Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Linda Hutcheons

Hutcheons, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. NYC: Routledge, 1988.

Loose Notes --

For 6 chapters, Hutcheons approaches a description of the postmodern, avoiding definition. Chapter headings describe the arc of her approach: Theory, politics, difference from modernism, contexts, and history.

Like so:

Theory -- Hutcheons would mix semiotics with her politics.
" . . . what I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resulutely historical, and inescapably political. Its contradictions may well e those of late capitalist society, but whatever the cause, these contradicitons are certainly manifest in the important postmodern concept of 'the presence of the past'" (4).

Politics -- The MO is reform thru parody.
" . . . most of these postmodernist contradictory texts are also specifically parodic . . . . When Eliot recalled Dante or Virgil in The Waste Land, one sensed a kind of wishful call to continuity beneath the fragmented echoing. It is precisely this that is contested in postmodern parody . . . " (11).

" . . . it is precisely parody -- that seemingly introverted formalism -- that paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation mwith the problem of the relationof the aesthetic to a world of significance external to itself, to a discursive world of socially defined meaning systems (past and presente) -- in other words, to the political and the historical" (22).

"In using parody in this way [ironically], postmodernist forms want to work toward a public discourse that would overtly eschew modernist aestheticism and hermeticism and its attendant political self-marginalization" (23).

VS the Modern -- She echoes an impression of modernism's "aestheticism," but avoids facile comparisons.


The literary and the historical are to be re-unified, per this. One does wonder when and how they might have been considered separate. Again, this seems to be glowering at the Newcrits. But then, what about all those allusions? Again, she distinguishes a PoMo method from modernism, which "attempts to separate literary language from reference" (142) -- an idea I have no way to resolve with Eliot, Joyce, Pound or even HD, really.

Histories will involve metafictions; the boundary between fiction and presumed nonfiction becomes problematized. Intertextuality obviously supplies various opportunity for parody and metafiction. Were this written later, the move onto the Net would have allowed for a ream of specultion that Hutcheon has little reason to perform in 1988.

Oh my, she's eventually showing her colors here. "This formalism is the defining expression of modernism, not postmodernism" (144). Then what comes after postmodernism? Clearly modernism, or another modernism -- since whatever it is will be, by definition, an innovation.

"Postmodernist reference, then, differs from modernist reference in its overt acknowledgement of the existence, if relative inaccessibilty, of the past real (except through discourse). It differs from realist reference in its -- again -- overt assertion of taht relative inacessibility of any reality that might exist objectively and prior ot our knowledge of it" (146).

Rather bizarre characterization. Pound, then, is postmodern, as are Eliot, Joyce, Williams, and almsot anyone writing before 1950. On the other hand, modernism returned later with people like Cage and Ashbery and movements like Oulipo. This is all just backwards. She's consistent to her idea, though. PoMo has moved past its "referential agnosticism," she quotes Norris for the term. So Bernstein and Silliman are modernists, and Pound and Joyce postmodern. Go figure.

Perhaps she means not history but the critical habit of treating the text in terms of the kinds of external information we call historical or political -- though, if so, she's answering the New Critics, and not the modernists. And, as nearly as I can figure, talking about different people than the ones that typically take the term postmodern.

Oddly, the subject remains in crisis, despite Hutcheons' assertion that form is no longer in crisis or in play. What can that mean, logically? I cannot define myself or know myself although all sensory information that said self possesses is owned by me as much as anyone. Do I just accept what others tell me I am? That seems like something that requires force. If "what novels like The White Hotel or Midnight's Children explicitly do is to undermine the ideological assumptions behind what has been accepted as universal and trans-historical in our culture" (177), then how can that possibly be done without formal innovation? Either I'm told a story that does or does not amuse me, and the structure of my ideas remains intact, or the story informs me, in which I see no reason it should be fictional. In fact, the more fictional is, teh less valid it can be in terms of accreting data in an already fixed system.

No, I don't see it. I don't think that the subject can ever be in crisis without some corresponding ripple in form. Can anybody run this by me a different way?

Hutcheon follows hard upon this with "In the postmodern 'history-like,' the ideological and the aesthetic have turned out to be inseparable" (178).

However, the postmodern for her has no particularly interesting formal concerns. Such formal concerns have left with modernist "aestheticism." Perhaps aesthetics and aestheticism are held to be opposite. As such, the crowd of conflicting politicizations are said to be postmodernism. Finally, she has to admit that "The art and theory I have been labelling as postmodernist are not, perhpas, as revolutionaryas either their own rhetoric or their supporters suggest" although she qualifies that they are not "as nostalgically neoconservative as their detractors would have it" (222).

Very well, let's not use the term neocon here; given 21st century context it has gone bitter. But this does not make sense at all. Obviously, if no important formal innovation exists, anything new has to be only the novel.

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