While we’re all struggling with how Beloved challenges our notions of what counts as “postmodern,” I think it’s helpful (as some of you already have done) to go back and look at some of the various theoretical conceptions of postmodernism we’ve encountered. Hassan and Harvey are good places to begin. Here’s something else I read recently that might be helpful (or perhaps confusing). Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker about Donald Barthelme, an undeniably postmodern writer. But what, Menand asks, is postmodernism again?
Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It’s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with “post,” it is fundamentally ambidextrous. It can mean, “We’re all modernists now. Modernism has won.” Or it can mean “No one can be a modernist now. Modernism is over.” (Louis Menand, “Saved From Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered,” New Yorker 23 Feb 2009: 68-76)
The funny thing about this division and its anchoring in modernism is that it seems to exclude Toni Morrison. In a sense, she precedes it all. With her emphasis on folklore, mythology, and oral storytelling, she really seems to be pre-modern. (Is that what antipostmodern means?)
Or is being pre-modern actually a kind of postmodernism (in that it is antogonistic to modernism)?