique.
The Post-Modern survived

initially on the wonderful slo
celebrating discontinuities u
explosions of scale began to
gave way to a culture clearly
the 20th century, it thrived u
memory of instability or s
dangerous life. It struck not a
fun of the culture's ability
not see that this resiliency w
indifference and poignant con
in advance that it was going
has no experience with truly
fostered a revolution without an enemy. News known is news
discounted.
In short, what began as a discontinuous aggregate of forms and
processes which appeared to be independent, ended up as a blinding
succession of temporary cultures, disseminated by increasingly
centralized agencies, in which the economic calculus of profitability was
the only criterion. The culture which developed was defined solely by
its markets - the intellectual corollary of which is category - and
markets, as some unliterary sage observed, are there to fool you, not
to lead you.
The primary characteristic of this centralized power was no longer
blind accumulation but calculated evanescence. An overmediated
Modernism became less an antidote than a stimulus to an overprocessed
culture. Literature refused to see that in such a situation, it remained,
in spite of itself, a conservatory force. It could not step back from the
experiment for fear of being branded reactionary. And so we ended
up with a most simple-minded Conservatism, justifiable only as a
Draconian reaction to inflation; a tacit acceptance of all the Modernist
clichés together with a literal revivalism in which equilibrium could be
envisioned only as a return to *

Modernism had put into question
Neo-Conservatism has failed to of
an avuncular Neo-Classicism to counter Modernism's Formalist
aestheticism. While skeptical of unbridled self-realization in art and
society, the Neo-Conservative accepts it unequivocally in economic
activity, and as a consequence fosters a politics free of moral and
practical justification. It promulgates Modernist attitudes insofar as
they accelerate technological progress, capitalistic creativity and
hierarchical administration, and in this sense definitively defuses the
explosive content of the Modernist revolution.
To all the uncertainties of the century, inflation adds the question

of what the future will buy. Even the most privileged and/or astute
cannot locate a store of value which is not anxiety producing, and
dispossession is so generalized that it cannot be blamed upon any class,
because self-interest can no longer be rationally determined. To argue
for a centrality of values in a culture in which all forces are exponentially
centrifugal has its charm, but to bewail the lack of standards in a society
in which institutions fail to preserve their integrity is simply to refuse
reality. The history of Modernism is the history of the failure to recreate
a moral dimension in the culture by aesthetic means alone. A return
to a new aesthetic probity is not likely to affect the puerility of our
politics. Certainly, the situation will not be ameliorated by a return to
an intellectual gold standard of Modernism.
The classic conservative defense of the "free market" is that its
failures are the consequence of an incomplete application of its
principles, complicated by a cabal of collectivist elitists. Yet the entire
period of Modernism was paralleled, in all the varied cultures it affected,
by a variety of broadly based spontaneous and pragmatic
countermeasures, by those who felt the elementary requirements of
social and artistic life were threatened by the ever expanding market
mechanism. To ignore the scope of this intervention is to be saddled
with the supreme 19th century fiction that markets arise spontaneously
to satisfy human needs, as well as to ignore the cell by cell dissolution
caused by inflation, the ebbing faith in all institutions non-profit and
commercial alike.
The Modernist revolt was in large measure directed against markets
dominated by petit Bourgeois national chauvinism, and was made
possible by the remnants of aristocratic salon capitalism. It should not
190 CHARLES NEWMAN
be surprising that Post-Mod

the multinational corporation, should have capitalized upon the
patronage of universities and museums, or that we should be nostalgic
for the remarkable interventionist spirit of Modernism - an art which,
in retrospect at least, eventually made its own market.
A chief irony of the inflationary Post-Modern era is that it provides
historically unprecedented employment for intellectuals within a broader
market offering a decreasing demand for their services. As a
consequence, intellectuals have learned how to create jobs for themselves
but not how to intervene effectively in the market. This is the most
banal but basic contradiction in the mythology of autonomy. But while
the self-protectionism of the contemporary American artist is
indisputable, his shortcomings are not likely to be ameliorated by the
"magic" of the marketplace, any more than a sterile Formalism is to
be amplified by some "magic" realism.
It is a fascinating thing to ponder how the Realist/Formalist debate

echoes the holistic antinomies of the Free Market vs. Interventionist
Worldviews. The Interventionist maintains, as the Avant Garde does,
that the market represents a status quo which must be leveraged or
subverted, depending on your politics, so that in the Formalist sense,
values must be incorporated into a system devoid of values, and that
in the end such values will somehow come to constitute an inwardly
coherent and self-correcting mechanism.
The Freemarketeer, on the other hand, justifies the status quo
precisely because it is devoid of extra-market values, emphasizing with
the Realist that objective truth can only be achieved through reciprocity,
the interaction of autonomous, self-interested activities which also
somehow come to constitute an equilibrium. The Neo-Conservative
wants his art simple, with its values up front, a governance which it
descries in the social sphere. The Interventionist wants to project values
into the social mechanism, but rebels when they are imposed upon art.
On the face of it, these are two of the more balefully speculative and
basically crazy notions in the history of ideas. The hypothetical
resolution in both cases cannot be understood apart from the adjustment
process which leads to it, yet in both cases this process is celebrated
as not only "invisible," but somehow altogether fitting. It is very
contemporary to want values, as long as they are in the other guy's
bailiwick.
Anyone with a residue of com

or its productive relations can
subjective amalgam of both F
that neither model alone can take into account normative human
behavior, much less explain the mystery of the dynamic process it
postulates. Likewise, no work of fiction, or the apparatus which heaves
it into the world, can be understood, much less produced, in terms of
Formalist or Realist exclusivity.
The neo-conservative critique is valuable in that it grants perspective
to the looseness of the Adversary style, and obviates the great blindspot
of the liberal left - that economic and aesthetic freedom are
conspicuously and historically related. In an inflationary era, it is
necessary to emphasize that benefits are in fact based to some exten
on value produced, and that real productivity must somehow be
determined and rewarded. Yet this is not likely to be accomplished b
a perverse combination of Manchester Liberalism, Social Darwinism
and Kantian epistemology, the removal of the weak sisters by the bi
brothers from the free market, or the notion that the rich will save us
if we only let them. The final irony of the neo-conservative is that he
reasserts the predominance of the free market at the exact historica
point in which the ability of free markets to control inflation ha
collapsed.
This represents no conspiracy, but only another missed opportunity.
Neo-conservatism has refused to insist on the accountability either o
producer or consumer; nor has it recognized the extent to which third
party agencies of transmission have annulled the traditional
transactional relationship of buyer and seller, reader and writer,
perceiver and perceived. It represents a vision of both social and
aesthetic experience which conveniently leaves the corporation, the
market maker, out of the equation. It has refused to mount an attack
upon the aesthetic utopianism of modern art and its scruffy live-in lover,
that dominant perceiver who has come to exist solely on the junk food
of ecumenicism. Its defense of realism has not reasserted the tradition
of reciprocal or objective truth, but only bought into the literal as an
aspect of consumer culture. Hence, we have a commercialism screened
by historicist facades, a rationalism which is defined ultimately only
by the profit motive.
Just as the conservative blindly equates Modernism with progress,
the Formalist all too often equates anti-modernism with the
reactionary - so that he revolts not against a narrow vision of
192 CHARLES NEWMAN
experience, but against th

revivalism through the f
palpable reality either eng
only its own aesthetic co
pretends to be a direct refl
as boring as a mirror.
Formalism and Realism have lost both their finiteness and their
history. They are no longer conflicting theories, competing modes of
inquiry, historical traditions, opposed realities, or even definitive
styles - only programs to be punched into.
What we have undergone is a kind of "digitalization" of American
literature, which is not so much the binary reduction of complex
experience into computer sets of ones and zeros, but what Kierkegaard
meant when he said "our age has attained an unparalleled interest in
forgery - in doing the highest things by leaping over the immediate
steps." This is expressed in Formalist/Realist debate as a self-
perpetuating oscillating series of cherished and hated selves; a classic
illustration of schizophrenic activity.
In any event, the Post-Modern ended, as all aesthetic movements

must, when it could provide no values as an alternative to the market
place - for the mysterious force of all serious art is the extent to which
it always exceeds the requirements of the market.
There will be two obvious and legitimate objections to this line of

argument. The first is that while it's all well and good to point out
cultural determinism in the abstract, no practitioner really takes such
ideas seriously when struggling with an expedient like, say, a novel -
even given the seemingly unquenchable appetite of Post-Modernism for
the problem which looks philosophical. But it is wrong to think that
because there is no cultural centrality, there are no strong cultural
predispositions. I have tried to suggest that the contemporary writer's
options of subject matter and technique are largely objectified by
confused attitudes towards History, Adversary, Audience and Genre -
the weight and absence of each - and more, that these notions are
independent of his perceptions of the "market," much less his "creative
soul."
Secondly, there will be the caveat that economics is too blunt a
metaphor for cultural, much less literary, analysis. I will go further
and suggest that the basic sense of Post-Modern culture is essentially
economic, that in fact, the onl

derives from the fact that it
democracies with a unique ahistor
as well as the illusion of an infin
value - and more, that when such economic progressiveness is
gradually eroded, the entire culture disintegrates. Inflation is reflected
in late capitalism not as political havoc but as cultural anomie. Unlike
Modernism, which thrived in a period of economic and political
upheaval, Post-Modernist art takes its dynamism from a relatively
classless society which asks "why shouldn't I get mine?" - the
aesthetic and intellectual expression of which is an art based upon, "hey,
why not?" - a program which is virtually guaranteed self-destruction,
insofar as it refuses to acknowledge the increasing disparity between
resources and expectations in both artist and audience.
In this context we can see that several of Modernism's time-honored
legacies have been brought to an abrupt and deservedly wretched
conclusion.
The single legacy of Modernism which remains discernably Humanist
was the idea of art as permanent- perhaps the only permanence. We
are well aware by now that art does not endure- what survives is largely
a matter of luck and extra-artistic activity. This in itself accounts for
the self-deprecation and defensive arrogance inextricably entwined in
most contemporary aesthetic gestures.
Secondly, Modernism's emphasis on the exposure of artifice, its
assumption that the reduction of art to its constituent elements, the
functionalist mode which dissects all things into its parts, somehow
clears the air, has been perversely long-lived. A great deal has been
bared, but nothing has been cleared up.
Post-Modernism rehearses the cycle of European Modernism in an
Americanized version. For Modernism begins with the cauterization
of a facile 19th century liberalism, and ends with the despair of failed
revolution. It is Post-Modernism's peculiar ambivalence that it registers
a progressive disillusionment with successive aesthetic liberations as it
pursues them; its dirty little secret is that Démystification does not finally
alleviate either human or aesthetic problems, but seems only to deepen
and further conceal them.
The Post-Modernist generation is the first in America to experience
both institutional support and control of the arts, the first to experience
an "official" mass culture, and the corporate bureaucratic mind-set
which accompanies it. It's no accident that this experience parallels the
194 CHARLES NEWMAN
ascendancy of the America

out, Age of Perfectability. O
predictable social prejudi
eventually tends to empty
inherent in the autonomous
of societal support. Art has l
not the autarky of cultur
subject.
Finally, let us bid farewell to those two most elusive historical
personages, the Vanguardiste and the Bourgeois, who have washed each
other's hands for more than a century, a stormy but enduring mutual
accommodation which thrived on all the strengths and disabilities of
Modernism. Heroic Modernism's certitudes were the expression not of
a doctrine but of a faith in the dialectics of oppositionism. Far from
synthesizing the antinomies- serious and popular, genre and counter-
genre, style and content, etc.- Post-Modernism only further ironizes,
and finally parodies them.
In this sense, such antinomies continue to represent the intellectual's
preferred escapism, insofar as they permit the illusion that a series of
rotating autonomous states offer real alternatives. Fiction cannot afford
to play this game. Literature can again resonate with experience, not
by adopting some new external imperative, which in any event the
consciousness industry will invent for it anew each morning, but by
a faithful rededication to its own peculiar generic constitution, its lack
of an ontology, and the consequent cross-process which defies
autonomy, a practical energy which can never be systematic, but cannot
fail to be inclusive. For if fiction does not aim for the inclusive, it
degenerates with astonishing rapidity into that most febrile of literary
forms- prose poetry.
Fiction, in short, is Modern man's method by which antinomies can
be unlearned-, a process in which oppositions are neither resolved or
transcended but made reciprocally evocative. Pluralism is not relativism.
The many languages of Babel are not nonsense; only different languages
awaiting conflation. And the truth of fiction is not indeterminate; only
a set of facts which cannot be presumptively inferred from other facts;
a truth which is unlikely to be expressed as a coherent theory.
The final contradiction which lies at the heart of Post-Modern

literature remains our fundamental inability to acquire a non-relative
vantage point for observing the

assumes an epistemologically pr
that it is impossible. The fact that our knowledge is based on a
contingent and finite position in the world, that the aesthetic act is not
empirically invincible, is not by this time exactly a world-shaking
discovery.
Certainly, there seem no two centuries as discontiguous as the 19th
and the 20th. If Modernist innovation seems perverse in its tyranny
of originality, was not its predecessor also something of an extreme
anomaly? In Ortega's words, "the exclusive realism of the 19th century
is an unparalleled monstrosity . . . situating the center of gravity of
the work in the Human. That is why the New Art, so extravagant in
appearance rejoins, in at least one sense the Royal road of Art. This
road is called the 'Will to Style'." The road we are still on, always
palliated by both commercial and critical fashion, which share and more
often than not dominate the same throughfare. It is an uncomfortably
short step from Style Moderne to "life-style," that consumer view that
life offers the freedom once reserved for art- without art's arbitrary
exactitudes.
Modernism did not cause our infamous "liquidation of literary
values." It rather simply presided over the end of describing all arts
and intellectual disciplines in literary terms. Language, as Foucault
reminds us, did not "return to the field of thought until the late 19th
century," when literary grammars of discourse began to be replaced
by technical languages in all intellectual disciplines. The 20th century
is an irruptive open site characterized by a radical reflection upon
language, and the tendency of all disciplines to assert their autonomy
and supremacy by an increasingly technical commentary upon their own
procedures. But this once exciting pluralist disputation has by this time
degenerated into a monolithic linguistic determinism as our central
revisionist commonplace, displacing any sense of literariness as a natural
aspect of human cognition, and banishing the novelistic from human
experience.
Fiction may be linguistic, but as language works it tends to disappear,
to escape its linguistic constitution. There is always a moment when
language wins itself away from its entanglements and drives on to its
proper due. The "problem" of fiction does not grow out of a defect
in language, but in false dogmatizing models which assume language
to be autonomous or frozen, rather than a disclosing agent, a problem
which always arises when a static model is applied to a dynamic process.
196 CHARLES NEWMAN
An inflationary culture only

equilibrium.
If we have learned anything it is that art can proceed with considerable
enthusiasm in the knowledge that if truth does not exist in nature, it
can exist as a provisional insight, internally consistent and pragmatically
verifiable. In Jacques Riviere's words: "For the writer, will not true
precision consist in gathering up the word, inscribing it where it appears,
accepting its fortuitous value; seizing its testimony without worrying
about its aberration ... ?" Fiction can take its stand, as Science itself
does, in celebrating the particularity of partial knowledge.
By playing off the amplitude of technique against the paucity of spirit,

by capitalizing upon the lack of relations between intellectual production
and the economy of life, Post-Modernism brings the cultural inflation
of Modernism to an attenuated conclusion, neither bang nor whimper.
It is a postlude which cannot be completed - but only peters out
arbitrarily and inconclusively, suffering no resistance save that of its
own lack of momentum. For all its frivolity it suggests nothing so much
as the tear which will not flow - a horror vaccui.
Post-Modernism constitutes its own aura - which we might call
Hypothetical Apocalyptic - based on the apprehension that we have
bought too much time, on time; that only a climactic washout can
correct the distortions of the last twenty years, as well as allay the
increasingly legitimate fear that the ongoing turmoil may provoke an
authoritarian reaction. There is the overwhelming sense that the culture
is at a breaking point, that we will not be permitted the graduated
painless decay so admirable in the fin de siede. This is the inevitable
consequence of cultural inflation, the self-feeding expectation of a
society which must ever increase consumption in order to absorb
continual devaluation, a psychology which has been analyzed only in
terms of the consumer but never in terms of the anxiety of the producer
of cultural goods. This anxiety has a distinctly unliterary ambivalence,
but it is underscored in literature by the fact that the rhetoric of crisis
has played itself out, that we have been denied the conventional
climacterics of history, that we have run out of deaths, that we are
undergoing real debacles and not projecting them in advance.
Permanent crisis is a Modernist mood; it gains both power and
perspective from the sense of a culture coming to a close and another
fast approaching, the clinching of the merger of Modernism and
Americanism. The permanent crisis was gratifying not because it held
out hope, but because, given it

had nothing to lose. Thus, Pos
uncertainty so much as an unc
Insofar as there is a crisis, it i
feasibility, and it is certainly
institutional, and that would no
in our aestheticized history wh
institutional terms. This perceptio
sentence in American literature
a cultural actuality which has n
indeed no necessary consequen
Would it be presumptuous to sug

in the making which chooses no
which does not see the necessit
and the canons of the recent past
continuity even if it cannot yet claim them - and which is not
embarrassed by the likely suspicion that there are vast areas of
experience untouched by Literary Modernism? No doubt such a
relinquishment will be seen as a cowardly retreat. Because of our
obsession with system and category, we believe that ideas can only be
supplanted by others - "the consolation, " says Nietzsche, "that the
first nature was once a second, and that every conquering second nature
becomes a first." But ideas can also simply subside, succumb to their
own essential toxicity. We always underestimate the cleansing power
of inertia - the despair of the Avant-Garde and Realist reformer alike.
Yet here, the Post-Modern might offer some small perspective, if
little consolation. For taken together in all their patent oppositionism,
the 19th and 20th centuries represent not simply another unresolved
split, but the potentiality of an extraordinarily rich, nurturing, complex
tradition- suggesting that all our antecedents are finally ours; that the
writer might have a number of entirely different perspectives within
his lifetime; indeed, a number of careers within a single work, within
the sentence itself. If the Post-Modern were capable of setting itself
an obvious task, it would be the recombinancy of 19th century
emotional generosity with the technical virtuosity of the 20th.
It remains the wonder of literature that it can provide a rich patrimony
without identifiable or even worthy parents. And it is the peculiar
privilege of this generation not to salvage the best of the past, or to
hedge the future, but to rethink what has been jettisoned in the name
198 CHARLES NEWMAN
of a spurious purity - to
then, by attention to those areas of experience ranystified by
Modernism's incessantly circular destruction of aesthetic conventions,
conventions which in our generation were rarely mastered, much less
experienced, can the not yet dead be said to be living.
"I am finite once and for all," says William James, "and all the
categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world, and with
things which have a history ... I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart
nor mind for anything of an opposite description, and the stagnant
felicity of the Absolute's own perfection moves me as little as I move it."
The Post-Modern era, which began so admirably as the refutation

of a sterile continuity, is suffused with the discovery that far from having
put Modernism in abeyance, it retains its most salient and questionable
features. Insofar as society is unwilling to charge art with any
accountability, art remains self-validating by default. Insofar as art
challenges the norms of the market, it is always justified by its
"essence," rather than by any value it might impart to life. To forget
such cultural idolatry is now the precondition for any creative thought.
It was Franz Kafka who anticipated, as with so much else, the figure
of the Post-Modern artist. "You must push your head through the
wall," he says. "It is not difficult to penetrate, for it is made of the
thinnest stuff. But what is difficult is not to let yourself be deceived
by the fact that there is already an extremely deceptive painting on the
wall showing you pushing yourself through it."
This is the unflattering portrait of the portrait of the contemporary
artist, his head stuffed through the cultural proscenium, only his ass
on view for those who are obliged to stake out the real. We do not
know whether this odd posture is due to his emulation or his avoidance
of his official portrait, whether this is a willed breakthrough or simply
the momentary inattention of a troubled man; a reflexive imitation,
or a desperate escape from a ridiculously limited identity. We suspect
that, in his ungainliness, questions about whether he is completing the
revolution or laying the ground for a new sensibility are of some
indifference to him, that he has limited energy to make further claims
for art, particularly when the instructions for technical subversion are
so precise, the barriers so porous, and equivocation so apparently
profitable. We do not even know whether this is supposed to be funny,
but we suspect that humor which must call attention to itself as humor
is not exactly humor - it sugge

fear.
What we do know is that the central question of this late hour of
the century, a question in which the social, political and aesthetic at
last lose their autonomy, can no longer be avoided. Once through the
wall, what then? How is the banality of revolution to be itself subverted?
Beyond the sheetrock of Modernism lies fire; a fire built largely from
books; a fire to which we must summon the nerve to consign our own.

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THE POST-MODERN AURA: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation

Author(s): CHARLES NEWMAN

The Act of Fiction in an Age of

As befits its subject, this will be a brief account of an incomplete

exclusively, of early Mod

There is a more elemental way of regarding Post-Modernism,

of the most destructive sort. As inflation affects members of the

confidence very recently, because it was not as severe as the

The confusion inflation wreaks on the population is by no means

Inflation affects the ideas exchange just as surely as it does

generation undergo historica

no one fully comprehends

Modernism fully corrobo

Walter Benjamin anticipates the peculiar relentless fluidity of the roles

character . . . The difference

plausible sense of continuit

exceptions will eventually turn

is the only place left that

My impatience with spec

Ours is a richly confused and hugely verbal age, energized by a

language and history often tell u

The conventional model of Modernism is that of a quantum jump

How such terminology com

. . . there is no denying that the work of the Post Impressionists

This is the insistence of a man who hardly thinks of himself as a

... for purposes of convenien

... It is lawful to anticipate these critics and to declare our belief

concession to what the p

Remember that definiti

Herbert Read alludes to

The etymology of Post-Mo

A post-Modern age of Wes

Elsewhere Toynbee seems to associate Post-Modernism with the

Postmodernism grew out of modern architecture in much the same

Post modernist art continues the Modernist's critique of

Postmodern Literature moves in nihilistic play or mystic

legacies, or as Allen Wanen Frie

For present practical purposes, we ma

If I haven't written sooner in reply

up. You speak of your d

The time for Beauty is o

groping in the dark. We are

Clearly all the basic assumptions and contradictions of Modernism are

The certitude of despair.

Aesthetic (and ascetic) moralism.

Self absorption in the grand manner: Elitism.

The ambivalence of a transitional age. Romanticized notion of

The simultaneous expression of supreme, even ethereal self-

The idea of art as an increasingly technical, even scientific process;

The artist both propelled and repelled by vague obligations,

The task of art, therefor

It is astonishing to observe, in America . . . to what extent the

The Post-Modernist mentality can only be understood as the product

the literary curricula of an

♦Hitler invades Poland. Brooks and Warren publish Understanding Poetry.

The professionalization of lit

This business of an "Adv

instant mediation which provid

Is it over? Can't you read betw