Grounding Postmodernism

Our reader for Adam Katz's essay on the late Ronald Sukenick observed "I think the article is hugely valuable for the growing number of . . . graduate students who work within post-structuralist premises but are fascinated by writing that, while conscious of matters that we call post-structuralist, exceeds the entailments—aesthetic, political, ideological—of those premises." I would expand this to young critics and add that there is much postmodernist writing that resists orthodox post-structuralist prescriptions by pushing toward transcendence, even to the archangelic figures of Nabokov and Pynchon. Katz sees Sukenick as being as self-reflective as anyone around, but as grounding his metaleptic razzle-dazzle in the forbidden category of experience interpreted by Katz through the sobering perspective of Hannah Arendt. Timothy Gray's "A World without Gravity" shows the logic of the counterintuitive pairing of Jim Carroll, poet, memoirist, rock performer, and former basketball star with Kathleen Norris, poet, memoirist, religious writer, and former Virgin of Bennington. Both sought to escape gravity into a postmodernist lightness of being as they circled in the Warhol orbit. Both wrote about angels but eventually rejected what Carroll called "these shifting platforms of artifice and quick change" to come back to ground, a spiritually vitalized ground. Gray grounds his essay as much in their life experiences as their writings, powerfully relating the two and, not incidentally, revealing the limitations of "nihilist chic" of a post-structuralist ethos that at first enabled but finally threatened to destroy their "expanding angelic energy." Finally, Ken Millard analyzes Rick Moody's Purple America as a novel that grounds its metafictional self-reflectiveness in its attempt to "historicize its own postmodernist aesthetic" via an examination of the corrupting effect of what might be termed nuclear discourse, with the characters and their language fissionating in the foreground while a reactor leak causes perturbation in the background. These three essays remind us, to cite two Jim Carroll band songs, that while we may respond to the power of angelic dreams—"I want the angel / Whose dreams are fatal"—the outcome may be "People That Die."