storytelling

There are a number of terms that are used a widely, but defy easy definition. Example: one of the Supreme Court justices supposedly said of pornography "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Ethan Canin once said the exact same thing about the term overwriting in my hearing.

There are other terms that fall into this category. My favorite is post-modernism, which is a word so laden with excess baggage that I have seen people develop a sudden cough and leave the room in a hurry rather than deal with it. I was thinking about this because I'm writing a scene at a party where academics are mixing with non-academics, and the P word comes up. If you can imagine a slightly drunk, very opinionated, very intelligent car salesman with a chip on his shoulder interrogating academics, you'll have an idea of what I'm trying to accomplish. i may end dumping the scene but it's quite amusing to work on it at the moment.

As a part of my research, I'm contacting friends and acquaintances out of my academic past. The conversation goes like this:

Me: Quick! In one sentence, define post-modernism!
A1: One sentence?

Me: Quick! In one sentence, define post-modernism!
A3: That's a tall order.

Me: Quick! In one sentence, define post-modernism!
A4: Christ, this is like my recurring nightmare about my doctoral exams.

Even when people have lots of time to reflect and write, pithy definitions seem to elude them. Examples:

Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins. (from the University of Colorado's English department website)

There are a hundred examples like this. There are far fewer easily approachable actual definitions, and none of them are short. Here's part of one that I found pretty accessible (written by James Morley, but found on this website at the University of Virginia:

1. premodernism: Original meaning is possessed by authority (for example, the Catholic Church). The individual is dominated by tradition.

2. modernism: The enlightenment-humanist rejection of tradition and authority in favour of reason and natural science. This is founded upon the assumption of the autonomous individual as the sole source of meaning and truth--the Cartesian cogito. Progress and novelty are valorized within a linear conception of history--a history of a "real" world that becomes increasingly real or objectified. One could view this as a Protestant mode of consciousness.

3. postmodernism: A rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience. Collage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, [this is part of Nietzsche's aesthetic philosophy, where Apollonian forces (harmony, restraint, etc) are necessarily at odds with the Dionysian forces (impulse toward disorder, irrationality, and spontaneity]. Dionysian passion are the foci of attention. Most importantly we see the dissolution of distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other. This is a sarcastic playful parody of western modernity and the "John Wayne" individual and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re-present the human subject.

One of the best places to get straight forward (but not always uncontroversial) information continues to be wikipedia.org, where you'll find a great deal on postmodernism, with lots of links to necessary side definitions:

Postmodernism is an artistic, philosophical, and cultural movement or condition, said to arise after modernism. Whereas modernism is thought to be the culmination of the Enlightenment's quest for an authoritatively-rational aesthetics, ethics, and knowledge, postmodernism is concerned with how the authority of those would-be-ideals (sometimes called metanarratives) are subverted through fragmentation, consumerism, and deconstruction. Jean-François Lyotard famously described postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives" (Lyotard, 1984). Postmodernism resists monolithic universals and encourages fractured, fluid and multiple perspectives.

So I decided to approach this from a different angle.

Me: Quick! Give me an example of something you'd call the ultimate in postmodernism!
A1: Ed Norton's character in Fight Club.
Me: The guy who beats himself up?
A1: That's the one. He says: everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. That's post-modernism, right there.

Me: Quick! Give me an example of something you'd call the ultimate in postmodernism!
A2: Seinfeld.
Me: Seinfeld?
A2: A show about a show about nothing.

Me: Quick! Give me an example of something you'd call the ultimate in postmodernism!
A3: Being John Malcovich.

I didn't get a chance to hear an explanation of that last example, but I assume it has to do with the way the movie questions reality and identity.

Thus, I have a direction for this scene I'm working on, and it's promising.

Posted by at 9:45 AM | Permalink