The American Century: Literature since 1945 715left in suspense. We are doomed to watch the world Hawkes creates just as Selvaggia
does, with helpless, horrified wonder. Or, to return to that remark of O’Connor, we
have to suffer it, like a dream.
Two other writers associated with postmodernism, Thomas Berger (1924–) and
John Gardner (1933–1982), could hardly be more different from Barthelme and
Hawkes, or from one another. Which goes to show, perhaps, that postmodernist is
almost as capacious a term as realist. A prolific writer, Berger has produced a series
of comic novels about his non-Jewish schlemiel hero Carlo Reinhart (Crazy in
Berlin (1958), Reinhart in Love (1962), Vital Parts (1970), Reinhart’s Women (1981)).
He has written parodies of the detective novel (Who is Teddy Villanova? (1977)) and
Arthurian romance (Arthur Rex (1978)), replayed Oresteia (Ossie’s Story (1990))
and Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crews (1994)) for modern times, and engaged in
satirical fables about, for instance, a man with the power to become invisible (Being
Invisible (1987)) or a man so discontented about his relationships with real women
that he builds an ideal woman secretly at the animatronics firm where he works
(Adventures of the Artificial Woman (2004)). Unquestionably his best novel, however,
is Little Big Man (1964). The narrator of this novel, Jack Crabb, the Little Big Man,
is by his own account 111 years old. He claims to be the sole survivor of Custer’s last
stand, knocked out Wyatt Earp, and to have been in a shootout with “Wild Bill”
Hickock. Drawing on the traditions of frontier humor and the tall tale, Berger
endows Crabb with a voice that is vernacular and vital, and a view of life that is
shifty, amoral, and unillusioned. “Most of all troubles comes from having standards,”
he declares. So, he careers between roles and between cultures with “a brainy
opportunism” as it is called by the prissy amateur historian, Ralph Fielding Snell,
who frames the novel with a foreword and epilogue. Snell admits doubt as to
whether Crabb is “the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of
insane proportions.” From one point of view, however, that hardly matters. Either
way, Snell and Berger intimate, Crabb is heroic: providing, either by deed or word,
“an image of human vitality holding its own in the world amid the surprises of
unplanned coincidence.” Set in a classic American past though it is, Little Big Man
(and, for that matter, The Return of Little Big Man (1999)) is about the typical
protean man of postmodern fiction for whom there are no settled certainties, no
sure codes, and roles are picked up or discarded like a set of clothes. There are no
absolutes, no essences; that classic past and its myths are themselves demystified,
mocked, and parodied. The only constant here is the constant of self-fashioning: a
self exploratory, in flux, that casually acts or voices itself into being – that makes
itself up as it goes along.
As the title of one of his critical works, On Moral Fiction (1978), suggests, Gardner
was nominally far from such moral relativism. “Art leads, it doesn’t follow,” he said
in an interview in 1977. “Art doesn’t imitate life, art makes people do things,” he
added, “if we celebrate bad values in our arts, we’re going to have a bad society; if we
celebrate values which make you healthier, which make life better, we’re going to
have a better world.” Consistent with this, he produced in his 1976 novel, October
Light, two interwoven stories concerned with the nihilism and alienation ofGGray_c05.indd 715ray_c 05 .indd 715 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM