From: karls@aurora.physics.utoronto.ca (Karl Schroeder)
Subject: Postmodern SF
Keywords: postmodernism, The All-Seeing Eye, MirrorS
Organization: University of Toronto Physics/Astronomy/CITA
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 20:30:39 GMT


in article 12352 of rec.arts.sf.written, David Stein dstein@rhea.math.ucla.edu
writes:
   [stuff deleted]
> written by Charles Jencks [0].  It is a small pamphlet of only 48 pages but 
> lots of photographs and illustrations.
>
>   Jencks's field is Architecture, and it is here that Jencks's description 
> of Post-Modernism (note the spelling) is the most clear and satisfying.
> But Jencks does attempt a general definition of Post-Modernism in arts,
> including Literature.  In his opinion the central trait of Post-Modernism
>is what he terms "double coding":
>
>        Double coding to simplify means both elite/popular and new/old
>        and there are compelling reasons for these opposite pairings. 
>        Today's Post-Modern architects were trained by Modernists, and
>        are committed to using contemporary technology as well as facing 
>        social reality.  These commitments are enough to distinguish
>        them from revivalists or traditionalists, a point worth stressing
>        since it creates their hybrid language, the style of Post-Modern
>        architecture.  The same is not completely true of Post-Modern
>        artists and writers who may use traditional techniques of
>        narrative and representation in a more straightforward way.
>        Yet all the creators who could be called Post-Modern keep
>        something of a Modern sensibility - some intention which 
>        distinguishes their work from that of revivalists - whether
>        this is irony, parody, displacement, complexity, eclecticism,
>        realism or any number of contemporary tactics and goals.
>        As I mention in the foreword, Post-Modernism has the essential
>        double meaning: the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence.
>
>   So it seems Post-Modernism attempts to communicate in a positive way with 
> the public without necessarily lowering its artistic standards.  Just 
> like Bugs Bunny may be enjoyed by both adults and children, Post-Modernism 
> tries to work on both high/low level.  Further, where Modernism may seek 
> to break with the past, Post-Modernism respects it and tries to incorporate 
> it into its design--without, again, ignoring the present. 

[material deleted for brevity]

> seems evident here as well.  To cite J. Barth:
>
>        My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates
>        nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century
>        modernist parents or 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 craftmanship, Madison Avenue
>        venality, or either false or real naivete, he nevertheless
>        aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal that
>        such late-modernist marvels (by my definition and in my
>        judgment) as Beckett's _Stories and Texts for Nothing_
>        or Nabakov's _Pale Fire_.  He may not hope to reach and move
>        the devotees of James Mitchener and Irving Wallace--not
>        to mention the lobotomized mass-media illiterates.  But
>        he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of 
>        the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call 
>        the early Christians: professional devotees of high art.[2]
    [stuff deleted]

>    So...
>
>    My question, then, is whether there are any science fictional
> works that may be reasonably termed postmodern.  In particular, I 
> would like to know if there is any connection between Cyberpunk 
> or _The Movement_ and postmodernism.  

I won't comment on rival theories of what's postmodern (a sign of the
times:  there are many).  Under the above definitions, there's probably
a lot of postmodern SF around.  The preeminent postmodern SF novel
right now though, may be The Difference Engine (Gibson and Sterling).
The rest of this may be a spoiler for some, so be warned!
 
TDE initially appears to be an alternate history.  It also initially
appears to be a spy thriller.  The story keeps mutating, however, and
expectations are set up and then not followed through on.  The man
being set up as the prime mover of the 'spy' plot is killed at the end
of the first section, and the P.O.V. character, a woman, simply
vanishes from the book, reappearing only briefly at the end.  Readers
familiar with the end of Gravity's Rainbow will not be startled by this,
but anybody expecting a straightforward projective alternate history will
have a right to be.  Many people I know who've read it have been irritated 
by this.  But wait, what's really going on here?

Gibson and Sterling have said that the book was written entirely on
word processor (no paper drafts) largely by a process of 'plagiarism':
they plundered Victorian literature for narrative, description, and
dialogue which they incorporated almost without change into the novel.
You could call this cheating, but it's consistent with what happens
thematically.  The novel is not a story set in an alternate world, but
is a story about CONSTRUCTING a world by means of storytelling.
The 'storyteller' within TDE is a kind of narrative engine, residing
in a computer somewhere, which imagines itself into being through the
narrative.  The narrative mirrors reality, but in this case the reality
is the narrative, a circular process.  The crucial image for this is
Lady Ada Byron gazing into a mirror at the end of the novel, an incident
that causes the differentiating engine of the storyteller to finally
become self-aware.

You can read the entire thing without making this interpretation.  The
careful use of historical language and narrative style (to the point of
lifting entire chunks of prose from books of the time) and the fact 
that the plots of the novel's sections are essentially period plots,
and banal, allows a traditional reading at any point.  Only when you
finish the whole, step back and look at it, does another interpretation
demand itself.  

This would seem to fulfil the conditions for postmodernity set out above.
-- 
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Karl Schroeder                         |  karls@aurora.physics.utoronto.ca  
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