Postmodernism, Part II
6-20-06 The American Writer & Creator After The Bomb
Much later I found out that according to my own calculations Postmodernism in American literature seemed to begin to happen exactly around the time of the splitting of the atom. Robert Creeley's poems began to appear in the middle 40's. His major book "For Love: Poems, 1950-1960" had completely abandoned rhyme. Yes, the atomic bomb blew rhyme & reason off the human palimpsest---literally, revolutionized the scale & mode of American literature. Abstract expressionism became the law of American painting. Abstract expressionists erased the representational figure and painted "The Unrepresentable"---expressed the Inexpressible: posthumous man on a posthumous planet. The Theater of the Absurd flourished at this same moment yielding Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" and "Endgame" expressions of absurd man in a nihilistic world that had been destroyed and vacated by the human. Postmodern man/woman had used up the cat's nine lives. What remains is a castrated language of memory fragments.
In America we had our own sad wise cracker---the brilliant teenage narrator of "Catcher In The Rye" Holden Caulfield. This magnificent creation of J.D. Salinger also heard the whispering in the kitchen. Mr. Caulfield was reporting from a mental asylum recent memories of life at private school and other remembrances of things recently past---our irreverent adolescent Proust who scribbled 'fuck you' on tombstones in the cemetery to express his outrage at mortality. The Terror underneath the veneer of the lying world reveals itself to Holden at every turn. And the redundant burst of laughter that blows over the surface of the world of J. D. Salinger is a gale of chilling giggles born inside the nausea of the guts which constitutes a microcosm of the world of "Irrational Man"---later the title of a book authored by William Barrett on the history and meaning of Existentialism in the modern world my favorite chapter of which is titled 'The Testimony Of Modern Art.' Carpe diem! Eat drink and make Mary for tomorrow we die. After "Catcher In The Rye" we have had many remembrances of things past in American literature & song & the movies.
Elvis Presley sang endlessly of lost love and the love he once had that he squandered. These songs of lost love and of never again love poured forth from the American cauldron of grief and desperation and madness. Patsy Cline fell out of the sky and died in an air plane crash at the age of 29 but before she perished she sang "Crazy" and more---more grief-soaked elegies. It is not that postmodernism took root. It is that the very finitude of man and woman the existentialists so often talked of had come down to earth and children and teenagers were struck by their own absolute contingency. Death lurked. Suicide beckoned. And Albert Camus answered: There is only one question in philosophy: whether or not to commit suicide. We were all held alive by a slender thread that could snap in an instant. One push of a button could detonate the big one and this act was forever over. And the whole race would perish. Francis Ford Coppola used "The Eve Of Destruction" to punctuate his Viet Nam War epic film "Apocalypse Now." Others sought comfort in Bing Crosby or Perry Como. And Karen Carpenter was always around to pour sweet wine on our bitter repast. There will always be a demand for candy bars, lollypops and ice cream cones in a world of lurking mass destruction, serial murders, and insane politicians. For every caustic Bob Dylan song and every realistic & poetic Joni Mitchell utterance comes a bevy of celebrators of flowing syrup & vanilla pudding.
But I have opened up a can of worms. There is no end to this. And I must get back to my central point. All the howling in the world of music & poetry (Allan Ginsberg one of the ablest poets of the whole generation wrote a much celebrated poem with that very title---"Howl") was accompanied by an opposite movement silent inward and directed downward ---minimalism carried the day. A paring down of the excess. A refusal to celebrate that which was killing us and stifling us. A refusal to affirm anything that was less than 100 percent verifiable. A scientific scepticism was present in the best artists of the age. And thus an austerity in the art. Robert Creeley's poems got literally smaller and smaller until they almost disappeared into the white page suggesting, among other things, the disappearance of man & that by which he is known: language, poetry, song. These poems seemed to want to escape the scrutiny of the world. They also became so diminutive they offered small targets for the mad bombers of the world. Creeley of course would escape the inessential. Picasso once said that after 1938 Anxiety was the Source of all his painting. Of course after the atomic bomb came the hydrogen bomb which further terrified the world. And then came the nuclear bomb and all of its consequent insanities. Now I wonder what great new genius will step forth finally to create the Anti-bomb of all anti-bombs. We are ready for it: The Return of the repressed lovers.
RLG Copyright 2006
Much later I found out that according to my own calculations Postmodernism in American literature seemed to begin to happen exactly around the time of the splitting of the atom. Robert Creeley's poems began to appear in the middle 40's. His major book "For Love: Poems, 1950-1960" had completely abandoned rhyme. Yes, the atomic bomb blew rhyme & reason off the human palimpsest---literally, revolutionized the scale & mode of American literature. Abstract expressionism became the law of American painting. Abstract expressionists erased the representational figure and painted "The Unrepresentable"---expressed the Inexpressible: posthumous man on a posthumous planet. The Theater of the Absurd flourished at this same moment yielding Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" and "Endgame" expressions of absurd man in a nihilistic world that had been destroyed and vacated by the human. Postmodern man/woman had used up the cat's nine lives. What remains is a castrated language of memory fragments.
In America we had our own sad wise cracker---the brilliant teenage narrator of "Catcher In The Rye" Holden Caulfield. This magnificent creation of J.D. Salinger also heard the whispering in the kitchen. Mr. Caulfield was reporting from a mental asylum recent memories of life at private school and other remembrances of things recently past---our irreverent adolescent Proust who scribbled 'fuck you' on tombstones in the cemetery to express his outrage at mortality. The Terror underneath the veneer of the lying world reveals itself to Holden at every turn. And the redundant burst of laughter that blows over the surface of the world of J. D. Salinger is a gale of chilling giggles born inside the nausea of the guts which constitutes a microcosm of the world of "Irrational Man"---later the title of a book authored by William Barrett on the history and meaning of Existentialism in the modern world my favorite chapter of which is titled 'The Testimony Of Modern Art.' Carpe diem! Eat drink and make Mary for tomorrow we die. After "Catcher In The Rye" we have had many remembrances of things past in American literature & song & the movies.
Elvis Presley sang endlessly of lost love and the love he once had that he squandered. These songs of lost love and of never again love poured forth from the American cauldron of grief and desperation and madness. Patsy Cline fell out of the sky and died in an air plane crash at the age of 29 but before she perished she sang "Crazy" and more---more grief-soaked elegies. It is not that postmodernism took root. It is that the very finitude of man and woman the existentialists so often talked of had come down to earth and children and teenagers were struck by their own absolute contingency. Death lurked. Suicide beckoned. And Albert Camus answered: There is only one question in philosophy: whether or not to commit suicide. We were all held alive by a slender thread that could snap in an instant. One push of a button could detonate the big one and this act was forever over. And the whole race would perish. Francis Ford Coppola used "The Eve Of Destruction" to punctuate his Viet Nam War epic film "Apocalypse Now." Others sought comfort in Bing Crosby or Perry Como. And Karen Carpenter was always around to pour sweet wine on our bitter repast. There will always be a demand for candy bars, lollypops and ice cream cones in a world of lurking mass destruction, serial murders, and insane politicians. For every caustic Bob Dylan song and every realistic & poetic Joni Mitchell utterance comes a bevy of celebrators of flowing syrup & vanilla pudding.
But I have opened up a can of worms. There is no end to this. And I must get back to my central point. All the howling in the world of music & poetry (Allan Ginsberg one of the ablest poets of the whole generation wrote a much celebrated poem with that very title---"Howl") was accompanied by an opposite movement silent inward and directed downward ---minimalism carried the day. A paring down of the excess. A refusal to celebrate that which was killing us and stifling us. A refusal to affirm anything that was less than 100 percent verifiable. A scientific scepticism was present in the best artists of the age. And thus an austerity in the art. Robert Creeley's poems got literally smaller and smaller until they almost disappeared into the white page suggesting, among other things, the disappearance of man & that by which he is known: language, poetry, song. These poems seemed to want to escape the scrutiny of the world. They also became so diminutive they offered small targets for the mad bombers of the world. Creeley of course would escape the inessential. Picasso once said that after 1938 Anxiety was the Source of all his painting. Of course after the atomic bomb came the hydrogen bomb which further terrified the world. And then came the nuclear bomb and all of its consequent insanities. Now I wonder what great new genius will step forth finally to create the Anti-bomb of all anti-bombs. We are ready for it: The Return of the repressed lovers.
RLG Copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 4:37 PM
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