The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism

If Los Angeles is the city that taught us how to be postmodern, might it also be the place where we begin to imagine what comes after? For well over 30 years, the architecture, demographics, lifestyles, and industries of Southern California have inspired countless essays and books on the nature and significance of postmodernity. Hollywood, Disneyland, the elevators at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the futuristic cityscapes of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, freeways, suburbs, shopping malls: these have become touchstones for some of the most influential reflections on the subject of American--and often global--postmodernism. (1) Thomas Pynchon wrote of the alienating, dystopian elements of postmodern California in his 1966 The Crying of Lot 49, where he described the road as a "hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of the freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain" (15). In the paranoid imaginings of his protagonist Oedipa Maas, traffic is an endless automated flow; the freeway exists less to facilitate human movement than to feed a city that craves only numbing, drug-induced happiness. Oedipa is little more than a pawn in a system too vast to be fully perceived or understood. Fast forward 30 years to Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, where the Los Angeles freeways are described by Manzanar, a man who gave up his home and his career as a surgeon to become a "conductor" of the vast symphony of urban life. As he stands on an overpass, "the great flow of humanity [runs] below and beyond his feet in every direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great heartbeat of a great city" (35). Like Pynchon, Yamashita uses metaphors of a living body to depict the freeway, but in this case its rhythms are those of human motion; traffic is not a narcotic artificially introduced into the system but the very lifeblood of the city, whose roads are "a great root system, an organic living entity" (37). These contrasting images are emblematic of fundamental differences between The Crying of Lot 49 and Tropic of Orange, a novel that locates seismic shifts on the cultural horizon in the neighborhoods, traffic jams, and volatile borders of Southern California. Separated by 30 years, the two works can be read together as bookends bracketing one possible beginning and end to a particular kind of US literary postmodernism.

This essay proposes that Tropic of Orange represents an afterword to literary postmodernism that I will call the globalization of American literature. My observations originate from a growing sense that canonical works of postmodern literature no longer belong on the syllabus of my annual course on contemporary American fiction, which used to begin with The Crying of Lot 49. My students often respond to Pynchon's novel as if they were victims of a cruel hoax. They have little appreciation for its darkly comic ambiguities and are unfamiliar with historical and political allusions that once would have been immediately recognizable to its readers. Its depiction of the sharp polarization of the globe, fears of looming nuclear apocalypse, and newfound distrust of a government enmeshed in secrecy and conspiratorial activity represent the concerns of an earlier generation. They fail to see what is innovative about Pynchon's flat characters or the medium cool tones and playful self-reflexivity of his language. Their responses caused me to realize that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pynchon's novel has ceased to read as a work of contemporary fiction, even though many critics continue to use postmodern and contemporary as synonymous terms. While my students find Tropic of Orange no less challenging, they are willing to grapple with its difficulties because they recognize its form, which evokes the internet's polyvocality and time-space compression, and its themes--the human and environmental consequences of transformations taking place at America's borders--as belonging to their own contemporary moment. While these structural and thematic concerns may seem quite postmodern, Yamashita's novel situates them in relation to the vast inequities, economic interconnections, and movement of people and goods associated with globalization. In what follows, I will propose that the teaching and study of American literary history can benefit from more careful distinctions between the contemporary moment of globalization and its postmodern precursors.

My argument relies on an understanding of postmodernism as the dominant form of avant-garde literary experimentalism during the Cold War, a period marked by the ascendance of transnational corporations, the upheavals of decolonization, fears of nuclear holocaust, and the partitioning of the globe into ideological spheres. The dark humor; themes of paranoia, skepticism, and conspiracy; preoccupation with close reading and textuality; and complex formal experimentation characteristic of the most canonical works of postmodern literature can be historicized as a response to and reaction against what Alan Nadel has called the "containment culture" of Cold War America. (2) By this account, the formal and conceptual innovations of a group of authors that includes Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Kathy Acker, William Gaddis, William Gibson, and others belong to an era of literary history that came to an end in the late 1980s. This more historically and stylistically bounded understanding of literary postmodernism strikes me as more useful than one that extends from the years after World War II into the present. Examples of the latter include Michael Berube's proposition that postmodernism is a name for the era of globalization that we now inhabit and Marcel Cornis-Pope's division of postmodern literature into pre- and post-Cold War varieties. Most famously, Fredric Jameson describes postmodernism as the "cultural logic of late capitalism," a periodizing concept, but one with no apparent end in sight. Couched in such expansive terms, postmodernism is an unwieldy category that encompasses such strikingly different historical contexts and expressive forms that it threatens to become incoherent. Defining it more narrowly as a particularly successful mode of narrative experimentation that declined with the waning of the Cold War alleviates this problem and provides an opportunity to consider the distinctive features and historical circumstances of a new chapter in American literary history.