NARRATIVE, Vol 21, No.

3 (October 2013)
Copyright 2013 by Te Ohio State University
Brian McHale
Aferword: Reconstructing
Postmodernism
As one of the frst epigraphs in my epigraph-heavy book on Postmodernist Fiction
(1987), I quoted the irrepressible American experimentalist, Steve Katz, from an in-
terview he gave to Larry McCafery around 1980:
I dont think the ideas were in the air . . . rather, all of us found ourselves
at the same stoplights in diferent cities at the same time. When the lights
changed, we all crossed the streets. (in LeClair and McCafery 227)
Opportunistically, I seized on Katzs wittily unpretentious fgure of speech as a con-
venient metaphor for the literary-historical mechanism that I thought was respon-
sible for the emergence of postmodernism in fction. Resisting the model of Zeitgeist
that McCafery had ofered him, Katz suggests that a number of American writers,
independently of each other, had all arrived at the same aesthetic threshold at about
the same time, not because they were implementing some theoretical projectideas
in the airor because they were in communication with each other (which would
not happen until sometime later, afer the fact), but as a consequence of the shared
literary-historical situation in which they all found themselves. According to this ac-
count, the breakthrough to postmodernism in fctionor Katzs breakthrough, any-
Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University.
He is one of the founding members of Project Narrative at Ohio State, and served as president of the As-
sociation for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) in 201011. Te author of three monographs
on postmodernist fction and poetry, he is also co-editor of four books, most recently Te Cambridge
Companion to Tomas Pynchon (with Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard) and Te Routledge Companion to
Experimental Literature (with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons), both published in 2012.
358 Brian McHale
wayis not theory-driven, nor is it facilitated by membership in some avant-garde
circle or coterie or movement (which would only come into being later); rather, it is a
consequence of the internal logic of genre.
Katzs metaphor proposed what seemed to me confrmationall the more valu-
able because it came from an insider and eyewitnessof the model of literary dynam-
ics that I adapted from the Russian Formalists. According to this model, when a genre
has exhausted its possibilities, it renovates or replenishes itself by shufing the hierar-
chy of its features, subordinating the features that had formerly been dominant, and
promoting formerly subordinate features to positions of dominance. Te language
of exhaustion and replenishment is of course John Barths, but the model of change of
dominant is ultimately Roman Jakobsons. In my view, the modernist novels radical
exploration of epistemology was in the process of exhausting itself in the middle de-
cades of the twentieth century, in such texts as William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), Jean-Paul Sartres La Nause (1938), Samuel Becketts Murphy (1938), Vladi-
mir Nabokovs Te Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Malcolm Lowrys Under the
Volcano (1947), and Alain Robbe-Grillets La Jalousie (1957), among many others.
What emerged from modernisms midcentury impasse was a diferent set of priorities
for fction. Already anticipated in the last chapters of Absalom, Absalom!, this new
mode privileged questions of world-making and modes of being over questions of per-
ception and knowing: it was ontological in its orientation, where modernism had been
epistemological.
In many respects, this account accords perfectly with one of the least contentious
defnitions of postmodernism: a main international current of literature and art afer
the waning of modernism, both continuous and discontinuous with modernism, as
Wang Ning restates it in his essay in this issue. However, my account difers in one im-
portant respect from this consensus defnition: it decisively locates the mechanism of
change from modernism to postmodernism inside literary history, inside the logic of
genre. Other theorists in the 1980s placed the mechanism outside: J.-F. Lyotard, in the
crisis of confdence in the master-narratives that had formerly underwritten Western
culture; Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, in the mutation of capitalism itself into
a form whose cultural consequences could be traced in the artistic products of post-
modernity; and so on. Nevertheless, I was confdent that I had identifed part of the
explanation for the change, if not the whole of it. Postmodernism was a phenomenon
complex enough to be multiply over-determined, externally as well as internally.
My confdence about having identifed the internal logic of postmodernisms
emergence in fctiona mechanism, if not the mechanism of changeled to over-
confdence about that mechanisms scope, indeed its universality. Glossing Steve
Katzs metaphor, I wrote this:
Te logic of literary history brought writers in various citiescities in Eu-
rope and Latin America as well as in North Americato a crosswalk; when
the stoplights changed, they had one of two options, either to remain on
this side and continue to practice a modernist poetics of the epistemologi-
cal dominant (as many have done, of course), or to cross to a postmodernist
Reconstructing Postmodernism 359
poetics of the ontological dominant. Te streets were diferent, but the cross-
ing was the same. (11; emphasis original)
Katz himself, I hasten to say, cannot be held responsible for this overgeneralization.
He had in mind only his North American compatriots, writers with whom he shared
a generational experience, and who would eventually be grouped together with him
as the surfctionistsRonald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, may-
be Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jerzy Kosinski, a few others.
He certainly was not thinking of anything as grandiose as a global postmodernism.
Nobody but me is to blame for extrapolating so casually from Katzs diferent cities
to cities in Europe and Latin America as well as in North America.
My extrapolation was symptomatic of what Teo Dhaen, elsewhere in this vol-
ume, citing Kumkum Sangari, identifes as the Western-centrism of postmodern
theoryor in my case, US-centrism. Wang Ning makes a similar point: Western
theorists, including me, constructed theories of postmodernism using exclusively
Western models, ignoring so-called Tird World cultures generally and Asian cul-
tures in particular. Postmodernist literature in places like China participated in an
international postmodernist movement but also refected domestic traditions and de-
velopments, functioning as (among other things) a strategy of economic moderniza-
tion and cultural and linguistic de-colonization. None of this was visible to me at that
time, twenty-fve years ago. I had not yet refected deeply enough on the phenomenon
of cultural uneven development, or even just diferent development.
Te streets were diferent, but the crossing was the same. In retrospect, it seems
brash to have assumed that writers elsewhere were subject to the very same logic of
genre as US or anglophone writers in the postwar years. Nevertheless, I did not think
twice about including francophone writers such as Beckett and Robbe-Grillet or the
Mexican Carlos Fuentes among my case studies of crossover artists who made the
transition from modernism to postmodernism. Nor was I alone in this: for instance,
Beckett and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges fgured among John Barths exemplars
of the literature of exhaustion, while, on the other side of the period divide, Italo
Calvino, an Italian, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez, a Colombian, unproblematically
exemplifed for him the postmodern literature of replenishment.
On refection, not even the inclusion of writers from continental Europelet
alone those from farther afeldseems particularly inevitable or self-evident. As
Dhaen observes elsewhere in this issue, only belatedly did postwar developments in
the various national literary traditions of continental Europe come to be subsumed
under the big tent of a comprehensive international postmodernism, so that, for
instance, a novel such as Calvinos If On A Winters Night a Traveler could be seen as
something like the European counterpart of Tomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow, the
model of American postmodernist fction. But there are good reasons for skepticism
about the transnational scope of postmodernism, even when it comes to Western
Europeans. Writers like Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Calvino came to postmodernist
fction by a diferent route than the North Americansso diferent, indeed, that one
might question whether the crossing really was the same afer all. Not only did the
360 Brian McHale
literary legacies they inherited overlap only partly with those of the North Ameri-
cans, but they participated in quite diferent literary worlds. Among other things, the
avant-gardessuch as the nouveaux romanciers and the Tel Quel group in the case
of Robbe-Grillet (Marx-Scouras), or the OuLiPo in the case of Calvinoplayed an
institutional role that they never really did for their North American contemporaries
(at least not until the time of the Language poets, a decade or more later).
Moreover, the generational experiences out of which the Europeans wrote were
barely comparable with those of the North Americans. Consider only their respec-
tive experiences of the Second World War. Te OuLiPo group, with which Calvino
was afliated, included in its ranks Holocaust survivors (such as Georges Perec) and
Resistance fghters (including Calvino himself); Beckett, too, of course, had been
a member of the Resistance. Daniel Levin Becker interestingly speculates that this
generational experience of occupation, resistance, and survival might have shaped
the OuLiPians aesthetics, in particular their approach to writing under constraint:
having sufered constraints over which they had no say, they created literary forms
whose constraints they chose and controlled (31314). Few North American writ-
ers shared comparable experiencesthough it is true that, among the surfctionists,
both Federman and Kosinski were Holocaust survivors (and both sometimes wrote
constrained or procedural fction).
1
If assimilating Western European writers to a supposedly global postmodern-
ism required a certain tone-deafness to cultural and historical diference, so too did
assimilating Central and Eastern Europeansonly more so. Nevertheless, Gnther
Grass, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Milan Kundera, Danilo Ki, Milorad Pavi, and
others regularly featured in accounts of postmodernist fction, mine included, de-
spite the radical disparity of their cultural and historical backgrounds and experience
from that of North Americans, especially during the Cold War era. Elana Gomel,
elsewhere in this issue, argues that Russian postmodernism expresses diferent so-
cial, political, and cultural dynamics than its Western counterpart, despite superfcial
similarities. Moreover, the cultural logic of this post-Soviet situation in Russia applies
also to the other national cultures of the former Soviet bloc. She goes so far as to con-
clude, following Vitaly Chernetsky, that there is no single global postmodernism, but
only a cluster of related phenomena.
All of us found ourselves at the same stoplights in diferent cities: but which
cities? Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Havana? Mumbai? Tokyo? Shanghai? Te unex-
amined assumption that postmodernist fction was really one and the same thing
everywhere, even when it emerged far from its Euro-American homeland, seems
indefensible today. Nevertheless, that assumption was a commonplace of the 1970s
and 80s, refected in my own book but also, for instance, in Dhaens publications of
about the same time (as he observes in his essay here), as well as in Barths account
of exhaustion and replenishment. Innovative Latin American writing, so it was as-
sumedthe fction of Borges, Garca Mrquez, Fuentes, Julio Cortzar, Alejo Car-
pentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Isabel Allende and othersand maybe innovative writ-
ing from the rest of the world as well, properly belonged to postmodernism, which
was a genuinely global phenomenon.
Reconstructing Postmodernism 361
What underwrote that commonplace was the further assumption that so-called
magical realism, supposedly the defning feature of the postwar Latin American
Boom, was best understood as a sort of regional variety of postmodernism. Whatever
one called it, magical realism or postmodernism, one assumed that its emergence
was everywhere driven by the very same engines of change as postmodernist fction
in Euro-American regions. I took it for granted, for instance, that the same internal
logic of genre that dictated Pynchons path from the overwrought modernism of V.
(1963) through the borderline case of Te Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to the full-blown
postmodernism of Gravitys Rainbow (1973) also impelled Fuentess transformation
from the modernism of La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) through the ambiguous
fantasy of Cambio de piel (1967) to the magical realism of Terra nostra (1975). More-
over, in the case of Latin American writers like Fuentes, the universal logic of genre
appeared to be reinforced by the external circumstances of their real-world experi-
ences, which typically involved straddling cultural divides, having one foot frmly
planted on their home soil, the other in Europe or North America, or (as Barth put
it) one foot always in the narrative past . . . and one foot in, one might say, the Pa-
risian structuralist present (204). In Fuentess case, that meant one foot in Mexico
City, the other in Washington, D.C.; in Cortzars, one in Buenos Aires, the other in
Paris; in Garca Mrquezs, Colombia and Europe; in Allendes, Chile and California;
and so on. Tis bi-culturalismthe writers straddling of metropolitan center and
postcolonial periphery, or First and Tird worlds (to use the terminology still
prevalent at the time, though now obsolete)could be construed as informing their
lived experience with a kind of ontological doubleness and vacillation that spilled
over into their fction. Tis same putative structure of experience seemed amply cor-
roborated, a few years later, by the careers and imaginative writing of Salman Rushdie
and others from the South-Asian subcontinent. Quintessentially bi-cultural, Rush-
die refected the globalization of magical realism, now all but indistinguishable from
global postmodernism.
In retrospect, however, the assimilation of magical realism to global postmod-
ernism looks more and more dubious, less like the recognition of a shared, universal
literary-historical situation and more like the appropriation of Tird World aesthet-
ic practices by First World cultural authoritiesa kind of cultural neocolonialism.
Looking back, what seems evident to me now are not so much the afnities between
magical realism and postmodernism as the impediments to assimilating the one to the
other. To begin with, the Boom in Latin American literature, associated with magical
realism, actually predates the onset of postmodernism itself, or at any rate predates
the use of the term in anything like its late twentieth-century sense. If the Boom dates,
as it arguably does, from the early writings of Borges, Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Miguel
ngel Asturias, Ernesto Sabato, and others in the 40s and 50s, and postmodern-
ism only emerges in the 60s (and acquires its name no earlier than the 70s), then
the magical realism that is a hallmark of the Boom cannot logically be regarded as a
regional variety of postmodernismif anything, the reverse: late in arriving on the
scene, postmodernism might appear rather to be a regional variety of Boom writing!
Moreover, the bi-cultural experience that seemed to be a special formative factor in
362 Brian McHale
the magical realists world-straddling careers and ontological poetics turns out to be
typical of the postcolonial condition, and not special at all. All postcolonial cultures
are by defnition bi-cultural or pluri-cultural, and the world-straddling experiences
of a Fuentes or a Rushdie, far from afording them a special (postmodern) vision of
their world(s), actually makes them representative. In this reversed perspective, it is
the pluri-cultural postcolonial experience that appears genuinely global, not post-
modernism, which settles into a narrower, more provincial niche.
Tus the subsequent global success of magical realism (Aldama)its overspill
beyond Latin America beginning in the 70s and 80s with Rushdie, US ethnic writ-
ers such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Ana Castillo, the Israeli Arab Anton
Shammas, even the British iconoclast Angela Carter, among others, and continuing
down to Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Dazshould probably not be
chalked up to the global reach of postmodernism, but instead to the reach of post-
modernisms other, global postcolonialism. Tis observation returns us again to the
unresolved question of the alleged global scope of postmodernism. My own assump-
tions about its universality, based on the operations of a supposedly universal logic of
genre, now seem misguided, or at any rate under-informed, over-confdent, and pre-
mature. Even if the Formalists change-of-dominant model of literary evolution did
adequately explain the emergence of postmodernism in North America and (maybe,
with reservations) Europe, that hardly justifes extending it to the rest of the world,
or excuses the appropriation of magical realism and its assimilation to a dubiously
global postmodernism.
Lets grant that the unexamined assumption of a global postmodernism, driven
by the internal logic of genre, was at best premature. Nevertheless, something inter-
esting seems to have happened in the quarter century that has elapsed since I made
my brash claim: even as postmodernist fction has waned in its North American and
European homelands (as Teo Dhaen and Robert McLaughlin argue in their essays
here), it seems to have fourished elsewhere. Postmodernism has arguably gone glob-
al in the intervening years. Corroboration can be found, for instance, in the fower-
ing of Chinese postmodernist fction from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, as refected
in this issue in Wang Nings essay on a 1987 novella by Mo Yan and Zongxin Fengs on
Han Shaogongs dictionary-novel from 1996.
If postmodernism has indeed gone globalas the very existence of this special
issue seems to attestthe mechanism of its global expansion still remains to be clar-
ifed. No doubt multiple mechanisms are involved, postmodernism being, as ever,
overdetermined. I can think of at least three.
Te frst involves economic globalization and its cultural consequences. Te
same external conditions that produced postmodern forms of artistic expression in
the West in the frst placethe conditions of late capitalism and the corresponding
crises of knowledge and belief identifed by Harvey, Jameson, Lyotard, and others
have traveled worldwide, so that by now almost no one remains outside the globalized
economy.
2
Consequently, it is only to be expected that forms of artistic expression
similar to those that frst appeared in the West should have begun appearing every-
where else.
Reconstructing Postmodernism 363
Secondly, the globalization of postmodernism might be driven by mechanisms of
dissemination, whereby ideas and models of Western postmodernism are transmitted
by more or less complex routes, through various intermediaries, to distant parts of the
world, where they are imitated, adapted, domesticated, resisted in various ways, and
so on. We glimpse this dissemination model in several essays in this issue: in Wang
Nings account of the piecemeal and partial way in which Chinese scholars transmit-
ted Western postmodernist ideas and texts to their colleagues and the general public;
in the controversy surrounding Han Shaogongs alleged plagiarism of Pavis Diction-
ary of the Khazars (1984), as reported by Zongxin Feng; and, perhaps most interesting
of all, in the case of Haruki Murakamis complex indebtedness to US postmodernism,
as traced here by Takayuki Tatsumi. Dissemination in this case is evidently two-way,
mediated in one direction by postwar Japanese translations of American literature
(including Murakamis own), in the other direction by Western translations of Mu-
rakamis novels, which in turn infuence Western postmodernists, and so on, around
the feedback loop.
Tere is, fnally, a third possibility, beyond economic globalization and the dis-
semination of models. It might be that the world has actually reached the thresh-
old of a genuinely global aesthetic, not explicable merely as the response to a global
economic order or a shared postmodern condition (though these factors are obvi-
ously involved), nor merely the result of imitating or domesticating Western models.
It might be that we fnd ourselves in a genuinely dialogic moment, when the cultures
of the worlds regions exchange memes and models among themselves outside the
center/periphery structure of either the old imperial colonialism or Western-centric
cultural neocolonialism. We might imagine these intra- and inter-regional cultural
dialogues, not routed through Western metropolitan centers but occurring among the
so-called peripheries, as a series of calls and responses (Moraru 206209).
Traces of this third possibility, too, can be glimpsed throughout these essays. It
can be glimpsed in the evocation of planetarity, in Spivaks senseor what Ursula
Heise has called a sense of planetin the essays by Dhaen, Batra, and Tatsumi.
We also glimpse it, I think, in McLaughlins account of North American post-post-
modernism, which, in novels like those by Junot Daz, Dave Eggers, and Karen Tei
Yamashita, seeks to unsettle the idea of the West, to destabilize the First World/Tird
World or West/East binaries, to reassert the reality of people whom globalization
others, and to open readers to the possibilities of other worlds, other distributions
of power, other ways of connecting. Above all, we glimpse this third possibility in
what Dhaen, following Christian Moraru, calls cosmodernism, implying a new form
of humanism governed not by the imposition of one idea of humanity on everyone,
but rather by relations of non-hierarchical diference. We might think of it as a kind
of benignly viral alternative to metropolitan postmodernism, proceeding not from
center to periphery or from developed to underdeveloped regions (to revert
to the old terminology), but rebounding back and forth among the regions, as each
writes back to the others.
Planetarity, post-postmodernism, cosmodernism. Perhaps claims about the
global scope of something like postmodernism werent wrong afer all, but ahead of
364 Brian McHale
their time. Perhaps now, for the frst time, we really do fnd ourselves in a situation
where, in diferent cities, the stoplights having changed, we are all about to cross the
street of the twenty-frst century togethermaybe from diferent sides of the street,
to meet and mingle somewhere in the middle.
Endnotes
1. Other North American writers whose experience of the Second World War could arguably be
said to have shaped their postmodernist practice include Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and
even the British novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, a veteran of Alan Turings code-cracking unit at
Bletchley Park (Brooke-Rose).
2. Kanika Batra, in her essay in this issue, raises important questions about the possibilities of re-
gional diference within the global, apropos of Harveys view that the urbanization process has
become genuinely global, and that its epicenter is China.
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