Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists

American Fiction after Postmodernism

Robert Rebein

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813192345, 9780813121765
• eBook ISBN: 9780813184593
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Robert Rebein argues that much literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s represents a triumphant, if tortured, return to questions about place and the individual that inspired the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other giants of American literature. Concentrating on the realist bent and regional orientation in contemporary fiction, he discusses in detail the various names by which this fiction has been described, including literary postmodernism, minimalism, Hick Chic, Dirty Realism, ecofeminism, and more. Rebein's clearly written, nuanced interpretations of works by Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Dorothy Allison, Barbara Kingsolver, E. Annie Proulx, Chris Offut, and others, will appeal to a wide range of readers.

1 / After Postmodernism

Studies of twentieth-century American fiction published before 1985—and even some published after that date—share a certain beautiful symmetry, a sort of pristine academic logic that is as pleasing to the eye as it is compelling to the intellect. In the early decades of the century, so the story goes, fiction writing in America came roaring out of the backwaters of nineteenth-century naturalism and into a revolutionary period of modernism and experimentation that was symbolized, in painting, by the New York Armory show of 1919. In the years immediately following World War I, American modernism flowered in the works of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, expatriate Americans well versed in European forms. In the 1930s, admittedly a period dominated by works of social realism, the modernist banner was nevertheless carried forward by the “Camera’s Eye” section of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, the isolated formal experiments of southern writers such as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, and the surrealism of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and others. The 1940s and 1950s saw the rise of an existential movement dominated by Jewish writers who, more than anyone else in America except blacks and a few unreconstructed southerners, understood the alienation that more and more characterized life in the United States. The two great writers of this period were Saul Bellow, whose 1944 novel Dangling Man brought postwar angst to the literary mainstream, and Ralph Ellison, whose 1952 novel Invisible Man made use of a mixture of naturalism, expressionism, and surrealism to powerfully depict the plight of the black man in America. From here, it was but a hop and skip to the next “evolutionary” stage, which was marked by a progression from the tentative modernism of the first five decades of the century to the “postmodern” masterpieces of the 1960s and 1970s, those self-reflexive, end-of-the-line works of fantasy and fabulation most powerfully represented in the “fictions” of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, and Thomas Pynchon. These were the Last Writers. Anything after or beyond postmodernism was by definition impossible—as difficult to imagine as an end to the cold war.

This, at any rate, is the story I was told in English departments in both the United States and England throughout the 1980s and even into the early 1990s. Whatever else may have been going on in publishing, in the rapidly expanding creative writing programs, in the literary magazines, or in the review pages of newspapers and magazines, in academe postmodernism still held sway—this despite the fact that by the late seventies even Robert Scholes, author of the largely celebratory Fabulation and Metafiction (1979), considered “self-reflection in fiction” to be “essentially a short-term trend . . . nearing its end.”¹

Stranger still was the fact that so many critics and scholars who publicly supported literary postmodernism would readily confess, when asked in private, to little or no joy in reading the books themselves. As Charles Newman observed in The Post-Modern Aura (1985), books such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) or Coover’s Public Burning (1977) were capable of creating a power feeling of ambivalence in readers, an ambivalence Newman described well when he wrote, “As the plot progresses, we come to notice that it’s as good as it’s going to get; and so for the first time in the history of literature we respond with a version of: ‘It’s terrific. But I wish it were over.’”²

Tremors of dissatisfaction with literary postmodernism could be felt in even the most thoroughgoing apologies for the new fiction. For example, Frederick Karl’s monumental American Fictions, 1940–1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation (1983), which pushes the postmodernism-as-destiny story line harder (and at greater length) than perhaps any other literary history of the period, contains strained and awkward confessions such as the following: “Literature in the modern or postmodern period is often inaccessible or even disagreeable—as were Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ in 1922—but it has a shaping vision that goes beyond the novel of the ‘now.’ We must once more make that leap, as though it had not been made before.”³

For Karl, although many works of literary postmodernism are “disagreeable” (and many more are not “experimental” at all but in fact repetitions of once-startling maneuvers reduced now to tired mannerism), the responsible critic must still praise these works because of their “shaping vision.” Exactly what this “vision,” so dearly bought, might be is notoriously difficult to define, but that it is of little immediate consequence becomes clear once we see the diminished role Karl assigns writers (“fiction-makers”) in the fallen, postmodern world. For Karl, the postmodern writer is neither a prophet, a voice for the multitude, nor even much of an artist. Instead, the writer is a “trickster,” a “coyote” whose ultimate goal is to survive in a world that has superseded him. “The novelist survives, of course,” Karl writes,

but like the coyote, he must work along the contours of different frontiers; he must approach borders differently, and he must be prepared to accept his lesser role in white man’s America. The magic has gone out, not only from his world but from the world; and it has passed elsewhere or been extinguished. What the novelist needs, now, is not only a vision but strategies for holding on; for he/she still embodies the crises, conflicts, and tensions which we associate with a culture—although precisely what the culture embodies has become a part of America’s fictions. (xiv)

No longer does the novelist hold center stage in the culture (if, indeed, he ever did). Literature itself is threatened with extinction, its meaning having fled or been sucked into the great void of the media age. In this fallen world, the writer is a kind of glorious victim, Christ minus the miracle of resurrection, a cosmic joker in the land of nada. The writer does not interpret, does not represent, does not dramatize nor even reveal the crises and conflicts in American culture—for these are all active constructions. Instead, the writer “embodies” these crises and conflicts and tensions, much as Bartelby in the Melville story embodies the tensions in his culture (that is to say, passively). Karl means to invoke here both Jung’s “Trickster Figure” and a similar presence in Native American myth, showing thereby how the death of modernism after World War II left a world that can only be haunted, not saved. Hence his conclusion: “To negotiate as ghosts in the shadow—not as saviors—is the function of the novelist, the one-time shaman now turned trickster” (xiv). And yet, there remains the central irony of Karl’s argument, which is that this Last Writer, so impotent and passive, is at once the culmination and the antithesis of an entire tradition. Hubris and abjection are so mixed here as to become finally inseparable. As Charles Newman observed in The Post-Modern Aura, “It is typical of Post-Modernism to inflate the riskiness of the literary impulse in exact proportion to literature’s diminishing influence” (82).

By the early 1980s, when Frederick Karl wrote the above sentiments, one had become accustomed to such melodramatic descriptions of the author’s reduced state. Indeed, one often heard them from the mouths of writers themselves. There was Philip Roth’s famous midcentury complaint, in the essay “Writing American Fiction” (1961), that American reality as represented in the media had become so bizarre, so protean and huge as to constitute “a kind of embarrassment” to the writer’s, by comparison, “meager” imaginative gifts. “The actuality,” Roth wrote, “is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”⁴ More famous still was John Barth’s lament in “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) that the techniques and forms used by fiction writers are somehow subject to becoming “used-up.” At a certain point in the development of any art form, Barth implied, it becomes depressingly clear to the artist, at least with respect to technique, that it has all been done before. “Our century is more than two-thirds done,” Barth wrote, striking the typical desperate note of this period; “it is dismaying to see so many of our writers following Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Balzac, when the question seems to me to be how to succeed not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who succeeded Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers.”⁵

Taken at face value, Roth’s despair about content and Barth’s about form would seem to justify all that Frederick Karl has to say about the American writer’s loss of faith and cultural authority in the late twentieth century. Against such statements, however, we must pause to add a few observations from our own time. In fact, far from having become paralyzed by the situation he described in 1961, Roth has gone on to write novel after novel—not least 1997’s American Pastoral, a book that treats the 1960s in the context of all that has happened since. In recent years John Barth has also adjusted his tune, distancing himself from his former statements. Collecting “The Literature of Exhaustion” in The Friday Book (1984), Barth paused long enough to add this “Author’s Note” to the above statement about Kafka and Joyce: “Did I really say this remarkably silly thing back in ’67? Yup, and I believed it, too” (67). According to Barth, such “silliness” was attributable to a certain “Make-It-New” spirit that operated as the bright side of the “American High Sixties”—about which, more later—the dark side being summed up by what Barth called, ominously, “traces of tear gas” (63–64).

To be sure, there is something of a Sputnik-era, arms-race lunacy about both Roth’s and Barth’s statements. In retrospect, they say a lot more about the cultural and political climate of the American 1960s than they do about either the nature of “American reality” or the “usability” of inherited forms. And it is in the above context of doubt and upheaval that Frederick Karl’s assessments in American Fictions, 1940–1980 make the most sense. When we read, for example, that in Karl’s view “the postwar novel has striven for precisely this achievement: to defamiliarize the familiar, to make the reader reinvent the world, and while moving human experience to the margins, to move the margins to the center” (xi), we glimpse some of the diversity of experience represented in today’s American novel while at the same time recognizing that the tendency to understand literary achievement so strictly in terms of form (at the ultimate expense of content) is not nearly so urgent today as it was even ten years ago. Indeed, how strange today to read the following, from Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Against Interpretation”: “Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.”⁶

We may also recognize a practice many of us indulge in when thinking about our literary history—our tendency to read backward from the present, starting with whatever is lately in ascendancy and interpreting all that came before it as a movement toward that ascendancy. If, to take an example, Henry James’s brand of psychological realism is currently important, then earlier writers in the tradition such as Hawthorne and Charles Brockden Brown increase in importance, too. If Ernest Hemingway sits atop the throne of American literature, however, we had better look to frontier writers like Mark Twain or pared-down stylists like Kate Chopin. In the case of Faulkner, Poe. In the case of Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner . . .

But I have jumped ahead of myself here. If the present moment is 1980, as is the case in Frederick Karl’s assessment, and literary postmodernism is—if no longer new or even very interesting, at least a sort of reigning lame duck—then our tendency will be to read all that came before postmodernism in light of its peculiar strategies and concerns. The progression we come up with, not surprisingly, is Karl’s beautifully symmetrical realism ‘modernism ‘postmodernism. The problem, of course, is that by the early 1980s such a model no longer described what was actually happening in contemporary American fiction (if, indeed, it ever did).

Perhaps no critic in America understood this better than Larry McCaffery, author of The Metafictional Muse (1982), a work that celebrates the “self-reflexive,” “metafictional” narrative strategies of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. From 1978 to 1980, when he was working on The Metafictional Muse, McCaffery was also traveling around the United States conducting formal interviews and “late-night discussions” with writers of the day. It isn’t hard to imagine what McCaffery, long known for his vocal support of experimental fiction, hoped to hear in these interviews. What he actually heard was another matter altogether. “The most important conclusion I’ve reached,” McCaffery would write of those interviews, “is that experimentation per se—especially experimentalism in the direction of reflexive, nonreferential works—is not nearly as important to writers today [i.e., in 1980] as it was a decade ago.” The reasons for this shift, as McCaffery points out, are not difficult to understand:

[S]o-called artistic revolutions have a natural life span, and they are inevitably succeeded by a new artistic climate generated by practitioners who do not share the enthusiasms of a previous group and who are anxious to define themselves as artists in new ways. Then, too, the energy and hard work of any significant creative movement will eventually produce, in the course of its development, works of surpassing and even intimidating success. Finally, a sense develops among the artists who have defined themselves as part of a movement that most of its possibilities have been explored.⁷

We should add to these reasons a few others. The fact is, literary postmodernism, especially of the sort practiced by the subjects of McCaffery’s book, appealed to far fewer writers, readers, and critics than what one would guess from reading Robert Scholes or Larry McCaffery. From the beginning, its primary home was the university, a status that explains not only why metafiction in particular was often said to be fiction “of the academy, by the academy, and for the academy” but also why so many academics who clearly found it “disagreeable” felt called upon to support and defend it (there were other reasons, of course, as I will make clear in a moment). Outside the English departments—and, indeed, even in “antithetical cells” within them, such as the creative writing programs—literary postmodernism was often seen as either ridiculous in its assumptions (all magic has fled from the world, it’s all been done before, etc.) or simply too limiting in its strictures. Women writers, especially, seemed far less drawn to it than men, and a similar observation (with appropriate footnotes) would have to be made about minority writers, who simply could not say, along with the mostly white, eastern males of postmodernism, that their world had been represented to death. On the contrary, it had been represented hardly at all.

And yet, for all that, the narrative of realism giving way to modernism giving way to postmodernism continues to provide the primary lens through which contemporary American fiction is viewed in the university, this even as the works of those writers most identified with literary postmodernism—Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Gass, and Pynchon—find fewer and fewer readers. The only real change has been a broadening of the notion of what constitutes literary postmodernism. As the editors of a recent anthology, Postmodern American Fiction (1998), put the matter, “The history of postmodern American fiction belongs to those authors who, in any idiom and for any audience, for brief passages or for entire careers, shared a new cultural sensibility as a response to an altered world.”⁸ As becomes evident when one flips through the book’s table of contents, such a broad definition allows the anthology’s editors to include a host of writers we would not normally associate with literary postmodernism—Truman Capote, Bobbie Ann Mason, Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, to name a few—while at the same time ensuring that pride of place is reserved for the usual suspects (Gass, Pynchon, et al.).

What could possibly account for such a bizarre state of affairs—one in which the books one constantly hears praised go largely unread because of their apparent barrenness and willful difficulty, while the books that might be said to come after postmodernism, many of them masterpieces, go largely unrecognized because of their relative accessibility and ties to a native tradition that predates postmodernism? The answer to this question turns out to be relatively simple, if somewhat difficult to explain, and it has to do with several likely responses to the seeming paradox I have just put in italics—after postmodernism.

For what could possibly come “after” postmodernism? Does not postmodernism itself connote a kind of finality, “the end of things”—not least of which would be the end of innocence with regard to language and mimesis? Does not the term refer to a period of time we are still, demonstrably, in? And anyway, doesn’t a denial of the dominion of postmodernism amount to a de facto admission of artistic and cultural conservatism? Are we not speaking here of a kind of regression, aesthetically speaking?

As I have intimated, the climate that gives rise to these questions is one of much fear and confusion and not a little willful blindness as regards what has actually been taking place in American fiction writing in the last two decades of the millennium. In the pages that immediately follow, I want to take up these questions more or less one by one (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. After Postmodernism
• 2. Minimalism and Its Discontents
• 3. Dirty Realism
• 4. Hick Chic, or, the “White Trash Aesthetic”
• 5. Return of the Native
• 6. New West, or, the Borderlands
• 7. Tribes and Breeds, Coyotes and Curanderas
• 8. The White Prison Novel as Bildungsroman
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index