THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9501050375
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
FICTION, SAID novelist Shelby Hearon, is an exercise of ``if . . . then.'' It is a text that gives ``meaning to meaninglessness,'' ``sense to senselessness.'' Fiction, she postulated, allows readers to take control in a world out of control. It brings order out of chaos, reason out of absurdity.
All around the room participants in the ominous ``The State and Fate of Publishing'' symposium at the University of Texas last November nodded along with the ominous words by this prize-winning storyteller (Hug Dancing, Armadillo in the Grass) from Texas.
IF . . . THEN. . . . If, then what? I thought. A conquering of fear? A restoration of faith? A reason to believe that we haven't destroyed all semblance of civility?
I studied the woman on the distant dais and wondered how I had become so estranged from her world and she from mine. Both of us writers, both of us questioning, striving for self-knowledge, wisdom, and yearning to share (and enhance) life experiences. Yet, she fears the ``real'' world and feels powerless, and I, while I may despair of it, don't. Where she sees randomness, senselessness and meaninglessness, I see cause and effect. Where she sees moral relativism, I see a loss of courage and empathy.
As I listened, agitatedly, to Hearon talk about moral choices within, but not without, literature, I gradually became aware of what was happening to me. I was being drawn into the ``postmodern'' world, a world founded on disillusionment, ambiguity, alienation, randomness and uncertainty. Hearon is hauling blocks for the pyramid.
In the postmodern world, unlike the one we once knew as the realm of ``Great Books,'' universal truths do not transcend mere happenings, moments or ``stories.'' The constantly evolving ``culture'' becomes the medium - or, if you will, the medium is indeed the message - and, therefore, art, that which speaks to all human beings at all times, becomes incidental, even irrelevant.
In postmodernism, originality takes a back seat, and repetition, like the laugh track of a TV situation comedy, defines reality. When Jean-Paul Belmondo emulated Bogie in Jean-Luc Godard's movie ``Breathless'' (1959), postmodernism issued its primal scream. The movement appropriates other conventions without shame; indeed, it does so with zeal.
Lots of smoke and mirrors, postmodernism is attitude and irony, irony, irony. It's slick, but, for me, ultimately unsatisfying. I believe in moral determinism, universal truth and the value of myth, and I have a sense of my place, albeit a place created by me, in a greater human community. I'm a throwback to the classics, a literary dinosaur.
And yet, I have been conditioned to think like a postmodernist. Mel Brooks and his great ``Springtime for Hitler'' number from ``The Producers'' came quickly to mind while I attended Hearon's nihilism.
I wanted to ask the novelist why she had allowed herself to become so isolated and alone, so unduly influenced by the bias and superficiality of today's reported culture. I wanted to, but at the cocktail party later, she was enveloped by fawning sycophants, and it didn't seem appropriate. A bit like Lee Harvey Oswald muscling his way through a crowd to see JFK. (A little postmodernist humor.) Yes, we live in an increasingly violent society, I would have said to her. But that doesn't make our lives and our deaths senseless or meaningless. How had Hearon lost - or did she ever have - a sense of the ``greater'' story?
I don't accept the amorality of postmodernism, however entertaining it may be, nor do I, at my core, accept ``randomness.'' Randomness strips events of their inherent cause and purpose and sacrifices people's lives to chance. I believe in searching for truth, not in denying its existence. And I believe in art, timeless and transcendent of culture. What art is and how it is made have become, in our effete fin-de-siecle society, perplexing questions. It once was as easy as ``Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'' But no more.
Like Keats' marbled Grecian urn, I hold fast to permanence in a changing world, to human passions and intellect. Literature enriches humanity, but humanity exists and has meaning without it. Even in postmodern America. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor for The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB