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The Questions of

What do the following have in common?

A poem about the characters in a book, and about the reader of that book, and about what they are doing when the book is not being read. [The poem, "Reading in Place," is in Mark Strand's collection The Continuous Life (1990).]

An American television series combining the elements of a murder mystery, a soap opera, a parody of a murder mystery, and a parody of a soap opera, in which the expected generic conventions occur but ironically, everything happening as if between invisible quotation marks. [The series is Twin Peaks by David Lynch (1990).]

A British television series in which a hardboiled detective plot -- long on wisecracks, tough talk, trenchcoats, and mean streets -- is systematically punctuated by the crooning of romantic tunes from the 1940s. The incongruousness of the juxtaposition is calculated, dramatizing that the cynical detective is in fact a disillusioned romantic in the Sinatra manner. [The series is The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter (1986).]

A story whose characters include the pieces on a board game as well as the people who manipulate them. What is the inner life of Colonel Mustard? Miss Scarlet? Professor Plum? [The story is "A Game of Clue" from Steven Millhauser's book The Barnum Museum (1990).]

A book of sestinas about Perry Mason, Della Street, Paul Drake, Hamilton Burger, and Lieutenant Tragg. [The book is The Whole Truth by James Cummins (1986).]

A novel about the adventures of a feline character from a once beloved, now defunct comic strip, who gets to be psychoanalyzed, witnesses the development of the atomic bomb, and speaks in a punning idiolect in which "capitalism" becomes "keepitallism," psychoanalysis "sighcowandallis," nuclear physics "newclear fizzsticks," and virus "whyrus." [The novel, based on George Herriman's comic strip of the same name, is Krazy Kat by Jay Cantor (1988).]

A novel about the lives of movie protagonists before and after the Hollywood films in which they figure. What happens to Rick Blaine after he and Captain Renault toast the beginning of their beautiful friendship at the end of Casablanca? What does George Bailey do with all the money he gets at the close of It's a Wonderful Life? What was Kay Corleone's childhood like, and how does she get along with her estranged son after her husband exiles her from the family in The Godfather, part II? [The novel that answers these and other such questions is Suspects by David Thompson (1985).]

A deliberate mistranslation of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, "Aus Einem April" ("From an April") beginning with the line "We dust the walls"; Rilke's poem begins with the line "Wieder duftet der Wald," which means "Again the forest is fragrant." [The poem is Frank O'Hara's "Aus Einem April" (1954).]

A sestina that contains the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a game, and a famous old lady, as well as the word bathtub, in every line, e.g., "In the apple tree Queen Mary of the Chrysanthemums shared a grape rook bathtub with her insect lamp." [The poem, written collaboratively by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, is entitled "Crone Rhapsody" (c. 1956).]

A poem in which the parts of speech turn into human characters springing into action, e.g.: "A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, 'And! But!' / But the Adjective did not emerge." [The poem, "Permanently," is in Kenneth Koch's collection Thank You (1962).]

Kenneth Koch, New York, April 1985.
Photograph copyright © John Tranter, 1985, 1998

A painting of a Dutch Masters cigar box, whose label itself reproduces a famous Rembrandt; also, paintings of the Camel cigarette label, the French hundred franc note, and the menu at the Cedar Tavern. [The paintings were done in the 1950s by Larry Rivers.]

A novel suggested by the contents of a rich eccentric's will, which directs his would-be heirs to solve three perplexing riddles: "When was a stone not a king? What was La Messe de Sire Fadevant? Who shaved the Old Man's Beard?" [The novel is The Conversions by Harry Mathews (1962).]

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What all these have in common is that each can be said to embody the spirit of

Quit stalling. What is postmodernism?

Nobody knows for sure, except you're supposed to say that before talking confidently about it. Best not to be too solemn. No one, with the exception of a few academics, really likes the term, but it won't go away, and it does afford a way to make sense of some recent developments in American fiction and poetry.

Postmodernism is best understood not as a rigid concept or a coherent ideological stance but as a bundle of shared impulses and tendencies amounting to a kind of common spirit. More than anything else postmodernism is an attitude, and that attitude is definitively ironic. It revels in comedy and exalts the spirit of parody and play. It treats the the monuments of tradition in particular with irreverence. The distinction between artifacts of high and low culture gets leveled. Characters and lives are confused. Poems based on intricate rules are written in a kind of partnership with the language, an attempt to bring out the poetry latent in the language rather than to impose meaning on language. Generic conventions -- particularly those of gangster movies, detective novels, and comic strips -- are cheerfully appropriated, and just as cheerfully deviated from, as the author wishes. Postmodernism is the triumph of irony.
      Fragments are postmodernist, as is the act of completing somebody else's unfinished work. Hoaxes by nature are postmodernist. So are pseudonyms. The Portuguese poet Pessoa, who wrote poems under many pseudonyms, each of which he outfitted with a full biography and a distinctive style, was an arch-postmodernist avant la lettre or -- to use a phrase favored by the members of the Oulipo, the French society of mathematically-inclined writers committed to the development of cunning new poetic forms -- a plagiarist by anticipation.
      When Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) tries to die like Humphrey Bogart in a '30s gangster movie, he is announcing the official birth of postmodernism. (Belmondo spends much of that movie posing in front of old Bogart posters.) The patron saints of postmodernism are Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, writers who favor parables, labyrinths, mirror games, riddles and linguistic oddities, false-bottomed narratives, artifice conscious of itself as artifice. The paradigmatic postmodernist gesture is the one performed by Borges's Pierre Menard, who sets out to write a book called Don Quixote that is identical in every particular to the Don Quixote of Cervantes -- word for word -- but is nevertheless superior to that of Cervantes, because it would be harder to write the book in Argentina in the twentieth century than in Spain in the sixteenth when, presumably, the medieval chivalrous ideal was closer to hand. Repetition is postmodernism in action. Everything happens twice, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce": Karl Marx's famous remark about history repeating itself is obligatory in any discussion of postmodernism.
      Games are postmodernist: the board game Clue, for one example, and the sestina verse form, for another. David Trinidad combines the two in his sestina entitled "Detective Notes," which begins with this stanza --

    Mrs. White with the Candlestick in the Hall
    Prof. Plum with the Lead Pipe in the Lounge
    Col. Mustard with the Rope in the Dining Room
    Mrs. Peacock with the Wrench in the Kitchen
    Mr. Green with the Revolver in the Conservatory
    Miss Scarlett with the Knife in the Study

-- and works variants on the formula for the next 33 lines.

How about an example of postmodernism that you utterly despise?

Postmodernism at its creepiest is the Chambers Brothers singing "The Time Has Come Today" in a commercial for Fidelity Investments, and the Kinks singing "All Day and All of the Night" in a commercial for Jolly Rancher fruit drink, and Janis Joplin singing "Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?" in a commercial for Mercedes-Benz. Presumably with irony, Salman Rushdie summarizes the worst in postmodernism. "The very concept of meaning is now outdated, nerdy, pre-ironic," Rushdie writes. "Welcome to the New Incomprehensibility: gibberish with attitude." ¶ [see endnote 4]

Did You Ever Hear "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?"

You did if you saw Michelangelo Antonioni's movie Blow-Up (1965), which has the Lovin' Spoonful's song "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" on its soundtrack. Blow-Up is the postmodernist apotheosis of the murder mystery. The nameless photographer played by David Hemmings in the movie is an allegorical stand-in for both the filmmaker and the viewer. He has witnessed a murder inadvertently and unconsciously. The only evidence that there has been a murder is the enlargment of a photograph he had taken thinking he was merely photographing a parkscape. The murder mystery as a genre asks, whodunnit? Blow-Up asks, what happened? And leaves the answer enshrouded in ambiguity. At the end of the movie a game of tennis is played without a ball. And as the camera pulls back, the hero watching the imaginary tennis game becomes smaller and smaller and suddenly disappears.
      The poignant indecisiveness of the photographer in Blow-Up makes him a postmodernist hero. It is not so much that he lacks conviction as that he suffers from a surfeit of epistemological uncertainty. There is another kind of postmodernist hero for whom it may be said, as Delmore Schwartz said of his Partisan Review colleague Philip Rahv, that he has plenty of convictions but doesn't let them stand in the way. If Bill Clinton is the first postmodernist president, that is because he seems prepared to embrace all initiatives, including contradictory ones, with no lasting allegiance to any, in a spirit of pragmatic eclecticism. The president is frequently accused of flip-flops in policy matters, but these can be seen in postmodernist terms as a ready example of what John Ashbery calls "fence-sitting raised to an esthetic ideal."

What's hot and what's not?

In Marshall McLuhan's terms, the Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, et al) were "hot" in the sense that radio as a medium is hot or that the personalities of Roosevelt and Churchill and Hitler were hot. An Abstract Expressionist painting was the product of great difficulty and struggle, even when that painting consisted of a single vertical stripe on a massive red canvas. The avatars of Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, who supplanted the Abstract Expressionists as the stars of the art world, were "cool" in the sense that television is cool. "You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good abstract expressionist," said Rauschenberg, for whom art meant never having to say you're sorry. As for Warhol, his soup cans and soap pads were insolently easy, nonchalant, no sweat. Other cool personalities of the early 1960s include John F. Kennedy, James Bond, Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Carson, and the Project Mercury astronauts. Modernism in this particular sense was a hot phenomenon; postmodernism, a cool one. William Butler Yeats: very hot. Robert Lowell: hot. John Ashbery: cool as a cucumber.
      The best way to capture McLuhan's sense of hot and cool is to compare a radio announcer's play-by-play account of a baseball game (hot) with an airy TV commentator's take on the same action (cool). Radio requires the listener's imaginative involvement; TV turns the viewer into a passive spectator. Only in the movies does a mad TV newscaster incite people to open their windows and scream their frustrations out into the street.

What is the relation of postmodernism to television and the movies?

Postmodernism is equally the product of disillusionment and of its opposite: the enchantment of illusions. The disillusionment is expressed through irony. The enchantment is celebrated through the movies -- through cinematic metaphors and images, narrative devices associated with the movies, or references to specific films. It is possible that T. S. Eliot introduced the cinema into poetry when he wrote of "a magic lantern throwing the nerves in patterns on a screen," but it was Frank O'Hara who put the movies into poems: "How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime / and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left." In an early poem O'Hara likened the avid moviegoer to Leda ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan: "Our / limbs quicken even / to disgrace under / this white eye as / if there were real / pleasure in loving / a shadow and caress- / ing a disguise!"

Frank O'Hara on WNDT-TV, 1964, talking with Barnett Newman.
 

"Real Television", New York, 1997,
photo copyright © John Tranter, 1998

"Proust?
Don't quote Proust at me!
This isn't Deauville,
you fuckwit!"

We live not in the era when a painter put a mustache on the Mona Lisa but in the era when that famous gesture became a cliche -- a time when such "shocks" are routine. "But today there is no point in looking to imaginative new methods / Since all of them are in constant use," wrote John Ashbery in "Definition of Blue" (in The Double Dream of Spring, 1970). Today the spirit of irony and parody must involve our own sacred objects. That is one of the brilliant strokes in Kenneth Koch's book One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (1988). The 112 short plays in the book exemplify the avant-garde impulse and mock it at the same time. There is an aura of cultural sexiness about being "avant-garde," though the term itself remains as slippery as ever. You can't define it, but you can demonstrate its possibilities over and over -- and that is Koch's mandate. Koch proposes, for example, six ways of turning Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy into an exemplary act of avant-garde theatre; he presents the same speech with six different sets of stage directions. In one case, the hero interrupts himself after the "sea of troubles" sentence -- he lights a cigarette, inhales, exhales, and walks offstage ("Smoking Hamlet"). In another, two actors go through the motions of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale while reciting Hamlet's speech ("Little Red Riding Hamlet"). In a third, a team of readers recites the speech one syllable at a time, changing their posture after every six syllables ("Team Hamlet"). The irreverence is not in regard to Hamlet but in regard to the avant-garde ideal that is seemingly embodied in these miniature verse dramas. My favorite play in the book is "After the Return of the Avant-Garde," which ends with this exchange:
 
"Which is more avant-garde -- a giraffe or an elephant?"
 
"A giraffe is more avant-garde, but an elephant is more surreal."
 

Why is there so much self-conscious artifice in postmodernist writing?

Because you can't escape it. Once Pirandello let everyone in on the secret, the temptation to interrupt the play and introduce the author was irresistible. The modernist epiphany is the characters' recognition that they are in the end merely characters in a play. The postmodernist epiphany is the playwright's determination to provide two mutually exclusive endings to the drama, as Ashbery does in his play "The Compromise" (1955). In a modernist universe, the traveler penetrates to the heart of darkness and tells a lie to keep the reality of that darkness from a person whose illusions he does not want to shatter. In a postmodernist universe, the traveler arrives in Marlon Brando's hut where the great man has been reading Borges. Artifice doesn't bother to disguise itself. In Ashbery's one-act play "The Heroes" (1950), Theseus explains that he had penetrated to the heart of the maze only to find that the fabled Minotaur he came to conquer was nothing but a rusted unambitious piece of stage-machinery.

What accounts for the popularity of the sestina in the postmodernist era?

It is an article of the postmodernist faith that language has a mind and a will of its own, an autonomous existence full of meaning and mystery. Unwilling to wait for lightning to strike, the poet manufactures inspiration by linguistic invention -- by playing with words rather than by trying to exercise mastery and control over them. Writing a sestina is an excellent example. You write a sestina for the same reason you try a Surrealist procedure (e.g., "Death: Male or Female" as an automatic-writing assignment). The object in each case is to discover what you know (or what you don't know that you know). A word game tricked out as a mathematical structure, or vice versa, the sestina consists of thirty-nine lines, distributed over six six-line stanzas and a final triplet; six words, occurring in a prescribed order, conclude all thirty-nine lines of the poem. The poet has to spend so much time solving the formal puzzle -- how to get the six end-words (or teleutons) to occur and recur in the exact order required -- that there is little time left to worry about the coherence of the imagery or the logic of the argument. The censorious ego, being otherwise occupied, steps aside and lets the poet's unconscious shoot directly onto the page. That is one important reason this medieval form is more popular in the English speaking world today than anywhere ever before.

In that case, how do you account for the popularity of the prose poem, which lacks line-breaks, let alone the complicated rules of composition in the sestina form?

The prose poem was born of rebellion. Charles Baudelaire, who created the genre, overthrew at a stroke the tyranny of the Alexandrine line, which was more dominant in France than blank verse ever was in England. Baudelaire's prose poems are energized by the subversive spirit of infernal laughter.

Charles Baudelaire, 1854, by Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon). [Rimbaud was born in 1854. J.T.]

For poets ever since, the prose poem has afforded an opportunity to perpetrate a dark joke. This alone would endear the prose poem to the postmodernist poet. There is a level of self-conscious irony in many recent American examples. "In order to free poetry of its mannerism and ticks, the prose poem must not take itself too seriously," writes Charles Simic, an exponent of the form. "Impossible to write, illegitimate in the view of so many poets and critics, it must remain a pariah and an object of ridicule to survive." ¶ [see endnote 5]

What makes laughter infernal?

Samuel Beckett in Watt explained that there are three distinctive types of laughter. There is the bitter laugh, the hollow laugh, and the mirthless laugh. The bitter laugh is the ethical laugh; it laughs at that which is not good. The hollow laugh is the intellectual laugh; it laughs at that which is not true. But the supreme laugh is the mirthless laugh, for it dares to laugh at that which is unhappy. Guess which of the three is the laugh of postmodernism.

Where will it end?

A postmodernist trick is to pull the rug out from under the reader. The speaker at the close of his presentation, sneaking a look at his wristwatch, smiles enigmatically and says, "What I've just said isn't true." I am tempted to do something like that. To say that postmodernism, so useful in giving academics something to talk about, is a fiction. To argue that we are not post-anything. We are, miserably or splendidly, ourselves, living now, living here. What I've been calling postmodernism is really an extension of modernism, not a repudiation of it. "Postmodernism is a misnomer," writes Janet Malcolm. "The architects and urban planners laboring under its rubric haven't abandoned modernism but have continued to work serenely in its idiom." You could make the same argument with regard to art and literature. It could be that nothing in postmodernism is new: all the tendencies of postmodernism were already there, if only embryonically, in modernism. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot, the high priest of modernism, introduced the techniques of collage and fragmentation so dear to postmodernism. Even the tendency to pull the rug out from under the reader goes back to modernist works by Henry James and Joseph Conrad in which a lie or a belated revelation throws everything into doubt.

Well, maybe. But when I look at my own enduring critical preoccupations -- my fascination with hoaxes and fragments, with hard-boiled murder mysteries and forties flicks, with parodies and paranoia, and most of all with the poets of the New York School and their painter pals -- I know they suggest so strong an affinity with the postmodernist spirit that to deny it as a potent force could only seem disingenuous. The real question, as I see it, is whether the aesthetic point of view embodied in postmodernism can coexist with the moral point of view that makes ethical behavior possible. Kiekegaard in Either / Or suggests that the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical is absolute -- one must decide between them. But good pre-postmodernist that he is, Kierkegaard cloaks himself behind no fewer than three pseudonyms in Either / Or, and it is entirely possible for a reader of that book to convert "either / or" into "both / and." I would like to think that the devices, the attitude and tone of postmodernism can be used -- and used with a vengeance -- for moral as well as aesthetic ends. Susan Sontag in her "Notes on Camp" said that the artistic temper of our century is composed of homosexual aestheticism and Jewish moral earnestness in concert. That is well said. It remains a challenge to bring these forces together in some way that preserves their individual functions and transcends them in the lasting form of art.