On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Introduction: On Endings

Introduction: On Endings No one encountering a book review that castigates an author as the “worst writer of his generation” would be surprised to find further incendiary claims, but Dale Peck’s poisonous 2002 review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil is worth quoting because it so economically restates one powerful narrative about the American novel after 1945.1 A scathing critique of Moody’s novel becomes a denunciation of the whole strand of contemporary fiction to which it belongs: these writers are “heirs to a bankrupt tradition,” a tradition that “burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo.” This is, in Peck’s mind, “a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything”2 Peck’s account of “the most esoteric strain of twentieth-century literature ” or “what some people think of as the highest of high canonical postmodernism” suggests that something went horribly wrong when the stylistic extravagance of modernism—an extravagance still tied to reference and empathy—decayed into a words-for-words’-sake postmodernism , which “turned the construction of a novel into a purely formal exercise, judged either by the inscrutable floribundity of its prose or the lifeless carpentry of its parts.”3 And so it was that the early twenty-first century declared a new open season on high postmodernism: Peck’s 2 / ON ENDINGS attack would be reiterated in Jonathan Franzen’s public airing of his agonized relationship with William Gaddis’s work.4 But for all the heat of Peck’s review, and notwithstanding the oddity of seeing these debates played out in the nation’s magazines (Peck was writing in the New Republic, Franzen in the New Yorker), the reaction of many academic readers might have been nothing more than a slightly embarrassed yawn: at most, we simply note the minor differences between this moment and its original, as if we were watching a deferential Hollywood remake of a classic movie. After all, the most surprising thing about these early-twenty-first-century attacks on postmodern experimentation was not their novelty but their familiarity, their repetition of claims made about postmodern fiction in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s by the generation of scholars that included Gerald Graff, John Gardner, and Charles Newman.5 And Ben Marcus’s 2005 defense of experimentation, published as a lead essay in an issue of Harper’s (“Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction”), could just as easily have been written by an updated John Barth or William Gass, valuing as it does the productive potential of difficult fiction for smart readers. This enduring categorization of postwar fiction divides writers into those who are committed to mimesis and the representation of “real” people with “real” problems and those who are not. In this story, a body of aesthetically innovative work (“postmodernism” in the most restricted sense) is set against fiction committed to the reality of lived experience. Depending on the critic’s commitments, “postmodernist” fiction becomes either powerfully world-making and ontologically rich or hopelessly narcissistic and autotelic, and the “realist” tradition either an expression of the possibilities of representation or evidence of imaginative failure.6 And if we can now laugh at the rasher claims made by partisans on both sides—Gardner, for instance, wondering whether Pynchon and Barth, with their “intellectual blight, academic narrowness, or fakery,” would still be read in the next century; Barth dismissing much fiction by women as nothing more than “secular news reports”—we are reminded by the debate in America’s highbrow press of how little the fundamental categories have changed for a substantial number of readers: there is metafiction and there is realism, the making of other worlds or the committed representation of our own.7 This repetition of claims from earlier decades is surprising not least because a substantial body of work has built on Linda Hutcheon’s assertion advanced over two decades ago in A Poetics of Postmodernism that Introduction / 3 much of what we have called postmodern fiction is actually seriously...