Tribal Politics and the Postmodern Product

In Color and Culture (2001), a history of black intellectuals, Ross Posnock suggested that "postmodernism is waning, including its tribal conception of politics founded on a romance of identity" (3). Based on the evidence of recent books on postmodernism in American fiction, however, one can only say that Posnock's prediction is premature and the "postmodern romance of identity" shows no sign of diminishing. Indeed, according to Lawrence Hogue, the death of the subject prophesied by Foucault has been transformed through the alchemy of postmodernism's "epistemological break with modernity" into an ascendancy of "postmodern African American, women, and American Indian writers" whose fictions collectively betray "new cultural, sexual, gender and social forms and paradigms in which to redescribe themselves, outside Eurocentric modernity's repressive stereotypes and conventions" (Hogue x–xi). "Make it new," the modernist slogan attributed to Ezra Pound, is being recycled by proponents of postmodernism who seem to be making "it" really, finally, honest-to-goodness new not by identifying new aesthetic incarnations of the novel but by adopting ideological positions and then proclaiming a specific political stance to be a formal innovation. Read together, these books suggest that American literary postmodernism is becoming an empty field, held together notably by a critical obsession with its own political and literary marginality.

Fredric Jameson said postmodernism would be like this. Jameson did not exactly say that American literary postmodernism was empty—far from it since he greatly admired E. L. Doctorow's work. However, insofar as Jameson saw postmodern writers to be portraying the loss of "history" and its replacement by an empty historicism, his argument implicitly suggested that with the end to history came as well the end to the history of the novel. For Jameson, what postmodern novels revealed was not only a kind of complicity with "the repudiation of interpretation" that is "a fundamental component of poststructuralist theory," but also that this complicity was consistent with the fact that postmodern aesthetic productions had become continuous with, and the expressions of, multinational capitalism's desire to reproduce itself endlessly. "Implicitly or explicitly a political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism," Jameson argues, postmodernity enacts a historical nightmare "in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacrum of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach" (64, 79).

As we shall see, the writers under consideration here helplessly iterate and perpetually enact Jameson's concern that aesthetic creation and commodity production have become the same thing. Hogue's Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (2009) and Witzling's Everybody's America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism (2008) present aesthetic choices as political expressions available for immediate consumption. Burn's Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008) addresses the cultural significance of Jonathan Franzen, a "postmodernish" writer whose work signifies its own attempt to negotiate its always waning status as literary product. Recognizing the indifference to aesthetic developments that characterizes much of academic writing about American postmodernist fiction, Lou Freitas Caton's Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics: Romancing the Postmodern Novel (2008) presents American postmodernist fiction as an anachronism of Romantic thought. Caton proposes a Coleridgean aesthetics to solve the identity politics squabbling that comes pouring forth, seemingly endlessly, from academic journals and presses. I begin with Hogue's study because it marks a kind of apotheosis of the logic that valorizes a "tribal politics" based on a "romance of identity" that Posnock dismissed as out of date but that remains at the heart of each of the books discussed. In equating Linda Hutcheon's notion that postmodern literature consists of acts of political subversion to substantiate his claim with the triumph of identity politics, Hogue's book stands as an ironic confirmation of Jameson...