Class of ’66

On or about October, 1966, human character changed. Or maybe not.

What if we said, just by way of a thought-experiment, that postmodernism began in 1966—at least in Anglophone fiction, but maybe elsewhere in culture, too; maybe everywhere. This is manifestly a crazy way to do cultural history (isn’t it?). The transition to postmodernism, if it ever happened at all (but let’s not go there today), is certainly a process, not a punctual event. The consensus view seems to be that postmodernism emerged over the course of the “long sixties,” the span of years from (let’s say) the Brown v. Board of Education decision to the end of the war in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the experiment of identifying a specific onset year, however arbitrarily—and in a certain sense, the more arbitrarily the better—has the potential to illuminate our thinking about periodization, change, and continuity. Nineteen sixty-six is as good a candidate as any, better than most: a year in which avant-garde tendencies converged, mingled and cross-pollinated with developments in popular culture, to explosive effect. If we said that 1966 marks the beginning of postmodernism in fiction, then what would that version of postmodernism—the one that begins in 1966—look like? Let’s try that idea on for size. Bear with me.

Why October, 1966? The late Raymond Federman, French-born Jewish-American novelist, claimed he sat down to begin composing his first novel, Double or Nothing (1971), on October 1, 1966, in Paris, in the process inventing surfiction, an American brand of postmodernism. Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t; maybe Double or Nothing is a model of postmodernist fiction, maybe it isn’t. Federman was a notorious self-fictionalizer, and his story is as untrustworthy as any of his novels, a personal myth rather than a sober matter of fact. In plain fact, most of the cutting-edge novels of 1966 stop short of surfiction in the Federman mode. Poised on the very brink of postmodernism, they exhibit for the most part a kind of aggravated modernism. A few of them, however, do topple over that brink. It is a precarious moment.

Nineteen sixty-six is a threshold year for fiction in at least one sense: a number of major novelists who would subsequently make the transition to postmodernism published their first novels in that year. A shortlist might include Robert Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists, William H. Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck, Joseph McElroy’s A Smuggler’s Bible, and Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Sky Changes. All of these novels are characterized by a modernist focus on the interior lives of characters—many of them experiencing extreme psychological states—and on the way different characters perceive the same exterior reality differently. The narrative techniques here are those of high modernism—internal focalization through one or more characters, interior monologues cast in the first-person or the third-person (free indirect) modes, juxtaposed perspectives of multiple characters, and so on—and the models are the classic modernist novels of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and others. The British novelist B. S. Johnson’s Trawl also belongs to this group because, even though this is not his first novel, Johnson here retreats to modernist-style interior monologue after the metafictional breakthrough of 1964’s Albert Angelo—literally a breakthrough, involving (among other things) punching a physical hole through several pages of the text.

Each of these novelists would sooner or later leave behind the edgy, aggravated modernism of these early novels and pass over into one version or other of postmodernism. Coover would make the transition by way of The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), his novel of an obsessive game-player who slips across the ontological border into his own game, and he would seal his transformation in his stories of world-building and -unbuilding in Pricksongs and Descants (1969), followed by the carnivalesque historical fantasia of The Public Burning (1977). Gass would shift by way of the transitional stories of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968) to the experimental book-making of...