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an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural

sound, text and image
Volume 3, May 2006, ISSN 1552-5112

Literature and the Postmodern: A

Conversation with Brian McHale
Brian McHale and Adriana Neagu

Adriana Neagu: As we advance into the twenty first century there

has been less and less talk of postmodernism, speculation of its
death and after-life. Soon after crossing the millennial threshold it
became quite clear that there was life after postmodernism after all.
Could it be that indeed we are past the postmodern age altogether?
In Postmodernist Fiction you describe postmodernism as emerging
from modernism with historical consequentiality. What does
postmodernism, with its radical questioning of historicity, seem to be
logically and consequentially preparing the way for? Is it now
possible to say with the benefit of hindsight, what postmodernism is
prior to, in order to discern a foreseeable posterity in current

tendencies? Or else, how different is your take on the postmodernist

experience today from that formulated in Postmodernist Fiction?

Brian McHale: The narrower question is that of whether I do stand

by my own poetics of postmodernism and I think I do. I think I dont
have any regrets, not important ones, about the position I stake out
there. I still think its tenable, given that its a limited position, i.e. its
ambitions are limited to a poetics of postmodern fiction, and given
those parameters, poetics and fiction, I think I am still able to stand
by it. My position in the second book, Constructing Postmodernism
was that this after all is an entirely heuristic view of postmodernism
and it does not make strong claims about its own status. So it
organises, still pretty much to my satisfaction, a range of texts; it
establishes some family resemblances; it establishes a sort of range
and some umbrella concepts. As far as Im concerned, as long as
one accepts the limitations of that project, I think it still works quite
adequately. So, Im not very interested in going back and undoing
that; I think thats still satisfactory, to me, anyway. If you wanted to
challenge it at the level of its failure to integrate postmodernist
fiction in a larger whole, you might say that it doesnt have a very
strong explanatory scheme, its explanatory scheme is entirely
internal to the literary-historical dynamics and does not respond in
any systematic way to larger historical developments. As long as

youre not looking for that larger historical sequence or history, then
I think the poetics still stands. So thats an answer at that level of
the issue. At the level of the fate of postmodernism altogether, here
I have to plead agnosticism. Im actually not a futurologist -- Im not
in the business of predicting the future, Im in the business of literary
history, which is to observe what has happened, and to think to
some degree historically, in the literary-historical sense, about the
present moment. But I think I have too good a sense about how
many variables you would have to be thinking about, not to mention
how many unexpected irruptions from elsewhere you would have to
be taking into account, to talk about the future, so I dont pretend to
have anything useful to say about where were going. Im
sympathetic to the idea, as I suggested in my Edinburgh lecture of 2
days ago, What Was Postmodernism? Or, The Last of the Angels,
that you heard the other day, that postmodernism may be
exhausting itself, that it may be reaching a kind of limit, but beyond
that, I dont have anything more sensible to say than anyone else
would. Nobody should treat as reliable anything that I or anyone
else for that matter-- might say about what is coming next,
especially in the light of the ongoing transformation of the whole
media ecology. It is distinctly possible that talking about
postmodernist literature will be rendered obsolete. Im not going to
endorse that view either actually, but it is a possibility. I think its

more likely that what were seeing in the present will continue, which
is to say, verbal literatures place in the whole media ecology is
going to change as the new media and forms of expression in new
media take up different niches in the overall system. Literature will
shift sideways, parts of it will be superseded by new media, parts of
it will develop new functions, and new niches. So I dont think I have
to take the apocalyptic view that this may be the last literature
generation or something like that, but I do think its a good guess
that literatures place will be quite different in the future mediascape
than it had been and that it is now. And that being the case, really,
one is in no good position to speculate about what the next thing is
likely to be.

AN: Of a whole plethora of reference works on postmodernism,

Postmodernist Fiction and Constructing Postmodernism are among
the rare few that offer an actual poetics of its forms, a systemic and
periodical understanding of its articulations with Modernism. The
formalist method that you then applied to the analysis of
postmodernist discourse proved enormously enabling and
productive, particularly in its valorisation of the Jacobsonian notion
of dominant. By resorting to a similar mindset, can we distinguish a
High Postmodernism, frozen, canonised, fossilised already, and is
that the unavoidable condition of all literary phenomena, the fate

inscribed, inevitably, as you put it in Postmodernist Fiction, in their

historicity?
Do you think that the obsolescence, the exhaustion that may be
profiling itself is to do with the becoming canonical of postmodernist
forms in literary discourse?

BM: I can see that view of the matter and its partly a satisfying
view. Yet, I never bought into the idea, which is a sort of another
apocalyptic idea, that postmodernism was a radical break, a leap
into the unknown, that there was no continuity and no way back
from it to where we had been before. Im more of the view that
postmodernist literary expression, and maybe postmodernism in
general, behaves like earlier cultural periods and phenomena
behaved, which is to say that precisely the mechanism you were
talking about is working, that a canonical version of it will be or is
being or has been crystallised now, which has its own life cycle, and
that the dynamics of change from the inside and change from the
outside are going on all along. I have no problem thinking about it in
those terms, so I expect to see that being played out. On the other
hand, Im also attracted to Lyotards view of a sort of perpetual
postmodernism, which is not I think at all incompatible with the other
view. Lyotard, as you know, reserves the name postmodernism for
what cannot be accommodated by the canonical system its

always what is left over for future recuperation. Therefore, we can

talk apparently paradoxically, to me not paradoxically at all, about a
postmodern that precedes the modern.

AN: An ingrained avant-garde nature, inbuilt in postmodernism,

preventing ossification, keeping the ball rolling?

BM: Exactly. Im quite reconciled to the idea that thats happening

even as we speak, and that some excluded aspect or part or range
of postmodernism will be left for future generations to make
something of, to take up and shift to the centre all those dynamics
which derive from the Russian formalists. I dont see any
incompatibility between Lyotards model and what was essentially a
formalist, in part structuralist view that I was using in Postmodernist
Fiction.

AN: In retrospect, if we step back, how much about cultural

postmodernism was media hype and vogue?

BM: I think a nuanced answer would be that, in the first place, the
general media embrace of postmodernism comes very late in the
day. Many of the things we recognise now as being postmodernist

preceded the coinage of the word altogether, and date from the
50s-60s. Even after the coinage of the word in the 1970s it had
been coined earlier, but its de facto coinage, its availability, dates
from the seventies -- even in the course of the 70s there is not
much media interest in postmodernism. If you go back and search
mass media, the term hasnt been taken up yet. So, even though
the term is already available in certain areas, to academics and
architecture critics, it still circulates in fairly limited circles, and really
only gets taken up as a media buzzword in the 80s sometime and
into the 90s. So its certainly the case that it was a media
buzzword and a fashion statement, but all that comes rather late in
the cycle, really after the most interesting uses of the term had
occurred in the academy and art practice. In other words, of course
there was exaggeration, of course there was hype and of course
there was a sort of media false consciousness about the
postmodern, but I dont think it interfered with the actual emergence
of the term, or the actual creation of what we see as its most
distinctive works, or the works likely to have the longest shelf life,
literary-historically speaking, or art-historically speaking. I think
those all predate the use of the term in mass media.

AN: And implicitly any meta-thinking, any form of self-representation

somehow.

BM: Thats right.

AN: Outlooks too are subject to the cycle of ideas hence bound to
change. In rethinking your findings in Constructing Postmodernism
and the developments and refinements to the poetics of
postmodernist forms that the book contributes, is there anything that
you would do differently in methodological terms? And what
prompted the work on The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole?

BM: I think not radically different, certainly not conceptually

different. Rhetorically the book is not entirely satisfactory now, there
are ways that I could have made it a more integrated book in
particular, but conceptually I think I still stand by it, and when I have
had occasions to reread, especially the Introduction, I think on the
whole Im satisfied with that. You asked about what prompted me to
move to the third book and it wasnt actually dissatisfaction with the
conceptual position of the preceding books, but a sense that really
there was a whole range of writing, which is to say mainly poetry,
that I didnt accommodate and didnt address in the first two books
and it was this that stimulated work on the third book. Out of that I
learnt something valuable, I think, which is that there is no reason to
assume that the model holds across all genres or across all cultural

practices, so that what I think makes a pretty sound argument in the

context of fiction, doesnt look nearly as sound in the case of poetry.
Poetry from certain points of view had been postmodern before the
postmodern, or had always already been postmodern.

AN: By definition

BM: Yes. And from other points of view, perhaps never

postmodernised. Im able to entertain both of these possibilities.
What this says is that the model that allowed us to discern the
transition in the history of the novel doesnt allow that kind of sharp
transition in the history of poetry; that poetry rather is a kind of
range, the umbrella under which you can group it is a much broader
one, and on the whole, the account of poetry has to be less
integrated by the nature of the object.

AN: Comparatively, how did you find the application of a formalist

and structuralist method to verse or perhaps not very productive
given the plurality that you are describing?

BM: Its not so much that its unproductive, its just that when you do
that, the results are much more various. You get a much wider
variety of findings. So, I think thats a net gain actually. One comes

away from this saying, well, after all, theres not a single unifying
postmodernism across cultural practices. Of course, theres really
no reason to imagine that there wouldve been. Despite Fredric
Jamesons very persuasive attempts to make all postmodernism
responsive to a single cultural logic, its hard to do, and that
probably has to do with the interference between, indeed the
intersection between, so to speak, exterior history and the interior
histories of each of these disciplines or practices, which are being
driven by their own internal dynamics, at the same time that theyre
all subject and responding to the cultural logic of late capitalism.
And out of that come these different chronologies, these different
sequences, and different strands of development. As I try to show in
the Introduction to The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole, if you
looked at the postmodernisms of different disciplines, you would
immediately see that some have strong postmodernisms, in the
sense that its almost inconceivable to talk about the history of that
field without the use of the term, and some have weak
postmodernisms, in the sense that plenty of people get along just
fine without talking in those terms. And theres some correlation
between the strength of their postmodernism and the strength of
their modernism, so there is such a thing as modern dance in a very
sharply defined way, and consequently postmodern dance is a
relatively clear profile. Equally, modern architecture and postmodern

architecture have strong profiles, whereas its much less inevitable

to talk about postmodern painting -- some people do, but its not
mandatory. You might talk about the postmodern in the field of the
visual arts, but even that is not as mandatory as it is in the case of
dance and architecture, and by the time you get to something like
postmodern music, then really its purely optional, and maybe
useless. So rather than assuming uniformity, that everything in lock
step crossed the same threshold at the same time, we should rather
assume that there are different thresholds that are crossed at
different times.

AN: And this within what might be construed as a plural, eclectic,

yet cohesive dynamics?

BM: Right. And possibly weakly or strongly cohesive at that.

AN: Speaking of degrees of internalisation, do you ever worry that

your paradigm for understanding postmodernism may be taken too
literally or appropriated in a reductionist, prescriptive even way?

BM: Sure and of course it has been. That comes with the territory,
its nothing to be worried about. And that happens despite all the
disclaimers that I did or might write -- it doesnt make any difference,

people will still believe what they please. You cant worry about it,
but when you get the chance, you complicate it for them, saying,
yes, but or no, it cant be as straightforward as that, can it, and
you just keep reiterating, that this is a heuristic device, this is a
construction, its not something Ive found out in the world, but Ive
made it in order to accommodate the things that I found out there in
the world. On the one hand, its very flattering and its very affirming,
because it means that people have found it handy, but it also means
that I have to be philosophical about the applications of it that look
misguided, or, as you say, reductive. I cant have those satisfactions
without also having the dissatisfactions.

AN: 9-11 and the fateful validations of the millennial anxieties that it
brought, became a periodical term, indeed an almost civilisational
marker. Can we see its reverberations on the scene of the
contemporary as a sudden relapse into an epistemological order, in
identity terms and otherwise? A catch term with Postmodernism
repeated like a mantra by its theorists was its politics of plurality and
multiculturalism. Did 9-11 mark the foundering of the
multiculturalism project?

BM: There are two things here. First, Ive always been suspicious
of the conflation of postmodernism and postcolonialism. In fact, Im
suspicious of the conflation of all the posts. I dont think
poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism are all the
same posts -- quite the reverse, Im fairly confident that theyre
each responding to different historical sequences, that they are the
fruits of different historical logics. Postcolonialism is coming out of
its own logic, and even its acknowledgement of, let alone its identity
with, postmodernism, is fairly weak; it doesnt actually need
postmodernism. There would have been a poscolonialism even if
there never were a postmodernism, Im fairly confident of that. The
conflation of postmodernism and poststructuralism I think is also a
mistake -- its a misunderstanding of intellectual history. The
assumption that the postmodernists were illustrating postructuralist
theory, I think, is very easily disproved just by virtue of the dates.
Poststructuralism in North America, where arguably the first
postmodernisms became self-aware, became aware of themselves
as such, wasnt available at the time when the first postmodernisms
were being put in place. North Americans werent reading Foucault
and Derrida in the original, and translations werent available yet.
The most that one can say, therefore, is that they share some
common ancestors, which is probably demonstrably true. So
postructuralism and postmodernism are more like cousins than

parent and child. But thats an aside. As for the 9-11 events,
Randall Stevenson and I, working on our coda to our edited volume
on the Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, have been trying to
work out our position about the end point of the twentieth century.
Were now thinking about a double end point, instructively double:
there is the endpoint that in prospect we imagined would be the
terminus, which is to say, New Years Day of the year 2000, a day
that had been anticipated, arguably, in all kinds of ways,
eschatological as well as utopian. If you remember, there was
anxiety about the possibility that the entire technological system
was going to break down that day because of software bugs, and
then when it didnt happen, there was this sort of anti-climactic
sense, almost a disappointment, certainly outright disappointment
on some peoples part because they thought that all this was going
to be a great opportunity, that all would be swept away and wed
start all over again. After the fact there was a certain amount of
resentment, of cynicism, suspicion that it was all hyped, it was all
marketing device, and conversely, a certain ambiguity; the software
engineers version of the story at least, is that in fact, they fixed it in
time, that in fact there was going to be a disaster, but that they
managed to patch up the software in a big rush in the few years
before the New Years Day 2000, and consequently they staved off
the system crash. We may never know how much truth there was

behind this; its very difficult to talk about something that

conspicuously didnt happen. So that gives us one model of an
endpoint to the century; its a kind of ironical and paradoxical model,
a model of how a period, a century could be imagined as ending,
prospectively -- all the millennial expectations and dreads, the
momentum building, and then nothing happens -- which reveals in a
very useful and instructive way the fictionality of that endpoint.
Turning over the calendar is after all an artificial dating system,
really only fairly recently put into place, and coming quite late in the
history of civilisation, adjusted several times, and resting on very
infirm foundations, and conventional in the end. You might recall
there was actually quite a great deal of debate at the time about
whether that was the proper date to be celebrating the millennium
anyway. It ought to have been on the New Years Day 2001, the
purists said. Nobody went out and had the millennial party that
night, but still the purists were right, from a purely mathematical
point of view, so the whole thing is a sort of exposure to view of the
fictionality of these sorts of thresholds and endpoints. Then,
conversely, the events of 9-11 give us the alternative model, which
is the violent irruption of history into what we thought was a
sequence, a continuous measured sequence, now suddenly
interrupted at a point we never anticipated, by means we never
imagined, literally unthinkable, out of the blue as they say, and

literally so, and imposing on us a threshold that we never imagined

having to cross. So theres the other model of how change enters
history and how we might measure endpoints and starting points;
not what we expected, but what we didnt expect; not what we had
bargained for, the apocalypse that we were being readied for, but
the one that catches us unawares. And thats a kind of parable.
There are these ways of thinking about measuring out units of
cultural time and periodising, one which we think we have under
control -- we can use the calendar to predict it -- and the other which
we have no control over, and which arrives unbidden and unlooked
for. It also changes our orientation, i.e. Y2K we looked forward to, 911, we look back from, because now we have an endpoint that we
didnt expect and what we had understood in one way about the
history leading up to that, we must now understand in a different
way, in fact we must understand as a history leading up to 9-11,
instead of as a history leading up to something else, leading up to
Y2K. Now suddenly we begin to perceive a different order in the
cultural history of the twentieth century. In literalistic or pragmatic
terms we understand what was misunderstood about the 80s and
the 90s, about what was unnoticed or misconstrued, the historical
developments that we did not take seriously enough or didnt
recognise for what they were, or other points that we failed to see
were on the same line. But then also in our cultural imaginations we

begin to see anticipations where we did not see them before, we

didnt recognise them as anticipations, and we recontextualise all
our apocalyptic imaginings and the imagination of disaster, we see
dress rehearsals, and sometimes uncanny anticipations that were
invisible before because without the event, there was nothing for
them to anticipate. On American radio in the days after 9-11,
several times over you heard recitations of W. H. Audens poem
September 1939, which is hair-raisingly apropos, although to read
it that way is surely anachronistic, because Auden was talking about
the onset of a different war, a different set of circumstances. But its
almost impossible, and in future, for students and readers further
away from the events, will be impossible for the poem not to be read
in the light of 9-11.

AN: As though the poem was inscribed with readings of the event?

BM: Pre-inscribed, which is very bad history in some sense, its

pure anachronism, but, at this point, impossible not to see. And so,
as you now reread the twentieth century, it has all to be reread
retrospectively, in the light of this event, ironically and uncannily.

AN: I find it a master-irony as well to think of an entire postmodern

dystopian horizon, the notorious post-holocaust, post-apocalyptic

fictions and recontextualise these in light of their premonitory value.

Once charged with a defective historical consciousness,
postmodern authors may in retrospect appear historically prescient,
postmodern readings of the contemporary culture, almost prophetic.

AN: Or at any rate, it looks that way now. Its exactly the dynamics
of Borges essay on Kafkas precursors. Without Kafka, the
precursors are not related to each other, but as soon as theres
Kafka, they are. Without that shock of 9-11, there is no recognisable
history that leads up to 9-11, and now there is, and hence it is
impossible not to see it in a certain way.

AN: Do you then think that the fateful day, has inevitably triggered
a sui generis radically different understanding of the
postmodernisms relation with history, perhaps a rehabilitation of its
ethics even?

BM: I couldnt say that. For one thing, were too near to the event,
and this is also part of my reluctance to be a futurologist -- I dont
know how thats going to turn out. As I was indicating in my lecture
at the University of Edinburgh, the other day, I do think there is a
waning of some postmodernist features around 9-11, or maybe its
even more correct to say that theres a notable silence around 9-11,

with regard to matters that you would expect to be expressed. My

account of the rise and fall of the angels is partly motivated and also
partly enhanced by the observable fact that around 9-11 there were
relatively few manifestations of this angel imagery -- not that there
were none, but that, given how angel images proliferated throughout
the 90s, you would think that on this occasion of all occasions the
angels would return in a big way. But in fact theyre rather sparse,
which suggests that in spite of 9-11 this sign of postmodernism, the
postmodern angel, is winding down of its own accord, that the life
cycle of postmodernism is coming to its end, as it must out of its
own internal logic, rather than having been brought to an abrupt end
by 9-11. So, in the end, 9-11 is another fictitious boundary; it really
is an irruption out of another order of things and it will be used
maybe as the marker of the end of a development, but it hasnt
been experienced that way; it will be another fiction.

AN: The vision of postmodernism articulated in your two poetics

stood out also in the positive note it sounded on the phenomenon,
on its discursive and plural nature. Do you subscribe to fellow
theorist Ihab Hassans thesis that in part at least, the legacy of
postmodernism can be viewed as in fact an aesthetic of trust? Too
easyDo you see that happening at all or being the case?

BM: Again, Im reluctant to speculate, but I see at least some signs

of restriction of plurality, or I suspect thats coming into force -- a
kind of retreat from the full multiculturalism to which we at least
gave lip-service once.

AN: At least from its frenzied, celebrational dimension.

BM: Yes, and on the whole, I think its a bad sign because it looks
like it is in response to 9-11 and the threat of the clash of
civilisations, and that whats being installed in its place is a new
kind of dualism; at least in some quarters thats sort of the desired
outcome of all this, that people are now going to be sobered up by
this shock of reality and will renounce the luxury of indulging in
pluralism, and that they will now confront the reality principle of
opposition and polarity. But theres such a tone of relief in the
quarters where youre hearing this from that its very suspicious.
After all, theyve been waiting for this all along, theyve been trying
to undo the plurality of the postmodern from the beginning; in North
America, and I think also in Europe, plurality is often coded in the
terms of the 60s and the undoing of the 60s. The 60s really is only
a figure of speech, its only a synecdoche really, but the cultural
warfare has been conducted in these terms. Its the 60s and a kind

of policing of the 60s thats at stake, and a call to order after the
excesses of the 60s, which is then recapitulated as a call to order
after the excesses of the 80s, again and again a call to order, which
in effect is simply the recoil from pluralism and the nostalgia for the
rather stable organisation of the Cold War years. Its really a
nostalgia for the clear-cut polarities and divisions of the Cold War,
and now of course you have to reorganise in order to have a
different set of poles, and one can claim the New Europe as your
allies against this other threat, but the structure is the same -- the
names have been changed but the structure is the same. So I think
theres more than a trace of that going on. I dont welcome it, and I
hope its resisted. For all the kind of centrifugal aspects of those
episodes of pluralism, I think thats preferable and less dangerous in
the long run. Ive lately been teaching in a course on science fiction
a novel by Samuel Delany called Trouble on Triton, which is from
the midst of the 70s, a book written in 1976, reflecting a sort of
utopian projection of that pluralisation, a world in which all kinds of
identities, sexual and otherwise, plural identities and consecutive
identities are made available by technological means, and life is
hard because you always have to be making these choices, always
continuously renegotiating the parameters of identity, and my
students, looking at the text, found it actually a dystopia. It was a
very unsettling project to them. They certainly were able to see that

it belonged to its historical moment, not to the future but to 1975-6.

But on the whole I think Delany was right, this is a sort of version of
utopia, living among the multiplicity of choices and the pain of
choice, rather than fleeing into the security of that Manichean world
view that the Cold War had provided and that after all almost
destroyed us many times over.

AN: Somehow Ive always been suspicious of postmodern plurality,

thinking that its only a shallow form of plurality, stemming precisely
from the refusal to choose, the pathological condition of liminality of
the postmodern logic.

BM: Of course it can be a shallow plurality, but why not, why not
have a shallow plurality rather than none? And its not just a
shallow plurality, one that can be easily recuperated by consumer
culture, that comes down to the choice between Classic Coke and
Diet, which amounts to nothing. But just because thats one version
of it doesnt mean that one wants to ban plurality altogether, and I
think there are deeper possibilities and potentialities. I could tolerate
the shallow pluralism of the marketplace if I felt confident that the
other plurality was also available and secure somehow. The fear is
well be left only with the plurality of the marketplace and in other

respects well be locked back into the Cold War, well be back in
what my friend Alan Nadel calls the culture of containment.

AN: Which would be anomalous.

BM: Yes, but not unthinkable. The first time around the culture of
containment was about consumer choice and containment of every
other choice, and theres no reason to think that it couldnt be
revived.

AN: You have worked with a broad range of authors whose

cataloguing as postmodern comes almost automatic these days.
One of the misconceptions in circulation for sometime in the 90s
among consumers, critics even of postmodern literature was that
writers across the ocean have done a lot more at the level of
innovation and experimentation than on this side of the Atlantic. As
with all clichd judgement, there will be a grain of truth in the
otherwise sweeping generalisation. From the poeticians point of
view, have North American authors, particularly insofar as the
practice of the novel is concerned, better served the vast panorama
of diversity and multiplicity available in postmodern forms?

BM: Im not sure I believe that. There are different national

chronologies, different national histories of postmodernism, and
then different national traditions which inflect it in different ways. So
I think it might be arguable that the Americans are first,
chronologically, for reasons which have to do with the internal
dynamics of American literature, and therefore available as models
for imitation, but I dont think that that means that they offer a
greater range, or that they exhaust the possibilities or anything like
that. I think thats not true, and in fact theres plenty of reasons to
think that, in particular French literature had what we are now willing
to call a postmodernism thats not a term that was available to
them then, and to this day theyre not very interested in the term
but it functioned for the American readers and the American writers
as a model of how to proceed in a postmodern direction. So I think,
given the different national histories and the different chronological
sequences, we can think of plenty of European examples that are
not closely related to American models; and even when they are
related, theres always a crucial element of mutual
miscomprehension which is absolutely essential to literary history.
Everyone is always, systematically getting it wrong, and without that
there would be no literary history. Raymond Federman, for instance,
has had an enormous career in Germany, in German translation,
and he is by now almost entirely unknown in the United States, hes

pretty much disappeared from sight, and the reasons for it are quite
extrinsic to his reputation in the States, or to the progress, the cycle
of his career in the States, and has everything to do with the
German reception of a certain kind of Holocaust literature. While it
would be incorrect and naive to say the Germans have
misunderstood Raymond Federman, its true in a certain sense
that Germans have a different appreciation of his work compared to
the Americans, but this is an entirely productive misprision, and
keeps happening all the time.

AN: Which brings us back to the larger cycle and the old equation:
literature-reality, and the postmodernist adventure in it. What are to
you the implications of the waning of postmodernism upon the
adventure of mimesis? Are we contemplating a return to realism in
mutated forms, a postmodern realism?

BM: This is the sort of question that I could evade rather than
answer by saying, if you understand realism in the way in which
Jacobson talks about it, which is to say as a historical dynamic,
where what is regarded as realistic in one generation is
subsequently regarded as purely conventionalised, stylised in the
next, and the violation of those conventions then becomes a new
realism if that is the dynamics of realism, which I think is arguably

so, then, firstly, postmodernism was never unrealistic, and secondly,

the new realisms, whatever they will be, will follow the same
dynamic. They wont be a return to some imaginary originary
realism, they will be realisms produced by the dynamic of the
response to the last realism, in this dialectical way. So, many of the
postmodernists that Im aware of, and especially the ones that I
knew personally, always protested that they were strictly speaking
realists, exactly in this Jacobsonian sense -- that the realisms that
were currently available were inadequate to the experience of
reality. This is the John Barth or Ron Sukenick story; they would
say, well, thats not the way reality seems to me, thats the kind of
reality which you would only get in a conventionalised fiction. Now
Im going to show you what reality seems like to me and the only
way to get there is by exploding the forms of the old realism. From
that point of view, postmodernism was never unrealistic or antirealistic or irrealistic. It follows from this that the next moves will be,
structurally, the same sort of move, though the outcomes are
unforeseeable. People will say once again, as they do all the time,
as they are saying now, the forms available to me dont capture the
reality that I experience, therefore I must invent the new forms,
violate the old ones, and the distance from the old forms is the
measure of my achieving my new realism. There is of course a
historical form of realism, which, however, we can describe in terms

of a set of conventions, the historical realism that finally reaches its

crystallised form in the nineteenth century; we can point to that and
say, yes, thats the historical form of realism, but that surely is not
what the postmodernists had in mind; they dont do historical
realism, they may parody or pastiche it, but they certainly arent
faithful to it, rather they are flagrantly unfaithful to it, and its unlikely
that any future realism will merely return to that. If it did, it would be
a pastiche, an ironic rewriting of historical realism in the way that
some of those postmodernist versions were ironic rewritings.

AN: And yet we seem to witness an insatiable appetite these days

for various forms of life writing, autobiography, memoirs, as well as
biography. The question arises to what an extent this can be viewed
as an erosion of the postmodernist subversive potential?

BM: Indeed all kinds of documentary writing, all kinds of grey-zone

writing between fiction and other forms, all the forms of life writing
are emerging, but its unsurprising that they should arise. I think this
is not a retreat from postmodernism, but the response, in the same
spirit, to the awareness that there must be some other way to
capture the reality that I experience, and to complexify it. And those
forms of biography and life writing dont look very much like classic
autobiography, or classic biography, or classic documentary genres

of any kind, they look strange, and they look strange in order to
make it strange, make their experience strange.

AN: Back to Russian formalism. Professor McHale, thank you for

de-familiarising the postmodern again at this particular juncture.

Edinburgh, 16 June 2005

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Volume 3, May 2006, ISSN 1552-5112