An example of postmodern fiction in the post-postmodern age

TP in book group often asks - though I think he knows the answer - "is this postmodern? - so for TP and for anyone else he wants to see a textbook example of postmodern fiction in the post-postmodern era check out Julian Barnes's "Homage to Hemingway" in current New Yorker. This is a textbook example of self-reflective fiction, fiction that in some ways is about itself and that requires us to think about and examine boundaries between fiction, nonfiction, memoir, art, reality. Sometimes this can devolve into gamesmanship, adroitness, and cleverness, but the best postmodern fiction, like this one, also tell us something about life and about personalities, in other words, they give us the traditional pleasures of fiction - consciousness of the consciousness of another, a mirror held up to nature, an imitation of an action in words - while also making us think about what fiction is and isn't. In this story, Barnes creates a protagonist so much like him that we of course suspect or believe that he is writing an essay or memoir: a writer describes three writing workshops he's run at various stages of his career, the promising young writer, the successful novelist, the mid- or late-career novelist plagued with doubt. Could it be Barnes? I suspect Barnes's career is much more successful and he's much more self-confident than the character he creates, but all writers have moments - ranging from episodic despair to true suicidal doubt and gloom - in which they question their gifts and their capacity. A submotif in these 3 stages Barnes describes is his using Hemingway as an example of great talent sometimes obscured by his bombastic personality, and describes a Hemingway story, which I can't recall, about 3 episodes at railway stations - Homage to Switzerland, I think he called it - and the parallels with the story we're reading are apparent. One of the women in the seminar, later joined by others, argues that H. is obviously sexist in that the women in the story are unnamed; the Barnes protagonist a first defends H. but then goes on to say what if I were to write a story and name the women but not the men, would that make a difference? Yes, they say. He notes that he did so (obviously this story - though that may be the first time we notice that) and then he says, ends the story with: But nobody would publish it. Ha! There's the joke - once we've read the story, we realize that it's by definition fiction, it is published (in the NYer no less). Though this could be just a bit of a gimmick (remember Laurie Moore's famous ending to The Only People Here are People Like Us, something like: Here'e the story; where's my check?), I think Barnes also leads us to reflect on the boundaries and limitations of fiction - through the whole story we are in a sense judging Barnes, inevitably we think he's writing about himself, just as we judge Hemingway by his stories, but at the end, showing that this is clearly "made up" he says: don't judge me (or any writer) by or identify us with the characters we create. Which is of course a half-truth: everything writers create is an expression of themselves and is a result of their own lifetime of experiences and observations and feelings. We write one thing - but not another - and those choices to define us - to a degree. But there is always a degree of separation between writers and their art. The magnitude of that degree is a one of the key integers of postmodern fiction.



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