I am in the midst, it seems, of the baby-killing literary canon*, as I have just finished both Toni Morrison's Beloved and John Updike's Rabbit, Run, both of which, with all apologies for the spoiling, prominently feature the death of babies and/or their eighteen year-old incarnate ghosts. The emotional effect of reading these back to back was semi-crippling; I in fact tried to watch the movie version of Beloved this afternoon and failed due to soul-cringing (though this may have been due to some SERIOUSLY odd choices by the special effects department and the fact that Paul D is played by, as advertised on the box, "Lethal Weapon IV's Danny Glover!"). To recover, I watched the Cubs game this afternoon, which thankfully did not incorporate the slaughter of any baby bears.
(* - not to be confused with the baby-killing TV cannon:)
So then I ventured out into the expanse of "teh interwebs" and read a few heady papers on Beloved & its relationship to postmodernism. A while back, my Tufts-bud Ariel was stopped before boarding an MBTA train and asked to pour his bottled water on himself to demonstrate that it was not acid (or that he was not a vampire and it holy water); this was in the height of Logan insecurity, and Ariel deemed it a "postmodern baptism." The Tuftsmen debated and it was relatively inconclusive whether this was actually a postmodern event or just one that had occurred in "these postmodern times," meaning that the label was more temporal than contextual. These are, it seems, the nerdy arguments that we have. On a fantasy baseball board. Nerds. Beloved, by contrast, has undeniable postmodern content, but also maintains an odd-place stance of offering a "truer" historical narrative than the traditional, white-dominated ones that tend to edit the African American experience out of the textbooks.
Postmodernism and (the decentralization of / corresponding need to restore) meaning is what I'm aiming to study in this little philo-venture, so these aspects of Beloved were enthralling to me (more on that in some review later, and yes, the laundry list grows). Pomo is, though, a slippery fish, as evidenced by the inability of 12 well-educated fantasy baseball players to nail it down. So here is a weak attempt: pomo is a school of thought / interpretation / art / architecture you name it that stands in opposition to the goals, attitudes, and belief structure of all things modern. "Modern" in this case means pretty much everything in Western thought from the Enlightenment through the 20th century. Simplistically, modernism represents the ideal that the world is an objective, knowable entity, that man is capable of coming to know this objective entity through the application of rational thought (and its extensions, e.g. the scientific method), that this knowledge is good and will allow man to conquer nature, resulting in continual progress towards some heretofore undefined beneficial end. Modernism has a tendency to streamline - think silver, flat edged no-frills buildings and appliances, uniform space suits in sci fi movies, modern art consisting of only pure forms of lines and color - so there's an overarching motif of whittling the universe down to a fundamental, controllable truth and set of laws to be mastered by mankind.
So, for an easy, working definition, pomo is the opposite - the belief that there is no centralized truth, but all experience is mediated by the particulars of person, community and context. Objective truth is at best inaccessible to us, at worst non-existent. Rational thought is limited in its ability to dissect the universe (though this isn't really a new idea). And because there is not objective truth and rational thought is limited, the idea that we can ever "know everything" is ludicrous. In fact, everything we "know" is only known within a context, and that context is formed by the community within which we know it and the particular heuristic / narrative we are applying. The beneficial end that modernism is theoretically progressing towards is viewed as an illusion, and in fact, in light of tech developments like atomic bombs, progress and the goodness of knowledge seem definitive non-guarantees. The whittling down of modern art is viewed as an artificial and imposed ideal; post modernism is so in tune with the concept of various, competing narratives that it welcomes contrasting styles and various eras in its art. Pomo art, at its essence, tends to ignore concepts of reality and truth and history as constructs, so you'll often see pomo art pieces as incorporating disparate elements in an attempt to make new statements. Pomo often utilizes irony - a basic form of juxtaposition of truth and intent, or anything in that general vein - and so pretty much anything that tends to blend elements, uses jarring, non-chronological storylines or shifting narrator perspectives falls under the general umbrella of postmodern (so yes, your four-fingered, text-citing, yellow friends might be called the epitome of this idea).
So pomo becomes a huge, amorphous and all-consuming category, with its root being that the notion of a linear history of humankind (or really, even a coherent notion of "the human condition" as a universal) is rejected. In fact, postmodern and "post-structuralist" get lumped together: structuralism is a method of study that acknowledges the constructed aspects of culture (e.g., language) but then points to the correlations across various cultures; post-structuralism rejects the "meta-structure" as a tool of understanding and not a "real" category. Post-structuralism takes things further and says that because understanding is so local-culture, local-narrative/structure dependent that texts, historical or otherwise, only have their meaning in the context of their interpretation by a reader. This is held to the point that "authorial intent" is considered irrelevant - indeed, the phrase "death of the author" is a pomo postulate, since even if you could pin down an author's intent, it would be the product of a culture of structures and narratives and not that of an individual mind.
Urgle. I found a few examples that I read in Stanley Grenz's A Primer on Postmodernism helpful. First, try to imagine the static truth/meaning of the sentence, "The mug is on the table." Pomo argues that while it seems like a simple, defined situation, that the real meaning of the sentence is entirely context dependent: if you are thirsty, it means one thing, but if you are being chased and need a projectile, it means something altogether different. Second, the term "mug" meaning mug is an arbitrary one. When you talk about mugs, you are limited to using your language about them, and since there is nothing "real" about the connection between the word and the object, you are stuck with all of the limitations of the language - namely, that language is inherently contextual and, beyond that, social. So the objective status of mug is inaccessible - you can only approach it through limited, conventional means. Finally, this may all seem like word-game hooey - but 20th century physics shows us all kinds of crazy things about the non-static, ever-evolving and relative nature of truth, even in the simple case of talking of objects and their motions. And if even the building blocks have their truth defined from a perspective...
My big problem with this whole take on "the world" is that it seems a gateway to all kinds of heinous things, like moral relativism and nihilism. And there's that whole, let's face it, uneasy feeling of having truth and your world de-centered. Pomo gets criticized for its cynicism and its having posed a whole bunch of questions sans answers; it seems the stance is "the world is shifting, unreliable, culturally structured and imposed upon by our arbitrary narratives; deal with it." And even if it seems on some level that there are biological imperatives that would transcend whatever categories we're slapping down - I mean, bullets to the head, not eating and the like will render whatever narratives you're operating under fairly moot - I'm really hesitant to bow to some kind of "evolution as predominant meta-narrative" idea because this just slips back into that moral relativism, that whatever good and badness we assign things is only good or bad insofar as they keep us alive and reproducing. And it's probably some kind of judeo-christian residual narrative I'm operating under that makes me feel that way, but all the same, that kind of world-as-survival wasteland is not a conception I'm very comfortable with - I'd like to find another way.
So that's the big question I've come to, and I like it, because it seems to finally be the underpinning-est of all the underpinning-ideas. A long time ago I took a film class at Duke TIP and it destroyed the way I watched movies; I could only see the structure and the set-up. I feel the same way about anth, religious studies, philosophy, and all the classes / reading I've done sense - once you've seen the structure and function of things, and if you've sniffed there arbitrariness - or at least their non-accordance with predominantly believed causes - you cease to be able to view life, or culture, or any of it the same way. This has, admittedly, caused some desperate nights for me. But I'd like to pursue meaning still; I think I've found where it lies.
Just to tie this back into Beloved for the sake of completion - the novel pulls off a dazzling marriage of fiction and history, memory and truth, and even throws in a brain-dashing infusion of the supernatural in the real, without a blink. Its pomo-ness lies in its juxtaposition of all these categories, its circular conception of time and its suspicion at the accuracy of the trad historical , linear narrative; its decidedly un-pomo stance is its effort to replace the trad narrative with the African American, emotional experience narrative and claim it as somehow "truer." And this may be a tragically cliché white male reading of the text, too, but damn if it doesn't engender unbearable guilt, not only over the inconceivable acts of past white generations, but guilt at any contemporary complaining we do next to the horror of those lives. It's a conception that renders the ranking and ratings of books ridiculous - I questioned repeatedly while reading how much of the power was derived at via literature/authorship, and how much was just the inherent pain in a terrible story- Beloved's death may contextually trump that of Rabbit's child no matter how well or badly each one was written, if I let my WMB take root. Regardless, great, powerful works; I will put something more coherent together about each soon.
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