In the Ruins of Literary Postmodernity

Andy Warhol, Raphael Madonna-$6.99, 1985. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Postmodernity is dead. OK, perhaps that is a bit bold, especially considering that “postmodernity” is amorphous and encompasses so many different concepts. But I do think that postmodernity, especially literary postmodernity, is dead or dying. Consider David Foster Wallace, who said in a 1997 interview that literary postmodernism “has, to a large extent, run its course.” He was referring to the exhaustion caused by the hyper-ironic, uber self-conscious, irreverent fiction of his time, a fiction quick to deconstruct the Grand Narratives of old—but replace them with what? Nothing. But now consider the finalists for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Far from being nihilistic and relativistic, these books all appear to make strong moral claims and offer certain Grand Narratives, albeit in terms familiar with our time’s current obsessions: race, gender, sexual identity, and environmental apocalypticism.

Assuming it to be the case that we are living amongst the ruins of literary postmodernity—that we currently exist in a post-postmodern age—what is the fiction writer to do? More specific to my own personal concerns, what is the Catholic fiction writer to do? If the void left by the death of literary postmodernity is not entirely consumed by identity politics, might there be a new opportunity for writers in the Catholic literary tradition to offer something beautiful and good and life affirming?

The good news is there are many such writers who I believe are already doing this, including two who published books last year: Trevor Merrill, with his debut novel Minor Indignities, and Joshua Hren, with his second short story collection, In The Wine Press. Hren’s dense, Faulknerian prose has a certain darkness about it, reminiscent of early twentieth-century French Catholic writers such as Léon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac, and Henri Daniel Rops. Merrill’s writing, on the other hand, is almost picaresque, dancing with a lightness more akin to Cervantes or Dickens. While their styles differ, their chief concerns are the same: how does one live a life of faith in our post-postmodern times?

To help readers meditate on those questions, both Hren and Merrill begin their works with provocative epigraphs. Hren quotes a line from a St. Augustine sermon, “The world is like a . . . press: under pressure.” Merrill jumps forward a few centuries to quote St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “Humiliation is the way to humility.” Both these epigraphs are essential to understanding their work, and get at something that is central to the entire enterprise of post-postmodern Catholic fiction. Namely, the path out of the ruins is not in any new system, or return to any old system, Ancient, Medieval, Modern, or otherwise. Rather, the key is both a return to wisdom and an application of ancient wisdom to post-postmodern realities.

This is exactly what Merrill does in Minor Indignities, a novel set in the very vortex of postmodernity at an Ivy League college (presumably Yale) during the Clinton presidency. The novel follows narrator Colin Phelps during his freshman year as he struggles to find meaning in a world in which he and his fellow classmates and teachers perpetually deconstruct and strip away tradition and social mores. Colin begins college exhibiting a certain degree of middle-class American bourgeois blandness: he was popular, a good athlete, and had only one sexual partner in high school. He later self-diagnoses his condition: “I was nice,” but “one of those anguished souls who rebel against their nice nature.” And rebel against his nice nature is exactly what Colin spends the bulk of his freshman year doing. As he tells a female classmate early on, and perhaps even deludes himself into believing:

I think college should be a place where you’re free to think what you want and do what you want, without anybody tying you down or putting moral pressure on you. There should be freedom from all constraints. Freedom from convention. Freedom from everything.

Colin and his friends do their best to live out this postmodern mindset, and as Colin writes, “[w]ith nobody around to scold us, we could, so long as no one got hurt—or so long as no one reported their pains—do as we pleased.” Colin both desires absolute freedom from all constraints and exists in an environment where he can absolutely attain his desires without reprisal. Nothing could be better, right? Of course not. Master of his own universe, or as David Foster Wallace put it, lord of his own “tiny skull-sized kingdom,” Colin soon becomes miserable.

For example, though he believes, or pretends to believe, that commitment is bad, and casual sex good, his sexual encounters fundamentally change the nature of the relationships with the women he sleeps with, no matter how much he tries to carry on as if nothing has happened. Though he pretends to be a radical non-conformist, he quickly morphs into an Epson copy of everyone around him. Though he tries to stand in mockery of the world, putting on postmodernist airs, he himself feels continually mocked.

What’s gone wrong? With no constraints on his happiness, why isn’t Colin happy? To answer that, one need look no further than Wisdom literature: “[W]hoever despises wisdom and instruction is miserable” (Wisdom 3:11). Colin is a living witness to the truth of that claim. While Colin experiences his own misery, it is not until he experiences a series of small and large personal humiliations that he begins to strip away the veneer and see himself for who he truly is: a weak (slightly pathetic) child, perhaps in need of saving. In other words, his own humiliations (I won’t spoil what those are), are his path to the possibility of humility and the beginning of wisdom.

To be sure, Colin is not saved by the end of the book; he is very much a work in progress. But the possibility for salvation has been opened to him, portrayed wonderfully by the image of a leather jacket. Colin purchased the leather jacket at a second-hand store in imitation of his avant-garde roommate, but it is comically small. Like his own transgressions, which are meant to elevate and free him from constraint but actually enslave him, the leather jacket is extremely uncomfortable and constricting. Yet, similar to an addict who can’t turn away from the vice that is killing him, Colin cannot and will not discard the jacket. Then in the final scene of the book, as Colin bends to tie his shoe, the jacket rips mid seam. When he inspects the damage, he is finally “struck by how absurdly small the jacket was, or had been.” He tosses the jacket in the garbage and runs after his friends, yelling “The bonds that held me captive have been undone!” So too, one hopes, his interior bonds, that the wisdom gained by his own humiliation might be a catalyst to live a virtuous life. 

Like Merrill, Hren is not afraid to peer into the postmodern cesspool and examine occasions for grace. But the grace that Hren portrays is never cheap grace. It is a grace given under pressure, like the juice extracted from a winepress. Of course, the image of the winepress is a common Biblical image, as in Revelation 14:19: “And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast [it] into the great winepress of the wrath of God.”

Wine does not come immediately from crushing the grapes. It has to be fermented first. The same is true of Hren’s characters. The external pressure of the world bears down on them, forcing them to reckon with reality and giving them opportunities for grace and for goodness to flow out. But the fermentation into hallowedness has just begun. Like the father and son in his story “Horseradish,” who sit on the porch they had previously built together, talking, really talking for perhaps for the first and last time. The son, emboldened, asks why his father stopped beating him when he was younger. The father, likewise emboldened, encourages his son to reconcile with his wife. And then the father and the son, both wounded by past hurts, disappointments, and sins, go together to the son’s house in the middle of the night to repair the stained glass window that the son had shattered with a thrown salt shaker during a fight with his wife. While it might be easier to repair a stained glass window than to repair broken relationships, the son has hope, recognizing the sacredness of this unrepeatable moment, asking to “be purged entirely of the words I would have uttered, whatever they would have been, as spoken they would have been a sacrilege on this night, on this night, on this silencing, shooting, starred night.”

Or like the man in “A Little Bank in My Soul,” who writes a letter to his lover who has run off, thanking her for “not having the child.” The abortion, he writes her, is the “single most selfless thing you did for me.” This is typical postmodern idiocy, calling good evil, and evil good. By the end of the letter, however, the man betrays his own guilt and shame, finally confessing that “things as they are still have knots I can’t undo alone.” While he begins the letter praising her for the abortion, he ends the letter asking for forgiveness, “because by now the restless guilt, nowhere to go, has erected a little bank in my soul. And is gaining interest.” Where does this guilt come from? If the abortion was good, why the shame? Why the need to repent? Again, Wisdom provides the answer: “Therefore those who in folly of life lived unrighteously thou didst torment through their own abominations” (Wisdom 12:23). Without his wife’s forgiveness, the man threatens to kill himself. Surely, he is not yet wine. But the grapes are being squeezed.

Or finally, like the young woman in “Old Blood,” who pops pills in order to fall asleep, lives alone in a West Coast condo her Vietnam-haunted godfather had given to her after he had moved into a nursing home, spends her days combing through “spreadsheets of dental records for insurance companies,” and confronts the fact that she almost moved to Charlotte for an online boyfriend who just killed seventeen people in a school cafeteria. Now utterly alone and working from home, she realizes she can no longer do alone what she had previously been doing: simply enduring. She reaches out to her godfather and invites him back home to live with her. Two lonely, broken souls: what good could they do for one another? Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps a great deal. Perhaps together they might remember that wisdom learned in the Garden, “It is not good that the man should be alone.”

Merrill’s and Hren’s vision promise no utopian easy fixes. Theirs is the long view. The view of faith lived, and forgotten, and lived again for a hundred, thousand, or million years. A vision peering straight through the center of postmodern misery to the only convincing remedy: wisdom born of suffering and endurance. If attained, it is an “unfailing treasure,” one that leads to “friendship with God” (Wisdom 7:14). Friendship with God—it is a laughable postmodern literary idea. But for post-postmodernity, is there anything worth pursuing more?