ABSTRACT
Discussions on postmodernism these days do seem more prone than most to confusing self-contradictions, perhaps because of the paradoxical nature of the subject itself. Charles Newman, for instance, in his provocative book The Post-Modern Aura (1985), begins by defining postmodern art as a “commentary on the aesthetic history of whatever genre it adopts” (44). This, then, would be art which sees history only in aesthetic terms (57). However, when postulating an American version of postmodernism, he abandons this metafictional intertextual definition to call American literature a “literature without primary influences,” “a literature which lacks a known parenthood,” suffering from the “anxiety of non-influence” (87). In this chapter I would like to focus my discussion primarily on American fiction in order to reply to Newman’s claims by examining the novels of writers such as Toni Morrison, E.L.Doctorow, John Barth, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon, and others, all of which cast what I see as a reasonable doubt on any such pronouncements. On the one hand, Newman wants to argue that postmodernism at large is resolutely parodic; on the other, he asserts that the American postmodern deliberately puts “distance between itself and its literary antecedents, an obligatory if occasionally consciencestricken break with the past” (172). Newman is not alone in his viewing of postmodern parody as a form of ironic rupture with the past (see Thiher 1984, 214), but, as in postmodernist architecture, there is always a paradox at the heart of that “post”: irony does indeed mark the difference from the past, but the intertextual echoing simultaneously works to affirm-textually and hermeneutically-the connection with the past.
