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Just the Age
by Michael Channing
I’ve always been fascinated by the different literary movements in American history. The early settlers, the Puritans, wrote about and for God. Very chaste, very limited in topic and form. But then the country spread across the continent, and the Romantics went wild and wrote about love and freedom and nature, bright flowers, and the dark creatures of the vast forest. You get Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville and my boys Walt Witman and Henry D. Thoreau, searching for God and Satan in equal measures. I really dig those cats, communing with Nature in its terrible beauty. I thought I was a Romantic.
I am not a Romantic.
They reigned for a while, but then war happened. Well, it never really stopped, but in a short span of time it happened furiously across the whole world. We witnessed the slaughter of thousands in an afternoon, all to move a line on a map a few millimeters to the left one day and few millimeters right the next. World War I (and let’s not forget the prequel, The American Civil War) made a lot of people rethink their once high-regard of battle. Well, the artists did some rethinking. The ones who need to hear those poems never seem to listen, do they? The old ways of thinking and acting and doing had failed us. So you get a bunch of writers like T. S. Elliot, who I like, and William Faulkner, who I don’t, giving the old forms the finger and just doing some weird shit, man. Rhyme, forget it. Meter? We don’t need no stinking meter. We can do away with plot and a steady viewpoint, too. Any rule of creating that can be broken, the modernists broke it. You got Picasso’s Guernica attempting to capture the chaos and brutality of war. You got Kafka’s The Trial tackling the faceless, incomprehensible injustice of simply being alive. That’s some deep stuff. I want to be deep and immense and weird.
But I am not a modernist.
Modernism, much like Heavy Metal today, was fractured into many schools of thought. In poetry, one particular group called themselves the Imagists. They didn’t wait for history to place a label on them, they went ahead and came up with their own name. Like a club for cool kids. Cool kids that wrote poetry and smoked tiny cigarettes. The Imagists looked at Whitman, who was among the first to throw rhyme and meter out the window, and thought, That’s a good start, old man. The problem with Whitman was he talked some good images, but the guy did not know how to shut up. Song of Myself
is like fifty pages long. Imagine if he had also written about someone else. The Imagists wanted to pare that down a bit. What if you could reduce all those images to just one? One perfect image that stands on its own without narration or moralizing or explanation of any kind. Just show a thing, and let it speak for itself. Even if you’re not a poetry fan, I bet you’ve read some Imagist poems. How about that one about the red wheel barrow beside the white chickens? That poem is so short, I for real quoted half of it in that previous sentence. Then there’s the one about the plums in the ice box. High school lit classes teach those, both by William Carlos Williams by the way, because they’re simple to read and easy to mimic. Teenagers look at them, barely twenty lines between them, and go, I can write some poetry, too. Maybe, but that really wasn’t the point. The Imagists strove for precise perfection. If you can say something in five words instead of seven, then you’ve gotten closer to the heart of your message. I really like this school of poetry, if not its founder, who was a real piece of shit. I love the attempt to portray deep emotion with a simple picture. No story, no lesson, just whatever meaning you bring with you. Between the thing and the observer, art is born. I would love to be an Imagist.
But, alas, I am not.
I’ll go ahead and spoil the next bit. I’m not a postmodernist either.
Postmodernism is maybe not a thing. It’s certainly not a deliberately planned approach with any sort of listable goals like Imagism was. But something happened after World War Part II. Artists didn’t just give up on the traditional rules and structures of story and painting, they gave up on being artists. Look at Andy Warhol who didn’t even work in a studio. He made his art in a factory. He made art that was fast and replicable. He painted soup cans and soda bottles, celebrities. He had people urinate on canvasses, made a chef’s kiss, and called it art. He made films that were just one, unbroken continuous shot of a building, or someone sleeping, or some guy eating a mushroom. That was the whole damn thing. The modernists looked for meaning, but Warhol said there was no meaning in his art. It was just a thing that took up space. So what was the point?
There was no point. That was the point. Now I have to admit, this does bewilder me. I look at Andy’s soup cans or exact replicas of soap boxes, and I find no value. But I read a quote from him that makes we rethink that position. He talked about Coke bottles. He pointed out that everybody paid the same price for the same bottle of Coke. Rich folks, poor folks, all professions, they all had equal access to the same flavor drink in the same shaped container. There was no price you could pay that would get you a better swallow of soda than anyone else. Art as class equalizer. Maybe that was the point.
One of my favorite writers is considered to be a postmodernist: Kurt Vonnegut. He did not adhere to standard plot structures. In his most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five, he summarizes all of the main character’s life before narrating all the big events in random order. He tells us how the book will end in the first chapter. And nothing that happens in the protagonist’s life seems to have a point. Everything ends with death. And every death is accompanied with the famous phrase So it goes.
From thousands of noncombatants burned alive in a firebombing, to a colony of lice on a decontaminated fur coat, all deaths are treated as equal. Nothing means anything. We’re all just things that take up space until we’re gone. All of us equal zero.
There’s that leveling again.
Not all artists that have been gathered under the postmodernist bumbershoot were that nihilistic. The most common thread you find in their works is a reaction against everything that came before. The war and its aftermath of nuclear fear made many doubt everything they’d been told. The old guard said art is supposed to educate and uplift? Balls to that, Big Daddy. Art is flat and meaningless, disjointed, shallow, unserious.
Many postmodernists doubled down on the experimentation of the modernists by making their story about the creation of the story. Vonnegut wrote himself into several of his books, interacting with his own characters. IItalo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler addresses you the reader directly and narrates the act of you reading the very book itself.
Postmodernism can still be seen in action today. Some of Alan Moore’s most insufferable works are written (and drawn) in the style of different artists as a commentary on art. Sometimes the pastiche loop becomes so puckered it threatens to disappear into itself.
Though the trappings of postmodernism are a bit too nonsensical for my tastes, I do like the experimental, thumb-in-the-eye-of-authority flare that many PMs bring to the table. But none of the postmodernists chose that label. Just as none of the Romantics called themselves that. Occasionally, some small clutch of writers names themselves the Imagists or the Transcendentalists, but their little group is inevitably swallowed into a larger cultural movement like pebbles joining an avalanche. And no one recognizes the movement till it’s almost past. And it's usually named by nonmembers. American film noir was named and classified by French critics looking in from the outside. Romantic literature was tagged as such by the artists who turned against it. If you could just pick your legacy, everyone would do it.
So what the heck am I? Is there a strong enough movement or prevalent enough set of similarities in literature today to even warrant a name? And if there is, do I fit? Or am I just a tourist typer, too odd to be called a member of the club, and not good enough to stand out as a maverick? Or am I just like all the other pebbles, coming down the mountain we’re not even aware of?
Maybe history will call this the Splintered Age. The time when technology gave just about everyone the means to publish anything in any genre or medium without the gatekeepers of industry, wealth, or status. That time when all the world was poets and philosophers, songsmiths and filmmakers. Good artists and bad artists, loud and obnoxious, mild and obnoxious, rich and poor, serious and silly, all clamoring to be heard, and, once in a while between requests for donations, stopping to listen.
The community is nice, but it does make it hard to stand out when everyone is standing.
