How Postmodernism Killed Great Literature
University English departments have made books that don’t matter
This essay was originally written for The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern Life” genre, I was compelled to see what all the fuss is about. Suffice it to say that I was not impressed. But I could not quite put my finger on the source of my disdain until, several days ago, it hit me: Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator walks away learning absolutely nothing.
The fault of this particular novel might be with Moshfegh’s nihilistic outlook on life, but the problem cuts even deeper. Today, the publishing industry as a whole turns its nose up to narratives that promote objective meaning.
There’s a lot to unpack in that claim, but it is no accident that the publishing industry shies away from books that illustrate “the good life” in the Aristotelian sense. Reared on the postmodern spirit that dominates colleges and universities, publishing professionals favor ambiguous, open-ended narratives to stories with clear redemption arcs. But, at its core, literature should not only teach us to think critically but also to live our best lives.
In 1908, New Humanist literary scholar Irving Babbitt set out to redefine classic-literature education in a collection of essays called Literature and the American College. An early literary critic, Babbitt believed that the purpose of literature was to cultivate a lasting moral imagination—that is, literature had a duty to craft readers into morally upstanding members of society. Though New Humanism’s reign was short-lived in the academy, its fundamental axiom—that the purpose of literature was to foster moral education—articulated the broader cultural tradition that has sustained the human soul for thousands of years. Literature is supposed to teach us what gives our lives meaning. After all, isn’t that why we gravitate towards literature in the first place?—to learn, by way of the particular, that which is universally true about the human condition?
Not anymore, it seems. By the 1960s, American universities had proceeded to wage a full-scale war on all aspects of morality and tradition, making way for the postmodern literary theorists who rejected the teachings of Babbitt and put forth the following postulates instead:
Meaning is relative if not entirely obsolete. In 1967, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida set out, in his famous De La Grammatologie (Of Grammatology), to attack the idea that a work of literature must contain an objective moral message. The book contains an extended condemnation of the tradition of “Western Metaphysics,” which, in Derrida’s eyes, privileged the good over the bad and light over darkness. In a nutshell, Derrida does away with the idea that we should gain objective meaning from literature and that literature must contain an objective moral message.
Authorial intention is irrelevant. There have been several postmodern writings on the erasure of authorial intent, but the most famous piece comes from the French theorist Roland Barthes, in an essay called “The Death of the Author.” As its title suggests, the essay lambasts authorial intention and argues that his or her identity is entirely irrelevant to a reader’s interpretation of a given text. If an author’s intention no longer matters, then a given text belongs entirely to the reader—a death knell to the idea of the author as a moral teacher.
“Grand narratives” are oppressive. In his book The Postmodern Condition, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard claims that one must be skeptical of “Universal Truths.” Overarching moral systems become oppressive, and any notion of “how to live well” reeks of the patriarchy, colonialism, et cetera.
Taught to analyze literature through these postmodern lenses, university students of literature emerge from English departments believing that literature should simply observe rather than teach. Some of these cynical young professionals then enter the publishing industry, where they insist on promoting moral relativism in the guise of fiction. It is no wonder that the publishing industry runs so heavily on identity-based readings. In the eyes of the moral relativist, a text can mean anything as long as someone feels that it means a particular thing. What is in vogue in the literary-fiction world today are books that deliberately refuse closure, painting characters who learn nothing by the end of their journey as they rebel against the very idea of meaning itself.
Moshfegh’s narrator, for instance, learns absolutely nothing about her hedonistic, degenerate lifestyle by the novel’s close. And while Moshfegh doesn’t attempt to excuse her character, she also refuses to condemn her. She launches an attack on capitalism but does not offer an alternative; she depicts a degenerate society but does not decry its moral downfall. A critic writing for The Brooklyn Rail said it best: “What has [the narrator] learned, and what will her life look like now? Perhaps these questions don’t need answering, as the ending leaves you intentionally unsettled.”
As Moshfegh and her literary supporters would argue, that is precisely the point of the novel—there is no significance! Modern life, according to Moshfegh and many other writers of contemporary literary fiction, has no meaning whatsoever! It is sad, absurd, and pointless—and, therefore, one should hibernate through it all.
Moshfegh’s writing is the direct outgrowth of the postmodern university conviction that all morality is relative and that the writer’s duty is not to lay out morals but to indulge his or her pessimism and nihilism.
After years of studying the great classics, I have learned precisely the opposite: Good literature should have a lasting moral message. The reason we still read Anna Karenina is not (only) that Tolstoy is a master of Russian prose or that the plot keeps readers on the edges of their seats but because the novel teaches us about that which is right and that which is wrong. We root for Levin not because he is “relatable,” as today’s literary agents insist characters be, but because he undergoes a redemption arc. He learns, through trial and error and several epiphanies, that there is nothing more important than maintaining a stable, loving family—that he will not live forever and that he must therefore imbue his life with meaning in some way. He chooses to marry Kitty—and, indeed, Kitty eventually chooses him—because he knows that blessing her with the gift of children will create more meaning in both of their lives than did his previous hedonistic lifestyle. Similarly, we watch Anna’s life gradually unravel because she has traded loyalty, love, and duty for empty pleasure. In the end, she commits suicide because, in the absence of children and family, her life has lost all meaning.
That is precisely what is missing from literature today—a plea for meaning. Today, the publishing industry churns out writing that fundamentally resists meaning, from Sally Rooney’s one-dimensional characters stewing in political ennui to Ben Lerner’s autofictional stand-ins who never manage to articulate a single moral stance. These books will fade into oblivion in the next decade while great novels with moral messages—Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, East of Eden—will stay with us even after we leave this earth, for they are not only well-written but also meaningful.
In a world in which many contemporary novels mistake ambiguity for depth, it is almost heretical to insist that literature ought to mean something. But if I’ve learned anything from five years in Ivy League English departments, it is that, unfortunately, postmodernism-influenced readers will fail to truly understand literature until they acknowledge that literature is nothing without meaning. We can all find deep meaning in our lives, after all, if we just look up, rejecting the nihilist conviction that nothing means anything anymore and figuring out why our lives are worth living.
Deep down, we all want to read and engage with literature to find meaning in our own lives. Back in the early 1900s, Babbitt knew that, too. The sooner English departments and the publishing industry reach this very conclusion, the sooner we’ll see great books line our shelves again.
In the meantime, I’ll take Anna Karenina over My Year of Rest and Relaxation any day.
Enjoyed this post? You can Buy Me a Coffee so that I’ll be awake for the next one. If you are a starving artist, you can also just follow me on Instagram or “X.”
Want more Liza thoughts? Order my latest poetry collection, Girl Soldier.
I agree entirely on the faults of postmodernism. Its presumptions make effective storytelling impossible. But I would differ, at least on the wording, with the assertion that the function of storytelling is to teach morality. That is the trap that Christian fiction tends to fall into, which makes it largely unreadable.
Rather, the moral structure of a story is a given from the start. Its moral norms are the rules of the game, which is why postmoderns can't tell stories because, for them, the game has no rules. The business of stories is not to teach what should be done, but to examine the difficulties of doing what we all know (in the story context) should be done. It is about the difficulties and challenges of performing moral action where the moral imperatives are known from the beginning. Hamlet's famous soliloquy is not about what is right -- the Almighty has fixed his canon gainst self-slaughter -- but about the difficulty of taking arms against a sea of troubles and the temptation to take the easy way out.
Moral action requires three things: Moral norms, a correct apprehension of the situation, and the courage to act. Even with a perfect grasp of moral absolutes, we cannot act correctly if we don't understand the situation and/or we don't have the courage to act and to pay the cost of acting. The role of stories in our moral development is not to teach the norms, but to help us learn to see straight so that we can apprehend situations correctly, and to help us develop the courage to act when we understand what the situation is and what moral norms require in that situation.
To this end, we should note, authors will sometimes create moral norms specifically for their story worlds. The moral imperative to toss magic rings into volcanoes does not exist in our world, but in The Lord of the Rings, it becomes the central moral norm on which everyone can agree, which then leaves the book free to focus on the struggle and the cost of obeying this imperative. That is the proper business of fiction.
You really think the narrator learns nothing? I thought she wanted to purge herself of consumerism and cheap beauty, to see things like a child again. And there's a scene I remember at the end where she's in central park and she sees a mother & child, and the child points at a "psychedelic crow" and asks, "What's that, mommy?" and the mother says, "That's a grackle, honey." I think the narrator has regained the ability to see the world like that child.
To me, postmodernism is basically instability of meaning, which is a staple in art. It also has a place in rational discourse if you're careful. I tend to think the problem starts when postmodernism is used as a replacement for rational discourse, at which point things have a tendency to take on the meaning the interpreter wants to see.