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12. The Postmodern
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
C h a p t e r t w e lv e The Postmodern Shepard Beattie Carver DeLillo Gaddis The postmodern structure of feeling can be characterized by a series of refusals: —the refusal of the old master narratives; —the refusal of the distinction between high and popular culture; —the refusal of the pure or the generic for the hybrid; —the refusal of the normative for the differentiated; —the refusal of the universal for the particular and the local; —the refusal of the unified individual for the non-self-identified subject; —the refusal of weighty allusion for light-hearted pastiche; —the refusal of the natural or the essential for the constructed. These refusals can feel, to some, like losses, especially a loss of the self’s felt sense of power in relation to the world. And the sense of coming after, of having survived the passing of a more passionate historical interval, can induce nostalgia, as when Frederic Jameson reads postmodernism “as the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure.” Koba Mercer questions the felt extent of this so-called cultural shift, where “predominant voices in postmodern criticism have emphasized an accent of narcissistic pathos by which the loss of authority and identity on the part of a tiny minority of intellectuals is generalized and universalized as something that everybody is supposedly worried about.” The five authors assembled in this chapter do share a concern, if not a worry, about one of the most “normative” and “natural” and “essential” of cultural institutions —the American family. Sam Shepard’s (b. 1943) work traces the difficulty, in a culture of performing selves, of compelling “recognition” from a parent. Ann Beattie’s (b. 1947) work also unfolds as a drama of attachment, one in which friendship replaces kinship, and children are stood in for by “things.” Raymond Carver (1938–88) and Don DeLillo (b. 1936) discover a surprising empathy for the figure of the “wife” as they explore the challenge of imagining—or being imagined by— the assigned partner of the “husband.” William Gaddis (1922–98) attempts to reconcile his readers to the anxieties swirling around the prefix “post-,” urging upon them an acceptance of being belated and indebted to circumstances of personal The Postmodern 235 origin in the same way that postmodern writers stand in a belated and indebted relation to the work that comes before them. Shepard’s plays explore the troubled relation between our fear of performance and our lust for attention. They do so by taking the careful measure of the spaces between us; there is nothing casual about the physical positions of the bodies on his stage. The blocking explicit in his stage directions and implicit in his scene dynamics advances a complex argument about the possibilities for character and action in his world. Exits and entrances reveal themselves as perilous moments of definition or self-loss. Characters seek without knowing it an instant of distinction or notice. Shepard’s management of the exclamation “Where do I stand!” reveals a conception of life as an unending and usually unwitting competition for space and for love. Shepard’s most celebrated play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 and takes as much of its power from how the actors move as from what they say. The subject of Buried Child could be called “the stark dignity of / entrance.” The phrase is from the William Carlos Williams poem in which he imagines the way a new shoot shoulders the earth crumbs and pushes up into the light. Buried Child ends with Halie’s lovely speech about how shoots and people come into the world: Good hard rain. Takes everything straight down deep to the roots. The rest takes care of itself. You can’t force a thing to grow. You can’t interfere with it. It’s all hidden . It’s all unseen. You just gotta wait til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong though. Strong enough to break the earth even. It’s a miracle, Dodge. I’ve never seen a crop like this in my whole life. Maybe it’s the sun. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the sun. If Shepard ends his play with an appeal to a sustaining natural order, it is because the cultural space of the family has so utterly botched the task of nurturance. What makes us grow, draws us out? The play foregrounds such...