Contemporary Drift

Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present

Theodore Martin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231543897
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism

What does it mean to call something "contemporary"? More than simply denoting what's new, it speaks to how we come to know the present we're living in and how we develop a shared story about it. The story of trying to understand the present is an integral, yet often unnoticed, part of the literature and film of our moment. In Contemporary Drift, Theodore Martin argues that the contemporary is not just a historical period but also a conceptual problem, and he claims that contemporary genre fiction offers a much-needed resource for resolving that problem.

Contemporary Drift combines a theoretical focus on the challenge of conceptualizing the present with a historical account of contemporary literature and film. Emphasizing both the difficulty and the necessity of historicizing the contemporary, the book explores how recent works of fiction depict life in an age of global capitalism, postindustrialism, and climate change. Through new histories of the novel of manners, film noir, the Western, detective fiction, and the postapocalyptic novel, Martin shows how the problem of the contemporary preoccupies a wide range of novelists and filmmakers, including Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Vikram Chandra, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt, and the Coen brothers. Martin argues that genre provides these artists with a formal strategy for understanding both the content and the concept of the contemporary. Genre writing, with its mix of old and new, brings to light the complicated process by which we make sense of our present and determine what belongs to our time.

Chapter One

DECADE

Period Pieces

A day, a year once seemed useful gauges.

Fernand Braudel

He’s helping define the decade, baby.

Bret Easton Ellis

HOW TO NOT NOT PERIODIZE

Time will tell. History will judge. These chestnuts of conventional wisdom convey the simple and seemingly uncontroversial point that we cannot periodize our own present. To name the essence of our age, to define the contours of the current period, requires a kind of historical distance that is constitutively unavailable to those living in the midst of it. The difficulty of comprehending and historicizing the chaos of contemporary life is why, in Fredric Jameson’s view, “the present is not yet a historical period: it ought not to be able to name itself and characterize its own originality.”1 Almost but not quite a period, the present casts into sharp relief what critics have variously labeled the “unfashionable,” “unsophisticated,” “paranoid,” “imperfect,” and “intolerable” practice of periodization.2 Yet if the present marks the outer limit of what we consider periodizable, it also testifies to what Virginia Jackson calls our continued “fascination with and attachment to the subject” of periodization itself.3 This ambivalent fascination means that periodization always reasserts itself, even in the case of a historical object like the contemporary that, strictly speaking, isn’t yet historical. Despite the paradoxes of historical self-reflection, we can’t quite give up on the possibility of periodizing the present. In this way, the contemporary period may be the quintessential example of Jameson’s famous maxim in A Singular Modernity: “We cannot not periodize.”4 As I argue in this chapter, Jameson’s double-negative provides a particularly useful grammar for talking about contemporary history. While it may be impossible to definitively periodize the contemporary, it is also impossible not to try.

And try we have. No shortage of periodizing frameworks—from post-1989 to post-9/11, from the end of the American Century to the end of history—have been set forth to sum up the life of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But one term in particular offers an especially illuminating case study in the complicated relation between periodization and the present. That term is postmodernism, one of the most discussed, discredited, and unavoidable periodizing terms of the past half century. Only now, some fifty years after it first entered academic usage, is there something of a consensus about the usefulness (if not the exact meaning) of the term. Recent journal issues dedicated to defining “Postmodernism, Then” and to describing what comes “After Postmodernism” express a newfound confidence in the word’s descriptive efficacy.5 This development is hardly surprising: whatever postmodernism was, it is now a thing of the past and thus an object that can be brought into historical focus. Time, indeed, is now in a position to tell.

The maturation of postmodernism into an object of historicist inquiry should not let us forget the more complex relation to historicity that was built into the concept from the beginning. What made postmodernism unique was that, in Brian McHale’s words, “postmodernism periodized itself.”6 From the start, it understood itself to be a period. But the project of self-periodizing turned out to be exceedingly difficult, weighed down by ambivalence and equivocation and wracked with worry over whether such a project was even possible. In many ways, it seemed not to be. In The Origins of Postmodernity, Perry Anderson reminds us that on the topic of postmodernism, “there was no consensus, only a set of oppositions … only disconnected interests and criss-crossing opinions.”7 This basic lack of “consensus” became the subtext of almost every theory of the postmodern. The essence of postmodernism as a periodizing framework was that it never seemed entirely adequate to the task of periodization. Of the countless books published on postmodernism, a surprising number begin with the embarrassed confession of this inadequacy. “It is almost standard practice for introductions to postmodernism to begin with the rather paradoxical assertion that postmodernism is impossible to introduce satisfactorily,” notes one standard introduction.8 “Postmodernism is an exasperating term,” laments another.9 A third book begins: “The concept of postmodernism … has come to suffer from semantic fuzziness. One cannot abstain from using the concept, but at the same time one does not know how to define it precisely.”10 Even the work that most famously bears its name harbors a surprisingly ambivalent attitude toward the word postmodernism. In the introduction to Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson justifies his choice of the term: “As for postmodernism itself, I have not tried to systematize a usage or to impose any conveniently thumbnail meaning, for the concept is not merely contested, it is also internally conflicted and contradictory. I will argue that, for good or ill, we cannot not use it.”11 This is less than a ringing endorsement. Even Jameson, it seems, recognized the double logic (or illogic) of the postmodern, seeing it as fuzzy and exasperating, “conflicted and contradictory,” but nevertheless as a term he had no choice but to continue to use. It is as if in his attempt to periodize the present, Jameson chose not the word that would most accurately describe our historical moment but the one that would most distinctly capture the challenge of producing that historical description. To be sure, there is certainly something frustrating about all the dodges and disavowals that underwrite the discourse of postmodernism. Yet there may also be something familiar in them. We have seen this self-canceling formula before. Postmodernism, it turns out, is exactly what it looks like to not not periodize the present.

The problem of periodizing the present could thus be said to be a knot tied between two “nots.” The paradox of not not periodizing remains audible, for instance, in the record-skip of what Jeffrey T. Nealon has more recently dubbed (in his book of the same name) Post-Postmodernism. Why did he choose this unwieldy word, which Nealon himself admits is “nonsensically redundant”?12 Because this redundancy is part of the concept itself. Post-postmodernism, Nealon tells us, is “not necessarily something ‘new’ ”; it is an attempt to “intensify, highlight, and redeploy” postmodernism, not to redefine or replace it. In other words, the author of Post-Postmodernism is hesitant to define the present as a completely novel period. The hesitation of the “post-post” (the announcement of a new that is “not necessarily” different from the old) essentially doubles down on the double negative, refusing to decide between novelty and continuity, rupture and repetition. The unavoidable sense of dissatisfaction that shadowed the periodizing discourse of postmodernism is further intensified by post-postmodernism, a term that Nealon claims he chose only “for lack of a better word.”13 The deeper lesson here, though, is that there are no better words for periodizing the present. We should never take an “epoch at its word,” Marx wrote.14 A term like post-postmodernism takes this caution to heart, confirming in advance its future negation in the form of its own nagging sense of self-doubt. Post-postmodernism says: Do not take this period at its word. In this way, it continues to record the history of the present in the syntax of the double negative, turning periodization into an attempt at self-definition that is indistinguishable from an act of disavowal.15

The limits (as well as limitations) revealed by these various attempts to periodize the present go a good way toward explaining what is so vexing about the term contemporary. As postmodernism has become both historical and historicizable, the problem of self-periodizing has not gone away; it has just been transferred onto the problem of the contemporary. In his introduction to the special issue “After Postmodernism,” Andrew Hoberek demonstrates how increased certainty about what postmodernism was goes hand in hand with increased uncertainty about what contemporary literature is now: “If contemporary fiction is indeed post-postmodern, this does not exemplify some singular, dramatic, readily visible cultural transformation—the search for which in fact constitutes a postmodern preoccupation—but grows out of a range of uneven, tentative, local shifts.”16 Hoberek’s insistence on the “uneven,” the “tentative,” and the “local” is an attempt to refuse the “singular, dramatic” work of periodization (here, too, “post-postmodern” appears as the name not for some major historical “transformation” but for the hesitation to characterize the present period in historically transformative terms). The problem of periodization thus becomes both bound up with and named by the contemporary. The contemporary is nearly, but not yet, a historical period. Perhaps our only choice is to put the contemporary in the double negative: to understand it as a not not historical period.

The argument of this chapter is that being not not historical takes a particular form in contemporary writing: the form of the decade. As the cultural historian Steven Biel has argued, the decade is a “standard feature of popular historical understanding.”17 It is also a form of historical understanding that may have a special relationship to the contemporary. Indeed, the truncated form of the decade seems to have become a preferred framework for imagining our present as a period.18 Jameson, for one, sees something historically specific in the “caricature of historical thinking” that was emblematized in the late-century prominence of the decade, the widespread need “to return upon our present circumstances in order to think of them—as the nineties, say—and to draw the appropriate marketing and forecasting conclusions.”19 Ironically, it was Jameson himself who brought the study of the decade back to scholarly respectability with his influential 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s.” Even though “Periodizing the 60s” includes some of Jameson’s earliest and most important ideas about periodization, it does not, oddly, say anything at all about its own choice of the periodizing category of the decade—an oversight that suggests just how “deeply ingrained in the historical consciousness of Americans” (in Biel’s words) the decade is.20 The ingrained importance of the decade is now nowhere more apparent than in academic studies of contemporary culture. Phillip Wegner’s Life Between Two Deaths: American Culture in the Long Nineties; Samuel Cohen’s After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s; Jay Prosser’s edited volume American Fiction of the 1990s; Leigh Claire La Berge’s Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s; Adam Kelly’s American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism; Jeremy Green’s Late Postmodernism (whose title “refers,” according to Green, “to the writing of the 1990s”); and Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism (which begins with an attempt to “ ‘periodize’ the ’80s”) all examine recent literature and culture through the rubric of the decade.21 This suggests that there is something about the form of the decade that makes it a particularly seductive way to respond to the question of the contemporary.

All these works of criticism share another notable feature: their decades never last just ten years. What Wegner calls the “long nineties” runs from 1989 to 2001; Nealon’s 1980s stretch from the 1970s to the 2000s; and La Berge’s history of financialization in the “Long 1980s” is one that begins “in the late 1970s” and “whose effects continue into the present.”22 In each of these cases, the arbitrariness of the decade as historical measure (why sets of ten?) becomes the alibi for its elasticity. Put simply, we use decades to talk about slices of time that aren’t decades. Usually these intervals last for more than ten years; often they seem to last right up until the present moment. The decade thus mirrors the ambivalent state of being not not historical: the strange status of something that is almost but not exactly a period. If the decade offers a conveniently arbitrary way to frame or delimit the present, the flexibility of that frame reasserts the problems of temporal flux and historical unboundedness that make the present so difficult to periodize. The numerically predictable boundaries of the decade at once suppress and expose the mutable form of the present. This is how the decade—arbitrary, pliable, ironic—perfectly captures the contemporary’s dialectical syntax of periodization.

Not confined to works of literary criticism, the problem of periodizing the contemporary also has its own literary history. The aesthetic struggle to frame the reality of social life as it flows through the present is the literary project known as realism. In The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan explains how the realist novel attempts to “produce a social reality that can be recognized as ‘the way things are,’ ” even though “the way things are” is never how they’ll be for long. As Kaplan suggests, realism is a genre under constant threat by “the sense of the world changing under the realists’ pens.”23 Realism does not so much contain the threat as expose it, demonstrating the tension between writing the present and watching it pass away. In this way, the genre of realism offers both a depiction of living history and a depiction of the difficulty of trying to depict history as it flows past us. In his seminal Mimesis, Erich Auerbach develops a similar account of the relation between the realist novel and the problem of the present. The key to understanding Honoré de Balzac’s distinctive place in the history of modern realism, according to Auerbach, is that “he conceives the present as history.”24 Balzac’s “histoire du coeur humain or histoire sociale is not a matter of ‘history’ in the usual sense— … is not, above all, a matter of the past but of the contemporary present, reaching back at most only a few years or a few decades.” For Auerbach, realism’s unusual notion of the historical present cuts two ways. While one of the “distinguishing characteristics of modern realism” is that “everyday occurrences are accurately and profoundly set in a definite period of contemporary history,” the very idea of the contemporary as a “period” becomes troubled and possibly untenable. That’s because in the realist novel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theses on the Concept of the Contemporary
• 1. Decade: Period Pieces
• 2. Revival: Situating Noir
• 3. Waiting: Mysterious Circumstances
• 4. Weather: Western Climes
• 5. Survival: Work and Plague
• Conclusion: How to Historicize the Present
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index