Teaching a Postmodern Text

Dr. T. Ravichandran
Faculty member
The Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India
E-mail: ravic4@rediffmail.com

I. The Problem of Definition

Fixing the Protean

Postmodernism is a polysemantic and self-contradictory term: polysemantic in the sense that it is multiple in its meanings, and self-contradictory as it contains its enemy within, "Modernism," which it seeks to revise and/or negate. So before a teacher would plunge into the teaching of a postmodern text, he needs to grapple with the definition of the term as such. Yet with no explicit and ready-made definitions available in the critical market, he needs to fix the untenable, hold the protean and make a stand, though on a slippery ground.

Postmodernism, like the mythical Proteus, is evasive when grappled, assuming all possible varying forms so as to avoid one fixed form that would display its proper identity. As Ihab Hassan perceives, "Postmodernism suffers from a certain semantic instability; that is, no clear consensus about its meaning exists among scholars" (1986: 14). The general difficulty is being compounded by the "brash adolescence" of the term and "its semantic kinship to more current terms, themselves equally unstable": "Thus some critics mean by postmodernism what others call avant-gardism or neo-avant-gardism, while still others would call the same phenomenon simply modernism" (1986: 14).

Mapping the Borderless

While some critics (Bradbury 1983: 164) suggest that Postmodernism has reached its end already, and while some others (Barth 1985) foresee it as a synthesis yet to come, the trend generally accepted by these critics is that it is a reaction against and/or a continuation of Modernism. Hassan also talks about its "historical instability." By this he means that the "Postmodern period" must be perceived in terms both of continuity and discontinuity, the two perspectives being complementary and partial. Hence the Postmodern phenomenon ought to be viewed in terms of both continuity and discontinuity from Modernism. In the former case, it is from Modernism that Postmodernism has spread its tentacles and it is Modernism which it tries to intensify, extend and revise. In the latter case, Postmodernism considers Modernism an anti-model whose versions it frustratingly seeks to subvert/convert/pervert so as to keep its versions incomplete. A related difficulty is that one could not successfully or completely define the term "Modernism" and learn to demarcate it from "Postmodernism." Hassan explains:

Modernism and Postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or Chinese Wall; for history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future. We are all, I suspect a little Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern at once. And an author may, in his or her own lifetime, easily write both a modernist and postmodernist work (1986: 17).

No General Consensus

In trying to contra-distinguish the term postmodernism from modernism, critics are of divided opinion. Therefore some contend that modernism has been superseded by postmodernism while some others consider modernism an extended/replenished phase of postmodernism. Andreas Huyssen opines that "while the postmodern break with classical modernism was fairly visible in architecture and the visual arts, the notion of a postmodern rupture in literature has been much harder to ascertain" (1990: 237). "The different accounts of postmodernist literature and its relation to modernist fiction that have been offered by Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, and John Barth, among others," according to Joel Black, "hardly constitute a consensus, and none of these views has yet succeeded in becoming a definitive critical statement on the subject" (1986: 96).

Ecriture Rather Than Literature

The postmodern tendency conjures up a galaxy of writers and critics. To name only a few dominant ones--among the writers: Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garc'a Márquez, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Jerzy Kosinski, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Federman, John Hawkes, William Gass, E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, D. M. Thomas, Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee. Among the critics: Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Susan Sontag, Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Gerald Hoffman and Geoffrey Hartman. As David Lodge comments, "Postmodernism has established itself as an ecriture, in Barthes's sense of the word--a mode of writing shared by a significant number of writers in a given period" (1988: 221).

Complicated Theoretical Background: Deconstruction and the Notion of Play

Postmodern difficulty is compounded in its complex theoretic background. In particular, one needs to grasp such complicated concepts as Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. Even some renowned critics have written off deconstruction by saying that it is highly ambiguous. Jacques Derrida himself seems to revel in paradoxes and contradictions. In an interview, he once remarked, "What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of course!" Nevertheless, Derrida "subverts" or "undermines" the supposition that the system of language provides adequate grounds to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a text or self. Deconstruction attempts to erase the boundaries between oppositions, hence to show that the values and hierarchical order implied by the oppositions are also not rigid. Every word contains every other word by association, and beyond that, the meaning of every word is always deferred by circumstances; meaning is that which differs, and which defers. Thus, for Derrida, it is made dialectically--it lies always in a tension between the binaries, and there is no central meaning ("absolute signified") holding it all together. Without meaning, then, there can be no Truth and no Authority, and so power relations fall apart. The centre was a "construct," rather than something that was simply true or there. "This is not to say that there are no truths, but to put it in a somewhat convoluted manner, the truth of Truth is that there is no truth; this is Truth's truth" (Wolfreys 1966: 188). Rather than mourning the fixity of meaning, one can play along, rejoice in multiplicity and affirm the provisional nature of all meaning. Thus the poststructuralist is of the view that the object-text can be construed in an almost infinite number of ways, none of which is more faithful to the text itself than any other. In the words of Mark Currie, "where the structuralist was concerned with structure, the poststructuralist is concerned with structuration, or the ways in which the text is constructed by criticism" (Wolfreys 1966: 59).

No Sense of Centre/Unity

Umberto Eco has suggested that Postmodernism is born at the moment when we discover that the world has no fixed centre and that, as Foucault taught, power is not something unitary that exists outside of us (Hutcheon 1988: 86). Burdened with the overwhelming fatherhood of Modernism, Postmodernism sees the centre as a construct, a fiction, and not a fixed and unchangeable reality. The old "either-or" breaks down and the new "both/and-also" of multiplicity and difference opens up new possibilities. The "mythical method" (of Pound, Eliot and Joyce) of ordering or giving shape and meaning to a fragmented world is displaced by a growing insistence that there is no order, no shape or significance to be found anywhere. In Todd Gitlin's words:

In the postmodernist sensibility, the search for unity has apparently been abandoned altogether. Instead, we have textuality, a cultivation of surfaces endlessly referring to, ricocheting from, reverberating onto other surfaces. The work calls attention to its arbitrariness, constructedness; it interrupts itself. Instead of a single centre, there is pastiche, cultural recombination [...]. Not only has the master voice dissolved, but any sense of loss is rendered deadpan [...]. The implied subject is fragmented, unstable, even decomposed, it is finally nothing more than a crosshatch of discourses. Where there was passion, or ambivalence, there is now a collapse of feeling, a blankness (1990: 15-16).

So Many Labels

The types, or rather species, of narcissistic narrative which mushroomed in this condition are labelled "Metafiction," "Historiographic Metafiction," "Parafiction" and "Surfiction." Since all the possibilities of the fiction are used up, abused and exhausted, fiction in its conventional sense becomes impossible. Hence the Postmodern fiction tries to explore the possibilities of fiction as a "fictional construct" than as a mimetic representation of reality. The Postmodern fiction does not aim to hold the mirror up to nature but simply to be true unto its self-reflexive nature. It is, as Raymond Federman observes,

the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's imagination and not in man's distorted vision of reality--that reveals man's irrationality rather than man's rationality [...]. Just as Surrealists called that level of man's experience that functions in the subconscious SURREALITY, I call that level of man's activity that reveals life as a fiction SURFICTION. Therefore, there is some truth in that cliché which says that "life is fiction," but not because it happens in the streets, but because reality as such does not exist, or rather exists only in fictionalized version (1975: 7-8).

II. The Problem of Over-Connectivity: Interdisciplinary Nature

A character in a novel by John Barth remarks: "to understand any one thing entirely, no matter how minute, requires the understanding of every other thing in the world." In a similar vein, a character from Pynchon says "everything is connected." Thus any reader who wishes to comprehend a postmodern text has to first combat with its myriad relations to inter/cross-disciplinary subjects such as the Fine Arts, Mass Media; Literature, Criticism; Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Architecture, Cybernetics, Anthropology, Mythology, History, Geography, Mathematics, Social Science and Technology. The problem for a teacher is then not only to be a master of his subject but also a jack of all trades in many others. Even a partial understanding of the novels of Thomas Pynchon, for instance, would call for a knowledge of thermodynamics and of concepts like entropy. Entropy, of course, indicates the declivity of energy or the measure of disorder actualised by it.

Introduction of Innovative Concepts: Cosmopsis

Cosmopsis intimates a cosmic mindfulness in extremity that as a result numbs the mind and the body. "Cosmopsis" is John Barth's ludicrous version of entropy. A portmanteau word coined from "cosmopolitan" and "psychosis," the term indicates a psychological malady. A cosmopolitan belongs to all parts of the world and is not restricted to any one country or its inhabitants; psychosis is a severely disordered or diseased state of mind. In this manner, the person who suffers from cosmopsis grapples with a cosmic awareness, that is all things are possible and equally tenable, and so he does not find himself on a rational ground to choose one particular idea and act. Because he sees the possibilities of everything, he feels nothing for anything. Cosmopsis is a disease of too much imagination, too much consciousness, and it paralyses the mind as well as the body.

An Eclectic Version of Many Versions

While Postmodernism is considered a "version," in the way defined above, of Modernism, Postmodernism itself creates various versions of its own; however, it sets them against one another without dominance of a single version, constantly implying that every version of perfection is really an image of void. Brian McHale points out that every critic "constructs" postmodernism in his/her own way from different perspectives, none more right or wrong than the others. He observes:

Thus, there is John Barth's postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; Charles Newman's postmodernism, the literature of an inflationary economy; Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodernism, a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; Ihab Hassan's postmodernism, a stage on the road to the spiritual unification of human kind, and so on. There is even Kermode's construction of postmodernism, which in effect constructs it right out of existence (Hutcheon 1988: 11).

Knowledge of Many Languages

In addition to the many subjects one ought to master to understand the pluriuniverse of Postmodernism, one further needs to be a polyglot--especially in the knowledge of many foreign languages, which is presupposed. In this manner, Pynchon is fond of frequently using words from French, Latin, Spanish and German in his novels. Thus, a knowledge of German is essential for a fruitful understanding of the functioning of a character like Shale Shoenmaker in Pynchon's V. "Shale" appears inits English meaning "ugly," and "Shoen"(schön) in its German meaning "beautiful": the reference is to Shoenmaker's profession as a plastic surgeon: he is a person who can make ugly things beautiful!

III. Unconventional Treatment of Character, Myth, etc.

Unconventional Character Mould: Characterless Personalities

A teacher could not interpret the characters in a postmodern novel by applying the conventional critical tools. Often, he cannot call them characters at all. Throughout Pynchon's novel, V., the central character's real stature is unclear. "Disguise is one of V.'s attributes" (1975: 385, 462). Stencil associates V. with a girl named Victoria Wren who appears later as Victoria Manganese, Viola and Venus. Yet truthfully, Stencil himself does not know "what sex V. might be nor what genus and species" since V. is known to be "a remarkably scattered concept" (1975: 389). The first time it appears in the novel it is as "mercury-vapor lamps, receding in an asymmetric V" (1975: 11); the second instance , as V-note, the name of a jazz club; and the third occurrence, as Veronica, a female rat. Later, V. is pervasive in place names: Venezuela, Valletta and a strange outlandish region--Vheissu. It is found in ideas as victory, virgin, Virgin, vantage, view, vision, violence, Vatican, various, vagrant, etc; also as energy, the symbol of verb, volt, vector, velocity and so on.

Critics have not only exhausted the probabilities of the letter V in the novel but also its alternative possibilities: V turned upside down and made 'A' (e.g. alligator, asexual); double V: 'W' (e.g. Waterspout, World); and inverted double V: 'M' (e.g.: Malta, Mara) (Greenberg 1969: 58-65). One ingenuous interpretation considers V. as just Pynchon's play on words with his readers, and V. here represents a reader-surrogate, "for V. is nothing less than interjects the paronomasic encoding of 'V is you'" (Vella 1989: 139). In spite of this surfeit of interpretations, the-he-she-it-they-V. stays, to borrow a term from Salman Rushdie, a P2C2E, that is, a process too complicated to explain. As old Stencil claims in his report: "There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she." (1975: 53). What V. holds is not an answer to a crossword puzzle, but cross-references to exemplify, as well as to mock what it exemplifies, the complicated identity-formation/fabrication process in a thoroughly capricious postmodern climate.

Uncanny Treatment of the Myth and the Real

The postmodernists differ largely from the modernists in their use of myth. As David Cowart observes, "where modernists exploit myth as a universal, instinctual truth, their successors either deconstruct myth as an unreliable 'metanarrative' or examine it as a language that, like all language, speaks its speakers rather than the other way around" (1990: 72). Thus if the modernists toil to find a meaning in coherence with myth, postmodernists puncture the mytho-centric-meaning by undermining the much vaunted authenticity / authority attributed to myth to structure reality. Myth no longer "served to explain," as M. H. Abrams defines it, "why the world is as it is and things happen as they do; and to establish the rationale for social customs and observances and sanctions for the rules by which men conduct their lives" (1971: 102). Linked with this distorted vision of myth is also the sense of perception of reality: "if modernism asks, how can we know reality (a reality whose existence is, ultimately, not in doubt), then postmodern asks, how can we know what is real? How can we read the signs and (social) codes that tell us what is real, but in such a way that we are not trapped within the constraint of those codes?" (Madsen 1991: 125).

Pynchon's method of blurring the boundaries of myth and reality is by attributing mythical status to contemporary figures. In this regard, Albert Piela III's comment on the postmodernists' jocular use of myth is pertinent to Pynchon's device. He remarks: "One of the reasons some Modernist authors appropriated myths for their works was that myths provided writers and readers a shared way of speaking about and understanding the world. While Modernists informed their works with classical and Biblical myths, their successors tend to be more playful" (1990: 125). In Vineland, Pynchon evokes the myths of popular culture, especially those shaped by television.

Pynchon subverts privileged myths by demonstrating the capacity of television programmes to provide a shared language between author and readers. Rather than seeking to recognise a number of specific allusions to Odysseus or Oedipus, the readers of Vineland need to identify such mythic figures as Mr. Spock, Jaime Sommers, and Oscar Goldman, who are renowned television characters. The point is that, as Piela III observes, "by recognizing the mythopoeic qualities of television programs and characters, Pynchon upsets a hierarchy that privileges classical and Biblical myths as those appropriate to a high-cultural activity like literature" (1990: 125). Similarly, Pynchon rewrites the stories of Biblical heroes in a technically advanced world. The name of Isaiah 2:4 given to a character in Pynchon's Vineland by his hippie parents, because of the passage's prophecy of peace, takes on an ironic slant interpretation that he is trying to borrow money from his girlfriend's father, Zoyd, to set up a violence amusement park.

IV. The Text Per Se

Subversive/Self-Reflexive Text

The Postmodern text not only effects the subversion of the received canons of text-manufacturing but also its own "subversion"--that is, it allows itself to undergo a "subversion." While producing a master version of a story, it provides sub-versions of the master version, thereby invalidating the whole; therefore, the readers are at a loss to arrive at the "total story" and/or "the total meaning" of the text. The text reflects itself to be the product of a highly self-conscious mind. The reader is, inevitably, bound to be the co-creator of the self-reflexive text, yet paradoxically, distanced from it because of its very self-reflexiveness. As Linda Hutcheon explains,

Some have argued that postmodernist art does not aim, as did modernist, at exploring the difficulty, so much as the impossibility, of imposing that single determinate meaning on a text. Yet it is also true that it does so, not so much by means of textual difficulties alone, but--paradoxically--by overt, self-conscious control by an inscribed narrator/author figure that appears to demand, by its manipulation, the imposition of a single, closed perspective. At the same time, of course, it works to subvert all chances of attaining such closure (1980: XIII).

Metafiction refers to fiction that calls attention to itself as an artifact, in order to raise questions about the relationship between fiction and reality (Waugh: 1984). In a novel in the realistic tradition of mimesis, we would not have an intrusion by someone outside the text's frame of reference into the very fabric of the novel, nor would we have the form of eternal regress we get in the structure of the novel, in which a segment does not come to closure but instead is repeated, with variation, with a spiraling outward, out of the novel. The various receding and interwoven levels of narrative presented by the Postmodern text suggest Derrida's discussion on an endless chain of signifiers in which there is no final "truth," or transcendental signified: each signified becomes a pointing signifier.

The Death of the Author and Intertextual Connections

Contrary to the traditional, humanist perception of the subject as something represented by the author, the individual who gives life to and nourishes the work, Roland Barthes opines in his essay, "The Death of the Author," that "it is language which speaks, not the author" (1968: 143). Barthes shifts the power and authority from the author to the writing itself, and subsequently the reader, who is actively involved in the text-making and meaning-construing process. The text is "woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages [...] antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony" (1971: 160). Julia Kristéva states in this way: "any text is constructed as a mosaic, any text is the absorption and transformation of another" (1986: 37). Both Kristéva and Barthes caution, however, that this mosaic, the "intertextual" in which every text is held, is not to be confused with some origin of the text:

[T]o try to find the "sources," the "influences" of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation, the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas. (Barthes 1971: 160).

Furthermore, Brenda K Marshall also comments in this context:

Intertextuality is precisely a momentary compendium of everything that has come before and is now. Intertextuality calls attention to prior texts in the sense that it acknowledges that no text can have meaning without those prior texts, it is a space where "meanings" intersect. There is no such creature as the autonomous text (or work). (1992: 128).

From the perspective of semiotics, Kristéva observes that the term "intertextuality" denotes a "transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another." (1986a: 111).

The De-teleological Text

The traditional as well as modern "teleological texts" presupposed the theory that events and developments in life and fiction are due to the purpose or design that they are serving. The written text as it was with a thematic or structuring principle progressed towards a pre-determined text. The book is generally perceived as a discrete physical object and correspondingly conceived as a discrete unit of meaning. The postmodern "de-teleological text" decentres this notion and holds no specific purpose or design in its function. It decomposes the object of the book in order to deconstruct the book as concept, and also it retards both that decomposition and that deconstruction. In this respect, the postmodernist authors have done away with plot, character, setting and theme--they view them as the true enemies of fiction. Consequently, the text has taken the pattern of a mosaic.

V. Final Note: Challenges, Not Problems

Most of the difficulties discussed above appear to be problems existing on account of a received pattern of thinking in the conventional reader/teacher's mind, which basically looks for an "answer." Comprehension of a Postmodern text is difficult for such a bent of mind, as the postmodernists seem to concur with Murphy's law that states, "there can be no answers, only cross-references." For the same reason, if the teacher would strive, like Pynchon's Oedipa, to look for a one-to-one correspondence between words and "meanings" in the text he may find himself in a state of paranoia. This paranoia is perhaps better than anti-paranoia since it is "a condition," Pynchon says, "not many of us can bear for long, where nothing is connected to anything." What is required, then, is a challenging mind that comprehends postmodernism in its polysemy and accepts the entirely different quality of reading that it demands. The postmodern text and the many texts intersecting within it may not be fully deciphered or completed. Rather, the text calls for an active participation, on the attempted disentanglement of the threads that run through it. As Barthes notes in his "The Death of the Author":

In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, "run" at every point and at every level; but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced. (1968: 147).

Further, the "plurality" of the text does not yield to a variety of interpretations; rather, it is "an irreducible plural" (1971: 159). Finally, the teaching of a postmodern text, in a sense, "begins in delight and ends in wisdom"--or, as Robert Frost would have explained it: "wisdom"--not of an eternal revelation, or a great clarification of life--but just "a momentary stay against confusion."

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Delhi: Macmillan India, 1971.

Barth, John. The End of the Road. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

_____. "The Literature of Replenishment." Postmodernism in American Literature. Ed. Ihab Hassan. Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1985.

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image--Music--Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. 1968. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

_____. "From Work to Text." Image--Music--Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. 1971. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Black, Joel. "Postmodernist Fictions: A Review Essay." Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986): 96-109.

Borklund, Elner. Contemporary Novelists. London: St. James Press, 1986.

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.

Cowart, David. "Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon's Vineland." Critique 32.2 (1990): 67-76.

Federman, Raymond. "Surfiction--Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction." Surfiction: Fiction Now ... and Tomorrow. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1975. 5-15.

Gitlin, Todd. "Life in the Postmodern World." The American Review 34.4 (1990): 12-18.

Greenberg, Alvin. "The Underground Woman: An Excursion into the V. of Thomas Pynchon." Chelsea 27 (1969): 58-65.

Hassan, Ihab. "The Culture of Postmodernism." Postmodernism in American Literature. New Delhi: United States Information Service, 1986.

Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen, 1980.

_____. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Huyssen, Andreas. "Mapping the Postmodern." Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge,1990. pp.234-277.

Kristéva, Julia. "Word, Dialogue and Novel." The Kristéva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 34-61.

_____. "Revolution in Poetic Language." The Kristéva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 90-136.

Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature. Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1980.

Madsen, Deborah L. The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. London: Leicester UP, 1991.

Marshall, Brenda K. Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Piela, Albert III. "A Note on Television in Vineland." Pynchon Notes 26-27 (1990): 125-27.

Pynchon, Thomas. V. Great Britain: Jonathan Cape Ltd.,1963. rpt.Great Britain: Picador, 1975.

_____. Vineland. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Vella, Michael W. "Thomas Pynchon's Intrusion in the Enchanter's Domain." Twentieth Century Literature 35 (Summer 1989): 131-46.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Wolfreys, Julian and William Baker, eds. Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance. London: Macmillan, 1996.

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