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

The Glories of Hindsight: What We Know Now

39 tHe gLories of HindsigHt: wHat we know now linda hutchEon As the cliché goes, hindsight is blessed with 20/20 vision. To keep to that same round number: twenty years ago, when trying to theorize what was then our contemporary culture, we didn’t have hindsight to guide us, so it is not too surprising that we could not foresee what would happen to this thing called the “Canadian postmodern” over time. A recent conversation with undergraduate students brought this home to me in a particularly sobering way. They were somewhat supercilious and definitely suspicious when they asked why it was that all the postmodern theorists we were reading (and who had been writing, of course, in the 1980s and early 90s) hadn’t “bothered” (their word) to take into account what was, in fact, really important about postmodernism. Their list of the theorists’ glaring omissions was long and included things like graphic novels, the Internet, and interactive videogames—in other words, all the things they had never known life without. My knee-jerk, “always historicize” lesson was delivered in reaction and, I hope, in not too high a dudgeon; but most interesting for me, was that in the linda hutchEon 40 discussion that followed, it became clear that my students simply had not realized that the first work actually labelled a “graphic ” novel, the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, wasn’t published until 1984; that personal computers became a reality only in the 1980s; that the World Wide Web became part of our lives even later (in the early 1990s); that while a very early version of what we could call a videogame was first introduced commercially in 1971, the industry collapsed in 1983 and wasn’t reborn until 1985, when it began to take off. This is the history of their twenty-something postmodern lives, but not the history of the postmodernism that was being theorized twenty years ago. The postmodern theorists of those years were limited creatures , to be sure, and not only in our failure to invest in crystal balls. Sometimes our lack of predictive vision and insight was the result of personal intellectual or experiential limitations (e.g., in my case, never considering poetry or theatre, or never having read and therefore never having thought about the vast realm of children’s literature). At other times, postmodern blindness was unavoidable because the world of art and theory changed over time: graphic novels came into being; queer theory and postcolonialism captured our critical and political attention . At still other times, we were hampered by our inability to imagine the impact of the new technologies, the new media that were just making their appearances. In exploring here some of these limitations, both the inevitable and the preventable, I want to concentrate on what someone theorizing the postmodern today—as an historical and as a current phenomenon (for it is both)—might want to take into account, with the benefit of that 20/20 vision of hindsight. Back then, in the 1980s, trying to make sense of the confusing and contradictory culture that was developing around us and changing daily, each of us defined the postmodern in his or her own way, and the plethora of postmodernisms that resulted has been the bane of critical historians, and students, ever since. For thE gloRiES oF hindSight 41 me, one way to make sense of those confusions and contradictions was to put them right at the centre of critical investigation and examine precisely that puzzling coexistence and confrontation of things, like the traditional (though ironized) and the new, the outward-looking historical and the inward-looking self-reflexive, the popular and the canonical. What if the postmodern impulse was one of both exploiting and undermining the conventions upon which it so obviously depended, conventions that ranged from formalism to mimesis? Both/and not either /or: maybe that was the postmodern way of thinking? But, if it were, it was not likely going to be a way of thinking that would be appreciated by a culture (Western culture at large, not only Canadian culture) then dominated by oppositional politics. And of course it wasn’t. Theorizing postmodernism, as some of us Canadians did, from what Fredric Jameson (with the help of ImmanuelWallenstein)calledthe“semi-peripheryoftheAmerican core” (qtd. in Stephanson 64) certainly allowed us to appreciate the importance of the challenges to centres and “cores,” American and...