Productive
Postmodernism
Productive
Postmodernism
Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies
Edited by John N. Duvall
with an afterword by Linda Hutcheon
State University of New York Press
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
2002 State University of New York
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ary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Productive postmodernism : consuming histories and cultural studies / edited by
John N. Duvall ; with an afterword by Linda Hutcheon.
p. cm. — (The SUNY series in postmodern culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–7914–5193–3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–7914–5194–1 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Postmodernism. 2. Arts, Modern—20th century. I. Duvall, John N. (John
Noel), 1956– II. Series.
NX456.5.P66 P XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
v
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface ix
1. Troping History: Modernist Residue in Jameson’s
Pastiche and Hutcheon’s Parody 1
John N. Duvall
2. Postmodernism and History: Complicitous Critique and
the Political Unconscious 23
Thomas Carmichael
Postmodernism, Fiction, History
3. A Mother (and a Son, and a Brother, and a Wife, et al.)
in History: Stories Galore in Li
a and the Wa
en
Commission Report 43
Stacey Olste
4. Donald Barthelme and the President of the
United States 61
Michael Zeitlin
5. “Postmodern Blackness”: Toni Mo
ison’s Beloved and
the End of History 75
Kimberly Chabot Davis
6. Historiographic Metafiction and the Cele
ation of
Differences: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo 93
W. Lawrence Hogue
7. Troping the Renaissance: Postmodern Historiography
and Early Modern History 111
Paul Budra
vi Contents
Postmodernism, Architecture, History
8. Los Angeles, 2019: Two Tales of a City 123
Kevin R. McNamara
9. Postmodern Casinos 137
Shelton Waldrep
10. Postmodernism and Holocaust Memory: Productive
Tensions in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 167
Nancy J. Peterson
Afterword
“Acting from the Midst of Identities”: Questions from
Linda Hutcheon 199
Works Cited 207
Contributors 219
Index 221
vii
Illustrations
1.1 Nothing to Wear by Lou Brooks 18
1.2 Drowning Girl by Roy Lichtenstein 19
9.1 Exterior of the Sands Hotel 145
9.2–9.3 Exteriors of tropical-themed hotels 146
9.4–9.7 Exterior and interior of the Excalibur Hotel 148
9.8 Luxor sign 153
9.9 Exterior of the Luxor Hotel 154
9.10 Exterior of the MGM Grand Hotel 155
9.11 New York, New York Hotel under construction 157
9.12–9.14 The theme park at the MGM Grand Hotel 158
9.15 Petroglyphs 164
10.1 The Hall of Witness 171
10.2 Opaque window panes in the Hall of
Remem
ance 173
10.3 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 174
10.4 Ringelblum milk can 178
10.5 Identification card 183
10.6 The Tower of Faces 188
10.7 The Hall of Remem
ance 190
ix
Preface
This volume grew out of a conference panel I chaired in 1996. My call
for papers asked that panelists think not only about the relation
etween postmodernism and history but also about the possibili-
ties suggested by Fredric Jameson’s focus on pastiche and Linda
Hutcheon’s emphasis on parody as the defining tropes of postmod-
ernism. But well prior to 1996, my own thinking about postmodern-
ism had been shaped by Jameson and Hutcheon. During the 1983
NEH Summer Seminar, “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,”
at the University of Illinois, I heard Jameson lecture from his work on
postmodernism and read in galley form the now famous essay “Post-
modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” which served
as the starting point for his book of the same title. Later, as a teache
of postmodern fiction, I found in Hutcheon’s two books from the
late 1980s—The Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of
Postmodernism—a useful heuristic to introduce and categorize a
number of contemporary cultural na
atives. Until her work on post-
modern fiction, when someone refe
ed to the postmodern novel, a
fairly small number of highly aestheticized texts, almost invariably
written by white male authors, came to mind. Hutcheon’s concept
“historiographic metafiction” clearly allowed one to include a num-
er of women and minority writers under the ru
ic “postmodern-
ism” who had previously been excluded from the designation.
Although I give students a number of theoretical perspectives
on postmodernism, including those of Andreas Huyssen and David
Harvey, for me, one of the biggest sticking points has always been
how to approach Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s radically different per-
spectives on the cultural work of contemporary na
ative. The need
to explore their differences seems all the more urgent given the
shared intellectual assumptions of Hutcheon and Jameson, particu-
larly their reliance on Louis Althusser’s sense of ideology as uncon-
scious systems of representation. Brian McHale has argued that
Hutcheon’s project “is fueled and animated by the anxiety of maste
na
atives—that is by her desire not to be thought to have invoked,
endorsed, or relied upon one or other totalizing master na
ative in
her account of postmodern poetics” (“Postmodernism” 18). Fo
McHale, Hutcheon’s postmodernism fails for its unsuccessful incor-
x Preface
poration of the master na
ative of feminism, as a secure site of social
critique, into her claim to disavow master na
atives. The Marxist
Jameson, in McHale’s view, is more successful because as an “unre-
constructed totalizer” (23), he is less anxious about Jean-François
Lyotard’s critique of master na
atives; the proof that Hutcheon is
wrong about the consequences of “endorsing a master na
ative” is
that “Jameson’s is incontestably the more catholic of the two post-
modernsims” (24).
Despite McHale’s thoughtful attempt to articulate the Jameson-
Hutcheon difference, the matter calls for further exploration since so
much applied criticism on postmodern texts is underwritten by the
exclusive authority of either Jameson or Hutcheon. So in part this
volume is a response to the students in my graduate courses on post-
modern American fiction whose questions have pushed me toward, if
not the answers, perhaps a better description of the pertinent issues.
My hope is that Productive Postmodernism will, if not synthesize, at
least provide contexts for understanding the differences between
Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s competing versions of postmodernism.
In the work that follows, three Canadian and seven American
critics investigate first-world na
atives and cultural texts. If ou
focus is largely on North American texts it is because postmodernism
most often has been identified as a first-world phenomenon, and
certainly from the perspective of Jean Baudrillard, America epito-
mizes such first-world culture. Moreover, the kinds of cultural texts
that Jameson deploys in his work suggest the extent to which North
American cultural texts can serve as a metonymy for first-world cul-
ture. However, by
inging Hutcheon’s more multicultural sense of
postmodernism to bear on these first-world texts, the chapters in a
number of instances are able to frame questions about Jameson’s em-
phasis on America.
Following my opening chapter, which lays out what I see as key
differences between Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s postmodernism,
Thomas Carmichael’s “Postmodernism and History: Complicitous
Critique and the Political Unconscious” serves as an alternative over-
view. While my sense of the two theorists underscores their differing
emphases on production and consumption, Carmichael instead reads
their positions in a more complementary fashion, seeing points of
intersection between Hutcheon’s compromised politics of post-
modernism and Jameson’s political unconscious. After these two
overviews, the remaining seven chapters fall into two clusters—
“Postmodernism, Fiction, History” and “Postmodernism, Architec-
xiPreface
ture, History”—a division readily suggested by the importance of
na
ative and architecture to both theorists.
“Postmodernism, Fiction, History” begins with Stacey Olster’s
“A Mother (and a Son, and a Brother, and a Wife, et al.) in History:
Stories Galore in Li
a and the Wa
en Commission Report.” This
essay reads Don DeLillo’s novel against the Wa
en Commission Re-
port and texts by and about Lee Harvey Oswald’s friends and rela-
tives. Examining this matrix, Olster maintains that Li
a provides a
point of confluence for various theories of historical production.
Next, Michael Zeitlin’s “Donald Barthelme and the President of the
United States” argues that psychoanalysis’ investment in the subject
still provides a useful purchase on postmodernity that may allow fo
an oppositional perspective on the totality. Beginning from a the-
oretical investigation into the persistence of authoritarianism and the
father-imago (and linking this to President Clinton’s ongoing oedipal
wreckage), Zeitlin turns to Donald Barthelme’s 1964 story, “The Pres-
ident,” to suggest the ways that this fiction explores and challenges
protofascist impulses in American culture precisely by keeping alive
the possibility of individual psychology.
Turning to African American literature, Kimberly Chabot Davis
examines the hy
id enactment of time and history in Toni Mor-
ison’s Beloved in order to shed a different light on the Jameson-
Hutcheon debate. For Davis, Mo
ison’s novel operates in the space
etween postmodern skepticism toward master na
atives and a
modernist politics still invested in a coherent historical memory. In
“Postmodern Blackness,” Davis argues that the power of Mo
ison’s
fiction emerges from the productive tension between the traditions of
postmodernism and African American social protest. W. Lawrence
Hogue approaches the issue of critical purchase through deconstruc-
tion. In “Historiographic Metafiction and the Cele
ation of Differ-
ences: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” Hogue sees parallels between
Reed’s aesthetic practice and Jacques De
ida’s project. For Hogue,
Reed’s fictional undermining of hierarchized binaries confirms
Hutcheon’s sense of historiographic metafiction while questioning
Jameson’s version of postmodernism.
The first section concludes with Paul Budra’s “Troping the Re-
naissance: Postmodern Historiography and Early Modern History.”
He believes that New Historicism’s and cultural materialism’s focus
on the Renaissance, the period in which the nascent na
atives of
modernity were formed, has trickled down to popular representa-
tions of the early modern period. Taking up two texts published in
xii Preface
1992 that represent Elizabethan England, Charles Nicholl’s history,
The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, and Patricia
Finney’s novel, Firedrake’s Eye, Budra argues that the conjunction of
postmodern historiography and early modern history has resulted in
the paradoxical entrenchment of teleology-driven historical na
a-
tive. The result is a substitution of postmodern paranoia for early
modern providence.
The remaining three chapters form the second section, “Post-
modernism, Architecture, History.” It opens with Kevin McNamara’s
“Los Angeles, 2019: Two Tales of a City,” which serves as a hinge
etween the first and second sections, inasmuch as his piece is con-
cerned with na
ative representations of architecture in a future
dystopian cityscape. On the one hand, the Los Angeles of 2019 in
Blade Runner serves as the quintessential depthless landscape that
Jameson delineates in his work on postmodern architecture; that
is, the city is