After reading The Lathe of Heaven, I felt more confused about what postmodernism is because I would have easily classified this as science-fiction. Let me point out a few things first: I understand that a lot of different texts from a variety of genres can be postmodern (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) just like you can draw upon different schools of analysis (like postmodernism) in relation to one text. And I also understand, since we’ve been talking about it nearly every class, how technology is a huge part of postmodernism—it interfering with or transforming our lives, it being seen as an extension of our bodies, etc. So, I’m not saying that I don’t understand how this book can be called postmodern.
What I’m confused by is this: A great deal of science-fiction deals with technology in some way, some in very similar ways to The Lathe of Heaven, so where does science fiction stop and postmodernism begin? Like, take The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This book is very similar to The Lathe of Heaven. In The Lathe of Heaven, a man’s mind can change reality, and with the aid of a machine (the Augmenter), this reality can be changed more often. In The Time Machine, a man invents a machine to change reality and subsequently does just that in the world he eventually finds himself in. So, is The Time Machine postmodern? Surely, one can argue that The Time Machine contains the same technological interference and perhaps even technological extensions of the body as does The Lathe of Heaven, not to mention a similar notion of rethinking/retelling history. But this book is widely considered classic science fiction. I mean, science fiction really is, by definition, a genre that has to do with envisioned futures and envisioned sciences and envisioned technology. So, wouldn’t most science fiction be postmodern?
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity cleared up some of my confusion. He writes: “The postmodern novel… [is] a shift from the kind of perspectivism that allowed the modernist to get a better bearing on the meaning of a complex but nevertheless singular reality, to the foregrounding of questions as to how radically different realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate. The boundary between fiction and science fiction has, as a consequence, effectively dissolved, while postmodernist characters often seem confused as to which world they are in, and how they should act with respect to it.”
So, it’s been a while since I read The Time Machine, but if I’m remembering it correctly, the main character doesn’t grapple with the same questions and complexity that George Orr struggles with. I don’t remember enough of the exposition in The Time Machine to really comment on the main character’s mindset, but I do remember it being a straight travel through time to a future that he eventually saved. This is, of course, not the same in The Lathe of Heaven, where all of these potential realities, to use Harvey’s words, coexisted, collided, and interpenetrated. Later, Harvey reinforces this thought by saying that postmodernists can’t “aspire to any unified representation of the world” but rather, that the world is, for a postmodernist, full of “perpetually shifting fragments.” This, combined with his earlier notes on science fiction, seems to line up well when distinguishing between modernism and postmodernism and thus The Time Machine and The Lathe of Heaven.
Harvey also cleared up the genre aspect, insofar as modernists seeing works “as examples of genre” and postmodernists seeing “a work as a text.” In other words, then, echoing my thoughts in the first paragraph, lots of texts, despite affiliated “genre,” can be postmodern. Oh! And that list on the schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism was awesome. I think that was exactly what I needed—something visual or straight-up about the differences between the two. By contrasting the differences, I’m able to understand both what postmodernism is and is not much better than I had understood it previously.