From Modern to Postmodern

From monstrouspossibility

From Modernism to Postmodernism: Stein, Beckett, and Calvino

“Postmodernity means the end of modernity, in the sense of those grand narratives of truth, reason, science, progress and universal emancipation which are taken to characterize modern thought from the Enlightenment onwards… The typical postmodernist work of art is arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentred, fluid, discontinuous, pastiche-like. True to the tenets of postmodernity, it spurns metaphysical profundity for a kind of contrived depthlessness, playfulness and lack of affect, an art of pleasures, surfaces and passing intensities. Suspecting all assured truths and certainties, its form is ironic and its epistemology relativist and skeptical.”

Academics in the 1960s observed that members of modern western society had begun to reject the grand narratives of modernity and invented the term postmodernity to describe socio-political and artistic results of this shift. Authors who saw that the grand narratives of modernity had come to an end began to write differently to reflect this shift, and literary theorists began to see an objective literary interpretation as an impossible task because each reader had their own narratives, culture, desires, and no way to read in a grand objective way. This essay will examine three texts, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms by Gertrude Stein, Stories and Texts for Nothing by Samuel Beckett, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms and Stories and Texts for Nothing are two transitional pieces of writing that can be examined through both a lens of both modernist and postmodernist concepts, while Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is self-consciously postmodern. The hypothetical distinction between modernism and postmodernism in literature will be shown to be indistinct and useful only in the historical examination of literature as an outgrowth of a dynamic western culture.

Although the term postmodern literature generally refers to post World War II literature, Gertrude Stein is considered by some to be ahead of her time and a leader in her rejection of the grand narratives of modernist thought. In Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms the reader is confronted by the utter impossibility to make an interpretation with any grand modern objectivity. Stein rejects any narrative at all in this prose poetry about household objects, food, and rooms. The reader is forced to make associations from their own history of the words on the page if they want to make any sense out of what is written or is otherwise forced to pay attention to only the sonic aspect of Stein’s work for enjoyment. On page two Stein writes “A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. A piece of coffee is not a detainer. The resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether.” Upon reading this passage one reader might associate with dirty urine stains on the side of a bathroom wall, while another might think of dirty yellow teeth, and yet another might think of dirty yellow armpit stains on a shirt or even dirty yellow stains on underwear left on the floor of a locker room. Gertrude Stein gives her reader nearly endless possibilities of interpretation, and in this sense is declared by some to be the mother of the postmodern rejection of objective interpretation. Nicola Pitchford, in her essay Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein’s Tender Buttons rejects the placement of Stein’s Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms as postmodern and would prefer her work to be labeled “simply different” because she believes that texts should be analyzed alongside contemporary texts in order to recognize the “historical circumstances that put both literary texts and theories in perspective.” Pitchford describes how labels of postmodern have been given in “book-length studies” to “Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats, Kierkegaard, and even Plato.” With so many different texts from so many different periods spoken of as postmodern, literary theorists weaken the concept that is best left to refer to changes in a particular time period of western culture.

A theorist who wishes to use postmodern literary concepts to examine literature in a historical context will have to ponder a book finished thirty-eight years after Stein wrote Tender Buttons, when Samuel Beckett completed his Stories and Texts for Nothing in 1952. Beckett had begun this piece seven years earlier in 1945 with three stories before a revelation he had that led him to complete the book in numbered segments of non-narrative in which he writes “What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me. Spells of silence too, when I listen, and hear the local sounds, the world sounds, see what an effort I make to be reasonable. There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” Samuel Beckett had started Stories and Texts for Nothing as a modern text and finished it postmodern style. Historically speaking, Beckett’s revelation was that there were no possibilities left in literature after his friend James Joyce had stretched the possibilities of language to their limits, and the only thing left for Samuel Beckett was to explore languages impossibilities. James Joyce has become perhaps the first author one thinks of when they think of modern literature. Samuel Beckett, through the development of his unique style, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969 and has become perhaps the first author people think of when they think of postmodern literature. Samuel Beckett wrote a piece later in his career called Happy Days which is mostly a monologue of a woman stuck from the waist up in the sand of a desert as she rambles on and tries to make the best of things. Samuel Beckett felt this way with writing in the sense that he was stuck with what had already been done with language and he was left to rearrange this to create the monstrous. The same year as this revelation, 1945, also marked other reasons besides the shadows left from James Joyce’s monumental modern novels for rejecting the grand narratives of modernism. Citizens of all nations must have felt a little more reluctant about the progress of science after they witnessed the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Academics do not have a clear distinction for when postmodernism begins but two of the biggest landmarks were certainly World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, although they aren’t certain what exactly caused societies increased skepticism. Fredrick Jameson believes the postmodern shift in societal thought is related to changing conditions of capitalism.

Regardless of the rejection of the narrative and the time period in which Beckett’s Text for Nothing the writer John Barth in his essay “Literature of Replenishment” does not classify Beckett’s Text For Nothing as postmodern where he writes, “my ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents of his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naivete, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels as Beckett’s Text for Nothing… The ideal postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irealism, formalism and contentism, pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction…”

Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is an ideal postmodernist novel which is certainly much more democratic in its appeal than Texts for Nothing. The reader is aware as they read Calvino’s If on a Winter’s night a Traveler of the self-consciousness of Calvino in his rejection of the narrative in favor of a collection of unfinished stories interspersed with numbered chapters that address the reader. In his essay “Italo Calvino and What’s Next: The Literature of Monstrous Possibility” Curtis White points out that postmodernism “is the locus” of something much older “ the Other Tradition of antimimesis,” a “reaction against realism,” a combatant against “State Fiction.” Perhaps another term is needed for what is similar between postmodern literature and literature that was before World War II that has postmodern features. Curtis White writes that “Calvino sees the confrontation between modernism- postmodernism and realism not as a narrowly literary dispute, but rather as an important part of a much larger cultural confrontation over the frontiers of knowledge and power.” Theorists must therefore keep the term postmodern in the contexts of the historical period after World War II so that the larger historical cultural shift becomes apparent.

Perhaps the term postmodern is not very useful. As Annie Choi writes in The New Bricklayer “The very idea of post-modern is a product of a peculiar form of capitalisms death: the contemporary multinational workforce has too much time on its hands, not because it is a leisure class, but because its jobs no longer imply making anything. We have time to contemplate our own demise as agents in a world, for we are sitting at desks built by the company that we work for, using the web built by the company we work for, occasionally looking out the window at a world that might or might not have been built (the world and the window) by the company we work for.” Authors have always written monstrously in their own historical style, but nobody ever spent as much time thinking about it as they do now. The most interesting writers have always been those who reject the dominant cultural values of their historic period. If postmodernism is to have any use to the practice of a writer it must inform her about the society that she lives in so she can play with her familiarity of her own culture of schizophrenia.