Roberto Maria Dainotto

Dept. of Comparative Literature
New York University
DAINOTTR@acfcluster.nyu.edu

 

 

Once a famous Hellenic philosopher, [Aesop’s] master in the dark days of his enslaved youth, had asked him why it was, when we shat, we so often turned around to examine our own turds, and he’d told that great sage the story of the king’s loose-living son who one day, purging his belly, passed his own wits, inducing a like fear in all men since. “But you don’t have to worry, sire,” he added, “you’ve no wit to shit.” Well, cost him a beating, but it was worth it, even if it was all a lie. For the real reason we look back of course is to gaze for a moment in awe and wonder at what we’ve made–it’s the closest we ever come to being at one with the gods.
 
Now what he reads in this analecta of turds is rampant disharmony and anxiety: it’s almost suffocating. Boundaries are breaking down: eagles are shitting with serpents, monkeys with dolphins, kites with horses, fleas with crayfish, it’s as though there were some mad violent effort here to link the unlinkable, cross impossible abysses. And there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes. That foul mound could be the movement of a hippogriff, for example, this slime that of a basilisk or a harpy. His own bowels, convulsed by all this ripe disorder, feel suddenly with a plunging weight, as though heart, hump, and all might have just descended there: he squats hastily, breeches down (well, Zeus sent Modesty in through the asshole, so may she exit there as well), to leave his own urgent message on the forest floor.
 

–Robert Coover, “Aesop’s Forest”

 

For this relief much thanks…

 

—Hamlet, I: i, 8

 

Dedicatory Epistle to the Reader

 

The paper hereby presented is, properly speaking, a treatise on evacuation. As such, its ideal location would be between Dominique Laporte’s Histoire de la merde and Pietro Manzoni’s Merde d’artista–works, in other words, secretly dedicated to friendly souls, or, as in this case, to the logorrheic interpreter of postmodernity. The author, but a humble hack, aims at the scholastic fame of having been able, if not to tap, at least to indicate a peculiar gap in postmodern criticism: for it appeared astounding to him that, among so many postmodernisms–“John Barth’s postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; Charles Newman’s postmodernism, the literature of inflationary economy; Jean-Francois Lyotard’s postmodernism, a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; Ihab Hassan’s postmodernism, a stage on the road to the spiritual unification of humankind…” (McHale 4)–the one concerned with the sublimity of evacuation had been so absolutely neglected.

 

To single out a certain sense of the sublime in contemporary literature, it is mandatory to impose severe limitations on and some critical selecting of the otherwise too heterogeneous material at hand. First, this research will be limited to North American fiction. Second, the investigation will focus on one particular theme that seems to have grieved American literature since the fifties–a theme that goes under the name of “the crisis of consciousness.”¹ What is intended here by “critical selecting” is that pre-Kantian form of judgement that constitutes the essence and very nature of the author’s critical method: “I like it, or I don’t.” On this basis, I have not the least intention to encompass within this reading the “fast-food fictions” (Pfeil 2) and minimalist melancholies of Jay McInerney or Susan Minot. They do not “fit,” and, moreover, they get on my nerves.

 

Of this critical scheme, the author is ready to admit that it is what nowadays seems to be the object of ridicule and scorn: it is, no doubt, a dogmatic scheme. It begins with an assumption about what contemporary American literature might be, and therefore it handles exclusively those works which “fit” into the scheme. In defense of this method, the author can only mention the innocence with which he is trying not to impose his assumption on any work.

 

If the reader finds this preamble to be redundant, or the following to be repugnant, let us make clear that these notes, “neither a defense nor yet another denigration of the cultural enterprise we seem determined to call postmodernism” (Hutcheon, Poetics ix), should be intended as an attempt to single out some strategies of aesthetic, and maybe also moral and political, survival within the limits of what Jameson has so grimly called “logic of late capitalism”–or, in Baudrillard’s more pertinent formulation, the logic of fast-food, anorexia, bulimia, and obesity. Henceforth, dear reader, consider the following as yet one more exercise in survival and digestion–an exercise morally and socially relevant of which the author professes himself to be a persevering practitioner.

 

Fables of Digestion

 

The term digestion itself is one of the interfaces between ideas of bodily and mental process. Latin digero meant properly to force apart, to separate…

 

–R.M. Durling, “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell”

 

Inclusion and exclusion, symbolic and material exchange, body boundaries, gender, and other identity factors are systematically and most deeply inscribed in the members of a given group through eating practices.

 

–George Yudice, “Feeding the Transcendent Body”

 

 

In this paper, the term “sublime” refers not only to a set of aesthetic practices and transcendental ideals that have manifested themselves in contemporary American literature, but also to certain features of our own life and culture, features that, to paraphrase Geoffrey Harpham, “have survived the loss of the ideological structures within which they emerged” (xi). Loss and survival are two of the most remarkable traits of the sublime: since Longinus, they mark the stages of the individual’s confrontation with a superior force that momentarily marks the disruption of the subject, which is first “scattered,” and then joyfully reconstituted, “uplifted with a sense of proud possession…filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we felt” (Longinus On the Sublime VII, translation mine).

 

There seems to be general agreement today about the fact that the first epochal horizon within which one can speak of postmodernity coincides with the alleged death of the subject–or, at least, with an “attenuation of the self,” as Lionel Trilling puts it in Sincerity and Authenticity. From the “loss of the self” of Wylie Sypher, through the “divided self” of Ronald Laing, to the “deconstructed self” of Leo Bersani, the identity of the “I” is dramatically scattered.

 

One can locate the first symptoms of the vanishing Emersonian self in the schlemiel of the literature of the fifties.² Undoubtedly, there are specific historical reasons that generate this sense of pessimism and loss. The crisis of consciousness in the literature of the fifties may well witness, in Edmund Wilson’s words, the “homicidal and menacing schemes” of McCarthyan policy (Wilson 128). At the turn of the new decade, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest warns against the clinical suppression of the subject in the political style of Kubrick: “[they] try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want to” (Kesey 57). As Hendin puts it, society, as symbolized in Kesey’s asylum, “controls and infantilizes [the subject] in the name of the best interests of the inmates” (Hendin 132).

 

And yet, the fiction of the sixties muses, with Kesey’s McMurphy, an outside space (“We want to live out of this society,” the king of the Merry Pranksters avows), the revival of the American dream, the fantasy of an ultimate frontier that, once crossed, will open onto the uncontaminated plains of ultimate innocence and freedom. Although the themes of power and suppression undergo some variations, say, from Kesey’s dystopic vision to Kerouac’s beatnik quest, the literature of the sixties traces a neat line between a power reduced to mere symbol of evil and an Adamic individual consciousness outside power and innocently extraneous to it. Curiously enough, the writer of the sixties uses the themes of power and consciousness in a way that resembles Thoreau’s, Whitman’s, and Hawthorne’s more than it resembles any postmodern writer’s: the Walden of literature is still a sacred wood in which I sing myself far from the evil of civilization and far from its scarlet symbols of doom. But is there any such a space of innocence in the coming society of the spectacle?

 

Postmodern statements on politics and society, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Coover’s The Public Burning, persistently echo the gloomy tones of Kesey’s Foucauldian clinic–but where is the ultimate frontier of innocence and freedom?

 

America was the edge of the World. A message from Europe, continent-seized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its kingdom of Death, the special Death the West has invented. . . . Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. . . . Is the cycle over now and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? . . . Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling.(Pynchon 722-23)

 

Or, as Richard Nixon admits in The Public Burning, some pages before being sodomized by Uncle Sam, “we cannot escape” (Coover 8).

 

Yet, the theory and practice of postmodernity may recast the question of “the crisis of consciousness,” raised in the fifties and brought to its final “paranoid” conclusions in the sixties, in “a more positive mode of confrontation between subject and power” (Olderman 124); the postmodern answer to this question attempts at producing new and different structures of survival–“new mutants,” to say it with Leslie Fiedler. The argument I want to support with this paper can be summarized as follows: the claim of a death of the subject in postmodern discourse must be understood, pace all those critics who take the “death-theme” in absolute earnestness, as a “radical irony” (Ihab Hassan) which aims at reconstituting what one can call–faute de mieux–the “radical subject”: a subject which stands to represent “the community of disappointed . . . literary intellectuals–and how many of us really stand outside this class?–whose basic need is to believe in the autonomy of self-fashioning.”³ Escape is impossible, since Kesey’s clinic is virtually everywhere, in “the crime labs . . . the records . . . the radios and the alarm system and the TV over the teller’s cages . . . the cells and the jails and the schools and institutions . . . the traffic signals and the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulation . . . the magnified maps of the city . . . the beats and patrols,” as Elkin’s Bad Man witnesses (70); and yet, the repressive project of society reveals itself inefficient to discipline the postmodern self-fashioning individual.

 

“I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I am invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.” But what can Ellison’s Bear do in the society of spectacle? How can Trilling’s “liberal imagination” survive the mystifications of mass-culture? And how can individual consciousness confront and survive a power disseminated in the most appealing forms of advertising, a power so forcefully obliterating reality with fictive simulacra? If “my life is a kind of simulation,” as the protagonist of DeLillo’s Mao II believes (97), how can the subject reposition itself within a society that transforms everything into simulation, in which even the individual, as Teresa de Lauretis warns, is “continually engaged, represented, and inscribed” (“Alice Doesn’t” 37)? In the last analysis, power is not framed within an inside that allows an outside innocence: power resides in the pre- fabricated notions of “reality” that the subject lives, “a series of overlapping fictions [that] cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth” (Coover, Burning 122). Power is the ability of mass-media to create “static tableau–The New York Times’s finest creation–within which a reasonable and orderly picture of life can unfold” (Coover, Burning 192).

 

Once reality and life have lost any ontological arche, and have become the result of a fictive construction, the radical subject, as Coover puts it, must become “cynical about it…learn the rules and strategies . . . [and become] a manipulator” (“Interview” 72); or, as Jerome Klinkowitz suggests, the radical subject must recuperate some sort of “transformative imagination” Disruptions 16) to be able to change plots and life, drive force beyond exhaustion, and transform indifference and its simulacra.

 

Indeed, the publication of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967) had to convince a group of American authors, now labelled as “post-modernists,” that the first step towards the Bildung–or rather, a re-membering–of the radical subject was “to destroy the hold which these artificial constructions have on men, typically by forcing the very patterns and mythic structures to undermine themselves” (McCaffery, “Checklists” 112). Robert Coover declares:

 

Men live by fiction. They have to. Life's too complicated, we just can't handle all the input . . . All of them [fictions], though, are merely artifices-- that is, they are always in some ways false, or at best incomplete. There are always other plots, other settings, other interpretations. So if some stories start throwing their weight around, I like to undermine their authority a bit, work variations, call attention to their fictional nature.⁴

 

Thus, the dead “I” opens a breach in the institutionalized mythic structures, a breach in which s/he will find space enough for inventing new plots and new fables of identity: the radical subject survives the attempt of annihilation by virtue of his/her ability to transform social plots, “work variations, call attention to their fictional nature.”

 

Why, then, does postmodernism insistently repeat the litany of the dead at the same moment in which death is to turn into survival? One reason may be that postmodernism tries to re-enact a drama that takes place in daily life– the risk that the subject could be actually annihilated by his/her inability to confront overpowering social myths. Most important, this dramaturgy allows postmodernism to celebrate an ironically initiatory rite, or “mythotherapy,” as Campbell Tatham suggests (“Mythotherapy” 155), that enacts the drama of a temporary collapse in order to subsequently reconstitute a new subject in a stage of sublime ecstasy: as a ritual, the death of the subject initiates the reader to confront overpowering structures and destroy their hold. “The process is part of our daily life,” Richard Poirier tells us, “and no other novelist predicts and records it with Pynchon’s imaginative and stylistic grasp” V. 5). Indeed, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow might be the best example to illustrate this kind of ritualistic sublimation of the self. If “They” have transformed the self into a “poor cripple, [a] deformed and doomed thing” GR 720), living in the “master plan” of a continuous alienation; if the self has been ensnared in a plot that is trying to subject both humanity and the Earth to the principle of economic exploitation–then it is “our mission to promote death,” and to become, like Katje and Gottfried, “children who are learning to die” GR 175). As the narrator says, “We must also look to the untold,” to a story different from the “master plan” that has constructed our very idea of identity GR 720). Like Slothrop’s, the human self must first be “broken down” and “scattered” in order to overcome alienation and return as the Benjaminian “bright angel of death” GR 738 ff.). In Pynchon’s novel, Slothrop’s “death” serves the purpose of recognizing fictions and social “master-plans” for what they are, thus liberating the subject from his/her dependency on artificial constructs. As Ihab Hassan argues, “revulsion against the self serves [postmodernism] as a link between the destructive and visionary impulses of modern apocalypse; it prepares for rebirth” Postmodern Turn 5). It administers last rites to all of human life.

 

Coover’s fictions are no less rich of ritualistic sublimations. Coover, with his proclaimed interest in Roger Caillois’ Eucharistic rites (“Interview” 74), repeatedly stages sacrificial public burnings, regicides, and other executions. In “Aesop’s Forest” the artist/Aesop, who has sinned against Apollo, is, like Orpheus, dismembered by the angry Delphians–“one eye is gone, the other clouded, an ear is clogged with bees, his hide’s in tatters.”⁵ Aesop’s sacrilege consists in having denounced Apollo’s Truth as a fable.

 

As Aesop remarks, with a sense of tragic irony, “I told them the truth, they called it sacrilege.” Like the postmodern demiurge, Aesop has de-mystified an absolute Truth, but, in so doing, he has hypostatized his own construction as a new truth, allegedly free from any Dionysian construction. Men live by fictions, they have to. But some fictions, like Aesop’s “deconstruction” of Apollonian Truth, start throwing their weight around. When this happens, fictions can turn against their creator, and Aesop’s moralized animals join the Delphians in the lynching of the author:

 

they are on him: wolves, boars, apes, moles, toads, dancing camels, plucked daws, serpents, spiders, snails, incestuous cocks and shamming cats, hares, asses, bats, bears, swarms of tongueless gnats, fleas, flies and murderous wasps, bears, beavers, doves, martins, lice and dungbeetles, mice and weasels, owls, crabs, and goats, hedgehogs and ticks, kites, frogs, peacocks and locusts, all the fabled denizens of the forest, all intent in electing him into the great democracy of the dead.("Aesop's Forest" 82)

 

At once, Coover’s story gives the idea of Aesop-the-fabler’s “radical” (anti-Apollonian) activity, and of Aesop-the-man’s entrapment in his own “eloquent text of the forest.” It is not less amazing to notice how Aesop is dismembered by his own “fabled denizens” than to notice how the Rosenbergs are sacrificed to the fable of American democracy in The Public Burning. To give credit to fictions is to put lives at stake. It is not surprising, in this context, that Coover’s narrative technique continuously aims at constructing “exemplary fictions”–fictions that, in Robert Alter’s formulation, “flaunt their own condition of artifice” Partial Magic x) and that, by so doing, escape any hypostasis onto the plane of myth and absolute Truth:

 

Ejemplares you [Cervantes] called your tales, because "si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar un ejemplo provechoso," and I hope in ascribing to my fictions the same property, I haven't strayed from your purposes, which I take to be manyfold. For they are ejemplares, too, because your intention was "poner en la plaza de nuestra republica una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entratenerse sin dao del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables antes aprovechan que daan"-- splendid, don Miguel! for as our mutual friend don Roberto S. [Robert Scholes, in The Fabulators] has told us, fiction "must provide us with an imaginative experience which is necessary to our imaginative well being . . . We need all the imagination we have, and we need it exercised and in good condition"--and thus your novelas stand as exemplars of responsibility to that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation. . .(Coover Pricksongs, 77)

 

Coover’s self-denouncing fictions, differently from Aesop’s moralities, do not permit “to have their miserable excrement read so explicitly”⁶–they do not establish any interpretive order. Because, if Aesop was the victim of an Apollonian social order, he has become, quite paradoxically, the grantee for a classical order–think of La Fontaine– which sees in Aesop’s fables the explicit moralities of “avarice, panic, vanity, distrust, lust for glory and for flesh, hatred, hope, all the fabled terrors and appetites of the mortal condition, drawn together here now for one last demented frolic.” Eventually, whether they were guilty or not of a radical and anti-Apollonian statement, Aesop’s fables serviced another artificial but stable moral order. Establishing the tradition of the Aesopian genre tells enough about the institutionalization of fable and the fetishization of narrative constructs, as Chenetier argues: “Aesop[‘s] . . . transformations, a founding gesture for his particular world-view, [have become] a-dynamic and irreversible” (“Ideas” 101). Hence, Coover’s exemplary tale, in order to exercise “all the imagination we have . . . in good conditions,” must dismantle the whole of Aesop’s mythologized apparatus. For reasons antithetical to those of the Delphians, Coover himself must sacrifice Aesop–or his now overpowering plot–on the altar of the postmodern transformative imagination, in the “Temple of the Muses” (“Aesop’s Forest” 81).

 

Whatever happens to Aesop, and whoever kills him, we know that his is a tragic end. But what happened to the postmodern subject, or, to a lesser extent, whatever happened to Coover in Aesop’s forest? Does the death of Aesop stands to signify the death of the author tout court? Does this coincide with Lyotard’s claimed death of grand narratives? Coover’s allegory is very careful about this: the felicitous announcement of the death of the author can well serve the political agenda of the fox, “that treacherous foul-mouth.” Should we give absolute credit to the wide-spread announcement of the death of narrative (another myth, indeed), the fox may engineer a subtle takeover and make us believe that its realpolitik is the ultimate demystification–we may find ourselves entrapped into Peter Sloterdijk’s “cynical reason,” the belief that, since ideologies are all equally false, one’s behavior should then be absolutely determined by “particular interests.” The problem with Sloterdijk, as with our fox, is that they do not see in their “cynicism” a new fiction, a novel artificial construction: the “particular interest” is not more “real” than what has so far been deconstructed. Interests, to paraphrase Baudrillard, are never “free” from ideological determinations: “there is no basis on which to define what is ‘artificial’ and what is not. . . . No one experiences this [particular interest] as alienation” (“Consumer Society” 40). The grand narratives that have a hold on our life may be easily condemned and unmasked on the assumption that, much like the Socratic “enlightened” rationalism according to Nietzsche, they aspire to Apollonian truth, forgetting that they are bound to the deceptive nature of the Dionysian. However, what is striking is precisely the degree of forgetfulness that accompanies many annunciations of death and unmaskings of grand narratives: the authoritative announcement of the disappearance of authority, and the articulation of a total and comprehensive narrative of a postmodern condition in which it would be impossible to articulate any narration, surreptitiously establish, as Coover suggests, a “foxy” and fraudulent totalizing order. If there is any difference between Aesop’s and Coover’s postmodernism, it is this: the “suspicion” Aesop casts on Apollonian order is recast by Coover on the suspicion itself, with the result that the denunciation of myths does not acquire the status of an Aufklarung, but rather, in Bentham’s formulation, of a “necessary fiction.”⁷ In other words, the de- mythification itself is the result of another fictive construction that can acquire “exemplarity” only if it recognizes itself as “fictive,” thus avoiding any hypostasis onto the plane of absolute truth and enlightenment. Whoever would execute the myth-maker and fight an order of reality must be fully aware that the logics on which s/he would perform the “de-mythification” are not devoid of a necessary fictional nature–or, in Coover’s own words, “It’s all shit anyway” (“Aesop’s Forest” 83).

 

More precisely, the death of the author/Aesop prepares for a rebirth: once Aesop’s moralized forest “extinguishes itself around him,” a new, exemplary forest can be created, and a new “self-conscious” author can take Aesop’s place. The execution of the author participates of a tribal ritual of initiation in which “killing the author,” as Frazer would say, “assumes, or at least is readily combined with, the idea that the soul of the slain author is transmitted to his successor.” As in Freud’s “totemic meal,” oral incorporation and its correlates–instalment and digestion of authority within the self–consume a patricidal act that sublimates the subject’s desire for strength, authority, and life. The Gerontion-like loss of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch that characterizes the narrator of “Aesop’s Forest” must be counterbalanced by a will to eat: “even in such decline, the familiar hungers stir in him still… his appetite for power outlasting his power to move” (“Aesop’s Forest,” 68).

 

It is the same hunger that saves the characters of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in their endless combat against the ghosts of patriarchal culture: “my mother won in ghost battle because she can eat anything…. All heroes are bold toward food…. Big eaters win.”⁸ In Kingston’s and Coover’s vocabulary, one must introject the myth for reasons of survival; only by following the drive of this appetite can the postmodern subject “learn the rules,” and find alternative plots, “more pathways, more gardens, and more doors” (Coover Pricksongs, 19). In other words, if eating practices and “disorders,” as Julia Kristeva suggests, may be the product of a hysterical resistance to (patriarchal) authority (“Stabat Mater”), it must be noticed that the postmodern resistance is not on the part of the anorexic, but, rather, of the bulimic. As the title (if not the argument) of Sohnya Sayres’s article on “Food and the Agon of Excess” suggests, postmodernism is a tale of bulimic excess, or, as George Yudice puts it, the promise of “transcendence in an age of fake fat and microwavable synthetic meals” (“Transcendent Body” par. 3). As Susie Orbach’s The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor implies, even the anorectic’s “hunger strike,” a loss at the level of the physical, “replenishes” the body with the metaphors of an excess in respect to social codes.

 

But is “appetite” enough for the individual’s survival? Cannot eating rather be, as Baudrillard’s discussion on “The Obese” insinuates, a “fatal strategy,”⁹ or simply produce a blockage? “As a child,” Kingston tells us, “I pictured a naked child sitting on a modern toilet desperately trying to perform until it died of congestion” (86). Cannot the introjection of social structures, literary traditions, and Aesop’s moralities, actually paralyze the childlike postmodern imagination in some sort of congestion? Or into a compulsion to repeat? Indeed, the rather heavy meal can create a digestive disorder, a rampant dyspepsia, and a metabolic chaos. The “urgent message” of the postmodern author is hindered. The author “squats hastily, breeches down. Ah!, what a plunging weight.” Can postmodernism overcome this moment of blockage, this compulsion to cite and repeat–this compulsion to death? One has reason for worrying: the signs shed in Coover’s forest seem to be Aesop’s and La Fontaine’s, rather than Coover’s own– “there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes”! For the voracious postmodern individual, blockage is the real threat, and survival coincides with some sort of “digestive capability”–the power to actively transform authorities and traditions into fecal signs, into wastes from which the subject has to separate in order to constitute itself as a subject. It is the ability of forcing apart, separating one’s individuality from that of the slain king. In the next section, I will try to associate the possibility of survival for the postmodern individual with a sublime ability to evacuate. This–it goes without saying–is a topic that the author, who is not free from certain academic scruples, has not the power to censor nor the happiness to approve. It is a topic that has been forced upon me by Robert Coover, for whom evacuation is “the closest we ever come to the gods.”

 

And so, with a timid “Can I?,” I’d like to move to the second section.

 

From Citation to Sublimation: Metaphors Of Evacuation

 

As if it were a game played by the sphincter muscle . . .

 

–Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

 

Although several critics have commented on the subject, the key document in defining postmodern American literature remains John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967). Barth’s radical announcement was that writers were facing “the used-upness of certain forms of exhaustion of certain possibilities” (29). From then on, the author could only cite and repeat old stories and earlier forms. It is evident that postmodern literature seemingly endorses Barth’s aesthetics of exhaustion: Coover’s repetition of Aesop’s fables, Barthelme’s rewriting of Snow White, Kathy Acker’s Borgesian Don Quixote, equivocally suggest a compulsion to cite, quote, and repeat a whole literary tradition that disturbingly crops up in the postmodern literary body. “Nobody had enough imagination,” Barth’s Ambrose muses at the end of Lost in the Funhouse (97). The postmodern author is condemned to cite and repeat old stories, given forms and structures. Or so it seems. Because some questions can still be asked: Is it possible to turn Barth’s aesthetic ultimacy, his entropic compulsion to cite, into a sublime strategy for the survival of the subject? Can the citing subject be “uplifted with a sense of proud possession” above the cited material? And, if so: According to which paradigm can we define this “uplifting” as “sublimation,” and in what terms?

 

Suzanne Guerlac, in her study on “Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime,” locates the force of the sublime in the humble practice of citation, in which the author takes “proud possession” of the given message (275). Frances Ferguson replies to Guerlac by suggesting that citation rather promotes, to be fair to Longinus, a “suppression of the author” (295; emphasis mine). Despite the different conclusions they reach, both Guerlac’s and Ferguson’s arguments, as Geoffrey Harpham argues (198-199), are essentially correct, since the Longinian sublime, in the last analysis, does not aim to promote auctorial individuality, but instead the unification of the author with a transcendent totality, or with a past re-presented by and in the citation. The author is thus “promoted” (Guerlac) by dispersing him/her self within a “totality” (Ferguson). When the Longinian author recognizes the citation “as something he had himself produced,” s/he is caught in the sublime experience because s/he feels as part of a transcendental creative energy.

 

From its very outset, postmodernism seems to tell a rather different story: postmodern citation can be more correctly imagined as a moment of blockage, in which the author is compelled to cite, to repeat,¹⁰ because a given totality–a literary tradition, a social given to which the author feels belated, or, as Kathy Acker puts it, some “great expectations”–already comprehends him/her. The problem for the postmodern author is that s/he, unlike Longinus, tries to escape that totality, whose overpowering force blocks and paralyzes. Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, trying to narrate her own story, finds herself captured in a plot–Grimm’s Snow White–from which she cannot escape: “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!” (6). Whereas the Longinian sublime contents the subject with a syntactical “sympathy” (the term is Burke’s) between subjective expression and absolute logos, postmodern technique tries to free the subject from the hierarchy of syntax, and hinges, as Hayden White comments, on “a paratactical consciousness: a language of linear disjunction rather than narrative sequence” (“Culture” 69). To put it in rhetorical terms, the organizing principle of postmodern narrative would be metonymy–the succession of unconnected elements –rather than metaphor–the link between the parts. Accordingly, Donald Barthelme breaks syntactic hierarchy to introduce an element of error, a metonymic uncodifiable fragment, in the ordered space of social information:

 

I have a number of error messages I'd like to introduce here and I'd like you to study them carefully . . . they're numbered. I'll go over them with you: undefined variable . . . improper use of hierarchy . . . missing operator . . . mixed mode, that one's particular grave . . . invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement, that's a bitch . . . no END statement.("Explanation" 79)

 

The Guerlac-Ferguson debate suggests that Longinus’s holistic sublime may lose its usefulness to describe a postmodern strategy. The ironic tone of postmodern citation implies a different movement, namely, in Paul Bove’s terms, “a radical break or rupture in the genetic pattern,” in which the subject inter-relates dialectically with his/her genetic/historical predecessor, thus instituting “discontinuities” rather than syntheses.¹¹

 

If Longinus’s sublime and Burke’s “sympathy” do not “fit” postmodernism, Neil Hertz’s “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime” tries to define the postmodern practice of citation in terms of Kantian sublime. The enormous “accumulation of secondary discussion,” the “proliferation of secondary comments,” Hertz argues, brings the postmodern author to face “a point of blockage: he [writes] of the threat of being overwhelmed by too much writing, and it may not be possible to go beyond that” (62 ff.) This “accumulation,” an enormous difficulty to ex-press (etymologically: ex premere, to push out) new signs under “the pressure of the super ego,” produces on the author/subject what Hertz calls a “blockage,” something emotionally similar to Kant’s fear and amazement in facing an overwhelming, “limitless” force. The subject/author feels impotent, constipated, quite dead. Yet, Hertz suggests, after the postmodern author posits this impossibility, after s/he installs such a monstrous accumulation impeding writing–after blockage is posited, writing flows out: a logorrhea, indeed, about the “impossibility” of writing. This process constitutes, according to Hertz, the liberating experience of contemporary sublime–an experience organized on the double “mind’s movement [of] blockage, and release.”

 

Let us consider, as an example of this mechanism of sublimation, Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism. The first chapter of this text is entitled “Representing the Postmodern,” and it begins with a subchapter devoted to the discussion of “What is Postmodernism?” That is to say: Can post-modernism have any identity? Hutcheon astutely plays on the oxymoron opened between the notions of “representation of postmodernism” and that of “postmodern impossibility of representation.” How can we possibly represent, in fact, a phenomenon whose first given is that of unpresentability? Impossibility rules the program of Hutcheon’s text, which is to represent the unpresentable. The Politics of Postmodernism may be seen as some kind of allegory–quite literally an anagogic attempt–of postmodernism itself. The entire postmodernist project is re-enacted here as the desire to “project,” and create, that which cannot be pinned down or mastered by representation. The transcendent object of desire is that which, according to Lyotard, moves postmodernism toward the sublime:

 

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations.(Postmodern Condition 81)

 

The entire postmodern “representation” (or “postmodernism represented”) is in it–the “post-modernist project,” or, in other words, that ephemeral, brilliant moment of writing the impossibility of writing that by itself represents an entire era, and transcends the logical and stylistic possibilities of representation in the moment the unpresentable is finally presented:

 

it seems reasonable to say that the postmodern's initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural' . . . are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn't grow on trees.(Hutcheon, Poetics 2)

 

The “indeterminate,” the “unpresentable,” is thus transcended, as Kant puts it, in the “representation of the limitlessness.” The question “What is postmodernism?” poses to the reader an apparently unrecoverable “momentary check” (Kant) to the possibilities of representing “an indeterminate reference”¹²; the feeling of impotence is then “followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful” (Kant) in the moment the unpresentable is finally “connected with the mere presentation or faculty of representation, and is thus taken to express the accord, in a given intuition, of the faculty of presentation, or the imagination, with the faculty of concepts” (Kant). The identity of postmodernism is given, albeit in a negative way, as discrepant from representation itself; or, rather, as ironic (negative) representation, as a representation that takes traditional (positive) representation ironically.

 

However, we have come a long way from Kant’s sublime. Kant’s was the attempt, once again, to reconstitute the excess of feeling within the notions of “unity,” “integrity,” and “coherence” sanctioned by the “ethical man.” As Hayden White has noticed, Kant’s sublime is some sort of disguised ideology which disciplines the suprasensible by reconciling it with the re-cognition of a social meaning in it. The individual, rather than freeing him/herself from overwhelming totalities, is eventually subjected to the overpowering force–a force of representation, or “faculty of concepts”–of the ethical man.¹³ By advocating the need for rupture, disjunction, and differance, the postmodern “improper use of hierarchy” might well fall out from any Kantian categorization. In his insightful “Sublime Politics,” Donald Pease implicitly maintains the necessity, for postmodernist poetics, of dropping out any argument about, and tendency toward, the sublime:

 

Despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has, in what we could call the politics of historical formation, always served conservative purposes . . . the sublime, instead of disclosing a revolutionary way of being that is other than the ethical, in Kant's rendition, is reduced to strictly ethical duties. Or, put differently, the sublime makes the formation of an ethical character sound as if it is a rebellious task.(275-276; Pease's emphasis.)

 

Published in boundary 2 in 1984, Pease’s might be seen as a declaration of postmodernist intents. However, Pease’s refusal of the sublime may be contradictorily sublime in itself. What Pease claims, in his elaborate discussion and description of so many theories of the sublime, is the necessity of dropping out, releasing a certain political embarrassment which seems to be the given of the sublime. By first citing an impressive mass of material on the sublime, and then proclaiming a repudiation of all these structures, Pease’s article offers a clear example of what I intend as the postmodern sublime, organized, indeed, on Hertz’s paradigm of blockage and release. Not only does Pease confront something as overwhelming as the sublime, but he also exceeds it, thus “uplifting” postmodernism beyond the possibilities of what is usually known as “the sublime.” In Pease’s epistemological displacement, the “sublime” reaches what Kant’s conservatism represses: namely, the discontinuity between the given structures and the individual effort to transcend that given; Pease’s sublime results in the differance between self and world, present and past, referent (the “sublime politics”) and sign (a discourse exceeding that referent).

 

Dick Hebdige, in “The Impossible Object: Towards a Sociology of the Sublime,” is more explicit than Pease in affirming the existence of a postmodern sublime based on the ironic rejection of previous theories of the sublime and on the disruption of totalities. Hebdige singles out what he calls “the pull towards the asocial sublime” in contemporary discourse: for Hebdige, the mode of the “asocial sublime” is a celebration of the “camp vision,” the vision of waste, trash, and excrement–an indirect citation of Barthelme’s “digging on the leading edge of the trash phenomenon.” The ironic inversion of the sublime from Kant and Lyotard’s totalizing aestheticizations (a re-engagement of the excess as aesthetic work), to the new “camp vision,” explicitly aims at both resisting unity and locating the force of postmodern sublime within the realm of an anti-aesthetic differance. For Hebdige, one of the most remarkable strategies of the postmodern sublime consists in the simultaneous citation and combination (“double coding,” in Umberto Eco’s or Linda Hutcheon’s terminologies) of texts belonging to high and camp culture. The result of this peculiar citational practice is complexly disruptive and constructive at once: at the same moment in which hierarchy (high vs. low culture) is disrupted, the post-modern subject is “uplifted” with a sense of complete mastery of both fields:

 

Rather than surrender mastery of the fields, the critics who promulgate the line that we are living at the end of everything (and are all these critics men [sic]?) make one last leap and resolve to take it all-- judgement, history, politics, aesthetics, value--out of the window. . . . The implication seems to be that if they cannot sit at the top of Plato's pyramid, then there shall not be any pyramid at all.(Hebdige 70)

 

As Fred Pfeil maintains, manipulation and digestion of culture in its entirety, from high to low, coincides with some sort of jouissance, of a pleasure that is, in the last analysis, the constitutive nature of postmodern subjectivity:

 

[the postmodern subject] finds him/herself an extraordinarily well-rounded, complete cultural consumer and connoisseur, eminently capable of taking pleasure in a spectrum of choices . . . ranging from just a step ahead of mass culture . . . to just a foot short of high.(108)

 

At this point, we can start defining the specific features of a postmodern strategy of the sublime, which is —on le sait!–an anti-theory, a virtual subversion of all totalizing theories. Hebdige’s sense of metaphoric inversion from art to anti-art, from aesthetics to anti-aesthetics, from the “beautiful” to the sublime “camp vision,” and from “exhaustion” to “mastery,” no longer stresses the drama of “ultimacies,” or the disintegration of identity; instead, it shifts into the strategy for the Bildung of a new subject. This new subject confronts given structures to master them with some kind of Keatsean negative capability.¹⁴ In his book on The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, Tom Le Clair argues:

 

Recognizing their dependence on their culture's system of dissemination . . . novelists have two strategies to counter the homogeneity of mass-produced and institutionally controlled information. One strategy is to collect to excess and thus use against the dominant culture its own information. The other...(16)

 

. . . But let us stay with the first of Le Clair’s strategies of mastery: the postmodern sublime, to start with, is a strategy of “collection” and ex-cess (etymologically: ex cedere, to give out), in which the givens of an “accumulation of writing” (Hertz), of a political embarrassment (Pease), or of “mass-produced and institutionally controlled information” (Le Clair), lead not so much to a rejection, but rather to an introjection (admission of the problem, commentary, citation, allusion), which poses a blockage suddenly overcome by a release, an ironic “excess” which turns the manipulator against cultural givens. This sublime strategy of ingestion, ironic blockage, and final release, has been defined by Arthur Kroker and David Cook as the privileged strategy of an “excremental culture”: such a culture nourishes itself of the “pestilential spirit” of social and cultural entropic systems, to finally digest and drop out a fairly new message of disruption whose “psychological signs are those of . . . disaccumulation”: “[postmodern art] exists at the edge of ecstasy and decay where the consumer culture of the passive nihilists does a reversal and in a catastrophic implosion flips into its opposite number” (10 ff.). Not altogether differently, John Barth’s metaphor of disaccumulation in Lost in the Funhouse suggests that “The final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self- consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history … Go on. Go on. To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid” (109).

 

Ihab Hassan, as far as I know, is the first critic who has defined the postmodern sublime as ironic discharge of the “infinite powers” that impede expression. Hassan’s metaphor is that of defecation overcoming the nausea brought about by constipation:

 

Nathaniel West, writing at the edge of our contemporaneity, first comes to mind . . . The Dream Life of Balso Snell, mock artist, proves to be a wet dream. More precisely, Snell imagines that he ascends into the bowels of the Trojan horse. This accords with his view of art as "sublime excrement." West seems to endorse this bilious irony: his own repugnance of life touches even his craft. His nausea, which no social dependency of the thirties can entirely explain, conceals itself in black comedy. A world of ugly doorknobs, dead dreams, and distressed loves, burns into the ash of parodic apocalypse. Thus West, turning violence into dubious merriment, is the new satirist laughing at the wound within his laugh. Thirty years after, William Burroughs carries the excremental vision even farther. A devilish mimic, he transposes a world ruled by entropy, waste, and disease into a film of metallic laughter.(Dismemberment 249)

 

The vision of excremental sublime, as “parodic apocalypse” of a subject opposing “a world ruled by entropy,” certainly emerges in many postmodern works. We might think of Pynchon’s “defecation rites,” or of the narrator of Gass’s The Heart of the Heart of the Country who asserts that “I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.” Federman’s The Voice in the Closet provides the (autobiographical) example of a thirteen-year- old boy hidden in a closet to escape the Nazis: “I was scared. And on top of that, in the middle of the afternoon I had to take a crap. And why not? So I unfolded one of the newspapers and took a shit on it” (47). After defecation, fear is overcome; the boy finds courage to leave the closet, and embarks to America. Federman charges the scene with almost obvious allegorical implications: the closet becomes the tomb and the womb for the coming-into- life of a new subject; defecation is the ironic release of the fear of death and annihilation. The same allegorical structure is at work in Coover’s Spanking the Maid. The “teacher” of Coover’s story has to realize that his Victorian ideal of Bildung–“feeding with spanking . . . that broad part preferred by him and Mother Nature for the invention of the souls”–is absolutely incorrect. For “that broad part” of the human body “seems more like a place for letting things out than putting things in.” After a moment of apparent death, which is, in truth, only a digestive pause, the “invention of souls,” the epiphany of the subject, happens in a water-closet, in a last heraldic effort to produce “spiritual” signs: “twitching amicably yet authoritatively like a damp towel, down a bottomless hole, relieving himself noisily” (102). Even more explicitly, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five offers fecal signs as allegorical signs of authorial consciousness and as the epiphany of the radical writer opposing war and its horrors:

 

Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from there. The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over. An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, "There they go, there they go." He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.(125)

 

This is the price that the subject has to pay for its survival. Giving up any metaphysical consistency, this sort of subject becomes, quite literally, an excrement, a surplus that cannot be codified and inscribed in the fabricated notions of “reality.” Its “resistance” to codification institutes at the same time its absolute superfluity in relation to the symbolic order. Its manipulation of codes and structures, in other words, cannot have any effectual consistency if not in establishing a topos in which subjectivity may exist, as a digestive process, in a sublime manipulation of pre-existing categories.

 

Examples of excremental sublime in postmodern American fiction could multiply almost endlessly. However, I should discourage my reader from thinking that the excremental sublime is limited to the (many) cases in which fecal signs explicitly appear in the literary space; rather, excremental sublimity consists of a narrative practice which I have defined as a movement from blockage to release, and from Longinian citation or Kantian re-presentation to sublime digestive transformation. As such, it encompasses a more general postmodern trend: it includes any strategy of incorporating social myths and given plots–we might say: history and/as literary tradition–to finally release new stories and new modes of being. This new mode of being is the postmodern radical subject, who has survived the menaces of death and has “uplifted” him/herself with “joyful pride” in an act of ultimate poiein. In this sense, we might well conceive of the postmodern subject as a sphincter muscle performing its daily activity of retention, manipulation, and ex-pression; Altieri seems to endorse this idea when he argues, rather aphoristically, that “as organ, the [postmodern] ego has its own rhythms of expansion and contraction . . . it is not a place to store experience, but a way of experiencing” (627; Altieri’s emphasis).

 

However, some mysteries are still unsolved: how can postmodern irony overcome the moment of blockage? And how can a subject be reconstituted–in his/her “way of being”– in spite of a power aggressively trying to “objectify” him/her? The postmodern answer to both questions is that the blockage–the “impossibility”–is not “real”; power is only a fiction. Put like this, the answer may seem too blunt, and it certainly exacts sharpening in order to prevent excessive optimism. It is my assumption that the achievements of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1962) and Norman O’Brown’s Life against Death (1964) must be taken as defining features of the American postmodern sublime. For it is in these works that, through an alliance of Marx and Freud, the inevitable confrontation of subject and power takes place in a radically new fashion. Exemplified (maybe at the excess) by Theodore Roszack’s “The Dialectics of Liberation,” the problem of “making a counter culture” during the sixties could be put like this:

 

While both Marx and Freud held that man is the victim of a false consciousness from which he must be freed to achieve fulfillment, their diagnoses were built on very different principles. For Marx, that which is hidden from reason is the exploitive reality of the social system. Culture--"ideology" [. . .]--intervenes between reason and reality to mask the operation of invidious class interest. . . . For Freud, that which is hidden from reason is the content of the unconscious mind. Culture plays its part in the deception not as a mask concealing social reality, but rather as a screen on which the psyche projects itself in a grand repertory of "sublimations." [. . .] There we have the issue. Is the psyche, as Marx would have it, a reflection of "the mode of production of material life"? Or is the social structure, as Freud argued, a reflection of our psychic contents?(84-85)

 

What is power, then? Social super structure, or father figure projected by the unconscious? Philosophically, the issue raises the question of the locus of reality; politically, it poses the question of how liberation is to be achieved: by social or psychic revolution? Marcuse’s answer to these questions is that power is both a reality and a fiction: accordingly, he tries to develop a radical social critique out of the psychoanalytic assumption that power may be, after all, a projection, a myth. Significantly enough, this Freudian turn moves American radicalism away from Marxist de-subjectification and, in a very Emersonian way, puts the accent upon those “tendencies that have been attenuated in the post-Marxian development of his critique of society [Marx’s, in his first writings], namely, the elements of communistic individualism.”¹⁵

 

Marcuse’s social critique hinges on the notion of “alienation.” For Marcuse, “alienation” does not have any of Marx’s (or Hegel’s) connotations. Alienation is no longer a locus between labor and exploitation, but rather a disease that is rooted inside human beings. What the psychiatrist knows is that alienation results from acts of repression: the patient “forgets” his/her own construction of symbolic structures that the analytic anamnesis should re-present. Marcuse emphasizes the primacy of consciousness in social changes: the subject must be conscious of his/her own projections; s/he must recognize, in other words, that “power” is nothing else than the re-presentation of an Oedipal complex Eros viii ff.). The impossibility, or blockage, is only a psychic construction, a story.

 

I will discuss the Oedipal strategy of postmodern sublime, based on Freud’s notion of “anal character,” in the next section. To bring the current section to a conclusion, let me notice how Marcuse’s social critique bears powerfully on postmodern narrative. Larry McCaffery’s The Metafictional Muse provides a neat summary of how postmodern narrative can produce an anamnesis of the artificial construction of overpowering structures of “reality”:

 

In examining the concept of man-as-fiction-maker, [postmodern works] deal with characters busily constructing systems to play with or to help them deal with their chaotic lives. Some of these systems are clearly fictional in nature: we observe writers trying to create stories, men struggling to break the hold of mythic patterns, desperate people inventing religious explanations for a terrible catastrophe. . . . Yet, [postmodern narrative] is filled with hints that other, less obviously artificial systems--such as mathematics, science, religion, myth, and the perspectives of history and politics--are also fictional at their core. . . . [T]here exists a tension between the process of man creating his fictions and his desire to assert that his systems have an independent existence of their own. . . . [T]his tension typically results in man losing sight of the fictional basis of his systems and eventually becoming trapped within them.(25-26)

 

The postmodern subject is thus the locus (maybe all-too literally a rhetorical topos) of consciousness; consciousness of the fictional nature of overpowering structures will finally allow the subject to imagine new plots, new stories, new lives to be told. Let us think, in this context, of Coover’s maneuver in “Aesop’s Forest”: the imaginative power of the narrator is here absolutely impaired by the presence of his grand precursor–Aesop. Facing such an overpowering presence, the narrator can only cite the stories already told by the genius–Aesop. But, as the scholar well knows, “Aesop” is only “a fictional construct . . . [a] biography . . . reconstructed to satisfy the Greek requirement, according to which all genres should have an inventor” (Chenetier 97). The overpowering presence that impairs the subject turns out to be a mere fiction! As Borges would put it, “[t]he fact is that every writer creates his own precursor.”¹⁶ The blockage–the death–may be overcome by consciousness, thus uplifting the subject as the true crafter of his/her own narration. In this moment of sublime release, the dejecta membra are re-composed into subjective expression: “Orpheus, dismembered, continues to sing” (Hassan, Dismemberment 45).

 

…You see, dear reader, how, step by step, singing along, citing, arguing, implying, yawning, digesting what has been already said, apologizing, we go on together from section to section! We are already at the end of the second section, and one hour ago the first one did not even exist yet. You see, this is the mystery and joy of the excremental sublime. There was a great silence, nothing that we could say to each other, no new story we could entertain each other with. In truth, you did not even exist, and neither did I. There was nothing, not even the excremental sublime. Maybe only the embarrassing feeling of something that we wanted to say. And then, in this silence, a voice is heard, a voice that I want to compare to the growling of the bowels after a meal long retained, and the voice becomes stronger, and the story bigger, and nothingness a logorrhea…. Maybe it was in this way that the world we live in was created–from the unintentional digestion of an apple….

 

… Well, I was happy to find ourselves at the end of the second section, but now I am losing myself in superfluous details. And so, let us jump into our third section….

 

The Postmodern Subject: An Epiphany Of Sorts

 

I think of myself as a lyrical socialist,which makes about as much sense, given the world we live in, as being an anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand.

 

–Robert Coover, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?

 

“All aesthetics has its root in repressed anal erotism,” the psychoanalyst says (Ferenczi 325). All writing, on le sait!, engages in some sort of coprophiliac activity. Yet the paradigm of blockage and release that we have followed so far seems to suggest that the process —the movement from retention to release–is far more important, for the postmodern Muse, than the final excremental result. It is this process, after all, that structures the intensity of postmodern narrative–a process of digestion of old and mythical structures that will indefinitely defer the production of an ultimate (fecal) meaning. In this sense, even the postmodern subject will be, as Altieri has already told us, a “process,” rather than a simple excremental left-over of our times.¹⁷ It is a subject, as Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote has it, that resists “capitulation to social control. . . . [t]o letting our political leaders locate our identities in the social” (18), and that continually refuses to end its manipulations and digestion into visible social signs. It is a subject, in other words, that finds in the process defined above as excremental sublime its locus and only raison d’etre.

 

Another way to define this process, and thus identify our subject, is of course through Freud’s notions of “anal retentiveness” and “anal character”:

 

they [anal characters] seem to have been among those who refuse to empty the bowel when placed on the chamber, because they derive an incidental pleasure from the act of defecation.("Character" 28; emphasis mine)

 

Anal retention aims at finding “an incidental pleasure” in the moment of eventual defecation. Pleasure is “incidental” to actual defecation, since it belongs more properly to the process of retention and release. Such process is also, as the quoted passage suggests, an Oedipal strategy, that is, a refusal of the Law imposed by authority. If defecation is a pleasure, this pleasure cannot accept any external imposition or constraint: the subject must decide when, where, and how, this pleasurable activity shall take place. Freud supplements the passage quoted above with a footnote which better highlights the Oedipal refusal of a super-imposed Law (i.e., the wish of the nurse) which tries to regulate defecation according to social (i.e., non-pleasurable) norms; the footnote runs like this:

 

It is one of the best signs of later eccentricity or nervousness if an infant obstinately refuses to empty his bowel when placed on the chamber, that is, when the nurse wishes, but withholds this function at his own pleasure. Naturally it does not matter to the child if he soils his bed; his only concern is not to lose the pleasure incidental to the act of defecation.("Character" 29; emphasis mine)

 

The fact that Freud confers on the anal character the quality of an “obstinacy [which] may amount to defiance, [and] with which irascibility and vindictiveness may easily be associated” (“Character” 28) should not pass unnoticed. The most distinctive traits of the anal character seem therefore to be those of a rebellious, almost anarchic energy; its main qualities, much more than “parsimony” and “order,” seem to be, as Freud’s essay on “Character and Anal Erotism” has it, “obstinacy,” “vindictiveness,” and “eccentricity.” Dispositions, in other words, which defiantly refuse social order. It is worth noting that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, singles out in anal retention a “most remarkable” strategy for the “sublimation” of a particular kind of subjectivity, that is, an “original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis . . . of hostility to civilization” (43). Thus, an “anal character” is the sublimation of an anti-social impulse, and the anal-retentive character might well be identified with Coover’s “anal-retentive anarchist with a bomb in his hand”: s/he who survives a repressive society by disrupting its order, and by transforming its Law into pleasurable fecal signs.

 

In this ironic negativity, in this reduction to a metabolic process, Lentricchia’s “radical subject” and “disappointed intellectual” seems to have been re-membered and brought back to life after a digestive nap; social reality has been redeemed from Debord’s consumer conformism, Jameson’s schizophrenia, and Habermas’s indifference.

 

“But,” the fairy-tale reads, “there’s always a ‘but'”. . . . Like Barthelme’s “angel,” my reader might be overtaken, at this point, by some fundamental questions (the question of angels in postmodern discourse has a considerable history, from Barthelme to Wim Wenders): Is redemption a mere narrative practice? Is the sublimation of the subject a mere narrative freedom resulting from the disruption of notions such as “essence,” arche, and “representation”? Furthermore: what kind of hopes can we draw from a narrative that resolves any signification to excrementality? Will digestion resist the inevitable commodification of our lives? Will we prevent society from reducing our selves to excremental left-overs? Henry Kariel, in The Desperate Politics of Postmodernism, woefully remarks that “we resist . . . by telling a story, by producing narratives that elaborately depict the drift of events as the sublime unfolding of the inevitable” (117). But what besides these stories and ephemeral resistance? What changes in “real life,” or in the real life of our postmodern subjectivities–those wonderful entelechies of creation? However puzzling the term “real” may sound in the context of a postmodern condition, the doubt cannot be repressed; the angel, unaccustomed to doubt, falls into despair: “Redemption is a fucking fiction anyway,” Gravity’s Rainbow admonishes us; “It’s all shit anyway,” Coover’s forest resounds. Maybe Cornelius Castoriadis is right in his jeremiad on “Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism”: even this allegory of the postmodern subject as excremental practice may be the, albeit sublime, manifestation of “the pathetic inability of the epoch to conceive of itself as something positive” (14). Moreover, as Yudice admonishes, it is difficult to discern any political relevance–if not Coover’s anal-retentive “anarchism”–in these narratives of subjective redemption:

 

The aesthetics accompanying current analyses of eating disorders tend to celebrate the individual body, thus not posing any challenge to the Right or Liberalism. We need an aesthetics that instills the values of the social body.("Transcendent Body" par. 36)

 

Undoubtedly, angels should start looking forward for a more “concrete” strategy of survival, a radical praxis that does not act only in the sacred wood of literary theory and in the groves of subjectivity, but also in the doomed world of production. Until then, postmodern theory and narrative will play the role of praxis while praxis has no more role to play.

 

Today that postmodernism, as Hassan pontificates (in Selves At Risk) is at its dusk–or is it an ironic dusk preparing for another rebirth? Today that postmodernism seems on the verge of its ultimate exhaustion, it is likely that we should surrender to the ultimate impossibility of reconstituting radical politics according to excremental practices. Probably, the postmodern sublime is today an untenable strategy even for real subjects’s survival. Linda Hutcheon, among many, advocates the necessity of going beyond postmodernism, of “using” it to “exceed” it: “Postmodernism manipulates, but does not . . . (re)construct the structures of subjectivity . . . [we] may use postmodern strategies of parodic inscription and subversion in order to initiate the deconstructive first step, but [we] do not stop there” Politics 168; emphasis mine). Postmodernism is dead! Long live postmodernism! (But isn’t there a sense of deja vu in Hutcheon’s forest? What is this initiation about?). Today, failure faced, one feels that new doors must be open, new strategies found, new steps taken, new paths trodden. Let us finally digest postmodernism!

 

. . . With a sense of deep elegy, a feeling of nausea and an unbearable burden in my constipated stomach, I conclude this paper with Robert Coover, postmodern Virgil, with whom my own quest begun:

 

THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED
THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS THERE WILL
BE NO REFUND.(Pricksongs 256)

Notes

 

1. See Max F. Schulz, Radical Sophistication, esp. 198 ff.

 

2. See Franco La Polla, Un posto nella mente: il nuovo romanzo americano.

 

3. Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988), 96-97; on the notion of postmodernism as “aesthetic of self-formation” see also George Yudice, “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival.”

 

4. Robert Coover, “Interview with Larry McCaffery,” 68. In a slip of the tongue Coover seems to echo Sigmund Freud: Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings to us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. “We cannot do with auxiliary constructions,” Theodor Fontane tells us. . . . But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others…. (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents 22 and 28)

 

5. Robert Coover, “Aesop’s Forest” 82; see also Hassan’s metaphorization of postmodernism in the terms of the Orpheus’s myth, in The Dismemberment of Orpheus.

 

6. Coover’s active participation in Aesop’s lynching cannot pass unnoticed in the shift from “They’ll be here soon,” (75), referring to the Delphians, to the final “We set him [Aesop] on his bendy legs and stepped back, blocking any possible escape” (81).

 

7. On the centrality of Bentham’s notion of “necessary fiction” in American narrative, see Guido Carboni, La finzione necessaria; see also Fred Pfeil, Another Tale to Tell.

 

8. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1989), 88 and 90. For the symbology of the ghosts as essence of patriarchy, see Sidonie Smith, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Filiality and Woman’s Autobiographical Storytelling.” Notably within feminism, “big eating” seems to counteract what Kim Chernin has called “the tyranny of slenderness” imposed on women by patriarchy; on this issue, see Kim Chernin, The Obsession. Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, and Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body.”

 

9. Jean Baudrillard, “The Obese,” Fatal Strategies; on the way food industry may re-code gastronomic excess into consumerism, see Warren Belasaco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry. 1966-1988.

 

10. In postmodern narrative, “[c]haracters become the passive receptors of phenomena from outside; they become all ears, listening to the sounds of voices, noises from the street, literary parodies and emulations, music . . . compulsion to repeat” (Poirier 9); anticipating for a moment, I would like to paraphrase Lacan, in order to individuate in the “repetition compulsion” an ironic (“reversal”) mode of affirmation of the subject in history but as difference from history: [the repetition compulsion] has in view nothing less than the historizing temporality of the experience of transference, so does the death instinct essentially express the limit of the historical function of the subject. This limit is death–not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual, nor as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as Heidegger’s formula puts it, as that “possibility which is one’s ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable (unberholbare)” . . . This limit represents the past in its real form, that is to say, not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historic past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past which reveals itself reversed in repetition. (“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Ecrits 103; emphasis mine).

 

11. Bove, Destructive Poetics 37. Examples of this break with genealogy: the abortion at the beginning of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote; the illegitimate child at the beginning of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

 

12. References are to Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement 90-94.

 

13. See Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and Desublimation.”

 

14. Charles Altieri, in “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence,” stresses the importance of Keats’s notion of “negative capability” in the context of American postmodern poetics; he traces a genealogy from Keats to Olson.

 

15. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 294-295; another exemplary case of the psychoanalytic turn of Marxism into “Marxist Humanism” is certainly Erich Fromm, Marx’s concept of Man.

 

16. Jorge Luis Borges, “Kafka and his Precursors,” 201; Borges’s own emphasis. Also Tony Tanner: “[postmodern writers suggest that] the plots men see may be their own inventions” City of Words 156).

 

17. Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence”; but is this idea of self-as-process a novelty of postmodernism? Identity as a process of self-creation is, after all, a Jungian idea. James Olney confirms: “Like the elements, individual man never is but is always becoming: his self, as C.J. Jung will say some twenty-five hundred years after Heraclitus–nor did man change much in the interim–is a process rather than a settled state of being” (James Olney, Metaphors of Self 27). And so, postmodernism is once again repeating the old, isn’t it? And yet, John Paul Russo comments on Olney’s passage, “[i]t is hard to reconcile the two sides of this sentence: on one hand man is ‘always becoming.’ On the other, man has not changed ‘much’ in two and a half millennia” (John Paul Russo, “The Disappearance of the Self” 22).

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