Between Vision and Void: Postmodern American Literature

Abstract

Part of the monument in present-day Hiroshima includes salvaged building stones and concrete sections, with the vague imprint on them of what might have been shadows of people running from the atomic cloudburst. It is tempting, in an age of slaughter, to adopt this image as the most honest measure of man no longer assumed, because of irreducible essence, immune to néantisation. The assertion of Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson, Jr., on the basis of over one hundred spokesmen transcribed in The Modern Tradition (1965), that the “cultivation of self-consciousness — uneasy, ardent introspection — often amounts to an almost religious enterprise” is little consolation when one considers how divinity has been drained of its authority, since the Middle Ages. Promethean man, resplendent figure of human aspiration in the nineteenth century, today is seen as token of Romantic self-delusion and destruction. No heroism is proclaimed for the estranged rebel-victims detailed by Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence (1961), in its preliminary survey of the contemporary American novel. And in The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971), Hassan’s prophetic emphasis is on vanishing forms appropriate to a “literature of silence”, even though he divides present-future fiction into acts of auto-destructive solipsism, and self-transcendent preparations for mystic apprehension. Similarly, Frederick J. Hoffman, in The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination (1964), argues that spectacular threats of man’s abolition — through nuclear overkill or accelerated depersonalization — have debased the hopeful Romantic question, What am I? into the frantic horror of Am I?