A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 705

movies, and rock concerts. Real and basic enough, however, are the “shitty choices”

with which the grunts are confronted. They can have “fear and motion” or “fear and

standstill,” Herr observes. “No preferred cut there, no way even to be clear about

which was really worse, the wait or the delivery.” Dispatches is a great nonfiction

novel about war because, caught in its panoramic field of vision, is the insanity of

combat as it was experienced by men teetering on a precipice, standing on the edge

of death every moment of every day. And, in its dark way, the book even has its own

heroes: those men themselves, the grunts who somehow made their way through

things with the help of black humor, bleak cynicism, and the belief that, in a world

without logic, the only logical thing to do was to go with the flow, stick to the job,

and try to stay alive.

Language and Genre

Watching nothing: Postmodernity in prose

When Wolfe was cataloging the forms of the contemporary American novel that, he

believed, had failed in the primary duty to the real, he picked out one group for

particular condemnation. They were the postmodernists: those who, Wolfe

scornfully suggested, wrote about “The Prince of Alienation ... sailing off to

Lonesome Island on his Tarot boat with his back turned and his Timeless cape on,

reeking of camphor balls.” For their part, some of those writers have returned the

compliment. One of them, for example, clearly thinking of figures like Raymond

Carver, has referred to the school of “Post Alcoholic Blue-Collar Minimalist

Hyperrealism.” The opposition is not universal, of course, nor even inevitable. On

the contrary, most contemporary American novelists exploit the possibilities of

both realism and postmodernism, and others besides, as they attempt to navigate

the two rivers of American history described by Mailer. Nevertheless, the opposition

has been there at times: between the New Journalists and the Fabulators, the dirty

realists and the fantasists or systems builders. And it is mapped out clearly in the gap

that separates Wolfe, Carver, and the Capote of In Cold Blood from the wholehearted

postmodernists of contemporary American writing, notably Thomas Pynchon

(1937–) and John Barth (1930–). Pynchon is perhaps the most acclaimed and

personally the most elusive of the postmodernists. Relatively little is known about

him, apart from the fact that he studied at Cornell, for some of the time under

Vladimir Nabokov (who did not remember him), and that he worked for a while for

the Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle. He has chosen social invisibility, the last

known photograph of him dating from the 1950s. Although this is almost certainly

motivated by a desire to avoid the pitfalls of celebrity and the publicity machine, it

has given the figure of Pynchon a certain alluring mystery. It also adds to the

mystique his fiction projects, since that projection is of a world on the edge of

apocalypse, threatened by a vast conspiracy directed by or maybe against an

established power elite. This conspiracy, the intimation is, is decipherable through a

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