This is not a work of postmodern journalism

Unfortunately, this is the lede of this article.

The “lede” (journalism jargon for the opening sentence or paragraph of a newspaper article) usually serves several purposes: It describes the main issue (e.g., Is there such a thing as postmodern literature?), it introduces a person who is important to the story (such as Michael Berube, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign English, who claims there is not) and it sometimes works in the names of other people who have differing viewpoints (Kevin McNeilly, assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia; Erin Moure, a Montreal-based, Governor-General-Award-winning poet).

My lede fails to do any of this. (Thank goodness for the second paragraph.) It just talks about itself. It does, though, achieve a few things: it creates a tone — self-deprecating, self-reflexive, gently humorous — for the story; it entices people to keep reading (it’s working so far) and it provides an accessible entry-point to a complicated issue.

My lede has another major weakness, but I hope to cleverly turn it into a virtue by the end.

Now, onward. In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Berube argued that postmodern fiction is a fiction.

“When people started talking about so-called postmodern literature, they did it in ways that really didn’t distinguish it very clearly from modernist literature,” he said in an interview. “I finally decided to say, ‘Look, these stylistic definitions really don’t work.’ ”

Berube defines postmodernist literature “as a form of writing that defeats readers’ expectations of coherence, as experimental narrative that plays with generic conventions, as fiction that dwells on ambiguity and uncertainty.” In postmodern fiction, the author can jump into a scene, characters can know they’re just characters, and sentences can know they’re just sentences and comment on themselves. Anything goes: The conclusion of the story can come in the middle of the book; characters, plot and theme are optional and open to infinite interpretation; stories and poems can include passages from other texts, gibberish, non-sequiturs or pretty buttons.

The postmodern era, though, began (arguably) at the end of the Second World War. But every characteristic of postmodern literature can also be found in much earlier works: Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century self-referential meta-novel Don Quixote de la Mancha, or The Arabian Nights, a 10th-century collection of stories within stories within stories, or even the Odyssey, in which Odysseus tells his questionable stories to explain where he’s been all those years.

More to Berube’s point, postmodern literature demonstrates no clean stylistic break from its predecessor, modernism. Not so with other art. Visual artists moved away from super-serious Abstract Expressionism to fun-and-games Pop Art. Architects rejected the steel and glass boxes of modernist “International Style” office towers and embraced whimsical structures using unconventional building materials and decorative elements from a variety of eras and styles. Meanwhile, postmodern writers didn’t go anywhere, do anything or purchase any casual wear that the modernists hadn’t already been there, done that and bought the T-shirt.

Writer’s interjection: I have never found a topic so troublesome as postmodernism. Every time I think I finally have a good grasp of the term, a dozen people who know more than I do immediately tell me I’ve got it wrong. I take only a little comfort when these experts also contradict each other. What a convenient segue! Coming up: dissenting opinions!

“The whole model, the paradigm on which Berube’s thinking is based, is for me reprehensible and condescending,” said Kevin McNeilly. “The essay is based on a false opposition between the modern and the postmodern. Like other generic or conceptual categories, these two are open for debate and aren’t fixed in the ways that Berube presumes.” He said Berube is deliberately trying to stir up controversy by arguing against a distinction that Berube himself invented.

Erin Moure sees no dichotomy either. “Postmodernism in literature, to me, as [Jean-Francois] Lyotard [a French philosopher] says, is something that exists in the Modern,” she said. “Berube’s definition, being simply formally based in an aesthetic of fragmentation, is really just perpetuating a popular and superficial (and ultimately banal) notion of what postmodernism is.”

Postmodern literature isn’t just defined by its style, she says, but by themes and ideas that are part of, and a comment on, modernism. “It is a resistance and turning back (as one folds over the corner of a page) on the Modern itself, on notions of a central, unified subject and of the great narratives of humanism.”

Moure’s argument, and others that similarly base postmodernism on content rather than form, hold more sway with Berube. “A number of people have written back to me in the wake of that article saying, ‘What about Cyberpunk, what about science fiction in general, what about the really hallucinatory historical novels of Robert Coover or Thomas Pynchon?’ I’m willing to say yes to all of these things. Well, not yes to all of science fiction. But the interesting thing about those arguments is that they locate their postmodern fiction not in a stylistic change, but a content change,” he said.

Which is what everyone else seems to be saying anyway. Stylistically, postmodernism may be more extreme, but it’s on the same path as modernism. In content, though, it represents a major shift. This shift has to do with the globalization that started with the Second World War. Berube thinks postmodernity has more to do with the digitization of money and with corporate ownership of public space and ideas, than with ambiguity and self-referentialism.

“I’m inclined to see the ATM as more of a postmodern artifact then your standard uncertain novel,” he said. At the end of his essay, he provocatively asks what framework we should use to discuss the literature of our time: “Postmodernism? Globalism? The century’s over. Let the debates begin.”

But no one else sees a conflict here. McNeilly: “Berube wants to use public organs and institutions — ranging from the university to your newspaper — to ‘sell’ his thinking and to invite the participation of others in the arguments he understands as relevant. And given that you want to write on him, his technique appears to work,” he said. (Yowtch!)

Moure: “Berube is trying to shift the terms of literary debates from modernism/postmodernism to globalization and global capitalism’s effect on literatures being written in English. To me, one subject doesn’t eclipse the other at all. Both are interesting.”

Now you can see the real failure of my lede: shoddily passing itself off as postmodern just because it refers to itself. It makes no reference to globalism, to the rise of shadowy corporations that tamper with our values without our knowing, or to the fact that money, which used to be based on something tangible, is now a bunch of ones and zeroes (whatever that means) stored on humming mainframe computers in institutions that none of us understand.

On the other hand, it illustrates the way people so commonly misinterpret postmodernism. So I guess it works after all.