I've been reading up on postmodernism because, well, I don't have a choice. Metafiction in the late 20th century = pomo. Just not way around it. First up, Brian McHale's Constructing Postmodernism. In setting up his collection of conceptually related papers (not a "book" per se), McHale recaps some of the history of pomo and talks about his previous book, Postmodernist Fiction. There are two points of interest, here, from Lyotard (who I will have to read next): master narratives and "little narratives."
McHale notes that Lyotard's pronouncement that pomo was partly a turning away from master narratives was descriptive, but of course turned into a proscription very quickly, which is important to keep in mind, I think. If there's a master narrative of American comicbooks, it's the creation myth of the superhero itself. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two plucky young Jewish men from Chicago (one from Toronto, if you're Canadian, that's our part of the myth), both science-fiction fans, invent Superman out of whole cloth and thus create superheroes, at the least, and possibly even the medium of comics, which some adherents to the American part of the myth still claim was invented in the US. Golden Age superheroes flourish for a generation (actually less than a decade), and are viciously attacked and killed by the evil Fredric Wertham (even though he wasn't just aimed at superheroes, which were pretty much already dead by the early-50s). Then comes the glorious age of innocence, the Silver Age (which was actually a bi-product of the confines of the Comics Code Authority, the 'CCA'; other genres just couldn't function within its rules).
Then the myth gets a little lost because nobody can quite agree on what age we're in now, or when the Silver Age actually ended. It's certainly over, and if we take the CCA as the defining feature, then it ended at some point in the late 90s when DC, Marvel, Image, et al. just stopped bothering to even ask the CCA for approval, but Marvel first published without CCA approval back in '71 (Amazing Spider-man #96). What's interesting, though, is that despite the penetration of a lot of postmodernist sensibilities to the popular sphere, the master narrative of American comics still holds sway with contemporary fans. This should not, as her McHale's reminder of the descriptive nature of Lyotard's commentary, be taken as retrograde or "backwards." It should, however, be a subject of study and enquiry.
What's really interesting, and this came out of a long conversation with a friend and colleague, is that the form of the books doesn't seem to have embraced this aspect of postmodernism even though the content has been making forays into it. The reworkings of the mythologies that are inside the comics are somewhat pomo in this regard; they're the stories that take the grand narratives and characters and try to humanize them. I'm thinking of Death visiting Element Girl in Sandman. A story about the every-day, the mundane, the annoyances of life. Instead of a story of her doing mortal battle with an Ancient Egyptian god in order to represent her anger and sadness at having her humanity taken away, we just have a lonely woman who's afraid to leave her apartment. McHale's a little unclear as to whether it's himself or Lyotard who really recommends this, but these are the "little narratives" that replace the "master narratives."
We can talk till we're blue in the face about whether they're better or worse, but that's beside the point (as always, I'd prefer my readers make their own moral decisions). The important part is that a high-fantasy genre is uniquely placed to take advantage of little narratives because they embody the juxtaposition between the little and the large, the "master" narratives. There's been a lot of this in science fiction, recently, little stories about people who happen to be living on starships. They used to bug me. I mean, why bother with fantasy if you're not going to use it? But now that I see this juxtaposition, I see that they can be all about comparing the massive with the mundane, deliberately making a show of not looking at the grand spectacle. When the Doctor tells a married couple that they're lives are more fantastic than his could ever be, I think that's a little pomo leaking into the Doctor Who world.
There is also an argument to be made that formally, they're still caught within the master narrative of capitalism. After all, to get Gaiman or Moore's life-changing thoughts, rendered in convenient comicbook form, you still have to purchase the comics, and to download special extra material off of the BBC Doctor Who website, you still need to have a UK IP address (or spoof one, of course). But that's just McHale's take on Lyotard. Jameson asserts, counter to McHale (although McHale doesn't mind) that Postmodernism is the intellectual aspect of late capitalism. In that sense, the apparent contradiction between pomo content and a master-narrative form is just capitalism's willingness to absorb that which opposes it and then turn it into a product. I hate to say it, but Jameson offers a more coherent explanation for this phenomenon.
But who said people are coherent or consistent? Certainly not me! Seems to me that we can just easily say that pomo just doesn't totalize, which would seem to be consistent with its vehement resistance to totalizing in general, to sticking to any one version of anything, to stasis or fixity. But that doesn't actually get us away from Jameson's position, which is probably accurate in so far as the publishers and producers like just don't care about the content as long as they get their buck. Perhaps they sleep well in the knowledge that art hasn't mobilized anyone to revolution for a while now, or maybe they know that the "revolutionary" art they produce isn't nearly revolutionary enough, or maybe they're totally ignorant to the workings of the system and genuinely don't understand how art can have any revolutionary content. (When, exactly, was the last time it did?). I don't know. I can't know. I don't think I even really want to.
The question this all brings up, to me, is part of that old "what's at stake?" problem. What's at stake, here, is at base whether or not popular forms of art--music, movies, television, comicbooks, etc.--are still, or ever were, capable of inspiring, sustaining, or taking part in revolutionary, liberatory, or otherwise shit-disturbing politics.
I wish I had an answer to that.
Posted by orion at September 2, 2007 2:36 PM