David
Starkey
Provisionally
Noted
Sunday,
October 10, 1999
Watched
a video of Carol Reed's The Third Man today. Holly Martens, the protagonist,
is talked into giving a lecture about the state of the modern novel
in front of a group of intellectuals in Vienna. It's a disaster, though,
because Holly writes genre fiction, Westerns. "Modern literature"
(one audience member mentions Joyce) might well be written on Mars
and in Martian, for all Holly has to say about it.
Ugh.
Started thinking about my talk for Antti Peltonen's postmodern fiction
class. Not that I have nothing to say on the subject--after all, I'm
teaching a seminar on pomo lit myself this term--but you never really
know how to enter someone else's class,, especially late in the term.
You don't know what's been covered, what's been valorized and demonized,
where the hidden agendas and prejudices and perversions lie.
Also,
the movie brings up the thorny issue of authenticity and authority:
who's qualified to speak on what subject? You'd think that a writer
could talk about writing, but it's implied that a literary scholar
would be a much more adept speaker for this group of Viennese intellectuals,
as Holly Martens seems entirely ignorant of his own craft. Of course
this is just Graham Greene--the "serious" novelist always
about to cross the line over to pop lit--lampooning the competition,
working out hiss own insecurities on the page and in the screenplay.
Still.
Anyway,
I start bouncing around ideas for this guest lecture.
Idea
One: Detective fiction as a model for postmodern fiction. The ambiguous
villain. Nothing is what it seems. Conspiracy. As everyone points
out, the difference is that in straight genre detective fiction loose
ends are tied up at the end. In pomo fiction they're left unresolved.
Idea
Two: Graphic novels and the death of the word. Discuss the ways that
semiotics has made language essentially superfluous as it has opened
up the possibility that any text, no matter how apparently trivial,
is capable of generating an interesting interpretation--in the hands
of a smart woman or man. Cf. Barthes, of course.
Idea
Three: "Avant-pop." Could reference Lance Olsen's long essay
on the Internet in preparation for Lance's possible visit to Oulu.
Or open up the discussion of postmodern fiction to include rock and
roll narratives. Rock and roll fictions: DeLillo's Great Jones Street,
Lance's Tonguing the Zeitgeist.
Or
all three of these as they apply to the fiction of Don DeLillo, the
author I hinted I would focus on when Antti and I first spoke.
Or
I could talk about the effect of language poetry on postmodern fiction.
The materiality of the signifier, the reader as co-constructor of
meaning, the ways that the pomo fiction writers slow the tempo down
through all sorts of technical roadblocks so the reader is forced
to read their prose as though it were poetry.
Or
else just spout the usual line, say what Antti and his class expect
to hear. Not very postmodern, but that would be safest, easiest. Isn't
that all that matters, after all, even (especially?) in a "postmodern"
critique: confirming expected beliefs.
Monday,
October 11
Okay.
Wait. Check this out. Had an idea in the shower. The presentation
itself would be as postmodern as the subject matter. It's what Charles
Bernstein is arguing for in all his recent hypertexts, what Raymond
Federman is doing in Critifictions, what Larry McCaffery is aiming
for in his hard-boiled detective cum porno prose in the introduction
to Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation. It's what I'm insisting
on in books like Writing What We Teach.
Email
Antti to try and sell him on the idea.
Tuesday,
October 12
No
word from Antti on whether these notes will ever be read in his class.
Perhaps he's out of town or very busy, or perhaps this is his postmodern
way of responding. If that's the case, I'm not sure if it's a yes
or a no.
Still,
this is appropriate. The absence at the beginning of the narrative;
the author attempts to inject it with presence but never quite succeeds.
Yet
if I could muster a bit more postmodern paranoia, I might be able
to think that Antti is taunting me. Perhaps it's an oblique, ironic
gesture in the direction of postcolonialism. Something to do with
a parody of Finlandization as the equivalent of colonization. Frantz
Fanon says that "decolonization is always a violent phenomenon."
For Antti, maybe it's a silent one, too.
Wednesday,
October 13
The
absurdity of thinking that a critic's writing isn't affected by her
life. Fiction writers abandoned that one centuries ago. Good for Roland
Barthes! Hurray for Baudrillard in America.
The
idea of this journal is that the personal informs the academic. So:
an anecdote about vision.
Just
before I leave America, I get a new pair of glasses. They don't arrive
until the day I board my plane, so I tuck them in my bag and don't
try them on until I reach Helsinki. When I get there, I find the prescription's
been radically altered, even though I only went it because I wanted
a new frame. Now I have to resee the world. And it's not working.
Headaches, the eye with the bad prescription twitches. I go to a Finnish
optometrist. She does the numbers on her machine, says: "You
can see all right either way." Well, not exactly. I can see.
But not right.
And
what does this parable mean? That style is the enemy of truth? That
truth is relative, i.e., I could take to the new glasses if I were
able to convince myself that they were doing me some good, that my
weak eye will be made stronger, that my vision, which seems fine to
me now, is somehow inadequate and I just don't know it? Eventually,
I send the damned things back to America and tell the optometrist
to change the lens. I want style and serviceability, form and function.
To hell with postmodernism if it impedes my ability to walk down the
street.
Thursday,
October 14
Still
no word from Antti. Perhaps this journal is a bad idea. Perhaps I
should just reheat something I've already done, let them eat Campbell's
soup: bland yet nutritional. Cheap, too.
But,
no. I want to experiment, to find out what I'm thinking now. This
moment. "One perception following instanter upon another,"
as Charles Olson would have it.
And
what better container for these instanter perceptions than the diary,
the oldest form of fiction. The pretense of revelation when the most
important, most intimate material is always withheld. Everything connected
by the false system we call "Time," arranged using the fiction
known as "The Calendar."
And
this journal is just my "official" one. I'm keeping another
that I won't let anyone read. And even that one never hears my darkest
thoughts. As if I knew what they were.
Friday,
October 15
New
angle: the prose poem as the ultimate synthesis of the postmodern
aesthetic. Work by Russell Edson, Amy Gerstler, John Yau, Carla Harryman.
Self-contained nuggets, like these journal entries. Fragments shorn
against the world, as Ezra Pound put it. Yet they aren't really fiction
writers, these prose poets: most are poets first, writers of prose
second (and it's usually nonfiction rather than fiction). I suspect
that's because the poem is so truncated. For all their vaunted anti-traditionalism,
postmodern fiction writers are still drawn to story-telling, to spinning
yarns. They're raconteurs. Granted, they want to do it in new ways,
but the sensibility is radically different from the lyric poet who
turns her hand to fiction.
Also,
the lesson of the prose poem is the failure of fiction. It says that
it's not worth going beyond a few paragraphs, a page or two. The ending
is always the same, nobody learns anything. If you're going to rev
up your wheels, buster, do it loudly and spectacularly and don't take
all day about it.
In
my own postmodern class yesterday, we responded to a quote from Gertrude
Stein: "What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is
prose." On the board I listed qualities of poetry, qualities
of prose. It soon becomes apparent that, aside from the merely technical
definition of poetry as a work of literature composed of lines rather
than sentences, there is no description that can be applied to the
one that can't, at times, also be applied to the other.
Saturday,
October 16
I
suspect now that Antti is not playing some postcolonial game with
me. Rather, he is trying to lure me into a conspiracy. He's playing
pomo cat and mouse. I keep thinking I'll find Colonel Mustard in the
basement with a pipe, but every clue is a fake, everyone is equally
with and without guilt. The moving end game.
Antti
wants to emphasize to me the ultimate futility of literary detective
work. But he and I are moving in different directions on this one.
The fact is, I prefer straight genre stuff. I read detective fiction
primarily for reassurance, to be comforted in the belief that, although
bad things happen in this world, the mysteries surrounding them will
be resolved, the bad guys, one way or another, will get theirs.
I
am writing this from Stockholm, a city that thinks it is postmodern
but is not. The "medieval old town," which isn't medieval
at all, is a step in the right direction. But a few palimpsests here
and there can never make up for all these Volvos.
At
the tourist bookshop (Antti will be glad to know), I buy a rather
plodding detective novel called The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall
and Per Wahlöö. But I bought it not to immerse myself in
uncertainty, but because I am in a strange city and want to know the
climax before I ever open the book. Similarly, when I first arrived
in Oulu six weeks ago, I checked out Raymond Chandler's Playback and
Hammet's The Thin Man and Maltese Falcon from the university library.
Comfort food. Cheese whiz.
Afterwards,
I watched a video of John Houston's The Maltese Falcon. How extraordinarily
close to the text Houston stayed! Only one are two scenes cut, the
whole thing done with great economy. Definitely not postmodern.
Right?
But
if the movie wasn't postmodern, my viewing of it was, my absolute
self-consciousness of myself as viewer. In the gap between the two
signifiers, I create a contingent signified. Always the relevance
of the subject position. Note: ask a French philosopher the following
question: what should I call my version of The Maltese Falcon and
to whom shall I tell that name?
Sunday,
October 17
I
sit here writing in the international airport, a conventionally postmodern
space, with its decentered travelers, low hum of Muzak, big electronic
boards insisting on the simultaneity of time zones, conceptually impoverished
discourse eddying from gate to gate, the swift current of late capitalist
currency coursing through it all.
Yesterday,
I listened to a performance of Bruckner's Mass in E Major in the Stockholm
Cathedral. Sat there, eyes closed, gripping my seat, chills, trying
not to lose my head. Music. There is no power in art like good music.
Literature is second-best, no doubt, but music comes round the back
door and gets you when you're least expecting it. Pure emotion. Supra-
(or sub-) rational. It's a mistake to intellectualize music the way
I'm doing in my Rock and Roll class. Larry Grossberg always complaining
about how little good writing there is on popular music. Well, man,
what do you expect? What sententious cultural theoretician is going
to be able to communicate as effectively as a good ensemble working
Bruckner's mass--or the Ramones playing "Blitzkrieg Bop"?
So maybe they do deserve all the excessive attention, bilious Pavoratti
and all the rock stars.
Monday,
October 18
At
last, word from Antti! It turns out that he was simply out of town
teaching (in Stockholm). He reports that the new format of my lecture
"sounds O.K." Mentions John Cage's Silence and Ihab Hassan's
Paracriticisms as further examples of this type of approach.
I
have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed in Antti as the co-author
of this fiction--even if he was in Stockholm following me (which I
doubt). His lack of authorial intention ("aleatory" Cage
and Maac Low call it) is, of course, very much in keeping with the
pomo rules. But his email has no hint of irony, no elision, no wink
or nod in the direction of a contesting view.
Or
is that very transparency just another ruse in his little game?
Clever
devil! By the end of this journal, I will know what fiction means.
Tuesday,
October 19
If
Don DeLillo is a great postmodern fiction writer (and I believe he
is), then postmodernism is the opposite of the depthlessness of which
Frederic Jameson accuses it. Take, as just one instance, the magnificent
opening set piece in Underworld describing "the shot heard round
the world," the home run hit by Bobby Thompson at Ebbets Field.
One event seen in Joycean complexity, as deeply and from as many perspectives
as is possible for a writer still intent on entertaining his readers.
Disjunctive but connective. 50 pages spent on the few hours of a baseball
game.
White
Noise, Libra, Underworld: these novels are decidedly not pastiche,
which Jameson says is the only possible approach when "all that
is left to imitate is dead styles": "without the satirical
impulse [of parody], without laughter, without that still latent feeling
that there exists something normal..." DeLillo, like Cardinal
Y. in Donald Barthleme's short story "See the Moon?" knows
the drill. But, without ever being sentimental, his fiction is always
yearning for some moment, past or future, in which things will make
sense. A stabilizing center. Something like "normal."
Wednesday,
October 20
Is
misnaming is the essential act of postmodernism? That is, by willingly
subverting the "proper" name for something, replacing the
expected with the unexpected, do we expose the "naturalness"
of language for the fraud it is?
If
so, then why are the names of novels so important to me? Why do I
recoil at the notion that Fitzgerald wanted to call The Great Gatsby
Under the Red, White, and Blue? Why do I feel sorry that Sony wouldn't
allow DeLillo to call White Noise Panasonic? (Interesting that in
both cases the writer is trying to reach out to the larger world.)
I think it's the New Aesthetician in me that's concerned with these
questions of art, that art may be best left to the artists after all.
(More on this later.)
Thursday,
October 21
When
I was a graduate student interviewing a visiting writer for the campus
literary magazine, the writer pointed out that, for him, rock and
roll was a more significant influence than literature. It wasn't The
Iliad he alluded to when composing his work; it was The Kinks' "You
Really Got Me."
This
writer is fifty now, at least. Imagine how many are like him, and
how few would still claim Homer as a living voice in their heads.
So
perhaps this journal should be focusing on rock and roll as an alternative
for literature. All other stories compete with pop music for an audience's
time. Few succeed. I could buy a guitar and bring it into Antti's
class. Just start wailing, solo for half and hour then leave without
a word. Now that would be something like higher education.
Friday,
October 22
Living
and traveling in a country where the language is as foreign to me
as Finnish is, I can't help but think about semiotics all the time.
Makes me want to construct poems and stories using only the international
sign system, those little pictures they use in airports. Imagine:
everything you need is already there: man and woman, fire and water,
danger and safety, the way in and the way out. Granted, a great deal
of linguistic subtlety would be lost if this method were universally
adopted. However, it might well result the postmodern literature par
excellence.
Saturday,
October 23
I'm
here in Turku for a conference. My talk, initially entitled "Elvis
as Onion: Unpeeling the King," I amend at the last minute to
"Elvis as Mirrorball: Subject, Subjectivity and the King."
I go from arguing that, when you peel away the many layers of public
perception wrapped around Elvis, you end up with nothing, to arguing
that Elvis is like a mirrorball reflecting back to viewers and listeners
whatever they bring to the text, that there is no "Elvis,"
only this vast cacophony of images and subject positions.
The
conference organizer indicates beforehand that a less-than-solemn
tone is best for this venue, but, naturally, my fellow presenters
tend to be rather more serious than was their charge. Horrid, horrid
academics, to borrow a locution from Oscar Wilde.
Later
in the day, I buy DeLillo's Underworld and Robert Stone's Damascus
Gate (impractical me: I'd already read library copies of both books,
now, on the other side of the world, I suddenly have to have my own
copies). Two big novels by two big thinkers. Although the latter didn't
do much to further Stone's reputation, Underworld cemented DeLillo's.
To be a major writer in America you still have to tackle the big novel.
Manifest Destiny. Moby Dick, baby. Ambition counts.
Also
go to see Elgar's Cello Concerto, one of my favorite pieces. There's
nothing like the low notes in that opening movement. Excruciatingly
sad. It seems impossible to answer an emotion that pure (although
the rest of the piece goes on and tries to do just that).
Elgar's
Cello Concerto is not postmodern. Neither is Turku. Fair play to them
both.
Sunday,
October 24
Finland
on a Sunday. It is truly the anti-America then. Quiet, still, unconcerned
with commerce. I check out of my hotel and wait in one of the few
open coffee shops for my late afternoon flight home. More bits of
ideas for this upcoming lecture.
For
me, the twin giants of postmodern fiction are Pynchon and DeLillo.
How ironic that both of them so accurately intuited the Internet--Pynchon
with his Trystero, DeLillo with his many "networks" of conspiracy--and
yet neither has really tackled the subject in his fiction. In fact,
their latest books retreat in time. DeLillo's Underworld dwells on
the 1950s, with a single Internet passage at the very end of the book,
while Pynchon goes all the way back to early American history in Mason
& Dixon. It's as though they've already done the Internet--its
vast complex of irrelevancies and conspiracies--before it ever existed.
So why bother now? It's old hat.
Monday,
October 25
Sometimes
I think I am more interested in the literary anecdote than the work
of literature itself. When I am listening, say, to an eminent lecturer
explicate an important work of fiction, my attention often drifts
until there is some injection of the personal, the biographical. Anecdotes
that may well be apocryphal are especially titillating. Is this a
postmodern phenomenon, the valuing of the half-fictional, half-factual
fragment, the little story with no climax or resolve?
So
drawn am I to these mini-narratives, that I have to consciously resist
relating them when I'm teaching. On a rational level, I know the fact
that Frank O'Hara was killed by a dune buggy in the wee hours on Fire
Island has nothing whatsoever to do with this poetry. Yet the story
begs to be told. Maybe it is the desire for closure, the need to round
the complicated work off with an emphatic period. Maybe biography
is always more interesting than art.
Many
of the teachers I remember from my own education were similarly driven
by a yearning to tell anecdotes that had no particular relationship
to the subject at hand. My high school geometry teacher, Mr. Carlson,
couldn't get through a lesson on trapezoids without rambling on about
good old Sweden or his second job as a plumber. I don't remember a
thing about the Romantics course taught by Peter Thorslev at UCLA--except
his drinking stories about Theodore Roethke. Andrei Codrescu at LSU
was another great teller of anecdotes. Perhaps this is a sub-species
of biographical criticism mixed with narratology. Anyway, what is
English Studies but stories about stories? What is criticism but a
highly stylized (highly attenuated?) narrative?
Tuesday,
October 26
To
continue: what thrills me the least about postmodern criticism is
its lack of humor, its lack of anything resembling real style. Would
that Oscar Wilde were alive today. Or is that foolishness? Wouldn't
he be as thick-tongued a fop as any of them?
No
matter. Here in Oulu I am formulating a new school of criticism I
call The New Aestheticism. It carries postmodernity to its only honest
conclusion. That is, the critic is obliged not only to admit that
the subject stands alone in a whirling, unresolved play of conflicting
identities--and be damned to the sham logic of academic allegiance--but
she must also defend her position with style. The New Aeestheticism
only privileges those works which overwhelm the critic by their beauty
or comedy or tragedy. Detractors will say this is old fashion impressionistic
doodling, but all detractors will be exposed for the Philistines they
really are. In fact, I would claim for the movement several of the
postmodernists I've already mentioned (in those moments when they
drop their dogmatism in favor of personal taste): Bernstein, Federman,
Baudrillard, not to mention the Helene Cixous of Sorties.
Alas,
practitioners of the New Historicism will have to leave the English
department and return to the History department, where they belong.
And I grant you that adherents of The New Aestheticism will despise
each other, though that is a measure of their true belief in its precepts--
for new truly experienced aesthetic experience can never be anything
other than transcendentally subjective.
At
any rate, it's certainly possible to have a postmodern sensibility
without writing in a postmodern style. Take Christopher Isherwood's
fiction, for instance. In the closet dramas he wrote with W.H. Auden,
The Ascent of F6 and The Dog Beneath the Skin, there is a certain
surface experimentalism (the "deep surface" postmodern critics
always refer to). But in Goodbye to Berlin, the style is nearly as
plain as Hemingway's, though the sense of irony is much deeper.
Wednesday,
October 27
Read
Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Tower. Favorite quote: "Dilemma
of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure." Written
in 1962, but a very prescient book. Especially the language, the frequent
dropping of articles makes the prose sound like Japanese-
English
and also gives it a telegraphic (telepathic?) quickness. In the alternate
universe of this book, in which the Axis wins World War II, the Germans
are the villains, whereas Dick's Japanese remind me of contemporary
Americans: on the whole, good-hearted rather than bad, but blind to
their own prejudices and ineffective at halting the world's current
when it starts to flow to the bad.
Thursday,
October 28
My
son's seventh birthday. The Lego toy I mail from Finland arrives on
time and is a big hit. Feel guilty about being here and not there,
guilty about spending time on relatively frivolous things like this
journal.
Will
the students in the postmodern fiction class realize that what I am
doing is creating a fiction? Will they care? There is minimal attention
to setting and dialogue, two important elements of fiction. But character
and tone? Boy howdy! The narrator loves these.
Me,
that is.
Me?
Postmodernism says, "Me, my ass."
Tomorrow
I have to get up at 4:30 a.m. to catch an early flight to Berlin.
My guidebook says: "The war reduced Berlin to 75 million cubic
metres of rubble." What does that mean? What can a fact like
that possibly mean?
Friday,
October 29
At
9 a.m., Berlin doesn't much impress me, even the famous Ku'damm. The
place seems tatty, run down. In the east, museums are closed for renovation.
Construction cranes are so omnipresent that the matchbooks put out
by my hotel include them prominently in the skyline.
But
by nightfall, I start to get it. This is where things are happening.
This is the new capital of Europe, and the rest of Europe ignores
that fact at its risk. Only bombs will make it go away again.
Saturday,
October 30
I
fear that I have begun to use Germany metonymically in my own postmodern
literature class. It stands for imperialism and the Holocaust and
post-war schizophrenia. (And, though the students don't know it--it
stands for the side of my family--the von Thielemanns--that I would
prefer to forget.)
I'm
especially uncomfortable because one of my students is German. A sweet,
quiet young woman who grew up in East Germany. She seems eminently
sane, and I know it's ridiculous for her to be associated with any
of the qualities I've just named. Yet Germany is so central to our
concept of postmodernity. Postmodern literature could not exist without
it. Let's face it, Adorno's question-- "How can one write poetry
after Auschwitz?"--turns out to be as much as challenge as anything
else.
Not
to mention the fact that Berlin has so clearly replaced Los Angeles
as the world capital of postmodernism. It's the collapse of the Wall,
and all that's turned out not to mean: no shared sense of realism
between East and West, the incomplete triumph of market capitalism
in the political sphere, its resounding failure in the spiritual.
The way the state hedges its bets. Just look at the difference between
Alexanderplatz and Potsdam Platz. The former, safe and stolid all
those years inside East Berlin, isn't worth destroying and reclaiming
by the West. But Potsdam Platz was already a mess, a no-man's land
during the Cold War. Barren, decrepit. Dogs and dogshit and barbed
wire. It was easy to tear down the ruins, to start afresh with the
new multi-story mall, the Sony skyscraper.
Of
course language is a site of power. But so is geography.
Sunday,
October 31
Take
the subway to see "Experimentelles Musiktheater, Werke von Cage,
Zimmerman, Beil, Blacher, u.v.m." Sounds like an event Emil Nolde,
my favorite German Expressionist, would attend, if Emil Nolde were
alive today.
The
concert is in Kreuzberg, which my guidebook enthusiastically endorses
as a walk through bohemian Berlin, the place where the poor and the
radical congregated before the Wall went down. I emerge from Kottbusser
Tor station to hear two drunk skinheads shouting at each other. An
old man with long ratty hair sits nearby, plucking at something invisible
on the ground between his legs. Turkish men in leather jackets lounge
near the phone booths. Smell of spices and burning meat. The crumbling
buildings are seemingly held together by the layers of posters plastered
on them. Mostly they appear to be Turkish campaign posters of some
sort. Smiling mustached men beneath red crescent moons. Also torn,
weather-faded advertisements for punk shows from last winter. Phone
numbers for God knows what.
I
get slightly lost, can't find the address. Leaning against a wall,
looking at my map, two young women with dyed red hair and cellos slung
over their shoulders walk past. In an instant, I realize where they're
going, and also what the concert will be like. A sprinkling of students,
a few aging but still earnest intellectuals like myself. A crummy
space on the second floor of a crummy building. Everyone in the audience
but me will be dressed in black. They will pay respectful attention
no matter what happens on stage. If there is a quartet of obese men
farting "Deutschland Uber Alles," it will make no difference.
I have seen this show a thousand times already in Chicago, and it
makes me sick to think of it.
I
turn around and head back for the Green Line, though I'm in a quandary
now because I want to hear some music. Instinctively I gravitate towards
the Philharmonia. My guidebook describes a "honey-coloured facade"
that "shimmers in the sun as the tent-shaped gable curves boldly
skywards above the auditorium," and an interior where the audience,
which surrounds the stage, rises up "like vineyard terraces."
The description turns out to be entirely too poetic for one of those
buildings thrown up in the late-fifties and early-sixties that have
aged as gracelessly as any structures ever constructed by humans.
My
late, unplanned arrival forces me to take what I can get, which turns
out to be "Zauber der Operette," a medley of lightweight
pieces spiced up with the occasional balletic interlude. The audience
is the opposite the Kreuzberg crowd: late-middle-aged bourgeoisie.
The stout woman in front of me talks and laughs to her friend during
the music. She claps along with a march. After three numbers, I change
my seat. I can still hear her, although she is not quite as loud as
the two women I am now sitting behind. During intermission, I move
to the opposite side of the half-filled auditorium. However, there
are two elderly couples, one directly to my left, the other down-right,
who chatter softly to each other, commenting on everything. I consider
stalking out, then I remind myself, This is it, baby. Unmediated reality.
Love it or leave it. I shut my eyes and rest my tired feet.
Almost
midnight now. Halloween in Berlin on the Christian Sabbath. Much howling
on the street seven floors below. The mind reels at the potential
perversities going on even as I scratch these lines in my notebook.
I've no desire to be outside.
Monday,
November 1
I
walk past the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Can there really be such a place
as a Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz? What miracles isn't institutional practice
capable of? Still, Prenzlauer Berg, east of Alexanderplatz, is becoming
gentrified. I wonder if I wasn't somewhat quick to dismiss the force
of the market.
Think
also about the exhibition I've been seeing over the last three days,
"Kunst in Deutschland." It's spread out over six venues,
though I only make it to three of them: the Old Museum, the New National
Gallery, and a converted train station, a huge well-lit space. My
biggest curiosity: what do you do with the Nazis? The curators' answer
is to give them a wall here and there, maybe even a room. Acknowledge
the period. Denigrate it. Move one. (Interesting that the Communists
appear to be less imperious in their tastes than their predecessors.)
Then,
at the airport, I buy an extra-large beer and a piece of the Wall.
My piece is a green and pink triangle about half an inch long. (Different
sizes have different prices; I get the next-to-cheapest.) The chip
of concrete is glued to the back of a horseshoe-shaped piece of Plexiglas.
Don't even talk to me about Baudrillard and his simulacra. Don't talk
to me about authenticity. There is something about this merciless
commodification of all that suffering that is beyond postmodernity.
It is so crass,it is almost sweet. This is what real postmodernists
believe: push it to its limit and beyond, and the truth shall set
you free.
Tuesday,
November 2
I
wonder if the students in the postmodern literature class would forgive
me if I admit that there are days when I write several entries in
this journal and other days I write nothing at all. Surely there must
be something in their syllabus that lets me off the hook.
Wednesday,
November 3
Hegemony
= Parsimony
Enlightenment
Mentality = Beer
Parody
= Self-consciousness
Commodity
Fetishism = What Little Girls and Boys Do to Their Barbies and GI
Joes in the USA After They Get Tired of Them; i.e., Cut Off Their
Hair and Draw on Their Faces with Permanent Markers and Cut Off Their
Heads
Thursday,
November 4
I
run into Antti in the cafeteria. The food is slightly less awful than
usual (I think that in a hundred years I could never get used to herring
casserole). We talk, reaffirm what will take place next week. He mentions
Cage's Silences again. Probably he will be unfazed by whatever I do.
Probably there is no conspiracy.
Friday,
November 5
Spend
some time flipping through my Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction,
thinking about who's in and who's out. I believe there is an unwritten
code of honor among anthologists that precludes harsh criticism of
fellow toilers, so I do my wondering sotto voce.
I'm
not sure what Philip Roth's Ghost Writer is doing in there. And if
Roth, why not Updike, surely he's been at least if not more formally
experimental? (I suspect political conservatism enters the picture
somewhere.) No Robert Stone, which I assumes has to do with his formal
conservatism. Any why Bobbie Ann Mason? Even in the pop culture section
that seems a stretch; I always associate literary minimalists with
a kind of hard-boiled anti-postmodernism.
Harry
Polkinhorn's "Consumimur Igni," a story in another anthology
(Avant Pop), reminds me of why it's so difficult to write cyberfiction:
the future's moving in too quickly. Something that sounds sci fi in
1990 sounds absolutely passé in 1999. There is no longer any
such thing as novelty.
Saturday,
November 6
Watch
the video of Naked Lunch. I remember it as being an incomprehensible
melange when it first came out. Now it makes perfect sense to me.
(Danger sign?) There is, however, something entirely too precious
about the seriousness with which the Kerouac and Ginsberg characters
read their work to each other. Wild post-adolescent ramblings. Incipient
postmodernism as bogus teenage boys who refused to grow up.
Finnish
flags flying today, stores closed. Takes me a while to figure out
that it's All Souls Day. I must say it seems a strange national holiday
for a Nordic country to observe. I'd like to take part, but I've got
no one here to visit.
Sunday,
November 7
Is
Oulu postmodern? That's the question I've been skirting around, isn't
it? That's the crucial pivot point.
After
careful consideration, I have decided that the answer is No. For one
thing, the Finns are too grounded in the historical past, in each
other, in daily life, to be very postmodern. To be sure, they're ironic.
But I don't think it's an anti-foundational irony. That is, I think
they think Truth with a capital "T" is out there lurking
around somewhere, if they could just find it. In this last regard,
they are like most Americans. They are, however, unlike most second-
and third- and fourth- and fifth-generation Americans in that they
cannot believe Bob Dylan's clever line "that when you ain't going
nothing / you got nothing to lose." You always have something
to lose.
Also,
I think it may be impossible to be postmodern in any country where
it gets dark at 3:30 in the afternoon. For all its love of film noir
trappings, postmodernity is a daylight phenomena. It exposes frameworks,
ideologies. It shines a bright light on naive realism.
Monday,
November 8
I
spent the better part of the weekend going back and revising this
journal, adding and subtracting, changing names and dates, trying
to make it sounds less rehearsed and more spontaneous. Go figure.
Tuesday,
November 9
Why
do so many French theorists double as psychoanalysts? Fanon, Lacan,
Irigary, Kristeva, Guattari. Who am I leaving out? Dozens of them,
no doubt. Urgh. I will be glad when tomorrow is over and I can stop
assessing things in terms of their postmodernity.
I
realize that this journal has been as much about postmodern art in
general and postmodernity in the West as it has been about postmodern
fiction. But I tell myself that any decent postmodernist will allow
for a healthy dose of cultural polyphony, hybridization and boundary
crossing.
I
wonder if the students in the postmodern fiction class will be disappointed
when they learn that I would never have spent this much time on my
little project if I hadn't, early on, decided I could publish it somewhere,
that the audience is more than just them, the occasion more than a
single classroom presentation. No doubt, it makes the journal less
heroic, less modernist, but I hope that's as they would want it. Surely
they understand market logic, the ground rules of production and consumption,
the law of supply and demand.
Copyright
© 2001 David Starkey
All Rights Reserved