Modernism vs. Postmodernism: Shepard's The Tooth of Crime and the Discourses of Popular Culture

Modernism VS. Postmodernism: Shepard's The Tooth of Crime and the Discourses of Popular Culture LEONARD WILCOX Postmodemism and the postmodem condition: one of the salient features of both, recent critics tell us, is the "effacement ... of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinctions between high culture and so called mass or popular culture.'" Such is Fredric Jameson's assessment, and in an important article on postmodemism he adds that many of the newer postmodemisms are fascinated with the "debased" landscape of advertising, media images, motels and the commercial fabric of the superhighway strip. These postmodemisms no longer "quote" from the popular texts as Joyce and Mahler might have done; rather "they incorporate them, to the point where the line drawn between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw."2 Certainly recent American literature draws upon the text of popular culture and its fabricated discourses, discourses as one critic put it "which proffer so many voices to be mimicked, like garments turned out for the season's fashion dictates.'" Yet in the best of our postmodemists the discourse of pop is not merely mimicked; it becomes a rich intertextual network, the constituent materials for the play of signification. Moreover, it becomes the very medium in which the postmodem condition is depicted: the condition of Americans living in an electronic, media-saturated culture, in the object world of schlock, living like Pynchon's Oedipa Maas among discontinuous images, simulacra and floating signifiers, in a world where even their president draws his narrative accounts and anecdotes not from the "master narratives" of western civilization but from the scenarios of grade B films. Obviously one thinks of Sam Shepard as a writer for whom the discourse of popular culture assumes a richness and density, and whose object world jukeboxes , diners, interstate highways, old Studebakers, Bob's Big Boys, film Modernism vs. Postmodernism stars, milk duds - is drawn from the detritus of popular culture. But Shepard might be considered our poet ofthe postmodern condition for reasons other than his use of pop discourse and pop myth. For beyond their preoccupation with popular culture Shepard's plays exhibit postmodern characteristics and address postmodern concerns. Like artists Warhol and Lichtenstein, or the contemporary photorealists Ralph Going and Chuck Close, Shepard's images are characterized by the flatness of the glossy advertising image, and his characters are post-auratic, "affectless," splintered and fragmented, "bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme.,,4 Moreover this fracturing of character, of self, is related to the fracturing of language itself, since in Shepard's plays identity is something constructed in language and discourse. Shepard's plays reveal a similarity to Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard's characterization of the postmodem condition in which language is: dispersed into clouds of linguistic particles - narrative ones, but also denotative, prescriptive, etc. each with its own pragmatic valence. Today each of us Jives in the vicinity of these. We do not necessarily fonn stable linguistic communities, and the properties of those we do fonn are not necessarily communicable.5 In Shepard's world of pop bricolage each individual speaks in a private code or ideolect, and becomes a kind of linguistic island separated from everyone else. As Jeep says in Action, "Its hard to have a conversation." For Shepard the Lyotardian breakdown of the grands recits or master narratives is a constant preoccupation. In Aerial! the characters return again and again to a book, as if ritualistically searching for a lost place, for an absent center in the narrative of the play's action, for some overriding structure in the narrative of their own existence. But in the post-historical space of the play, the master narratives no longer provide structure in the midst of linguistic fragmentation; they no longer "shore up the ruins" in any modernist sense nor provide a grounding for social or individual identity. Hence in some ofShepard's plays the selfor speaking subject may emerge as the dialectical opposite of a linguistic island - centerless, "polyphonic", spoken by an alteration of voices. Strapped in an electric chair, Mazon begins the monologue of Killer's Head: Oh yeab, today's the day...