POMO KILLS ME. In Memoriam David Foster Wallace. EDINBURGH REVIEW ARTICLE (extract)
31 January 2010
The article from which this very short extract is taken was written by myself and appears in full in the new Edition of The Edinburgh Review. With reference to David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Don Delillo and others, it charts the rise and the limitations of Postmodern fiction.
PO-MO KILLS ME
In memoriam David Foster Wallace
Why can’t I be a postmodern writer? Why can’t I embrace irony and write ‘mash-up’ novels? Or put the world in quotation marks and ironically ‘deconstruct’ daily life? Am I just dated, quaint? Why do I still stick to this outmoded form called ‘telling stories?’ Throughout my years attempting to write I’ve constantly had to assess my work against the provocative ideas of the influential postmodern author David Foster Wallace. His suicide last year, after years of complex negotiations with his own style and subject matter, has led me back to question the role of postmodernism in fiction.
My long, troubled history with po-mo started in artschool (I graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1990). My education was a living example of the total transformation that swept through the art world at that time and left fiction reeling in it’s wake for over a decade. With po-mo, writing stories became impossible, risible. Recently, I’ve had to go back to where it all started to find out where I, and maybe even postmodernism, went wrong.
I entered Glasgow School of Art straight from high school, young, naïve, wanting to be a painter. Neo expressionism was in vogue, with painters like Stephen Campbell, Peter Howson and Ken Currie in the international spotlight; all painting bold, larger-than-life canvases of brave and bold (and often working class) men, expressing the power of the imagination and their unique artistic selves. It was all rather daunting. Madonna bought works by some of these artists and many talked about them in terms stolen from the 50’s and Jackson Pollock – the solitary artistic genius, the no-sell out existential soul, the artist against the world. That someone like Madonna could pay the price of a mortgage for these paintings that were supposed to be profound expressions of human truth and dignity was deeply unsettling to me.
In rebellion, I preferred trash. I was into Warhol and Pop Art. I had questions about gender and politics; my art was more about questioning than expressing. I was, at that time, a Trotskyite, my parents had been hippies and I grew up witnessing the death of their dream. I was also confused about my sexuality; all around me sex was being used to sell everything from cars to cola. I felt that art should in some way address these very troubling issues. I struggled, and failed, at making little paintings about big questions. My images were always invaded by advertising, I felt that photos torn from fashion magazines said more about this thing called ‘me’ than anything I could express. I was a failure; my ‘self’ was just too confused, too superficial.
Enter a visiting theorist who delivered the first of many lectures on something that the art school had thus far protected us from. I recall a sense of panic-attack realisation as he discussed Jean Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra, and Frederic Jameson’s Post Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It was revealed to our scared and impressionable minds that Jackson Pollock and the great painters of his era had been used as pawns in the cold war and been covertly funded by the CIA. Self-expression carried the mark of an American colonialist mindset, the rampaging western male ego. The way forward was to stop feeding the machine the myth of the artist/genius and to take apart the mechanisms of Art, exposing its complicity in consumerism. The word was Deconstruction. The old certainties were dead. The grand narratives of modernity were in crisis; Marxism was a corpse and Feminism had become a caricature of itself. It was the End of History, The Death of the Author. The artist and the author were what had led us into this human tragedy called modernity.
I don’t know if those lectures were the start of the revolution at Glasgow School of Art but these apocalyptic revelations had a devastating effect upon me. Starting, yet another, unfinished collage experiment with pages from Marie Claire and text by Marx, which my painting tutors condemned, I decided to open myself to the many doubts. Within a month I had abandoned painting, given up on Trotskyism and re-started my life, taking photographs and writing ‘texts’. I re-styled myself as a postmodernist and felt I was making a stand against the rampaging western ego of self-expression.
CONTINUED...
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