Based on the article by Michael Berube, it’s hard to say when Postmodern fiction was born and what it is exactly. And yet, here we are discussing Postmodern American fiction. So, after finishing the Lathe of Dreams and reading David Harvey’s “The Condition of Postmodernity,” I thought about Harvey’s discussion of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, in which “incommensurable spaces [are] justaposed or superimposed on each other” (48). In this heterotopia of postmodernist fiction, “characters no longer contemplate how they can unravel or unmask a central mystery, but are forced to ask, ‘which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of myselves is to do it? instead.” Orr, the powerful/passive dreamer in Lathe of Dreams, seemed to fit this postmodernist model for a fiction character. Because realities were altered while he was sleeping and because he was dreaming, Orr woke up and each time wondered, “Which world is this?” Since the conditions of the day-to-day world were changing, sometimes radically, Orr needed to discover how he figured into each new world. Similarly, Oedipa Maas had to approach each situation and person as though individually separate from each other and yet tangled up, sometimes intentionally and with no intention or connection at all.
I find this jarring and I’m beginning to think I prefer modernism. Maybe my approach to analysis is still caught up in the moral crisis born of the Enlightenment, but I’m pretty uncomfortable with all the uncertainty. I’d like to know that a glass of milk is a glass of milk, even if it has the possibilities of changing into some other substance at some point in the future (this is a random example, I know). And yet, I’m noticing a postmodern effect in most media—films portraying the lives of people who will never meet and yet showing how their lives intersect all the time (Love Actually and Crash) or the Internet’s hypertext world. To close, I have to say that the idea that there is no singular explanation or meaning behind something is somewhat welcoming because it doesn’t seem to close doors on anyone about being right or wrong (I’m thinking of the Lathe of Dreams discussion about the snake bite scenario); and yet, it can rub me the wrong way since I like having answers and finding a moral at the end of my stories.