The Question of Postmodernism

THE QUESTION OF POSTMODERNISM Ihab Hassan The question is in many parts, yet it comes to this: can we perceive a new phenomenon in contemporary culture generally, and in contemporary literature particularly, that deserves a name? If so, will the provisional rubric "postmodernism" serve? How does this phenomenon-let us call it postmodernism-relate itself to other concepts, such as modernism or the avant-garde? And what theoretical and historical difficulties does it conceal ? Acts of definition are often arbitrary; at best, they seem a kind of intelligent tautology, telling us what we think we already know. What, then, may be gained from this line of questioning? If nothing else, some sense of that complex misunderstanding which enables us to understand a little our cultural moment, perhaps even our own mortality. Let us begin. HISTORY OF THE TERM I am not certain where or when the term was first conceived, assuming that history is genetic and terminology viviparous. But this much we know: 30 Federico De Onis used the word postmodernismo in his Antologia de la poesia espanola e hispanoamericana (1882-1932), published in Madrid in 1934, and Dudley Fitts picked it up again in his Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry of 1942.1 Both meant thus to indicate a minor reaction to modernism already latent within it. The term also appeared in Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History as early as D.C. Somervell's first-volume abridgement in 1947. For Toynbee, "Post-Modernism" designated a new historical cycle in Western civilization, starting around 1875, which we have scarcely begun to discern. Somewhat later, during the 1950s, Charles Olson often spoke of postmodernism with more sweep than lapidary definition. But prophets and poets enjoy an ample sense of time, which few literary scholars seem to share. In 1959 and 1960, Irving Howe and Harry Levin wrote of postmodernism rather disconsolately as a falling off from the great modernist movement. It remained for Leslie Fiedler and myself, among others, to employ the term during the 1960s with premature approbation , and even with a touch of bravado. Fiedler had it in mind to challenge the elitism of the high modernist tradition in the name of pop. I wanted to explore that impulse of self-unmaking which is part of the literary tradition of silence. Pop and silence, or mass culture and deconstruction-or as I shall later argue, immanence and indeterminacy-may all be aspects of postmodern culture. But all this must wait upon a more patient analysis. I am aware that these remarks cannot do justice to the history of the subject . I hope they do it no violence. One thing is certain: the rubric "postmode:n" has now gained wide if anxious usage. It has adhered to art, literature, music, dance, architecture, urban planning, cultural tendencies of every kind-and once, even, after a lecture I gave on postmodernism in Japan, it was ingeniously used by someone in the audience to describe a new type of politics. THE CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS OF POSTMODERNISM Yet having said this much, I have said little about that knot of conceptual problems which constitutes postmodernism itself. Let me now try to isolate nine of these problems, beginning with the most obvious, moving toward the most intractable. 1. The word postmodernism is not only awkward and uncouth; it evokes what it wishes to surpass or suppress, modernism itself. The term thus contains its enemy within, as the terms romanticism and classicism, baroque and rococo, do not. Moreover, it denotes temporal linearity and connotes belatedness, even decadence, to which no postmodernist would admit. But what better name have we to give this curious age? The Atomic, or Space, or Television, or Semiotic, or Deconstructive Age? Or the Age of Indetermanence (indeterminacy and immanence) as I have antically proposed?2 Or better still, shall we simply live and let others live to call us what they may? 2. Like other categorical terms-say poststructuralism, or classicism 31 Is postmodernism only a literary tendency, or is it also a cultural phenomenon, perhaps even a mutation in Western humanism? and romanticism for that matter--postmodernism suffers from a certain semantic instability: that is, no clear consensus about...