Assembling Postmodernism: Experience, Meaning, and the Space In-Between

Early in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, we encounter the heroine, Oedipa Maas, standing on a hillside overlooking the Southern California city of San Narciso. As she surveys the landscape below with its "vast sprawl of houses,"

she [thinks] of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and [saw] her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her...with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had...there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. (Pynchon 1966, 13)

While superimposing her first printed circuit on the Southern California landscape in 1966, Oedipa, without quite realizing it, was standing on the verge of what we now call postmodernity. Both images--the postmodern city and printed circuit (a defining item of our information technology)--and their complex, superimposed linkages are great icons of postmodernism. ¹ Now, more than a quarter of a century later, as the postmodern era might be drawing to a close, we are perhaps still just as puzzled and perplexed as we were at its beginning. Like the modernists, "We had the experience but missed the meaning," as T. S. Eliot observed in what became a famous truism of his era. ² Indeed, by now we appear to be as confused about the meaning of this term "postmodernism" as by the "postmodern" world itself. Like Oedipa, trying to navigate the labyrinths of Pynchon's novel, and like Sophocles's Oedipus wandering through the nightmare of his life, we may learn more and more, and yet its meaning (along with meaning itself) often seems--and is--maddeningly uncertain. And we are haunted by the possibility that it might never quite become clear.

As a result, we inhabit, it seems ever more uneasily, the space between our experience of the postmodern world and its meaning--a space, experience, and meaning that seem even more complex and resistant to our grasp than those of modernism. What we have been learning to do, what we are still learning to do, is to span the gap that is this space. This essay aims to suggest how our students and we might do that, and the role literature might play in the process. My argument here is three-fold: that literature provides a privileged site in which the thought--ideas and conceptual structures--and the experiential "feeling" (both in its sensory and affective aspects) of postmodernism come together; and that, in this way, literature arguably constitutes one of the most powerful models and means available for bridging the gulf between them. Beyond its capacities to represent and synthesize postmodern ideas and experiences, literature is also a source of powerful challenges to various aspects of postmodernism, and so offers ways of thinking through (and perhaps even past) many of our peculiarly postmodern dilemmas.

Postmodernism(s):
Definitions

First, however, it is necessary to explain what I mean by postmodernism, even though it may not be possible to define this term in the traditional, "pre-postmodern" way--that is, to give it a single sense, to determine its meaning once and for all, and so forth. In the postmodern theoretical world, such definitions tend to continuously undermine and sometimes un-define themselves. Indeed, even if it were possible to offer such a definition, would it not be too late by now? By this point in history, there are so many ways of seeing postmodernism, and the term is used by so many people in so many disparate ways, that it seems almost to mean or describe everything--and therefore, some of the critics of postmodernism...