The Internet’s only a much more complex (and crowded) elevator.
I’m not terribly interested in whether real, brain-chemically-defined Asperger’s is over- or underdiagnosed, or whether it exists at all except as a metaphor. I’m interested in how vital the description feels lately. Is there any chance the Aspergerian retreat from affective risk, in favor of making one’s way into the world in the role of alienated scientist-observer, might be an increasingly “popular” coping stance in a world where corporations, machines, and products flourish within their own ungovernable systems? If so, finding such a stance human itself—finding it more human, rather than less—might be one of the imperatives of our art. If there’s anything to this at all, you’d have to agree that the science-fiction people are not only canaries but that they sensed before anyone else that we’d entered a coal mine.
You’ll catch an echo in the first line—was it Philip K. Dick’s death I took personally, or Italo Calvino’s? This made two in a row: living writers I’d declared my favorite who then died just as I set out to meet them in person. I should quit doing that.
The Best of Calvino: Against Completism
I took Italo Calvino’s death—twenty years ago as I write—personally. He didn’t know it, but he’d broken a date. One of the greatest European writers of the twentieth century, and among the only Italian writers, with Moravia, Pirandello, and Eco, to have penetrated our translation-retardant literary culture, Calvino had been about to visit the United States to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard, when, only sixty-two, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and, weeks later, died. On top of the Harvard commitment, Calvino had agreed to a small American book tour, which would take him as far as Cody’s Books in Berkeley. I was scheduled to be seated in the front row, breathlessly. Instead, I learned of Calvino’s death by reading a notice taped to Cody’s doors on the night when he would have read.
Calvino was more than simply one of my favorite writers. Gore Vidal, in the New York Review of Books, wrote that “Europe regarded Calvino’s death as a calamity for culture.” Selfishly, I took it as my own calamity, feeling deprived of a chance to announce myself to the one living writer who effortlessly straddled the contradictions that my own (inchoate) writerly impulses presented. Calvino, it seemed to me, had managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: His novels and stories and fables were both classically modern and giddily postmodern, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic. With his frequent referencing of comics and folktales and film, and in his droll probing of contemporary scientific and philosophical theory, Calvino encompassed motifs associated with brows both high and low in a lucid style wholly his own. As comfortable mingling with the Oulipo group in Paris (Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau, and others, who spliced the DNA of literature with surrealist games) as he was explicating his love for and debt to Hemingway, Stevenson, and the Brothers Grimm, Calvino seemed to never have compromised in his elegant explorations of whatever made him curious in nature, art, or his own sensory life (like women’s calves). His prose was ambassadorial, his work a living bridge between Pliny the Elder, Franz Kafka, and Italian neorealist cinema. And—I intuited then, I know now—he was a kind and generous person, colleague, teacher, friend. Had he lived a couple more months, Calvino would have likely tolerated my effort to waste a few of his shrinking hours on earth by making him listen as I bragged of how much he’d influenced my unwritten works.
I worry a little about the state of Calvino’s shelf, twenty years later. Not that any of his books are out of print; the opposite. Calvino’s two U.S. publishers have been scrupulous in presenting every one of his titles in elegant trade paperback editions (most of these in an appealing uniform sequence from Harcourt Brace). I’m using the word “titles” advisedly: Gore Vidal’s 1974 essay, introducing Calvino to readers in English, was called “Calvino’s Novels,” yet Calvino stakes out a curious distance from the tradition of “the novel.” Only The Baron in the Trees claims a novel’s typical form and proportion; most of his books are arrangements or sequences of stories, fables, fragments, or fugues, linked by common characters, by symbols or motifs, or by some elaborate frame. Beyond that, it’s useless to generalize about them. Marcovaldo and Mr. Palomar feature lead characters, author/reader-surrogate types, who observe the city, countryside, and universe; The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Invisible Cities are matrices of interwoven fables and meditations; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a metafictional antinovel made of first chapters; the two collections Cosmicomics and t zero feature (mostly) another bemused witness, this time of evolution: His name is always Qfwfq, but he takes alternating form as a mote of cosmic dust, a dinosaur, a seashell, a caveman, and others. (Someone teach these books in Kansas, please—Darwin’s foes would evaporate in a cloud of epiphanies.)
To make things more complicated, some of Calvino’s best work is scattered in other collections, Difficult Loves, Numbers in the Dark, Under the Jaguar Sun, and The Watcher. There are two great novellas, published together as The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount. Throw onto the pile three volumes of essays and lectures, and the problem emerges: This completist’s heaven is a browser’s purgatory.
I say this as an admitted completist, but also as a former bookstore clerk, one who Calvinoishly watched other readers as they chose books. With too many uniformly lavish editions, the novice reader, wading in, is at the mercy of dumb luck. This happens a lot. Steerforth Press, meaning well, has made it as likely that a reader curious about Dawn Powell will come out of a bookstore clutching the glum early volumes set in Ohio or the misfiring The Happy Island, as that they’ll snag Turn, Magic Wheel or The Locusts Have No King. Will that reader try twice? Behind the gorgeous jackets, flawed books jostle beside the masterpieces.
Italo Calvino never wrote a bad book. But his greatness is like a mist cloud, without a single, encompassing magnum opus to make a beginner’s entry point, or to shove into the time capsule of posterity. Is it sacrilegious to propose a fat volume called The Best of Calvino? Or call it Tales, or Sixty Stories. It isn’t as though the individual volumes need to go out of print to make room for the omnibus I’m envisioning. Maybe it’s outrageous to do violence to a structure as organically perfect as Invisible Cities. Fine: Include the whole thing, the way The Thurber Carnival made room for My Life and Hard Times.
When Knopf, in 1980, honored Ray Bradbury with The Stories of Ray Bradbury, the editors broke into linked sequences of stories like The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man (the dedication reads: “… for Nancy Nicholas and Robert Gottlieb, whose argument about favorites put this book together”). Similarly, the someday compiler of The Selected Stories of John Updike will have to pillage the Maples and Bech sequences. “Greatest Hits” collections have their place in literary history. Before Leon Edel came along, Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” was part of a volume called Embarrassment. Trust me, only hard-core Jamesians would recognize the other titles on the contents page. For them, The Complete Stories of Henry James floats on, available in libraries and used bookstores. Arguments about favorites are energizing things, and they honor reputations as beautifully as do uniform sets of Complete Works. Italo Calvino, in his long-but-too-short career, scattered his treasures. Sure, he deserves readers who’ll savor them in their original formats, but he also could use a treasury.
—The New York Times Book Review, 2005
Postmodernism as Liberty Valance
Notes on a Ritual Killing
1. Spoiler alert. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an allegorical Western that I am now going to totally pretzel into an allegory for something else entirely. Actually I’ll reverse it: The original allegorizes the taming of the western frontier, the coming of modernity in the form of the lawbooks and the locomotive, and memorializes what was lost (a loss the film sees as inevitable). My version allegorizes the holding at bay, for the special province of literary fiction, of contemporary experien
ce in all its dismaying or exhilarating particulars, as well as a weird persistent denial of a terrific number of artistic strategies for illuminating that experience. The avoidance, that’s to say, of any forthright address of what’s called postmodernity, and what’s lost in avoiding it (a sacrifice I see as at best pointless, an empty rehearsal of anxieties, and at worst hugely detrimental for fiction).
2. The chewy center of TMWSLV is a gunfight. A man stands in the main street of a western town and (apparently) kills another man. The victim—for this is, technically, murder—represents chaos and anxiety and fear to all who know him, and has been regarded as unkillable, almost in the manner of a monster or zombie from another movie genre; his dispatch is regarded by the local population with astonished relief and gratitude, such that they will shower the killer with regard (he’s destined to become his party’s nominee for vice president of the United States). The secret the movie reveals: The killer was not the man in the street, but another.
3. The three persons in TMWSLV: James Stewart a.k.a. “Ransom Stoddard,” the upstanding, even priggish young lawyer from the east, defined by his naïve sincerity and dedication to the rule of law; John Wayne a.k.a. “Tom Doniphon,” cynical veteran of the frontier, who tends to an isolationist-libertarian approach toward civilization but is essentially lovable and will become heartbreaking by film’s end; and Lee Marvin a.k.a. “Liberty Valance,” a sadistic, amoral thug who delights in sowing chaos and exposing the fragility of social convention (by terrorizing family restaurants, newspaper offices, elections, etc.).
4. Stewart/Stoddard believes he’s “the man who killed Liberty Valance” (he stood, after all, in the center of town, visible to all, with a gun in his hand). More important, the witnesses believe he’s the one. In fact, it was Wayne/Doniphon who did the deed, while hidden in a shadowy alley, after having elaborately conspired to goad the helpless and pacifistic Stewart/Stoddard into his public role as a gun-toting defender of public peace against the savage anarchy of Marvin/Valance.
5. Liberty Valance, i.e., “Free Persuasion”—what an absurd, obvious, Pynchonian name! But then, the characters in Dickens and Henry James have odd names, too.
6. “Venturing back in time isn’t the only option for novelists loath to address the mass media that most Americans marinate in. There are also those populations cut off from the mainstream for cultural reasons, such as recent immigrants and their families. And then there are those at the geographical margins … It’s remarkable how many recent American literary novels and short stories are set on ranches … The American novelist is buffeted by two increasingly contradictory imperatives. The first comes as the directive to depict ‘The Way We Live Now’ … Cliché it may be, but the notion that no one is better suited to explain the dilemmas of contemporary life than the novelist persists … [The] other designated special province of the literary novelist: museum-quality depth. The further literature is driven to the outskirts of the culture, the more it is cherished as a sanctuary from everything coarse, shallow and meretricious in that culture. If these two missions seem incompatible, that’s because they are. To encompass both … you must persuade your readers that you have given them what they want by presenting them with what they were trying to get away from when they came to you in the first place.”
—Laura Miller, The Guardian
7. Let’s wade into the unpleasantness around the term “postmodernism”: Nobody agrees on its definition, but in literary conversations the word is often used as finger-pointing to a really vast number of things that might be seen as threatening to canonical culture: author-killing theories generated by French critics, collapsings of high and low cultural preserves into a value-neutral fog, excessive reference to various other media and/or mediums, especially electronic ones (ironically, even a Luddishly denunciatory take on certain media and/or mediums may be suspect merely for displaying an excess of familiarity with same), an enthusiasm for “metafiction” (a word that ought to be reserved for a specific thing that starts with Cervantes, but isn’t), for antinarrative, for pop-culture references or generic forms, for overt (as opposed to politely passive) “intertextuality,” for unreliable narration, for surrealism or magic realism or hysterical realism or some other brand of “opposed-to-realism” affiliation, for “irony” (another term that’s been abused out of its effective contour and function, and its abusers have fewer excuses than do those of postmodernism), etc. etc. etc. Now, any writer espousing, let alone employing, all of the above things would be a gorgon-headed monster, surely deserving rapid assassination for the safety of the literary community in general. (Or maybe not, maybe they’d be splendid.) But—and I present this as axiomatic—such a person, and such writing, is impossible to consider seriously because all of the modes denounced under the banner of “postmodernist” are incompatible: You can’t, just for instance, exalt disreputable genres like the crime story and also want to do away with narrative.
8. The reverse person, a literary person inclined toward or at least compelled by none of the above-named modes or gestures—and I present this not as axiomatic but as an obnoxious opinion—would be dull beyond belief. They basically would have declined the entire twentieth century (and interesting parts of several others). You’ve read our entire menu, sir? And nothing was of interest? Really, nothing?
9. “… as a phenomenon, postmodernism is either specifically aesthetic or more generally cultural; it is either revolutionary or reactionary; it is either the end of ideology or the inescapable conclusion of ideology … It is expressed in architecture, art, literature, the media, science, religion and fashion, and at the same time it is equivalent to none of these. It is both a continuation and intensification of what has gone before and a radical break with all traces of the past. It is, above all, simultaneously critical and complicit.”
—Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence
“Critical debates about postmodernism constitute postmodernism itself.”
—Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture
10. I suggested that abusers of the word “postmodernism” had excuses. I offer the above quotes as exculpatory evidence. The serious use of the term manifestly propagates bewilderment. But the quotes are also a reminder that the term has serious uses. It means more than “art I don’t like.”
11. What postmodernism really needs is a new name—or three of them.
12. The first “postmodernism” that requires a new name is our sense—I’m taking it for granted that you share it—that the world, as presently defined by the advent of global techno-capitalism, the McLuhanesque effects of electronic media, and the long historical postludes of the transformative theories, movements, and traumas of the twentieth century, isn’t a coherent or congenial home for human psyches. Chuck Klosterman details this suspicion in his essay on the Unabomber, called “FAIL” (though it might as well be called “Sympathy for Theodore Kaczynski”). His conclusion, basically, is that in the teeth of contemporary reality we’d all be a little bit crazy not to sometimes wish to kill that sort of postmodernism. I speak here as one who’s spent loads of his own good faith hurling tiny word-bombs at the rolling edifice of the triumphalist Now. This postmodernism we’ll call Kaczynski’s Bad Dream.
13. The second substitute term I’ll offer is for the avowed, self-declared postmodernist school of U.S. fiction writers: Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, John Hawkes, a few others, many of them one another’s friends, and many of them influential teachers. A few non-teachers—Pynchon, of course (unless he was teaching high-school social studies or geometry somewhere). This clan, when Barth and Pynchon were scooping up major prizes, rode high enough that they seemed worth knocking down. This is the epoch John Gardner tilted against in On Moral Fiction. True, this tribe once had the effrontery to imagine itself the center of interest in U.S. fiction, but if you still hold that grudge your memory for effrontery is too long. To go on potshotting at these gentlemen is not so much shooting f
ish in a barrel as it is shooting novelists who rode a barrel over Niagara Falls twenty or thirty years ago. Or the equivalent of the Republican Party running its presidential candidates against the memory of George McGovern. (Of course, both are done, routinely.) We’ll call these guys Those Guys.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 10