Postmodernism in American literature - Book Report/Review Example

Postmodernism in American literature Originally a reaction to modernism in critical theory, postmodernism is most celebrated movements in American literature and the novels of this category clearly reflect the cultural, intellectual, and artistic state of affairs and disillusionment that existed in the post World War II, especially in the Western world. Postmodernism is "An international movement, affecting all the contemporary arts, which has succeeded modernism... In literature, it has its origins in the rejection of traditional mimetic fiction in favor of a heightened sense of artifice, a delight in games and verbal pyrotechnics, a suspicion of absolute truth and resulting inclination to stress the fictionality of fiction." (Head and Ousby, 887) Two of the most celebrated American examples of postmodern fiction are Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Art Spiegelman's Maus which offer scope for a stimulating comparative analysis of postmodern novels for an understanding of the distinctive features of the works belonging to the category. Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a graphic novel which is completed in thirteen years which gives an account of the struggle of novelist's father to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew. The novel is especially celebrated, among others, for its representation of history and violence in a postmodern style of narration and the novelist reduces the characters to the state of animals which literalizes the call for petits recits that is customary in postmodern discourse at present. The various themes of the graphic novel, especially the novelist's enunciation of the Holocaust which gives the book a meta-biographical feature, along with the other narrative features, illustrate the significant elements of a postmodern fiction. The 1966 novel In Cold Blood by Truman Capote spells out the carnage of Herbert Clutter, the wealthy farmer from Holcomb, his wife, and two children in 1959 and the plot intertwines the intricate psychological story of two parolees who join their hands in a gory massacre. The true value of this great work by Capote is evident in the fact that this 'nonfiction novel' cannot be ignored in any account of the 'new' American writing, especially the historiographic meta-fiction, of the 1960s and 70s and one may realize this novel as "a modern rewriting of the realistic novel - universalist in its assumptions and omniscient in its narrative technique." (Hutcheon, 115) Therefore, Capote's In Cold Blood and Spiegelman's Maus offer two salient perspectives of a postmodern fiction in American literature and an analysis of these novels can provide one with an effective guide to the distinguishing features of postmodernism. This paper undertakes such a comparative analysis of the novels by Capote and Spiegelman in order to demonstrate some essential principles or concepts connected to postmodernism in American literature. One of the most essential comparative elements in the prominent postmodernist novels by Capote and Spiegelman is the representation and nature of history in the two works which has unique implication for postmodern thought. The postmodern and poststructuralist thought are most often pigeonholed as merely negating history. However, one may realize it in a more authentic manner as extremely occupied with the more relevant question of how one understands one's relationship to the past. In the late twentieth-century thought as evident in the postmodern novels of Capote and Spiegelman et al, one discovers some more fundamental questions such as how one memorizes in history and what is rendered as history in the midst of an awareness about the implication of the images in mediating memory and history. Capote's In Cold Blood and Spiegelman's Maus present such a distinctive view of history and violence through significant images of history and specific narrative strategy, though there is vital difference in their representation of these themes. "If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form through which the past could be re-experienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no such easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the role of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift." (Sturken, 10) Both Capote and Spiegelman treat history and violence in their own individual styles which have common features to several postmodern writings in American literature. Spiegelman's Maus, especially makes use of the postmodernist images to represent the history concerning the Holocaust and the related violence. In a reflective analysis of Spiegelman's Maus, one realizes the intentional rebellion of genre and cultural norm which is an essential feature of the postmodernist novels. In his book Maus the novelist makes use of a traditionally 'low' genre, i.e. the comic strip or book, in order to convey a serious and grave material and one notices a conscious and deliberate inversion of the norm, hierarchy, and cultural order in the work. Whereas the work is a very strong rereading of a survivor's tale and the testimony of this tale to the son, it may undoubtedly be regarded as a strong refurbishing or modification of the generic possibilities of the 'comic' itself. The novelist makes use of an impressive style of postmodern narration which reduces the characters to animals and provides illumining images of the Holocaust. "The reduction of the players to cats (the Nazis), mice (the Jews), pigs (the Poles) and other national stereotypes offers a conscious, intentional miniaturization and reduction, pointing up not merely the process of compression, simplification and devaluation, not merely of the Nazi's practices before and during the Holocaust, but the reduction and simplification present in many 'responses' to the Holocaust as well." (Friedl'nder) Thus, one comprehends that Spiegelman, by this method, literalizes the call for petits recits which is so rampant in postmodern discourse today. There are also other significant features of a post modernist novel in Maus such as multiple narratives and kinds of texts. Thus, one notices maps of Poland and the Camps, diagrams of hiding places, actual photographs from the family records, comprehensive plans of the crematoria, an exchange table for goods in Auschwitz, and a handbook for shoe-repair etc, along with the images, dialogue boxes, and commentary. There are also evidences of different text-types in the novel Maus. "The reader moves through several different 'historical subject-positions' and narrated events; there are the pre-holocaust, the Holocaust, and the post holocaust, but also, within one time-frame, there can be other times and places co-present as well. Maus thus juxtaposes and intertwines past and present, the different subject histories of each protagonist, and the very different cultural contexts of Nazi occupied Poland and Rego Park, New York." (Friedl'nder) All these aspects of the work contribute to the postmodern characteristics which the narrator was celebrating in his novel. Maus has been regarded as a typical postmodernist novel which challenged the validity of the norms and practices of the genre and the culture. In this famous comic book by Spiegelman, the Holocaust experiences of the father Vladek opened up a new way of Holocaust representation which reached broader public. The novelist fundamentally departs from expected forms of representation and the norms of the genre in portraying the Jews as mice, Poles as pigs and Germans as cats etc. The reader also notices that the tragic account of Vladek's survival of the Nazi invasion is frequently interrupted by the author's mediation of his father, his expressions of annoyance and aggravation etc. Thus, this particular style of narration in the novel provides new conventions about the genre and the effect of this type of narration is that reader is aware of the author's rejection as a child of a survivor which helps him in depicting his father and his story in clear-cut terms. Through the representation of people and countries in distinctive terms, the narrator achieves a postmodernist treatment of the topic and the images presented to the readers describe this phenomenon in an unambiguous way. "As such, Maus achieves a kind of reversal of the animated and the photographic... Hence, Maus succeeds ironically in making the comic book animals more authentic than the disruptive insertion of the staged, performative photograph." (Sturken, 10) In comparison to the novel Maus, Capote's In Cold Blood also presents one of the evident examples of postmodernist writing and there is a different type of treatment of the main themes such as historical representation and violence. The novel tells the psychological story of two criminals and the major concern here is the effect of crime by these parolees on their community. One of the major intricacies of the work is the forceful psychological relationship between the two offenders which make the novel a ground-breaking work of true crime. However, it is the postmodern elements in the novel which attract scholarly analyses and studies. According to Geyh et al, "In Cold Blood (1965) illustrates how the postmodern inclination to blur the boundary between standard journalism and fiction could itself create a new layer of narrative tension within the bounds of the tradition novel." (Geyh et al, 125) Thus, Capote's novel celebrates postmodernist trends in a different way, i.e. it is often associated with 'the nonfiction novel' which is different from 'the new journalism' trend in American postmodernism. The New Journalism is a new form of postmodern writing which is exactly an American phenomenon. The contemporary postmodern writings in American literature celebrated this new form of 'the new journalism' which is overtly personal and provisional journalism, autobiographical in impulse and performative in impact. "The famous exception is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which is modern rewriting of the realist novel - universalist in its assumptions and omniscient in its narrative technique." (Hutcheon, 115) Capote's In Cold Blood is greatly celebrated as 'the nonfiction novel' as against the trends of 'the new journalism' and the nonfiction novel did not just record the contemporary hysteria of history. The novel is a modern rewriting of the realist novel and there are certain elements in the work which make it a late modernist creation. According to some critics like Podhoretz, there is an issue of the choice between fiction and nonfiction in the novel which was opposed by other critics such as Zavarzadeh. "What he calls 'the modal ambiguity' of In Cold Blood, then, is claimed by Zavarzadeh as the narrative equivalent of 'the inherent complexity of contemporary reality'. Hence the book's account of events surrounding the real-life murders of a rural family by two young drifters in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas...turns Holocomb - by means of Capote's 'mythopoeic' approach - into 'a crisis city; a state of existence reflecting contemporary America..." (Lucy, 85-6) In conclusion, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Art Spiegelman's Maus provide the best examples of postmodernism in American literature and both the novels celebrate postmodern trends in literature in their distinctive ways. The allegorical representation of facts and events in the novel Maus suggests the postmodern feature of deviating from the traditional values and norms of narration. The overall theme of the novel is presented through the graphic images and stunning narrative style. "The very title of the books is a powerful reworking of the convention: Maus rewrites the cultural norm and invents a new discursive space to address the questions of Jewish trauma, guilt, shame, and, perhaps most importantly, the transmission of these conflicts from one generation to the next..." (Friedl'nder) The novel In Cold Blood is another beautiful example of postmodern trends in American literature and the work is celebrated as 'the nonfiction novel' representing new trends in postmodernism. The novel is a fine example of postmodernist writing which is the blurring of boundaries between the novel and journalism. Therefore, both the novels represent postmodern aspects in American literature in distinctive ways and there is great scope for further comparative analysis of these novels as postmodernist examples. Works Cited Friedl'nder, Saul. "Trauma, Transference and Working-Through." History and Memory. 4. 1992. 39-55. Feb 26. 2009. . Geyh, Paula, et al. Postmodern American Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. P 125. Head, Dominic and Ian Ousby. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. P 887. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. 1988. P 115. Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. New York. Blackwell Publishing. 1997. P 85-6. Sturken, Marita. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Afterimage. Vol. 26. Iss. 6. 1999. P 10. Read More