RE: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism

Getting Ready to Have Been Postmodern

87 getting ready to Have been Postmodern chRiStian bök “Postmodernism,” as a category of literary analysis, is now more than two decades old in Canada—but despite copious volumes of work done on the subject since the influential publication of The Canadian Postmodern by Linda Hutcheon in 1988, the term has yet to refer to the very form of radical fiction that her treatise at first purports to define but then proceeds to ignore. Hutcheon notes in 1988 that, beyond Canada (in both America and Quebec), postmodern literature subscribes to an anticlassic , anti-mimetic agenda that rejects traditional conventions of realist writing1—but in order to argue that Canada remains rich with examples of such radical fiction, Hutcheon must locate this agenda, paradoxically, within realist writing itself.2 1 Linda Hutcheon notes that, in America, critics equate postmodern literature with “the extreme non-representational textual play […] of ‘surfiction’” (20), and in Quebec, writers have turned “radical experimentation” into “a kind of norm”—one that offers “an infamous alternative to realism” (ix). 2 Hutcheon snubs indigenous literature by the avant-garde, averring that, chRiStian bök 88 While Hutcheon might argue that postmodern literature is “excentric ,”3insofarasitoccupiesamarginalpositionattheperiphery of our culture, she nevertheless exacerbates the marginality of such literature by failing to discuss anti-classic, anti-mimetic fiction on the grounds that it has only a minor status among the major voices in Canada—and consequently, she forfeits the appropriate opportunity to study the work of avant-garde4 writers who have gone largely ignored in canonical narratives about our literary heritage. Even though a handful of critics have balked at these rhetorical manoeuvres,5 her book has nevertheless sanctioned exuberance among far too many scholars who now have permission to read, as postmodern, any realistic narrative that demonstrates even the merest degree of narrative aberrancy. Such scholars have adopted the catchy jargon of the “pomo,” but they have continued to evade any sustained encounter with the most obdurate examples of postmodern innovation, thereby ignoring the rare cases of a more experimental genre in order in Canada, “the very real challenge to the conventions of realism has always come from within those conventions themselves” (20). 3 Hutcheon notes that “postmodern writers […] are always in a sense ‘agents provocateurs,’” criticizing the dominant culture, and “[t]his almost inevitably puts the postmodern writer into a marginal or ‘ex-centric’ position with regard to the […] dominant culture” (3). 4 “Avant-garde” is used here as kind of “paleonym” for a diverse variety of literary coteries that have historically used anti-classic, anti-mimetic techniques of writing in order to critique the discursive conditions under which literature itself gets written and admired. While I do not mean to imply that all species of the avant-garde throughout history are, by any means, “postmodern ,” I do argue that postmodernism does itself constitute a “moment” in the evolutionary redefinition of these avant-garde techniques. 5 Frank Davey has surveyed some of this dissent, citing disputes by, among others, Lorraine Weir, Sylvia Söderlind, and David L. Clark (“Contesting ‘Post(-)modernism’”). Lorraine Weir, for example, notes that, by “domesticating deviance and inscribing it within [a] postmodern paradigm, Hutcheon converts […] the non-referential into the referential” (181), thereby defanging the recalcitrance of the avant-garde so as to reaffirm the normal values of humanist pedagogy. gEtting REady to havE bEEn poStmodERn 89 to depict as progressive the many cases of a more conservative genre. Hutcheon defines postmodern literature as a genre of metafictive historicism—a brand of parodic mimesis that disrupts mythic narratives about our country through ironic repetition of its history.6 Hutcheon, however, cannot define this term without first resorting to an oxymoron, denying the avant-garde so as to convert postmodernism into a genre of unrealistic, but verisimilar, realism—and in doing so, she performs the trope of irony in keeping with her theme of irony, since her essay does not address the topic that her title has saluted. Hutcheon instead discusses novels that, if not both classic and mimetic in form, rarely align themselves with the provisional conditions of the postmodern and its refusal of humanist values, but rather align themselves, at best, with the revisionary traditions of the modernists and their renewal of humanist values. While both aesthetic movements might respond to a common crisis of meaning, disjoining language from its referent in order to express anxiety about what is real and what...