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