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.
Setting aside your caricatures of postmodernism: Big publishing has gone commercial, and Penguin is hardly representative of the industry. It's one of the few literary imprints left. Look at the deals on Publisher's Marketplace, and you'll see that it's extremely hard to publish a novel without a redemption arc. Even nonfiction is increasingly required to have a moral arc. The industry has many problems, but taking cues from Derrida is not one of them. If only!
A timely and concise piece, Liza! Irving Babbitt was correct in 1908 when he said that literature is about moral education. Literature teaches us about the things that give our lives meaning. But in the 1960s all that changed. American universities rejected Babbitt’s teachings in favor of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s teachings which by the way, are highly harmful to our young people might I add. Derrida scorned the idea that a work of literature must contain a universal moral message or that we should find objective meaning in literature. Barthes dismissed the idea that authorial intent mattered or that the author’s identity should matter to the reader. Lyotard chastised the idea of grand narrative as oppressive. He claimed that universal truths should be rejected. Overacting moral systems are oppressive he cries and any notion of “how to live well” is bigoted and rooted in racism, sexism, colonialism, etc.
These ideas are all ridiculous and cockamamie! Okay, on number one a work of literature absolutely MUST contain a universal moral message and we MUST be able to find objective meaning in literature. This is how all the best work of literature have stood the test of time and resonate with people through the centuries. It also gives them a profoundness they wouldn’t otherwise have. Authorial intent absolutely DOES matter! Barthes was a total moron! The author had a specific message they wanted to get across to the audience, that’s the whole point of it! The author’s identity absolutely DOES matter because it helps us understand where their coming from and why they take the viewpoint they do.
An overarching grand narrative and universal moral truths are not at all oppressive or bigoted! There are certain things that universally as human beings we can all understand and that we all feel. You can find folktales and myths from all over the globe and they have similar lessons to take away from them there just told in different ways. That is not bigoted, it’s quite the opposite it shows the profound ways in which we are all connected and part of the universal human family! No matter if one is American, European, Asian, African, Latino, Indigenous, or Middle Eastern we can all agree for example that murder, rape, adultery, stealing, cheating, lying, spreading rumors about someone else, and punching someone in the face are wrong. We can also all agree that kindness, generosity, fairness, compassion, honesty, love, being faithful to one’s spouse, showing respect for one’s elders, honoring one’s father and mother, and tradition are good things.
A person in Somalia, India or Syria could read A Christmas Carol and be inspired by its message of not being miserly or greedy and showing compassion towards and helping others. A black man from Jamaica is just as capable as a white man in Germany of reading Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy and feel empathy for her on the loss of her father and how his memory tortures her. A Trans person could read Anna Karenina and be struck by how once she lost the meaning in her life it destroyed her just as someone who isn’t Trans could be. A gay person could weep for Elie Wiesel after reading Night and be appalled at the Nazi’s brutality just as a straight person could.
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.
Very interesting points here. I also prefer reading older works of literary fiction rather than some of the newer books that come out. The new stuff is entertaining, sure, and I think having a gripping plot and likeable or "relatable" characters is important to some extent (even if the themes and message are valuable, no one will read it if it isn't a little exciting). But I still think the moral value is the most important part of a book, so my favourites tend to be books that actually changed my life or my beliefs in significant ways and not just the ones that had characters I liked. On the level of word choice and sentence structure, many of the new bestsellers are also lacking, as you have pointed out in a previous post about the MFA writing style. I also think fiction should make someone more empathetic. Dickens is very sympathetic to children and the poor, like Hardy is to women. Of course you don't have to read them through a class-based or feminist lens but I still think reading them has the potential to make someone a more empathetic or understanding person. In one of your posts you said AI can't replace jobs where a human connection is important and I agree that humanities students would be well-suited for these types of roles because I think literary fiction helps develop empathy. I know you mentioned Anna Karenina here and elsewhere on your Substack, and you make it sound very interesting so I will definitely read it. My favourite novel happens to be Jude the Obscure and I think it actually challenges the idea of a traditional family and marriage, so perhaps it is very different from Anna Karenina? But nonetheless I expect literature to deal with these kinds of big, consequential questions and not just be entertaining.
The post modern attitude of nihilism and disaffection for everything breeds modern dysfunction that puts almost everything into a downward spiral. Better to read novels that retain some shred of meaning.
On-the-nose points. The contrast between the vivid ideals of the flesh-and-blood Babbitt and the empty conformity of Lewis’s fictional one can map almost one-to-one onto the comparison between meaningful literature and modern meandering work.
Excellent essay Liza. I agree with you 💯%. I was in an academic and academic influenced theological environment for a long time and I was always ambivalent about it. Now I pretty firmly believe it was entirely destructive and produced very little good fruit in the lives of the people who were involved in it. Postmodernism is a universal acid that damages and destroys whatever it comes into contact with.
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.
Setting aside your caricatures of postmodernism: Big publishing has gone commercial, and Penguin is hardly representative of the industry. It's one of the few literary imprints left. Look at the deals on Publisher's Marketplace, and you'll see that it's extremely hard to publish a novel without a redemption arc. Even nonfiction is increasingly required to have a moral arc. The industry has many problems, but taking cues from Derrida is not one of them. If only!
“Nihilists! F— me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.” —Joel & Ethan Coen
A timely and concise piece, Liza! Irving Babbitt was correct in 1908 when he said that literature is about moral education. Literature teaches us about the things that give our lives meaning. But in the 1960s all that changed. American universities rejected Babbitt’s teachings in favor of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s teachings which by the way, are highly harmful to our young people might I add. Derrida scorned the idea that a work of literature must contain a universal moral message or that we should find objective meaning in literature. Barthes dismissed the idea that authorial intent mattered or that the author’s identity should matter to the reader. Lyotard chastised the idea of grand narrative as oppressive. He claimed that universal truths should be rejected. Overacting moral systems are oppressive he cries and any notion of “how to live well” is bigoted and rooted in racism, sexism, colonialism, etc.
These ideas are all ridiculous and cockamamie! Okay, on number one a work of literature absolutely MUST contain a universal moral message and we MUST be able to find objective meaning in literature. This is how all the best work of literature have stood the test of time and resonate with people through the centuries. It also gives them a profoundness they wouldn’t otherwise have. Authorial intent absolutely DOES matter! Barthes was a total moron! The author had a specific message they wanted to get across to the audience, that’s the whole point of it! The author’s identity absolutely DOES matter because it helps us understand where their coming from and why they take the viewpoint they do.
An overarching grand narrative and universal moral truths are not at all oppressive or bigoted! There are certain things that universally as human beings we can all understand and that we all feel. You can find folktales and myths from all over the globe and they have similar lessons to take away from them there just told in different ways. That is not bigoted, it’s quite the opposite it shows the profound ways in which we are all connected and part of the universal human family! No matter if one is American, European, Asian, African, Latino, Indigenous, or Middle Eastern we can all agree for example that murder, rape, adultery, stealing, cheating, lying, spreading rumors about someone else, and punching someone in the face are wrong. We can also all agree that kindness, generosity, fairness, compassion, honesty, love, being faithful to one’s spouse, showing respect for one’s elders, honoring one’s father and mother, and tradition are good things.
A person in Somalia, India or Syria could read A Christmas Carol and be inspired by its message of not being miserly or greedy and showing compassion towards and helping others. A black man from Jamaica is just as capable as a white man in Germany of reading Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy and feel empathy for her on the loss of her father and how his memory tortures her. A Trans person could read Anna Karenina and be struck by how once she lost the meaning in her life it destroyed her just as someone who isn’t Trans could be. A gay person could weep for Elie Wiesel after reading Night and be appalled at the Nazi’s brutality just as a straight person could.
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.
You are just giving me more support for my book. I’ll definitely be quoting from this article if you don’t mind. Thanks! And great essay! 👍
Very interesting points here. I also prefer reading older works of literary fiction rather than some of the newer books that come out. The new stuff is entertaining, sure, and I think having a gripping plot and likeable or "relatable" characters is important to some extent (even if the themes and message are valuable, no one will read it if it isn't a little exciting). But I still think the moral value is the most important part of a book, so my favourites tend to be books that actually changed my life or my beliefs in significant ways and not just the ones that had characters I liked. On the level of word choice and sentence structure, many of the new bestsellers are also lacking, as you have pointed out in a previous post about the MFA writing style. I also think fiction should make someone more empathetic. Dickens is very sympathetic to children and the poor, like Hardy is to women. Of course you don't have to read them through a class-based or feminist lens but I still think reading them has the potential to make someone a more empathetic or understanding person. In one of your posts you said AI can't replace jobs where a human connection is important and I agree that humanities students would be well-suited for these types of roles because I think literary fiction helps develop empathy. I know you mentioned Anna Karenina here and elsewhere on your Substack, and you make it sound very interesting so I will definitely read it. My favourite novel happens to be Jude the Obscure and I think it actually challenges the idea of a traditional family and marriage, so perhaps it is very different from Anna Karenina? But nonetheless I expect literature to deal with these kinds of big, consequential questions and not just be entertaining.
The post modern attitude of nihilism and disaffection for everything breeds modern dysfunction that puts almost everything into a downward spiral. Better to read novels that retain some shred of meaning.
On-the-nose points. The contrast between the vivid ideals of the flesh-and-blood Babbitt and the empty conformity of Lewis’s fictional one can map almost one-to-one onto the comparison between meaningful literature and modern meandering work.
My goodness! Terrific!
Excellent essay Liza. I agree with you 💯%. I was in an academic and academic influenced theological environment for a long time and I was always ambivalent about it. Now I pretty firmly believe it was entirely destructive and produced very little good fruit in the lives of the people who were involved in it. Postmodernism is a universal acid that damages and destroys whatever it comes into contact with.