English 211: Fiction
Lecture 8: The Late 20th Century Novel
In the early 20th century, when the idea that God is dead was first introduced into the general culture, it caused infinite anguish and a great sense of loss. Writers and artists, and then people in general, began to question the very meaning of life, and finally arrived at the conclusion that, if there is no God, life is inherently meaningless. Objective truth does not exist; all we have to rely on is our own perspective--our own truth--since that is all we can see. Most of the literature written before World War II (most notably T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) dealt with the issue of how people could go on living with these realizations.
By the end of World War II, though, these ideas had been culturally (although not necessarily individually) assimilated. After the atrocities of the war, it wasn't so hard to accept the idea that there was no benevolent God watching over every little sparrow, and life had been thrown away on too large a scale for people to deceive themselves that it had any real meaning. Even in the midst of their joy and relief that the war was over, the predominant attitude was disillusionment: "Okay, so God is dead and life is meaningless. Now what?" In the aftermath of a war whose actions and results were almost incomprehensible, writers found themselves with new dilemmas: the pre-war world was gone, and a whole new world had taken its place. Postwar writers concerned themselves not so much with moaning over the loss of God, but with how to find ways to cope with a world in which the only constant was change. And as life changed ever more and ever more rapidly, literature changed with it.
Contemporary literature is difficult to characterize because it reflects contemporary life and culture, which is rapidly changing and full of contradictions. But there are certain trends which stand out. (These are generalizations, remember; there are exceptions.)
First, contemporary literature is no longer "innocent," but ironic. It reflects our political, social, and personal disillusionment, and no longer dares to believe it can create anything new. It can only cast the old in new forms. In the postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco explains:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony...But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.
Some writers (although not all), in fact, believe that innovation is no longer possible. There are only so many ideas and combinations of ideas, and they've all been used. All that's left is to imitate, in as fresh a way as possible, what the past has left us. As an example, critic Fredric Jameson points to Star Wars:
...One of the most important cultural experiences of the generations that grew up from the '30s to the '50s was the Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Rogers type--alien villains, true American heroes, heroines in distress, the death ray or the doomsday box, and the cliffhanger at the end whose miraculous resolution was to be witnessed next Saturday afternoon. Star Wars reinvents this experience...[it] satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artifacts through once again.
An increasing number of novels and plays are set in the past, but their events are seen with contemporary cynicism; notable examples are Margaret Atwood's novel, Alias Grace, and Charles Frazier's novel, Cold Mountain.
A second trend in contemporary literature is a new cynicism about the role of art and literature itself. For previous generations, literature and other arts were meant by their creators to be "anti-Establishment"--that is, to repudiate and subvert established values and traditions. In other words, Art set itself apart from Society, seeing the masses as people who needed to be enlightened, but who were so bound by social and religious tradition and apathy that they probably couldn't be. Many contemporary writers and artists still feel this way, but increasingly, the line between "High" and "Low" culture is hard to distinguish, since the mass media coopts art and images for its own so quickly, and since "serious" writers no longer limit themselves to the drawing rooms of Henry James and Jane Austen, but often set their novels in seedy, B-movie locations and surround their characters with the paraphernalia of the consumer culture. As Kirk Vardenoe and Adam Gopnik, the directors of High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, have written, "In the age of Joe Isuzu, a hardened knowingness about the value-emptied amorality of media culture was, far from being the preserve of a small cadre of vanguard thinkers, the sour, commonplace cynicism of the whole commercial culture."
In a third trend, contemporary literature accepts as given the idea, handed down from the early 20th century, that everything we know is dependent on our perspective. I see things one way, and you see them another. Thus, since there is no truly objective observer, there is no such thing as "Truth." There is only my truth and your truth, and those can change at any moment with the addition of more facts.
But contemporary literature takes this idea a step or two further, calling into question facts themselves, and arguing that "facts" are unreliable, influenced by culture, historical perspective, language games, and other undiscovered or deliberately omitted facts. Thus, contemporary literature argues, two contradictory "truths" can (and often do) exist side by side. (You'll see this clearly in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, for example.)
Because of this ability to encompass contradictions, contemporary literature, like contemporary society, sometimes seems schizophrenic. Even as it questions and denigrates the use and value of language, it uses language carefully and precisely to illustrate its ideas. Even as it documents fragmentation and disintegration, it draws all the fragments into a cohesive whole. Even as it celebrates human diversity and laments human alienation, it reveals the universality of human character and emotion.
What Comes After Postmodernism?
Not all literary critics agree on a definition of the term "postmodern." "Postmodern" literature is defined by some as any literature written after World War II. Other critics argue that, in order to be called "postmodern," literature must be experimental in its style and structure. Still others use as their criteria a set of themes or assumptions about the world. While these arguments can be interesting and productive, we don't have time to go into all of them in this class. For the purposes of this class, "postmodern" will refer to literature which
- was written after World War II
- is experimental in its style, language, and structure
- accepts the assumption that life is inherently meaningless
- is ironic, cynical, and disillusioned in tone
- is committed to the idea that "objective truth" is an illusion
- presents experience as fragmentary and discontinuous, as though the ordinary rules of cause and effect had ceased to function.
As you may imagine, happy endings do not abound in postmodern literature, and neither do hopeful endings; there's also not a lot of redemption.
But something odd began to happen in literature on its way to the end of the 20th century, and it has continued into the first few years of the 21st. The most explicit sign of this change appeared at the end of the play Angels in America, by Tony Kushner, in 1992, when God reappears after having been missing for the better part of a century. Certainly, it's not the omnipotent God of the Old Testament; it's a considerably weakened God, who is reduced to accepting help from the despicable Roy Cohn. But the fact remains: God is back. And Prior's last speech ends on a very hopeful note: "The Great Work Begins." This is not the cynical, disillusioned, meaningless message we've seen in other postmodern works. The play implies that we've descended into the depths, and now it's time to climb back out of the pit and rebuild a better world. In fact, the main character, Prior, follows a trajectory that is the opposite of that followed by many other postmodern characters. They begin hopeful and end disillusioned; he begins disillusioned, hopeless, convinced of the meaninglessness of life, and ends up with energy, hope, and optimism. Many of the characters around him have redeemed themselves in some way.
Certainly the ending of the play is not entirely happy; but it is very different from the endings of most postmodern works. The ending of Angels in America is a call to action, beginning with the assumption that all life is not meaningless and hopeless.
More and more, this change of attitude is beginning to appear in contemporary novels. Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love, Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and many others leave open the possibility that life has meaning; that innocence can be good; that disillusionment can be overcome; that redemption is possible. Of course, this is still the 21st century: we all know that life is fragmented and often beyond our control; that truth is a matter of perspective; and that "facts" can change from moment to moment. The world is a violent place and human beings are capable of astonishing cruelty. The ground under our feet is quicksand. But many contemporary novelists seem to be saying that, despite all of this, there is room left for just a bit of optimism.
Michael Cunningham and The Hours
Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and raised in La Canada, California. He attended Stanford University, and later received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He now lives in New York City. He teaches writing at Brooklyn College.
As with all authors, certain themes and ideas recur. In an interview with Dave Weich of Powells.com in 2005, he said,
I seem to be interested in whatever love and hope the love of life that hope implies can survive. I feel like my books always end happily, even though a lot of readers don't agree. But they always end with life going on; they always end with something still ahead; they always end with somebody moving into some uncertain future that may be terrible or may be great or may be some combination of the two. Human happiness is only interesting to me in its ability to survive disaster, so I write about people who are either undergoing some kind of terrible change in their outer lives or some kind of inner crisis.
The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1999. In an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth of NewsHour, Cunningham spoke about the origins and ideas of the book:
Virginia Woolf's great novel, "Mrs. Dalloway," is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old. I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss. For me it was this book. It stayed with me in a way no other book ever has. And it felt like something for me to write about very much the way you might write a novel based on the first time you fell in love, the first -- your first seminal experience of any kind. This book feels like, I don't know, something that happened to me...Her insistence on the sacredness of the ordinary is very much part of what I love about her. Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things. But everything you need to know about human life, about human experience can also be found in two elderly women having tea in a corner of a little shabby tearoom some place, very much the way the recipe for the whole organism is contained in every strand of DNA.
Michael Cunningham's novels include:
- A Home at the End of the World, 1990
- Flesh and Blood, 1995
- The Hours,, 1998
- Specimen Days, 2005
- By Nightfall, 2010
If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!
Some of the information in this lecture derives from:
1. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Modern British Literature, eds. Frank Kermode and John Hollander
2. Eds. George McMichael, et al. Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2
3. Eds. George and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature.
4. "Same Old, Brand New Michael Cunningham." Powell's.com Author Interviews. http://www.powells.com/authors/cunningham.html
5. "A Conversation with Michael Cunningham." Online Newshour. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june99/pulitzer_4-13.html
