po-mo story assignment

Postmodern Story assignment

Rough draft: June 4

Final: June 8

Length: 3 pages

Assignment:

Write a story that acknowledges fiction’s limitations and playfully pushes against them.  Your story should be one or more of the following:

Self-conscious                                       Self-referential                         Absurd                                   

Transparently artificial                      Intertextual                     Metafictional/metatextual

Genre-bending                                      Playful                                     artifactual

Some examples, in addition to the ones we’ve already considered: 

Borges’s story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” poses as an academic essay about a modern writer who rewrites Don Quixote.  The essayist insists that the modern writer’s version is much better than that of Cervantes, even though they are word for word the same.

Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a short novel about a guy who has gone out on his lunch break to get a new pair of shoelaces.  The novel takes place in the man’s head while he rides  down the escalator in his office building.

Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations takes large chunks of Dickens’s novel but tells a very different story, one of sex and violence; bordering on the unreadable, this novel critiques the male-dominated world.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried calls into question how we know what “really” happened, etc.

Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, whose chapters can be read in various orders.

You might:

rewrite a book we’ve already read, and interpose authorial commentary;

write about trying to write a story;

write a story with different endings;

write a story about a character in search of a story, or a setting in search of a character, or a plot in search of a setting, or…

Read a work of American fiction from the past 50 or so years

By next Tuesday (E) or WEdnesday (F), you have to have acquired a copy of a creative, narrative work written by an American sometime since 1955 and you have to have begun reading it.  The book does not have to be "postmodern", but since you do have to write a "postmodern" story, it might be helpful.  Below is a brief list of some books that might be good to read:

Title, Author
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,  Junot Diaz
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,  Dave Eggers
Beloved (or anything else by), Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse Five (or anything else by),  Kurt Vonnegut
The Breast (or anything else by),  Philip Roth
Pale Fire,  Vladimir Nabokov
The Crying of Lot 49,  Thomas Pynchon
The Dead Girl,  Melanie Thernstrom
The Secret History,  Donna Tartt
Brief interviews with Hideous Men,  David Foster Wallace
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
A Visit From the Goon Squad,  Jennifer Egan
The History of Love,  Nicole Krauss
Either of Jonathan Safran Foer's novels
Maus and Maus II, by Art Spiegelman
Fun Home and You Are Not My Mother, by Alison Bechdel
etc.

Field Trip to Walden Pond

Meet me in the Atrium Thursday morning at 8:30 AM.  If you don't come on the trip, you will come to class and will have to write an essay. If you are coming on the trip, here's what you should do:
 
Bring $10 for the bus if you haven't already

Bring the signed teacher approval form if you haven't already.  (If you have turned in your Teacher Approval signature form, you will already be excused from your classes for the day; if you have NOT turned in the form, please bring the signed form as soon as possible so that you can be excused.)

Bring lunch.

Bring something to write with.  Bring a book if you like.

Wear clothes and shoes that will be okay in the woods, and bring a positive, flexible attitude.   The weather should be okay, but it has rained a lot, so there may be some mud on the trails in places.  We will be walking, sitting, and writing in the woods.

See you then.

Postmodern absurdism

In class a few weeks ago we read some John Ashbery and James Tate poems.  Yesterday in class we read a short story by Donald Barthelme that reminded some of you of the Tate poems.  For those of you who weren't in class yesterday, here's the story:




The School   
by Donald Barthelme

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their education, to see how you know the root systems… and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks. It was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes—well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably… you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe… well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander… well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.

We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, “Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then….” And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap-yap-yapping. They named it Edgar—that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.

And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program; all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing; the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the school, particularly; I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year—it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.

The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that: the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.

I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? And I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered such a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.

I said, that’s sound.

They said, it’s a bloody shame!

I said, it is.

They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.

I do like Helen but I said that I would not.

We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.

I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the window.

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

Postmodern self-consciousness

In the last month of school, you will read some contemporary American literature of your own choosing.  Last Friday I talked about something that often shows up in fiction of the past several decades, and read aloud some passages for illustration.

One feature we often see in contemporary literature is a heightened self-consciousness, a way in which the text comments on itself, or contains texts within it.  This is not a brand new technique, of course—we see it in the opening to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in Hawthorne’s preface to The Scarlet Letter, and in the ironies and commentaries built into Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and even such apparently earnest works as Whitman’s Song of Myself.  Nevertheless, self-consciousness is probably more common, and taken to greater lengths, in fiction written after the nineteen-fifties.

Often this self-consciousness is expressed in anxiety about the inadequacy of writing to handle the inexpressible intensity and variety of real life.  For example, Vonnegut’s first chapter in Slaughterhouse Five talks about how he had been trying for years to write a novel about his experiences during the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II.  The horrors of this experience seemed unable to be expressed through normal fictional conventions.  How can you represent the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocents?  Similar feelings were often expressed about the holocaust: after such overwhelming horror, how can one believe in God, how can one make art?  Such anxieties were often felt on a smaller level as well: Dave Eggers opens his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with an “Acknowledgments” section that includes things like long discussions of how he chose the title of his book, and sentences like, “While the author is self-conscious about being self-referential, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality.”

Often, these anxieties about how to deal truly and authentically with the difficulty and slipperiness of real life seem to have made the authors turn, ironically, self-consciously, to parody, to humor, to science fiction, to magical realism, to cartoons.  It’s no coincidence that the most famous American book about the holocaust is a graphic novel, and one with two strands, a present-time level on which the author interviews his survivor father about his experiences, and a past-time level that shows his father’s experiences.  Including the interviews makes it clear that the author is not pretending to complete authority, that the author is aware that writing about the holocaust is on some level impossible.

So—you don’t have to read a self-conscious, postmodern book—but you might consider it. Here are some possibilities:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Fun Home and Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Dead Girl be Melanie Thernstrom
Slaugherhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Breast by Philip Roth
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Open City by Teju Cole