Postmodernism- a future ?

[Marmaduke]

OK...I've failed. For the third attempt, I've tried to read Douglas Coupland's All Families are Psychotic and given up. It's terrible, cliché ridden and pretty empty in terms of content. This is a writer out of gas, coasting, and coasting to a dead end.

I had read all of his previous books (and not in the order they were written) and loved 'Girlfriend in a Coma', 'Life After God' and 'Generation -X', but I am sorry, you can feel the decline in his writing, and All Families is little more than a string of clichés and empty resonance from contemporary culture. It is one thing to satirise a culture, but when does that become a dead end to thinking and little more than a bland catalogue of the vacancies you seek to escape ?

Next. Chuck Palahniuk. Now I've just finished all his books, just finished 'Lullaby'. Here we get the usual 'road movie' that he used in 'Invisible Monster' and reads like a tamed down version of 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. I loved 'Fight Club' and 'Survivor' but after that, as with Coupland, we get the same recycled themes and style of writing.

The fact is both writers are seen as 'thermometers' of a generation (even if this is only ever one in retrospect) yet both writers suffer from (in my opinion) of the same postmodernist fatigue. The same thing applies to Noam Chomsky and some of his fellow writers. We get fantastic descriptions of society and the hypocrisy that it evolves around, yet no 'theory' is ever offered as to why this should be. Have we ditched Marxism or Post (or Late) Marxist thinkers in favour of social critics that after four books (Chomsky excepted) seem to run aground. It is fine to offer a critique- Orwell did that, and in my opinion, did it better. His writing would not have had the contemporary resonance that Coupland or Palahniuk, but somehow I suspect it will survive. In an attempt to describe the disposability of contemporary culture, both are in danger of becoming the same. They both explore a cul-de-sac of culture, but end up becoming as much a part of the this as the thing they seek to describe. How long until the next item in a new novel features a novel of one of the above on a coffee table. Welcome to the wilderness of mirror that such writers, who attempt to evoke a time and place of our particular time, become the thing itself.

It is like (as I saw the other week) in an interview with the war photographer- James Natchweny. There was a section where he was photographing some Palestinian kids throwing rocks at IDF tanks. What we had was a camera filming another camera filming these children and beggared the question, who was acting for whom , who was the subject, or really was there one any more ? Who is watching whom ? Subject and object become blurred, but in a supossedly valid way. Have we just succumbed to the intoxication of our own culture that seek to we describe- or is it easier to reuse it's own terms and language in an attempt to deconstruct the same ?

Last year, W G Sebald was killed in a motor accident near his home in East Anglia. Only late in life did his works get published, and he lived as an exile in England for most of his life. He wrote of exile, of alienation, of the emptiness and irrelevancy life can become. He can be seen as 'old fashioned' but his ideas are as far thinking as any of the writers that wear their 'modernist' credibility on their sleeve, Sebald makes far higher demands on the reader, and his books occasionally littered with his poorly executed black and white photos, draw you in, and rather than just describe a time- force you to confront it as a reader. He isn't a passive writer, although his gentle tone may lead you to think so. He works on a general crescendo, a slow development of a twisting theme that you are never sure you known where it leads, but know it has a inevitable destination.


[Edited by Jasperthecat on 24th November 2002 at 20:16]

[Niquie]

...I'm buying you a television for Christmas.

[imported_grafix]

Originally posted by Niquie
...I'm buying you a television for Christmas.

Get him a TIVO too so he doesn't miss 'The west wing'

[Niquie]

The West Wing is my favorite television show!

During the commercial breaks I find myself talking out loud and saying "This is the best gawdamn show on T.V!"

It is the ONLY HOUR of television when I WILL NOT answer the phone.

[imported_grafix]

I lov ethat show as well!
It's awesome
that and 'everybody loves raymond' hehe

the only problem is: it's not realistic.
With a republican party in power-the liberal style of the West Wing seems 'unrealistic'
But hey-at least it helps us all dream

Originally posted by Niquie
...I'm buying you a television for Christmas.

I will help you and I will even deliever it

Originally posted by grafix
I lov ethat show as well!
It's awesome
that and 'everybody loves raymond' hehe

the only problem is: it's not realistic.
With a republican party in power-the liberal style of the West Wing seems 'unrealistic'
But hey-at least it helps us all dream

Never even heard of this