On Endings

American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Daniel Grausam

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780813931661
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What does narrative look like when the possibility of an expansive future has been called into question? This query is the driving force behind Daniel Grausam's On Endings, which seeks to show how the core texts of American postmodernism are a response to the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and especially to the new potential for total nuclear conflict. Postwar American fiction needs to be rethought, he argues, by highlighting postmodern experimentation as a mode of profound historical consciousness.

In Grausam's view, previous studies of fiction mimetically concerned with nuclear conflict neither engage the problems that total war might pose to narration nor take seriously the paradox of a war that narrative can never actually describe. Those few critical works that do take seriously such problems do not offer a broad account of American postmodernism. And recent work on postmodernism has offered no comprehensive historical account of the part played by nuclear weapons in the emergence of new forms of temporal and historical experience. On Endings significantly extends the project of historicizing postmodernism while returning the nuclear to a central place in the study of the Cold War.

1 / Institutionalizing Postmodernism: John Barth and Modern War

Holding distinctly antagonistic visions of the nature of fiction during the different phases of his career, John Barth exemplifies the metafictional turn in American writing during the 1960s, and provides a perfect case study for understanding some of the social and political pressures that contributed to the emergence of this new aesthetic. Furthermore, Barth was the great institutionalizer of metafiction both within the American university (first at Buffalo, and then at Johns Hopkins) and for a larger reading audience, providing a public face—in lectures, journalism, and reviews—for what we would come to call the postmodern canon.¹ Yet, while Barth came to define a moment and a method, his critical statements have perhaps obscured some of the most interesting features of his fiction: his copious nonfiction has given his critics little room to maneuver with his novels and stories because it exhaustively explained and defended his work in ways that made contextual and referential readings difficult (even perverse); his reputation, as Amy Hungerford has noted, has suffered as a result, since in highlighting his own “creative” exploration of novelistic form he implicitly—and in some cases explicitly—downplayed the importance and achievement of writers committed to representing the social world.² It is the contention of this chapter, however, that we should understand Barth’s career, and the larger question of the emergence of metafiction, in the light of the Cold War: that we can, in fact, read the history back into a movement that seemed—through spokespeople like Barth—to flaunt its purely formal and linguistic interests. As we shall see, even Barth himself came retrospectively to realize how problematic some of his statements from the 1960s and 1970s can look.

Before he became the unofficial public advocate of postmodern fiction, Barth was the author of more traditional “serious” novels in the 1950s, and it is essential to return to this “apprentice” work if we seek to historicize the turn to metafiction. Self-conscious narratives though these early novels are, they are hardly the elaborate imaginative exercises that have come to define Barth as an exemplary metafictionist. The Floating Opera (1956), Barth’s first novel, is heavily influenced by the existential mood of the 1950s, and I want to show in this chapter how highlighting the relationship it posits between finitude and literary form makes it possible to historicize and politicize Barth’s more playful later fiction. Barth is interested in periodizing the twentieth century in relation to global conflict, and his early work reveals the links between history and narrative self-consciousness in ways that help to indicate the Cold War content of his later metafictional forms.

In a political reading of Barth’s later Sabbatical, Allan Hepburn notes that “most critics read Barth’s fiction for its formal high jinks at the expense of reading its political subtexts”;³ and this tendency has had especially pronounced effects on how the early fiction is understood. Barth’s first two novels—The Floating Opera and The End of the Road (1958)—tend to get isolated as early efforts of interest only to the extent that they anticipate formally the later novels usually considered Barth’s most distinctive and distinguished work (and even this is debatable; for some critics and reviewers they are simply apprentice pieces, not even worthy of such qualified interest). In his recovery of the social vision of the early novels, Thomas Hill Schaub suggests that the dominant critical trend has been to read Barth backward, and in so doing erase the political even in those novels that retain or display a commitment to relatively straightforward reference: “In fact, since the publication of the experimental stories in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Chimera (1972), critics have tended to read Barth’s first novels entirely outside of or disentangled from their social and historical moment, and find in them the origins of his later ‘metafiction’ and postmodern experimentation.”⁴ Schaub presents two options: either we read the early texts as the origin of the later metafiction, or we read them inside their social and historical moment; a third possibility, though, would be to combine the two, reading them within their historical moment in order to find in that historical moment the origins of Barth’s move to metafiction.⁵ In so doing, I engage what I take to be the implicit claim made in Schaub’s account of the critical history: that readings of the early texts through the perspective offered by the metafictional “achievements” of the later ones erase the political precisely because those later texts don’t seem to have a political or social point; the early novels “produce” the later ones in that they prefigure the interest in pure fiction-making, displaying in miniature some of the features of Barth’s later work even though they seem on the surface to be largely realist texts. At the risk of sounding perverse, I would entirely reverse Schaub’s equation: by understanding the metafictional qualities of the early novels—especially the ways in which they link history and fiction—and in seeing how they anticipate the later work, we can begin to see the political vision at the heart of the more explicitly metafictional novels. Only by seeing the metafictional impulses in his more realistic work can we see the burden of history in Barth’s metafictions.

On with the Story

Part of the problem is that Barth has been so forcefully schematic in establishing binaries that divide his early fiction from his later work, realism from metafiction, and politics from art. Perhaps the most programmatic example of this tendency is his famous essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” in which Barth argued for the refashioning of fiction as the only way to replenish the depleted form of the novel. But even a reader familiar only with Barth’s fictional works would be aware of Barth’s own account of his career during the 1960s. For instance, the 1967 preface to the revised and combined edition—revised to restore them to their original darker endings, after Giles Goat-Boy had established Barth as the foremost “fabulator” of his generation—of The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, gives us a ready-made template for understanding Barth: “Is your muse the lady with the grin or the one with the grimace? Are you a realist or a fantast? Ought you to make your art for its own sake or engage it in the service of some lofty cause? Are you more interested in the thing said than in its saying (the Windex approach to language) or vice-versa (the stained-glass approach)?”⁶ Barth goes on in his foreword to suggest that his early works come down on one side of this divide and his later on the other, and his other critical writings from the mid-1960s only confirm this metafictionist conversion narrative. In his “Muse, Spare Me” (1965), for instance, Barth announces that he has now entered a new phase: “In any case, the image I’m lately fonder of—the aptest, sweetest, hauntingest, hopefullest I know for the storyteller—is Scheherazade.”⁷ Crucially this version of Scheherazade ignores the fact that her storytelling is primarily a way to ward off her own death, and those of her women compatriots, at the hands of a tyrant king: what Barth values in the Arabian Nights (even though he is clearly aware of the frame tale) is the purely artistic rather than the social or political meaning of aesthetic production: “But I say, Muse, spare me (at the desk, I mean) from social-historical responsibility, and in the last analysis from every other kind as well, except artistic.”⁸

When read according to Barth’s insistent prompts from the 1960s, it is quite easy to ignore the tensions in the 1987 preface to Barth’s extraordinarily playful Giles Goat-Boy (1966), a novel that Barth designated the first of his fully fabulatory projects. This is how he narrates his revolution/conversion: “By 1960 I had completed what I regarded as a loose trilogy of novels—The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, and The Sot-Weed Factor—and I felt, particularly in course of writing that extravagant third item, that I had put something behind me and moved into new narrative country. Just what that movement was, I couldn’t quite have said; today it might be described as the passage made by a number of American writers from the Black Humor of the Fifties to the Fabulism of the Sixties.” This story of an escape from parodic reference into “fabulism” accompanies, however, Barth’s interest in the most pressing features of contemporary experience, since Giles Goat-Boy is so obviously an allegory of the Cold War. Even as Barth seemed to be disavowing the “Windex” approach to language, he was producing the novel that most directly engaged the history of its present. Indeed, alongside his much longer accounts of the aesthetic and personal origins of the novel, Barth offered the following in his new 1987 introduction, where, if only in retrospect, his plea to his muse seems somewhat more complicated than the earlier disavowal of social responsibility in favor of aesthetic bliss: “At the end of ‘the Fifties’ the Cold War was chilly indeed: Both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. by then had operational hydrogen bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines. The successful Sputnik launch of 1957 had triggered both the ‘space race’ and an epidemic of academic gigantism in the U.S.: a massive effort to ‘catch up,’ fueled by an inpouring of federal money that would fertilize the groves of Academe right through the Sixties. And the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—another reasonable benchmark for the change of decades—had brought home to many, as the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons had not, the specter of apocalypse.”⁹ Paradoxically, the rejection of topical reference accompanies a deep interest in it. These passages from Barth’s 1987 preface imagine two paradigm shifts—one is aesthetic, the other military—separating Giles Goat-Boy from Barth’s earlier novels. In what follows I explicate the relationship between these two shifts.

“More Than a Little Overwrought, and Too-Clever by Half”

The massive influence of Barth’s own critical statements from the 1960s about the primacy of aesthetic production for its own sake can be felt in the extraordinary critical obliviousness to the central conceit of Giles Goat-Boy: that it is an unmistakable, albeit comedic, allegorical portrayal of the Cold War.¹⁰ George Giles, who has been raised as a goat by a disgraced, and now pacifist former weapons scientist named Max Spielman (a Robert Oppenheimer clone) comes to learn that he is human, and quite possibly the child of WESCAC, the massive computer system that keeps in operation the west campus of a university that stands in for the universe. Giles understands that in a world where no one can graduate anymore (that is, no one can move on to a new future, or even really escape campus), he must end the border dispute between west and east campus fueling the post–Campus Riot II era of “Quiet Riot,” and prevent the computers that now run the campus/world from EATing (annihilating) everyone. Many key 1960s American politicians and defense intellectuals are represented in the text; an electric boundary fence between campuses mimics the Berlin Wall; and proxy wars and spheres of influence are represented when New Tammany College (the America of west campus) worries about the reactions of T’ang College (Asia) and Frumentia College (Africa).

However, critics have represented this aspect of the novel as at best incidental, or subservient to the “real” point of the book. The historical allusion is “quite superficial,” Robert Scholes wrote in 1967: “It functions merely to remind us that this is not a literal transcript of Reality.”¹¹ Thus Scholes transforms the novel’s referential content into a kind of radical antireferentiality: the historical allegory works, in his account, to remind us that this isn’t in fact history—an odd argument in itself, and strikingly odd in view of the elaborate lengths to which Barth goes in order to establish and maintain that Cold War allegory over the course of the novel. Readings of the novel have conventionally emphasized its use of archetypes of the hero and the quest narrative; somewhat inevitably these also tend to treat the allegorized 1960s setting as irrelevant.¹²

To point out that the novel allegorizes its immediate present is not to minimize its exuberant fabulation: The central character thinks he is a goat, after all; the novel is built on the exorbitant conceit of a university as the universe; and the novel is encountered through an elaborate series of prefaces that call into question the authorship and ontological status of the text we are about to read. In short, the novel is a textbook example of what Brian McHale has called the “dominant” of the postmodern, namely the ontological questions raised by a novel that actively asks us to consider its own status as text. And reading the novel alongside Barth’s contemporary nonfiction, it is certainly tempting to follow Scholes in seeing the real-world content of the novel as beside the point. But what if we take Barth’s 1987 preface seriously? What if literary transformations are, as Barth came to suspect, related to military ones?

In a new (1984) preface to that old classic “The Literature of Exhaustion” in The Friday Book, Barth wrote that he could now smell the tear gas of campus unrest in the margins of the essay. This acknowledgment clearly anticipates the 1987 preface to Giles Goat-Boy, where he linked the intensification of the Cold War, and especially the arrival of new weapon delivery systems with another way of seeing the division between his early and later work. I’ve quoted Barth’s “Muse, Spare Me” already, but it is worth returning to this 1965 essay, because his revisions to it reveal a growing self-consciousness about the historicity of metafiction. Barth had been commissioned to write a short piece on the black humorists of the 1950s and 1960s, and he began by condescendingly distancing himself from their interest in contemporary life: “I beseech the Muse to keep me from ever becoming a Black Humorist. Mind, I don’t object to Black Humorists, in their place; but to be numbered with them inspires me to a kind of spiritual White Backlash. For one thing, they are in their way responsible, like more conventional social satirists: They dramatize—and good for them!—the Madness of Contemporary Society, of Modern Warfare, of Life With the Bomb, of What We Have Nowadays. . . . I’m not impressed by the apocalyptic character of the present age.”¹³ When Barth returned to the essay in The Friday Book nineteen years later, it was with embarrassment: “For the posturing in my first paragraph—‘I’m not impressed by the apocalyptic character of the present age . . .’—I apologize. If I ever wasn’t, I have certainly become so.”¹⁴ What Barth sees when he revisits his 1960s writing is the connection between the then-trumpeted aesthetic break with contemporary politics and the specific problems caused by the Cold War, perhaps now highlighted for him by the visibility of nuclear threat in the Reagan era. Barth can now see something resembling an unconscious in those texts; symptoms of an age he had yet to fully integrate into his conscious writing mind can now be seen as such.

Fiction and the Figures of Death

To say that Barth’s fiction flirts with destruction is to state the obvious: the title of his second novel, is, of all things The End of the Road; The Floating Opera ends with a narrowly avoided explosion that would have killed several hundred; the threat of total annihilation hangs over the university in Giles Goat-Boy; and his later Chesapeake Bay fictions are set against a backdrop of Cold War espionage and the national security state. For most readers of Barth, however, the horizon of apocalypse in Barth’s world has seemed primarily an aesthetic matter: how, in the face of the used-up quality of traditional fictions, do we invent the novel anew? What forms of ending are appropriate to this new aesthetic? How do we avoid the sedative traps of closure?¹⁵ Such questions have tended to erase the specificity and historicity of his novels’ treatment of endings. Yet The Floating Opera is nothing less than an accelerated history of finitude in the twentieth century: its narrator and protagonist, Todd Andrews, is born in 1900, and his life is in many ways an allegory of twentieth-century life (and death). And this history of the possibility of death is also a history of the literary techniques appropriate to the forms that death has taken in the century of world wars.

Todd Andrews’s virtuoso experiments in genre and form engage the problems of communication and audience raised by modern mass death. World War One makes visible the contingency of modern life, and World War Two a new indistinction of civilian and soldier that requires a new critical relationship to narrativity and to audience. In this representation of the changes in literary technique caused by modern war, The Floating Opera contains within itself a miniature version of the split in Barth’s career that I outlined at the beginning of this chapter. The difference in kind between Barth’s early fiction and his metafiction is already registered as a difference of degree in his first novel, and this difference helps us read Barth’s longer career; this first novel suggests how we might align the story of Barth’s aesthetic transformation from black humorist to fabulist with the story of how modern war was transformed in the nuclear age.

As critics who have linked this novel to Barth’s later fiction have pointed out, The Floating Opera has a fairly complex structure. It is na...