716 The American Century: Literature since 1945contemporary life. One circles around popular culture: television, with its “endless
simpering advertising” and “its monstrously obscene games of greed.” The other
focuses on high culture: the literature of absurdism and entropy with its assumption
that “life ... was a boring novel.” What the protagonist in both stories has to learn is
a deeply traditional lesson: the difference between false art and real life. He has to
return from the false worlds of mass culture and amoral literature to the true world
of relationship; and, finally, he does. Gardner’s finest novel, Grendel (1971), however,
does not entirely conform to his own expressed views about art. The book tells the
story of the Old English epic poem “Beowulf ” from the point of view of the monster.
Gardner himself was a medievalist scholar; and here he plays with medieval notions
of psychology and numerological symbolism as he sets the materialism, nihilism,
and sheer brutishness of Grendel against heroic Christianity. What emerges from
this extraordinary tale is the revelation that Grendel is indispensable to the civilizing
forces of science and the arts. He is the brute existence on which humans depend for
their definition of themselves. “You stimulate them! You make them think and
scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they
are,” a sympathetic dragon tells Grendel. “You are mankind, or man’s condition:
inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain.” A source of power for
humanity, apparently, Grendel is also the source of power for the book. Like Satan in
Paradise Lost, he may lose but the author seems to be secretly on his side. Edgy,
unnatural, unreliable, Grendel is a typically postmodern narrator. Constantly
dramatizing or changing himself, his strong, seductive voice leaves the reader
without sure ground. “I cry, and hug myself, and laugh,” he declares, “letting out salt
tears, he he! till I fall down and gasping and sobbing. (It’s mostly fake.).” Gardner
may have been suspicious of postmodernism and keen to give his work a moral
dimension. Ironically, his finest character and narrator is irredeemably, necessarily
amoral. And his best work is his best precisely because it has a postmodern edge.
The range of possibilities charted by writers as otherwise different as Gardner and
Berger, Hawkes and Barthelme suggests that postmodernism is probably best seen,
not as a unified movement, but as a cluster, a constellation of motives, a generic field.
It is a field that is itself marked by skepticism about specific generic types; in its
disposition to parody, ironic inversion, and metafictional insistence on its own
modes of significance – and, in particular, language – it is the absolute reverse of the
stable. The one constant in postmodernism may be instability and, beyond that, the
capacity to challenge the stability of all that is signified, all that is supposedly real.
This master paradox of postmodernism, that is constant only in its inconstancy, was
handily summarized by Ronald Sukenick (1932–2004) in The Death of the Novel and
Other Stories (1969). There, he insisted that “the contemporary” lived in “the world
of post-realism” and had “to start from scratch.” “Reality doesn’t exist,” Sukenick
argued. “God was the omnipresent author, but he died: now no one knows the plot.”
So, living in an age of epistemological redefinition, an urgently felt need to redraw
the mental maps of the world, postmodernist writers thrive on the imperative of
being aberrant, arbitrary – above all, different. And the loose, baggy monster of
postmodernism can include such diverse radical experimentalists, aside from writersGGray_c05.indd 716ray_c 05 .indd 716 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM