On the occasion of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, who
once appealed to my undergraduate taste, Louis Menand considers whether that
author should be considered a Modernist or a Postmodernist; and adds an acute discussion of the ambiguity of the prefix “post-”
in such employment. In the
first, “Mission Accomplished” sense, “being postmodernist just means that we
can never be pre-modernist again.”
In the snootier “epitaph” or “we’re so over that” sense, “being postmodernist means that we can never be
modernist again.”
As for the original project of the Modernists (as, Picasso,
Joyce), “they did it by shifting interest from the what to the how of art, from the things represented in a
painting or novel to the business
of representation itself.
[The New Yorker, 23 Feb 2009, p. 68]
As in other cases of such self-consciously trendy,
navel-gazing devolutions, the
gambit was not original. In
Curtius’ chapter on the post-Classical period in Greece,
The materials and implements
necessary for writing now also
became worthy of a poet’s art. We
have epigrams on the writing tablet; on the wax with which it is covered; on
the calamus; as well as a threat
to the boring beetle, “enemy of the Muses”.
[Ernst Curtius, European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), p. 306]
From thence it
is but a few steps down to exhibiting urinals in museums (thus Duchamps), or
penning an ode to a chamber-pot, as in Gide’s accurately titled Les
Faux-Monnayeurs:
La Vase Nocturne
Quiconque à quarante
ans n’a pas d’hémorroïdes
…
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