Week 2 – Short Stories – American Postmodernism

On Dehumanization and the Humanization of Silence

Sorry this post is coming a little late. I was without power–but thankfully still had gas for heat–last night!

I noticed many people spoke about the dehumanizing aspects in the stories like Super Goat Man and Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms.” However, I see an oppossite effect occuring in Foer’s story, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease.” While I would not make the claim that this is a depiction of the most functional family, I will make the claim that the way Foer presents silence actually humanizes the characters and by using symbols, adds dimensions to silence–or a lack of speech–that are rarely represented.

A basic function of many stories and human interaction, in general, is communication. Represented in stories through dialogue, it is how the characters interact. However, in “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease,” the characters interact almost entirely through silence. Foer’s use of specific symbols to represent specific types of silence convey more emotion and meaning than words themselves could. This story deals with relatively heavy topics. As Foer states in the opening paragraph, “we have forty-one heart attacks between us, and counting” (135). The dialogue that follows is then represented by four open squares, or absences of language between the narrator and his father. In a typical story, this would be a hard conversation to write. However, in Foer’s story, we see that first the father says nothing, then the narrator, to which the father replies with more nothing, and the narrator once again follows suit. This is not just a period of silence, this is an open exchange of nothing said.

Additional marks like the closed square and the ‘??’ add new elements of silence to the conversation the narrator has with his mother, who is intent on loving some grandchildren–not yet birthed–before she dies. In this exchange we see the open squares (nothing said) and also the narrator’s willed silence–he has nothing more to add. When the mother answers with “??” her silence insists on an explanation that will not be offered.

Not every mark deals with silence. The ‘¡’ mark is a whisper and the ‘::’ marks point to a deeper meaning in the relationship between words. In this case, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” deals as much with the “unsaid” as the silent. In describing the ‘←’ mark, the narrator says, “familial communication always has to do with failures to communicate.” This line cuts to the heart of this story (pardon the pun). Silence and the unsaid take on whole new meanings in this story because of the variety of representation. And this is what this story is really all about. While I see the dehumanizing effects that come from a family that barely say any “real” words to each other, I see the humanizing aspect in their varied silences. The real issue in this story is not silence, but a family who has 41 heart-attacks between then, and a son who has not yet found a companion. The silences that take place between father and sons revolve around the fear of death and failing hearts. The dialogue exchanges between mother and son incorporate the fear of death but add the element of loneliness to it. What’s worse than dying of a bad heart? Dying of a bad heart before finding love, marriage, and providing grandchildren for your desperate mother. This can be seen in the final pages of the story when the only things spoken are: “Are you hearing static,” “Jonathan?,” “Jonathan~,” “I::not myself~,” and the whispered, “I’m probably just tired.” For so few words spoken, this passage conveys an intense amount of emotion. The concerns about health and loneliness are poured onto the page, creating an almost overwhelming sense of emotion, yet very little is said. It is in this way that the many faces of silence–as interpreted by the narrator–are used to humanize a family that appears to have serious communication issues. A story where they simply say nothing would be void of emotion and create a dehumanizing effect. A story where they say nothing, but in a myriad of different ways and in many different contexts is one that humanizes their fears and also their unspoken love for one another.

-Jared Clark

Work Cited:

Foer, Jonathan Safran. “A Primer on the Punctuation of Heart Disease.” Eggers, Dave, ed. The Best American Nonrequired Reading. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003: 135-142.

Response to First Week’s Reading

One of the things that I noticed in many of the works we read for this week was the tension between the past and the present. In “POSTmodernISM: A Paracritcal Bibliography,” the author attempts to go about defining postmodernism and its predecessor modernism with mixed success. In Foer’s short story there is both admiration and conflict between the different generations represented within the author’s family. “Super Goat Man” depicts the distance between the nostalgic older generations and the less interested and invested younger folks.

This tension reiterates the trend of fragmentation in postmodern work. Together, the inability to fully understand and reconcile the past to the present and the fragmentation of structure in these postmodern stories contributes to a feeling of uneasiness that others have mentioned in previous blog postings. The disconnection between past and present in terms of memories and values makes for a seemingly foundation-less, free-floating contemporary point of view; the younger generations do not immediately identify themselves with their parents’ generation, thus leading to a fluid, undefined sense of self. The uncertainty, ambiguity, and rejection of the past mirrors the unconventional structure of many postmodern narratives. The story “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” serves as an example of internal conflict and structure. Structurally, the story unfolds in un-chronological order, which then establishes the character of Arthur/Art/Soap/Wolverine as a somewhat disembodied individual. I also think that a large part of the mystery, the reason why we as readers keep reading is not just because we want to know what Soap is going to do at the party, but that we want to know who he is, his identity.

Despite the negative connotation I associate with fragmentation, I think many postmodernists (?) view this division as an advantage. John Cage writes that “Now there’re more and more of us , we find one another more’ n’ more interesting. We’re amazed, when there’re so many of us, that each one of us is unique, different from all the others.” While few of the works we read this week label the postmodern identity as an improvement or a tragedy (Foer’s story seems most at odds with the ideas of heritage and the permanence versus fleeting nature of family values and traits), I think it is interesting that this conflict can be viewed as both good and bad.

In reading Dr. Sample’s post about the atrocities in “Uniforms” I’m not sure what he means by diminishing and multiplying effects. The randomness, repetition, and an underdeveloped context for the violence (at least to me) made the acts of atrocity seem pretty meaningless and petty. I’m interested to know what others’ thoughts are on violence in postmodernism. Clearly, DeLillo’s “Uniforms” depicts extreme violence in a very matter-of-fact, detached manner, which, as many have said in previous posts, is extremely disturbing. I wonder where one would place a work like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in terms of postmodernism. McCarthy’s work is similar to the piece that we read for class in that they both possess an indifference toward acts of atrocity, but McCarthy goes into much more detail. How does this difference change things?

Response to first week’s reading

Foer’s narrative is probably the only one of the short stories that seemed relatively clear from the beginning. It draws attention to the importance of listening to what is unspoken and untold and cleverly frames the story through the narrator’s instructions on the uses of the “silence marks”:: with each explanation, we are given a piece of information about him that ultimately narrates his story. I’ve come across some writings in psychoanalytic criticism, such as Cathy Caruth’s “Unclaimed Experience,” that emphasizes the significance of reading into the silences that is particularly to be exercised with narratives that deal with trauma. I wouldn’t know how to approach this story in terms of psychoanalysis, at least not for now, but I get the sense that we are left with an opportunity of exploring the narrator’s silences more deeply and examining not only what he doesn’t say in his conversations but what he doesn’t tell his audience.

Don DeLillo’s “The Uniform” reminds me a lot of Joseph Heller’s novels in terms of its use of elements of absurdity and irony. It appears to me that this story follows the style of black comedy and I see the “cartoonishness” that Dr. Sample points to in the portrayals of the killing and raping that paradoxically makes the scenes all the more disturbing. This narrative style serves the purpose of depicting a grotesque image without the descriptiveness expected and with simplicity and flatness that makes it more comical in a way. But to understand the purpose of this use, I’m reminded of something Heller had said about Catch-22, that he had wanted his readers to laugh and then look back in horror at what the they were laughing at. There’s also the recurrent attempt to articulate a traumatic experience (Harlow and her history of sexual abuse) and not being taken seriously and not being capable of comprehending it that we also see in Catch-22. Is the excessive use of absurdity and hilarity a retreat from the futile attempts of expressing the horrific and the grotesque? Does that suggest the inadequacy of language in these cases?

Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” I liked the most, despite its difficulty and ambiguity. By taking the setting and the several references to horror films into consideration, the story seems like a mimicry of horror films of the 80’s and early 90’s that typically start with a group of unsuspecting teenagers gathering at a party where there’s music and beer, midway through the villain crashes and the slaughter begins. But in this story the zombies never show up. I’d hate to take this story back to psychoanalysis, too, but does that mean that the whole idea of zombies is just in the protagonist’s head? And why does he continuously slip into different identities as the narrator uses different names for him?

As to Hassan’s “POSTmodernISM” I was initially put off by its difficulty as I had trouble understanding what he was talking about, but reading more into it, I kind of get him. I think his article is interesting and useful. I especially appreciate the attempt he makes to compare Modernism and Postmodernism and show how they are different. It’s quite an interesting and ambitious attempt, and I mean ambitious in a good way, considering the time his article was published.

DeLillo’s “The Uniforms:” Violence Mediated Through Film

War, terrorism, rape, murder…gauche boots? baseball? Lucky Strike? Luis Bunuel? Where and how do we connect the associative lines? In a world where terrorists carry Molotov cocktails “in a Coca-Cola sixpack,” these associations are jarring, yet feel somewhat natural (DeLillo 5). Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” is a crossroads of many things: sex, violence, and consumerism (perhaps accurately identified as the DeLillo-ian trinity), and this trinity is mediated through DeLillo and delivered to the reader; however, he is not the sole “owner” of the texts. As expressed from the lips of DeLillo himself, the short story “is an attempt to hammer and nail my own frame around somebody else’s movie (http://perival.com/delillo/dduniforms.html): Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend.”

In a sense, the story reads like a script for some terribly perverse action film (hence, Godard). DeLillo’s descriptions are limited to whom and how a band of terrorists rape, pillage, burn, and mutilate its victims, and like any good screenwriter, DeLillo provides detailed sketches of costumes and props; “Bradley wore Hassan’s red beret; a blue bandanna around his neck; buckskin pants and moccasins and a bright green football jersey with the silver numeral on the front and back. He put some lampblack under his eyes […]” (11). Amusingly, Bradley (or “Wheaties”) emulates the American jock turned brutally hard soldier, often associating what he sees in battle with sports (He thinks of Jean-Claude’s Molotov toss as “girlish” and un-baseball. He fashions his own grenade tossing as a Kareem-esque skyhook). This merger between sport and war is a theme that DeLillo experiments with a lot (most notably in End Zone).

Interestingly, many of the sporadic, anecdotal interjections made by the characters/actors reference directors and films:

“[Harlow] told them this was a trick she had learned in Algiers during the time of the filming of Pontecorvo’s great fictional documentary” (5).

“Jean-Claude asked the crew whether it was true or false that Resnais had faked the filmclips of the bomb victims in his movie about Hiroshima” (8).

“Jean-Claude had learned the lighter fluide trick from his father, who had been in the hills with Bunuel when the latter had declared that the days of the slow dissolve were numbered” (9).

And so on…

Jean-Claude, thinking like the filmmaker that he is, provides a mini-lecture on the importance of effective uniforms in war films/newsreels; “The revolutionary uniform must be tight and spare. Touches of color, individuality and personal fantasy are to be encouraged. […] We will shoot in color because color is the color of childhood fantasy” (7). Summarizing Jean-Claude’s remarks, the violence they commit becomes and image mediated through film and delievered to the masses. Thus, the lethal consequences of war/terrorism come to mean less than the emotions and reactions evoked from the audience viewing this product (Examples? DeLillo points to the Zapruder film in later works. Our generation? 9/11?). As Jean-Claude might suggest, in today’s world, history is often learned through (and altered by) media. (I’m reminded of the persuasive power of Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” or Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin.”) I think DeLillo is trying to illustrate this point for us. As we are reading through the story, Jean-Claude is filming all the horrific acts, ensuring that the violence reaches its potential as a visual media. Sadly, violence has been reduced to its prospect as images on a screen, losing its entrie connotation as lethal. In “The Uniforms,” life has become mediated through film, and the result is propagandisitic art for the anxious consumer.

More dehumanization, or less humanization

I think the idea that Sara proposed, that of “dehumanization” is an apt observation throughout this week’s readings. In Link’s story, Soap is dehumanized, or dehumanizes himself, preferring to go by inanimate names (soap, art) or by false identities/characters (Will, Wolverine). Likewise, Carly pretends to not be the host of the party and tells Soap about her parents and their relationship through a depersonalized third person narrative.

The idea of zombies, as I am a huge Romero fan myself, stuck out particularly to me as “dehumanizing” – not simply for the obvious reason that they are no longer human beings as we know them, but also for the reasons that Soap is attracted to them, the things that make them un-human. The fact that they move in groups but have no social structure, that they literally consume or desire to consume the very organ associated with and responsible for our identity and personality (which then turns the victim into a consumer of brains/identity, some kind of dehumanizing machine), that a zombie in a gas station attendant’s uniform is no more a gas station attendant than he is the president of the United States, once that brain is gone. Ironically, I don’t think Soap is really afraid of Zombies, or at least not for the reasons we might think he should be. He’s not afraid of losing his identity – in fact it seems he’s afraid of keeping any identity for very long. It seems like Soap would be more afraid of being “locked into” Zombie, forever, and not having the chance to be Sweetheart, Wolverine, Soap, Art, or any other future selfdom.

De Lilo’s characters do similar things, focusing so much on the clothing and accessories worn during their “revolution”…also the seemingly arbitrary nicknames (identifying someone as something unrelated to their identity) and the desire for a [any] “black militant type” just to “round” things out.

Lethem’s story, Super Goat Man, does something interesting with the concept of dehumanization. He both dehumanizes, and ultra-humanizes the titular character. When it behooves Everett, he makes the “hero” less than human, making him super-banal, almost pathetic, yet the narrator is also pretty hard on SGM, as Everett holds him, at times, to higher standards than the non-hero men of the story. For example, there seems to be less disdain for the other men living in the commune.
And obviously the last line of the story shows how he holds the largely dehumanized hero to an unrealistic standard, an ultra- or super-human standard (what did the other men do to save the boy? How close did they come to saving the day?) despite the fact that he seems repulsed by the idea that a “sub-human” super-hero was with his wife.
Lastly, Super Goat Man is dehumanized, partly, in that he isn’t given the inalienable human right to mess up, by Everett at least. Sorry that was inarticulate to say the least.

The Experience of Postmodernism

Many of the previous posts have discussed this feeling that it is unsettling and seemingly impossible to try to deduce Postmodernism, and I wanted to say that while I feel the same way, I also think it is comforting to consider that the experience itself may be the point. I get the impression that these writings intend to unsettle us and that unsettling feeling can also apply to understanding the point of the pieces themselves and the point of the movement in general.

I, too, felt the inclination to look at the stories as an aggregate group. I concur with Alana that the first thing I noticed was “the element of something unsettling or something that doesn’t ‘fit’-that forces you to stop and think or retrace your step as it jars you out of the rhythm of reading.” I, too, was more than uncomfortable with the content in DeLillo’s story, and though we had no warning of the content, I think that is, again, part of the experience. While I had to tell myself multiple times to look past my own offense at the content, I can admit that the story effectively shocks, disturbs, and unsettles.

In fact, the dehumanization Sara discussed in her post as applied to Foer’s piece also pertains to DeLillo’s story; both the characters in the story and the readers themselves may be viewed as dehumanized. I went back, after reading “The Uniforms,” to find how many times gratuitous sexual violence occurs in the tale, and I found at least eleven examples. I am curious, having never read DeLillo before, whether he usually includes this kind of sexual violence and why. As I said, I think feeling unsettled is important in Postmodernism, or at least a little confused, but when I read this story in particular, the excessive mentions of rape and castration distract and offend so much that I feel more disgust than appreciation. Then again, I feel as if that may be the point.

Another common element in some of this week’s reading is the questioning. I have already mentioned the reader’s experience of confusion, but perhaps the same is true for many of the characters in the stories, as well as in Cage’s piece. For example, in “Super Goat Man,” after the superhero fails to save one of the frat boys from his six-story fall, the narrator asks, “Had the hero failed the crisis? Caused it, by some innate provocation? Or was the bogus crisis unworthy, and the outcome its own reward?” (73). The narrator questions, and probes those questions in the (confused) reader, what it all means when the bizarre hero does save the drunk college student. Likewise, in Foer’s piece, the misunderstandings which are carefully delineated for the reader almost all result from questions that the narrator’s family members pose to him, to which he cannot or does not verbally respond. For example, the narrator’s mother asks, “Are you dating at all?… But you’re seeing people, I’m sure. Right?… Are you ashamed of the girl? Are you ashamed of me?” (82). In this case, the mother cannot understand the son, but he tries, perhaps successfully, to understand them both.

And in Cage’s piece, almost every statement incites questions, though few are actually phrased in the form of questions. The questions that do appear tend to ask the reader to think through society’s logic, like this one: “Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don’t ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eighth (October), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?”( 204). This question reveals a logical fallacy and effectively pokes fun at what society would call “logic” at all.

The questioning in these pieces does not necessarily lead to answers, as is the case in much of Postmodernism, but it sure does make you think. What I am wondering, and I am guessing we will address much of this in class, is what it was in our American society which affected our literature so much? I can name a few triggers on my own, but I am very interested in the historical events and trends which triggered, in particular, the tendency to disturb and to question which is evident in this literary era.

Hassan’s “rhetoric of dismissal”

Reflecting on Ihab Hassan’s “POSTmodernISM,” I am struck by one (seemly) vital difference between modernist and postmodern literature. In modernist literature, language (in the sense of word choice and syntax), integral to the core of the work, directs the form (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses). However, postmodern works employ different architectural processes for “attaining such an aesthetic” (Hassan 16). Is this, as “some profound philosophic minds of our century” (15) suggest, “the disease of verbal systems” (15), a reflective condition of deterioration achieved by creating texts in a new way and using old rules to analyze them? Clearly, Hassan’s “rhetoric of dismissal” (9) is easy to achieve, but what does it mean?

A. The Fad. In the case of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease,” the success of the story is contingent on punctuation and symbols. Printed in standard typography, the story would, in effect, disabled. Instead, the punctuation and symbols take on the function of language. Is it likely that we are to see more stories of this kind, that it will be a new movement in literature? Or will this too “quietly go away” (9)?

B. The Old Story. Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” uses another effect to stand in for language: shock value (a combination of “dehumanization” (19) and “antinomianism” (21)). DeLillo employs (to borrow from Professor Sample) “cartoonish violence” as both a structural support and to facilitate movement in the text. Censored even in the most basic way, there would be little to nothing left of the plot, characterization, etc. in the same fashion as a Quentin Tarantino film “edited for tv.”

C. The Safe Version. Jonathan Lethem’s “Super Goat Man,” like the two previous pieces, adopts another type of structural support: the insertion of the strange and unusual, treated as ordinary. This technique is not new, but the emphasis put upon it to carry the story is. Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” offers as an excellent modernist (though this label could be debated) point of reference. Though Kafka employs a similar device, he adjusts the syntax of his sentences, often reversing the places of the direct object and the verb to further defamiliarize the reader. Lethem seems to make no effort to tinker with the language, instead relies wholly on the “oddity” of a superhero to do most of the work for the story.

D. The Newspeak of Art. Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” marries the “strange and unusual” with an eccentric main character. She returns to old method of storytelling. She relies on language, demonstrating the contingencies of identity by adjusting the main character’s name. At times, the story seems both “conventional” (9) and “innovative” (10). Whether this serves as refreshment or irritation is contingent on the reader.

Though it may seem unfair to apply the rules of the old system (aka “rhetoric of dismissal”) to new works, this phenomena is neither new nor game-changing. For as literature changes, there will always be older (and yes, at times, antiquated or cultured) points of comparison (as was it for the Victorian writers, the realist and naturalist, and the modernist to name a recent few). And as time goes on, new works continue to be baptized and welcomed into the canon. This “cruel” vetting process seems, as Hassan observes, to be more endemic to the change itself than the quality or the “lasting power” of a particular literary movement, technique, or device.

Thoughts on Hassan’s “prophecy” and fragmentation characteristic

This week’s reading confirms that the list of attributes of Postmodern work seems varied and, in some cases, contradictory. In reading the works for this week’s class, it seems that the definition of Postmodernism has always been unclear, but Ihab Hassan’s essay “POSTmodernISM”, an attempt at defining Postmodernism, seems to have been somewhat prophetic. Additionally, it seems that along with the “fragmented” definition of Postmodernism, fragmentation is a key characteristic of Postmodern work.
Hassan states his belief that our world is headed for a “utopia indistinguishable from nightmare” (22), and he worries about the disasters of “Pollution, Population, [and] Power” (issues also raised in John Cage’s work). I can’t help but wonder—are we currently in that “utopia indistinguishable from nightmare” that Hassan predicted? Despite all our modern conveniences and advanced technology that seem to make our lives easier, we also live in a world fraught with problems, including those of pollution, population, and power. If Hassan felt that he was in an age of “runaway technology” in 1971 (24), I can only imagine what his thoughts would be now!
While Hassan says that “we dwell happily in the Unimaginable” (22), he also suggests that we need to “open up alternatives to the Unimaginable” (30). Not only do these assertions appear to be contradictory, but Hassan’s concept of the Unimaginable, a place that seems to be defined as a healthy balance between “Complacence” and “Hysteria”, is unclear to me. Is the Unimaginable bad in Postmodernist terms because it is a balance? Is the desire and goal of Post-Modernism to break balance? It would seem that our society is out of balance. It does not seem, however, that Post-Modernist works are attempting to fix this problem, but, rather, are reflecting this lack of balance through content and style, including fragmentation.
In addition to some of the motifs that seem to be present in Postmodern works, John Cage’s piece really highlights this fragmentation characteristic. I was intrigued, but also frustrated, with the style of John Cage’s work. I felt that the piece was like a puzzle and I tried to find a pattern, attempting to match up the various fonts and pieces of stories. The piece seems like it could be classified as stream-of-consciousness, but I’m not sure that the term is appropriate for Postmodern works. The story of the Duchess seemed to be the most consistent, and, not only did it add humor to the piece, it also pulled me into the piece and kept me reading until the end. I’m curious about Cage’s inclusion of the Duchess story. Is the story simply added to provide humor in the midst of the fragmented, but running, commentary on how the world is changing and declining? The story does also seem to show that, as the title states, by attempting to fix a problem you will only make matters worse.
Along the lines of fragmentation, the writing style of the pieces seems to be rather “choppy”, lacking variety of sentence structure and even including some awkward syntax. John Cage’s “Dear Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” and Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” all posses some degree of this “choppy” quality.
My hunch is that the fragmentation of the pieces, in content, style, and structure, mirrors the fragmentation of the world in which we live. However, not all authors demonstrate this fragmentation in their pieces. (For instance, I feel that Lethem’s “Super Goat Man” has a wonderful flow, much in contrast to the Cage and Link’s work.) I’m curious about these choices and how all of these pieces fit into the puzzle of Postmodernism.

I was struck by the part in Hassan’s piece “POSTmodernISM” about “Periods.” I am trying to wrap my head around periods as well. This short post sorted out some of my confusion with Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism, but considering that those three movements came over the span of only 60 years, it stands to reason that individuals were alive and writing over multiple literary periods, and perhaps in multiple literary styles. Hassan asks, “Does modernism stretch merely to stretch out our lives?” (7) I would be interested in knowing the reactions of authors historically to shifts in literary trends. Do they welcome the change, or try to “stretch out” the old period? Hassan says that the avant-garde should “serve as the agent of change, which is recognizable when still newer change is in progress” (10). Can we really not recognize change as its happening enough to name it? Will post-modernism acquire a new name after something else takes its place? It’s strange that although Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism all reacted to each other and were more or less chronologically progressing, we don’t call Naturalism “Post-Realism,” etc. (What did they call Naturalism while it was happening?) So why is postmodernism called postmodernism? The name is almost a negative space – a sign: “Reserved for the name of the period after Modernism.” Does postmodernism have no defining characteristic of its own other than that it defies categorization? And seeing as many authors neither knew nor cared what literary period or style they were writing in, how useful are these literary categorizations – and to whom are they useful?

In a related development chronicled in the article “Modern Book Publishing and Book Culture – TIME, the publishing industry seems to be shifting into a more postmodern form. So not only literary movements are shifting, but literary media are shifting as well. As we discussed in class, postmodernism is a product of new technology. I liked the lip service to fandom, but it was a little vexing that the author implied that fandom’s postmodern activities only started recently with the Internet. The article’s vision of the future of publishing – amateur writers blazing new trails while professional writers lay back and watch – reminded me of Hassan’s view of critics “Taking few risks, the best known among them wait[ing] for men of lesser reputation to clear the way” (9).

The DeLillo piece I found extremely offputting at first, but as the narrative became faster and more ridiculous it caused a sort of Brechtian-alienation shift within me to not only become aware of the component parts of narratives but also to become aware of the component parts of our visual experience of society. By starting in a more conventional, slow-moving narrative style and then moving toward the more extreme style, it also exposed my own assumptions that stories are supposed to “make sense,” characters are supposed to be developed, and actions are supposed to be motivated. At the end, I found myself wondering if the soldiers that they killed would be soldiers if they had been out of uniform, and if the women that they raped would be women if they weren’t wearing skirts and dresses.

Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” was one that I loved at first – I found Soap’s internal narrative hilarious. That’s why I was so taken off guard by the kidnapping at the end. I felt like I had missed some sign earlier – a clue that this was going to happen. A big clue, of course, is the painting. It is at the center of what caused Soap’s life to change so dramatically by going to prison, and Soap shows a strange attachment to it that even he does not understand. Its shifting identity parallels Soap’s and Carly’s own shifting identities. It changes depending on how the viewer looks at it. So too do Carly and Soap’s identities shift depending on how another person perceives them. Soap’s name was given to him by others, and the reader only realizes Carly’s “friend of the family” identity is false when Soap points it out. Given the extent to which the reader sees the inside of Soap’s head, it’s amazing that I just didn’t see the kidnapping coming. This lack of real internal access, coupled with the emphasis on outer identity implies that there IS no real internal identity, that we are all shifting constantly like the painting, made up of “stuff that isn’t the same every time you look at it.”

The Modern/Postmodern Divide

Hassan’s essay makes several connections between Modernism and Postmodernism. He also attempts to create a divide between the two genres: “Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable which Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments” (23). I think that the “Unimaginable” Hassan describes stems from a breakdown in communication. He writes of an indescribable feeling of fear, the familiar “litany of disasters,” that comes from the breakdown of language and the discontinuous narratives on which our society is built.

Modernism also emphasized fragmented forms, but unlike the Postmodernists, they found this fragmentation tragic. Faulkner’s writing moved away from a fixed narrative point-of-view long before Postmodernism became a literary movement. The difference is in the disposition of the Modern vs. Postmodern author. Faulkner lamented the fragmentation of humanity, whereas Postmodernism chooses to glorify it.

One of the Postmodern preoccupations is with the failure of communication and the inability to reconcile mutiple, contradictory narratives. Thus we are left with an abstract, fragmented string of narratives. Cage attempts to embody this fragmentation in his short story. He intentionally makes it difficult for the reader to follow any single narrative by randomly changing the text. Sometimes he keeps the text the same for a particular narrative, giving the reader a false sense of security. Eventually the text for each narrative changes, causing the reader to become lost in the strand of narratives.

“I like stuff that isn’t the same every time you look at it”

“I like stuff that isn’t the same every time you look at it” (spoken by Carly in “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”): It seems that this observation sums up a primary characteristic of postmodern literature and rhetoric, one which is evident in most of the short stories and passages assigned this week.

I enjoyed the short stories, particularly the pieces by Foer, Lethem, and Link. Foer’s piece was especially moving because it recounts experiences and emotions that are common to the human experience, yet are usually unexpressed. I wonder whether these emotions are untold because language as we know it fails to convey them, or because these emotions are not necessarily meant to be expressed, and should simply lurk in a person’s mind until other emotions take their place? Either way, Foer’s use of symbols and characters in place of incommunicable emotions effectively illustrates that language is significantly less sophisticated than we may think. Foer’s piece also displays another recognizable characteristic of postmodern texts: its focus on signifiers and the absence of a constant “signified.” If I understand it correctly, this characteristic resonates with Carly’s statement. Foer shows that though these symbols encapsulate unspoken emotions, these emotions are dependent on specific circumstances. Therefore, their meanings are fluid, changing every time they’re felt in a different context.

Link’s piece, “Some Zombie Contingency Plan,” does not have the easiest plot to follow, but it is enjoyable nonetheless. I’m not usually a fan of fantasy fiction, but I enjoy stories that have enigmatic and thought-provoking metaphors intertwined in the text. In response to Jennifer’s earlier post, I think the zombie metaphor is one that concerns the ambiguity and fluidity of identity. The main characters, Soap and Carly, repeatedly camouflage and change their identity throughout the story. Though Soap constantly presents the hypothetical situation of zombies invading as a fear-inducing scenario, I think Link wants the reader to think of Soap as a potential zombie, in a metaphorical sense. In other words, maybe Link is making the point that metaphorical zombies—individuals who are not necessarily dead on the outside, but are void on the inside—are to be feared more than the actual, fictional zombies. While attempting to escape from an “actual” zombie is certainly frightening, Link hints that individuals who themselves morph into metaphorical zombies can find no escape route (you cannot escape from yourself). Again, the postmodern statement above about things appearing differently in various situations also fits this storyline. The indistinctness of the characters’ backgrounds and personalities as well as the overall elusiveness of the plot collectively point to this postmodern notion of perpetual ambiguity and malleability of meaning within the text.

Finally, I found Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” an engaging piece to read as well. Though I found it initially difficult to immediately identify the theme or purpose of the piece, I was able to deduce a pattern in the text after a second read. Obviously, the structure of the piece is meant to be avant-garde, in order to capture the reader’s attention or unsettle the reader in some way. The title’s ironic humor has significant bearing on the meaning of the piece as a whole (I think): it seems that Cage is implying that human intervention—any attempts by humans to “improve the world”—usually fail and result in the opposite. Aside from technological advances, which are acclaimed in this piece (“Success for humanity lies in technology…), almost all other human attempts to change the world are useless or harmful. Among many other themes that I couldn’t decipher, Cage calls for the removal of government and politics (anarchy), the eradication of environmental pollutants, and the obliteration of “arthritic” language that is structured and lacks fluidity. Though no one can deny that there are meaningful messages within this text, they are still open for interpretation.

With Cage’s text as well as all the others assigned, the meaning of the text is never the same every time you read it. This indeterminacy is what makes postmodern, avant-garde texts unique—if they do nothing else, they will NOT fail to make you think. When the reader is given a chance to think, the result will likely be fruitful change. As Hassan points out in “POSTmodernism,” “What the avant-garde probably still needs to do for a time is serve as the agent of change, which is recognizable when still newer change is in progress.”

Form and function

I agree with the post’s that have commented on this week’s readings in regards to seeing the authors experimenting with how their content is being delivered. Although Cage’s “Diary” at first seems to be a fractured mess, you can see strands of text looping back on themselves throughout the work. One of the strands that I picked up on and most interested me concerned how content is delivered and digested by reader and author. Although haphazard in appearance at first, Cage put great thought into how this piece was put together, the snippets of text he chose, the fonts, sizes, etc. He also alludes to the importance of form several times throughout diary. He references Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake (as does Hassan) repeatedly, which I have not read, but is known for its difficult syntax and structure. Cage writes on 208 “TO RAISE LANGUAGE’S TEMPERATURE WE NOT ONLY REMOVE SYNTAX: WE GIVE EACH LETTER UNDIVIDED ATTENTION, SETTING IT IN UNIQUE FACE AND SIZE; to read BECOMES THE VERB to sing”. Cage’s use of different fonts, sizes and grammatical structure is meant to keep the reader on their toes, so that they give each letter undivided attention, which gives the words themselves and their structure as much meaning as any overarching idea that the work is presenting. Cage also writes about how reading should be enjoyable, and that enjoyment can come out of the artifact itself as much as its content: “Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazine’s or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one’s mail and in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests”. I also think that Cage is trying to replicate what he admired in the ancient chinese language, that it was free of syntax and”floated in no-mind space.” Cage is rebelling against modern ways of delivering language that he feels have become “arthritic.” I personally enjoyed the Cage piece and thought it was similar to the mash-ups we were listening to in class when exploring postmodernism, many disparate parts being brought together to add up to something that is more than the sum of its parts, while at the same time making you appreciate each of those parts that you are experiencing in a new context.

The Jonathan Safran Foer piece also explores new ways of delivering language, although in a much more personal way. I thought his piece was about how the traditional forms of communication, or writing about communication fail to really capture the essence of what is being said/felt. Foer sees gaps in languages that cannot be filled by the traditional methods of writing and seeks to fill in those gaps with his new symbols. However, in the end it is futile as those new symbols will leave new, smaller gaps, and any attempts to fill those gaps will create newer, smaller gaps, and so on. I think Foer just wants the reader to step back and re-examine language and communication. We take language for granted and assume that words have a fixed meaning, but really they are just signifiers and each of us have our own perception, based on what we have learned/experienced, on just what those signifiers mean.

On Lethem, DeLillo, Hassan, and Cage

I was excited to see that Jonathan Lethem was one of the included authors in the download. I had read Lethem before but only his non fiction, an essay entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence” which appeared in an issue of Harpers. The essay was so well written and convincing that I read it twice in one sitting, which is a rare occasion considering my short attention span. “Super Goat Man” was just as engaging. I thought the story had great blend of fantasy and reality, which I suppose is indicative of a postmodern story. Super Goat Man is not revered by the youth like the other grandiose superheroes; instead he is small time, which I think adds a bit of reality into the plot, making Super Goat Man more of a human. The narrator’s parent generation embraces Super Goat Man for his rejection of pedestrian life, as Everett says in the opening paragraphs, “It was our dads who cared.” This was a facet of the story that I found interesting. Everett disliked Small Goat Man, and also it seemed to me that he disliked his father for his interest in the minor hero. It bewildered Everett that his father and Super Goat Man had so much in common. His detest for this connection comes at the end, “I knew that my loathing had its origins in an even deeper place, in the mind of a child wondering at his father’s own susceptibility to the notion of a hero.” From the hippy parties to Jazz music, Super Goat Man is the hero of the past, a hero that is unrecognizable in Everett’s generation. Furthermore, I thought the element of Jazz was metaphorical for its association to Super Goat Man and Everett’s father. Everett has little interest in it, as if Jazz is passé for Everett’s generation.

Don DeLillo’s story was difficult to digest, not just for the grotesque killing scenes, but also the barely there plot. There story didn’t seem to be heading in any sort of direction, but only to show the depravity of the terrorists. Jean Claude describes the War uniforms shown in film, claiming that uniforms from the civil war are connected to success. Color and personality are encouraged. “We will shoot in color because color is the color of childhood fantasy.” The terrorists’ uniforms reflect Jean Claude’s argument; they are motley dressed with various styles that even exceed cultural boundaries. I could possibly infer from this that the consumerist culture, which is today’s culture, embraces personality and color, bears the new uniform and it is this uniform that cloaks the depravity of DeLillo’s terrorists. This sounds like total bs but it’s the only thing I managed to pull from the story.

I agree with Alana’s post that the typography and position of the text have an impact on the Cage and Hassan essays as well as the content, and that it influences the reader’s perception of the essays without even having read the words. From what I’ve seen, this tactic seems to be a reoccurring one in postmodern literature.

Week One Post: Responses to Short Stories and Journal Articles

After reading and rereading this week’s journal articles and short stories, I started looking for similarities-not necessarily similarities in content, but similarities in “feel”-to see if any of the pieces made me feel like they were linked. As we discussed in class, the question of what exactly constitutes a postmodern piece of writing is still rather fuzzy. Personally, it’s always made more sense to me to talk about literary genres more in terms of stylistics than era (meaning that I would respond to a Gothic novel written recently as a Gothic rather than a postmodern novel, while still acknowledging the work’s context). I also tried to compare the pieces to the different postmodern artifacts we looked at it class.

The first piece, John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” is, I think, the most obvious piece just in terms of how it’s constructed, with the varying fonts, lines, and split-up occurrences that don’t seem to have an ending or a point. In this piece, the aesthetics of the work itself seem to have as much of an impact as the content, by which I mean the piece would read (or “feel”) very differently if it was presented, for example, with traditional margins and all in the same font. Similarly, Ihab Hassan’s POSTmodernISM has a very conscious style or format that greatly impacts how the work is read-text as object and not merely content.

Looking at the short stories as an aggregate group, I think the first thing that stood out to me is the element of something unsettling or something that doesn’t “fit”-that forces you to stop and think or retrace your step as it jars you out of the rhythm of reading. Jonathan Safran Foer’s piece does that purposefully with his symbols that indicate a certain feeling or emotion as they stand in for something that cannot necessarily be conveyed through text. (How would one write a willed silence?) Jonathan Lethem’s “Super Goat Man” introduces a unbelievable character into an otherwise realistic piece, and then demands the reader’s acceptance of the believability of Super Goat Man in these otherwise banal surroundings. The strangest thing for me in Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” is not the zombie plans or the presence of the zombies in the text, but the painting that seems to have come from nowhere.

Don DeLillo’s piece reminds me of Brett Easton Ellis (although it would be more fair to write that the other way): all surface and very brittle, like a sheet of caramelized sugar. (I would appreciate a trigger warning before texts with content like DeLillo’s.) I found it interesting that the figures in DeLillo’s piece seem concerned mostly with aesthetics-surfaces and appearances-than ideology (the attention to their clothing, the wish for a “black militant” on page 10). In this piece, I think DeLillo takes particular expectations and refuses to fulfill them, in favor of a facile piece that, in its very shallowness, reveals the emptiness of the characters’ actions.

Finally, I suppose I can say that if a pattern emerged for me, it was the pattern of something unsettling or “out of place” that I mentioned before. The best example that I can think of off the top of my head of other authors who achieve this same effect is the poet Frederick Siedel, although I’m not sure if I can confidently say that I’m any closer to understanding how to classify things as postmodernist.

Self-Awareness, Dehumanization

I agree with Jennifer’s summary of Foer’s story. He attempts to create a symbol-driven handbook for categorizing the depth of emotions arising from, among other things, love and illness. But the complexity of human experience cannot be limited to the characters on a standard keyboard. The approach reminds me of Hassan’s point that “we no longer know what response is adequate to our reality” (23). Hassan also describes dehumanization as a process of turning emotions into an equation, calling it a “revulsion against the human” (20). Foer’s story plays with this, but I wouldn’t call it dehumanized. Actually, I think its form allows it to have an opposite effect. Obviously no generic handbook would ever have such intimate examples, and by disguising itself within generic instructions, the underlying sensitivity is exposed.

I just mentioned Hassan, but I mostly didn’t know what he was talking about. I’m curious about what others thought of the “POSTmodernISM” essay. I had a hard time with it, partly because I’m unfamiliar with many of the names and works he referenced, partly because the form threw me off.

As for Link, I think I liked her story better than Jennifer did, but the ending also confused me. The zombies were what initially attracted me to this story, too, and it’s nice that Soap fears them but at the same time appreciates their simplicity. I don’t consider them much of a metaphor; I think they’re just zombies, but by the end I still felt like I’d missed something.

One part I found especially engaging and hoped would be expanded more was when she described Soap’s painting on 158-159 like a depiction of the story itself, the story of being lost in the woods. No one really knows what the painting is supposed to be or where it came from. Maybe it’s a forest inside of which is a prison, inside of which are these strange characters. But that’s about as far as I got with that interpretation. I like how the narrator calls Soap so many names, the preferred name being an object. Does this count as dehumanization? Sometimes he’s Arthur, or Sweetheart, or…Wolverine? At the end he’s not there at all. So whose story is it?

I’m also curious to know what everyone took from the Cage piece. I was initially skeptical because of the multiple fonts–they seem a little gimmicky and annoying, especially since they don’t really make a pattern and I really want them to. But I enjoyed the story/poem and how self-aware and contradictory it is right from the beginning, with its hopeful title and hopeless parenthetical title. It’s sometimes like a piece about good intentions gone wrong. Tunnel workers go on strike to make more money or have better conditions, but the government ends up not just not needing them, but actually doing better without them. That’s so sad.

But back to the fonts: What do you think about them? Are they just there for attention? I don’t get why the form is the way it is, unevenly centered and mashed together, unless maybe the point is to look jagged (which is possible) or maybe there’s no point at all (also possible). What is it that holds everything together here?

On Foer, DeLillo, and Link

I thought I’d post in regard to some of the short stories while they’re still fresh in my mind.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s short story, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” intertwines visual media with text in an attempt to simplify conversations he has had with his family. The symbols ultimately stand in for dialogue and therefore complicate rather than simplify these conversations, at least for the reader who, if he/she has as short-term of a memory as I do, must flip between pages in order to decode the symbols. Thematically, this story works in that it reveals the complex dynamics of communication (and the futility, I suppose, in attempting to simplify it). And, of course, post-modernly, the story makes good use of mixed media and substitution.

I read somewhere that Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Weekend, which I had seen once a couple of years ago (yay for Netflix). I don’t remember the film well enough to have made this connection on my own. If anything, the absurd fast-paced plot made me think of Voltaire’s Candide. In researching “The Uniforms,” I came across a passage in Marc Osteen’s American Magic and Dread that I thought the class might find interesting:

“The story dramatizes DeLillo’s recognition that, as Steven Connor argues, in postmodern culture ‘images, styles, and representations are not the promotional accessories to economic products; they are the products themselves’…DeLillo’s prescient vision of terrorist manipulation of the media anticipates the themes of Mao II as well as the media savvy of real-life terrorists. But the relationship between the media and violence works both ways: the bombardment of consciousness by images is itself a form of violence.”

Like Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms,” Kelly Link’s “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” makes use of lists in the text. It took me about ten pages into Link’s story for me to realize that I’ve read her before. Another of her short stories, “Stone Animals,” appeared in Best American Short Stories 2005. The thing is, it wasn’t the author’s name that made me recall this other work; it was something in the style of the writing. I disliked “Some Zombie Contingency Plan” for the same reasons I disliked “Stone Animals.” I’m having a hard time trying to express exactly what those reasons are; maybe they’re based in my aversion to fantasy, or, on a related note, maybe it’s the nonfiction writer in me talking. Or maybe those reasons are the same inexplicable reasons I have for being unable to sit through many of David Lynch’s films (most notably, Inland Empire). I think it’s just that, while I enjoy the absurd, the bizarre, I need it to make sense in the end (or at least some weeks thereafter, when I’ve thought about it enough). I had originally been excited to read “Some Zombie Contingency Plan,” solely because of the title, having been a fan of zombie films for a long time (I even own The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks), but the use of zombies (as metaphor?) in this story threw me off. I’m interested in what the rest of the class thinks. Oh, and check out this blogger’s post about Link’s use of zombies as metaphors:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006628.html