Music/Book Reviews: What is “Postmodern” Art?

Fire in my Mouth

Composed by Julia Wolfe

Conducted by Jaap van Zweeden

New York Philharmonic Orchestra

Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, Manhattan

January 25, 2019

The Nix by Nathan Hill

The Ferryman by Dez Butterworth

“Postmodern” is one of those terms that is bandied about by literary and film critics, usually without definition, and, like the term “ironic” I am sometimes hard pressed to connect the similarities of the examples used. So I looked it up in Wikipedia, and got more confused. While the term seems to have started with French philosophers like Foucalt and Derrida, espousing the end of expertise and criticism, and pushing the narcissistic idea (appropriate for our times) that how we experience something is all that matters, the term has bled over into architecture, music, visual art, and literature, and has been dominant since the 1960’s. Some general commonalities include eclecticism (multiple styles, voices, or media contained in the same work), parody, irony (there’s that word again!), and jouissance (playfulness). The general idea is a decline in both the seriousness and self-importance of the work’s creator, and placing more importance on the viewer. The implication is that we should not take any of this “art” stuff so seriously. In literature postmodernism relies on devices like the unreliable narrator, metafiction (where we are reminded that this is a play, not real life, as in when a character starts talking to us as an actor during the show, or a director shows messy film cuts or multiple takes during a film). A version of (unknowable) reality is to be constructed by the viewer/reader from innovative uses of language, picture, notes, etc., and not from any unfounded conception of “truth” in which a work of art depicts what is actually out there.  This attitude rubs me the wrong way, since as a scientist I seek the truth and what is knowable, and I find the world’s reality, with all its variations, plenty interesting. Of course, like most things, these ideas are not really new. Sterne’s 1759 novel Tristram Shandy begins thusly: 

It is with LOVE as with CUCKOLDOM— 

—But now I am talking of beginning a book, and have long had a thing upon my mind to be imparted to the reader, which if not imparted now, can never be imparted to him as long as I live (whereas the COMPARISON may be imparted to him any hour of the day)—I'll just mention it, and begin in good earnest. 

Like any movement (Romanticism, Classicism), all this is interesting to read about, but the proof of the concept is in the quality of the art. I’ve had several recent outstanding experiences with postmodern artworks that show how all this can be effective, not just gimmicky and intellectual. One that I have already reviewed, the 20+ character play The Ferryman, uses postmodern devices like telling the story from multiple perspectives, and having characters speak in a range of styles from flippant teenage to oracular prophetic, and relies on the viewer to synthesize the story from these multiple voices. More extreme postmodern eclecticism is seen in The Nix, the superb first novel of Nathan Hill. Hill is a 40ish author who grew up in the technology-centric world of obsessive video gaming, tweets, and self-absorbed millennials.  This wonderful, eclectic novel certainly contains all that, but pivots on an event before his birth, the violent societal upheaval of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots. Like many first novels, it centers on a roughly autobiographical character Samuel Anderson, a struggling young writer and academic in his late twenties, frittering away his genius at a mediocre private college teaching ungrateful millennials in the Chicago suburbs. His marginal fame (and teaching position) resulted from the fluke acceptance of a short book he wrote as an undergraduate. This story, modeled the books of his childhood, was a “choose your own adventure” story where the reader can choose her own story arcs (a satire of postmodernism here). Written as an adult adventure, the publisher mistakes the short novel as a sophisticated children’s book, and markets it to great critical and public acclaim. Hill surrounds this somewhat pathetic protagonist (he has no real friends, but is addicted to the online game Elfscape, where his violence-prone peers are either twelve or act that way) with a bevy of interesting people that give us a good snapshot of modern society. His depiction of a ruthless millennial girl determined to raise her grade is dead-on and hilarious. Her narcissistic arguments are dissected with logical precision by chapter headings: false dilemma: “I’m gonna have to drop out of school!” or post hoc ergo propter hoc: “Just because I skipped class doesn’t mean I should fail. That’s really unfair.” Like a good postmodernist, the author uses multiple styles and voices to present this canvas, most memorably an 11 page single sentence chapter depicting the rambling stream-of-consciousness of “Pwnage”, a 30 year-old, malnourished, sleep deprived gamer now trying to kick his habit and write a long deferred novel:

…the only way the novel was going to get written was if he quit the game completely and deleted all his characters in an apocalyptic move there was just no going back from, but of course not before saying goodbye to all the people who were friends with him, people, when he told the he was quitting in order to spend more time with his book, usually responded at first with “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!” (which, if he was being honest, was delightful), followed by an expression of confidence that they didn’t know anything about the novel or even Pwnage’s real name, still he very much liked being told of his inevitable future success, which kept him sitting in his chair for many hours waiting on each of his Elfscape friends to log on one by one so that he could tell them the news and have a version of the same conversation ha had already had about two dozen times, during which he’d been sitting in exactly the same position with one leg tucked under his body for so long that his skin was deeply imprinted with the lines of his faux-leather plastic chair, while meanwhile he was developing inside his leg what doctors would call a deep vein thrombosis, or in other works a blood clot, which was causing redness and pain that he might have felt had the leg not already gone way beyond the pins-and-needles stage and into complete and almost anaesthetic numbness…..

There are many levels of postmodern fun here. The third person narrator moves suddenly from Pwnage's thoughts to the physiology of his illness in the same sentence.  His name “Pwnage” is authentic gamer-ese for “pure-ownage”, or dominance, and stems from a mis-typing of “own” with a p in the first position by some frantic gamer of legendary yore. Pwnage has never really spoken to any of these online “friends” (millennial communication), and later in the novel a face-to-face meeting with the novel’s protagonist shows Pwnage, the legendary emperor of Elfscape, to be an unhealthy sallow middle age man (eventually diagnosed with diseases ranging from vitamin B12 deficiency to thyroid insufficiency). What Hill does superbly in this novel is show an acute eye for all the failings of our society and an acute ear and eye for how these failings are expressed. Yet with all the postmodern shifting of characters, voices, tones, and eras (1960s to present), he holds the plot line together with seamless control, even dramatic tension. The ending resolves the very opening pages of the novel. Like the best Mahler symphonies (and Mahler said “A Symphony must be like the world—it must contain everything) Hill gives us a collage-like panorama of our times, with all its stylistic contrasts, yet does so while unifying the artwork into a dramatically convincing whole. Read this book.

What about postmodern music? Contemporary composers often attempt similar poly-stylistic pieces but usually fail due to either lack of unity or just lack of melodic or thematic inspiration. I heard a rare exception to this last week at Lincoln Center, where the New York Philharmonic, conducted by its new music director Jaap van Zweeden, performed the world premiere of Fire in my Mouth, an oratorio for women’s and girls choruses with full (Mahler-sized) orchestra by Julia Wolfe (b. 1958). Wolfe, well-known in contemporary composer circles, but new to me, has written a large-scale, impressive piece about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 mostly female immigrant garment workers lost their lives, having been locked into an unsafe Manhattan factory room that burst into flames. It led to some of the first efforts to ensure worker safety. Like many postmodern pieces, the text was pasted together from actual interviews and letters of participants or viewers (mixed-media postmodernism). The oratorio in four movements began with “Immigration”, in which the women sang of their expectations for a new life with effective minimalistic wavelike surging motives that reminded me of high grade John Adams.  The second movement “Factory” was really cool, as the strings used extensive col legno (tapping the back (wood) of the bow on the strings) technique to simulate the sound of hundreds of whirring sewing machines. This underlaid interweaving songs of Jewish and Italian women—the two ethnic groups most affected by the tragedy. The contrasting textures and rhythms demonstrated the best of this musical language of eclecticism, much as Hill’s differing character voices in The Nix accomplished the same unity-in-diversity. The third movement “Protest” featured militant worker’s songs, with an effective appearance by the large (120+) girls chorus who marched down the aisles of the concert hall and gave the testimony of an underage girl being worked to death. An excellent effect here was when the excellent women’s chorus The Crossing brandished large shears and played them in percussive counterpoint with the orchestra. The final movement “Fire” depicted the actual blaze. It nicely transitioned from the text of the prior protest movement, as the women sang:

I want to look like an American

I want to walk like an American…..

Hurt like an American

Bleed like an American

Burn like, burn like, burn like…..

The text of the final movement relied on testimony of observers, e.g. seeing a woman’s hair burning, or a couple jumping to their deaths. The text and projected archival photos of people looking upwards at the carnage eerily evoked scene at the base of the Twin Towers on 9/11 (by the way, why have there been no major musical treatments of this event?). There were superimposed lighting effects, photos of participants, and effective choreography for the choruses throughout. As the piece ended with a contrapuntal litany of all the names of the dead workers (evoking the names of all the 9/11 victims engraved on the memorial downtown), each girl chorister raised her hand to identify with each sung name, a moving personalization of the tragedy. This was a well-integrated, dramatically effective piece that did what music should do, that is raise an idea or text to a higher plane of emotion. The NY Phil is to be credited for investing big in the hundreds of performers, special effects, and enlarged stage needed for this debut. It was money well spent on a very impressive composition.