Hidden Truth/Hidden Truth.iso/data/genufo/genufo/alien/main_archive/j_upto_r/postmodernism.txt

Text File | 1997-01-02 | 18KB | 440 lines

Postmodernism, Alienation and the Small Press

by Don Webb

[Don is a great guy as well as freelance writer always
 looking for assignments...]


I could begin this gang bang review of small press
offerings with the usual platitudes on the small press
community -- how Mike Gunderloy grew me from a bean etc. --
or just toady a Lithuaninan SF group who asked if I could
send them some good small press stuff (Gediminas
Beresnevicius / Anakalnio 91-16 / Vilnius 2040 / Lithuania a
real address send them stuff!), but I'm not going to do
that.  I am going to talk about postmodern life and
fictional approaches to dealing to alienation and
individuation.  Dealing with alienation is easy in modernist
fiction.  Afterall you have something to be alienated from.
The modern paradigm is based on the keyword reason.  This
paradigm has been the intellectually established one in
western society from about 1500 to the middle of this
century.  Unfortunately most would-be "modernists" are not
very good practitioners of the chief tool of their Age.
Most are in fact hypocritical believers grasping at the
conceit that they are indeed "reasonable." There is a clear
cultural matrix, and clear outsiders.

The postmodernist paradigm has yet to find its keyword.
In postmodernist fiction, as well as in postmodern life,
there are no clear outsiders anymore, and there are fewer
groups offering their image as one to identify with.  Even
those groups who -- say for example the televangelists --
want money not offering a way of being as means to changing
both self and world.  These five offerings approach the
nature of alienation/individuation with different strategies
and differing degrees of success.

Rob Hollis Miller proposes the nature of the Secret as
the way to examine reality.  Is there a Secret?  Am I part
of the Secret?  Or maybe -- more frighteningly -- there is
no Secret at all.  He takes his starting point from Phillip
K. Dick, maintaining the reality quest in fiction almost
religiously.  Denise Dumars deals with alienation as the
primary horror of our times.  Her characters fall out of
contact with the world, while we watch with the same sick
fascination of watching the horror movie monster stalk his
prey.  Her fiction reflects the two labels hung on her
writing, horror and poetry.  Mark Amerika revives the most
alienated character from modernist fiction Gregor Samsa and
turns him to a demiurge (echoes of Jerry Cornelius and Leggy
Starlitz here) the modernist alien stirring up things in the
post modernist landscape until the words and sentences melt
under the strain.  Cris Mazza reduces the world into the
harshness of subjective reality -- desire which is seen as
the one coherent and true constant and the fragments of the
objective reality -- meaningless signs that merely amuse us
for their lost sense of wonder.  pete plate makes perhaps
the most hopeful statement to our postmodern eyes (although
to modernists it would be seen as a cry from hell).  He
proposes the synthesis of will and the unconscious as a way
of obtaining sufficient being to change both self and world.
He offers a very self-driven way out of the nightmare of
history.  His is the boldest of the five, because it
represents a model for rebellion in a society where there is
nothing to rebel against.  We stand on the threshold of a
new epoch which goes beyond the collectivist totalitarianism
of the medieval and modern Epochs.  The postmodern world
with its lack of centralized values can be the Epoch of
freedom, provided that we find freedom in individualist
approaches which are neither exclusively rational nor
irrational.  We can read these books not only to be
horrified and amused, but for inspiration as we find and
defend our own freedoms (while old beliefs systems fight old
wars).

The
publishers
 of these books are significant.  These
are not going to be found in your B. Dalton's, in fact you
may be lucky to find them at all.  The sponsors for this
particular cultural revolution are, a very small slipstream
press (I realize that I have to pay Bruce Sterling a dime
for using the word "slipstream") in Oregon with the
microscopic print run of 250, a fragile collective of state
and federal grants out of Boulder, and finally a small art
house in Edinburgh which isn't afraid of printing the works
of an American revolutionary.  The
real
 value of the small
press, or of any fringe, is that you can see where your
culture's going.  Remember on a coral reef -- it is the thin
outer fringe that's alive, not the dead core.

I first saw Rob Hollis Miller's name in an article by
Michael A. Aquino in
Nyctaclops # 13
 (1977).  Aquino was
responding to an article Miller had written concerning
Aquino's made-up Yuggothic language appearing in the
Satanic
Rituals
.  I was not surprised therefore when this slim
volume yellow with its apocalyptic title (and religious
speculation) came my way.  This book deals with fiction,
metafiction and reality games.  Its principal characters are
dead before the beginning, and never make an appearance save
by implication.  The book, like
The King in Yellow
 after
which it is clearly modeled, is a series of short stories
tied together by thematic reference to the works of Phillip
K. Dick (called variously Dickens K. Philps, Dick K.
Phillipi, Dickens P. Phillips, etc.) and Gurdjieff (called
Hafiz).  In a somewhat Borgesian manner Gurdjieff's work is
treated as a commentary on Dick's, and both are treated as
the sacred works of a what may or may not be a cult with
what may or may not have a secret inner core.  Like the
characters in Dick's novels, Miller's heroes are not so much
worried about what is reality, as by who is interested in
manipulating them to think which reality frame is the right
one.  The book is the first place that the effect of Poe's

Eureka
 on Dick's
 Exegesis
 is made clear.  Both works are
ignored by the standard critic, but both contain the roots
to the fruit that is debated, dissected and enjoyed.  For
this revelation, Miller is in particular to be praised.

I suspect that Miller is doing his work backwards,
beginning with the cosmogony before writing the great body
of work that this is the key to.  Or perhaps he's playing a
more subtle game and writing the cosmogony to a body of work
that will never be written and will only be dreamed by the
Reader experienced enough in the literature of exhaustion to
create whole worlds by the implication of thought.  A unique
synthesis of Gurdjieffian ideas and postmodernism.  It is
said that there is an order of Black Sufis, who rather than
trying to upset the dozers in the cave by pointing out that
all is illusion, instead choose to produce such a plethora
of images, one atop another, that the dozers figure it out
for themselves.  Recent grandmasters of the order include
Phillip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson.
Ocean of Fire and
Glass
 is very much an apprentice work to join the order, but
I suspect that the true magic will come from the much
traveled Mr. Miller.

Denise Dumars is another poet whose short fiction has
recently been released as a chapbook from Wordcraft of
Oregon.  I use the word "poet" since her poetry has been
widely published, and several of her poetic techniques
appear herein -- particularly the dreamy quality of light.
She has recently coauthored a screenplay -- it would be
interesting if that same quality of soft and sharp focus can
be translated to the screen.  There are nine tales in the
collection ranging from the prose poem that forms the title
piece to a really good horror story "Lenin's Lich." (Future
anthologists take note "Lenin's Lich" and my own "The Taste
of Salt" would make a good beginning for that collection of

Great Communist Zombie Tales
 that I'm sure you're planning
-- where's Rodger Elwood when you need him?)

Dumar's strengths are revealed in her tales of
depersonalization.  Her alienated characters sink into
grayer and grayer universes of silent screams.  Very
Beckettesque although told in the tones that will sell in
the horror semi-pro market (there are reprints here from

Nocturne, Witness to the Bizarre, Der Riss in Himmel
 and
others).  A recurrent image is the falling of a gray or
silver metal dust that literally takes the character away
from direct contact with the outside world.  For the most
part this is the horror fiction of real life; Dumars' scenes
of LA, Albuquerque, and San Francisco read true.  I suspect
that if these stories were written by a European, preferably
a dead male one, we would have to pay a great deal more for
the collection.

Both of these perfect-bound volumes were printed by
Dark Regions Press for Wordcraft.  Dark Regions is
apparently in the production business, and if you need a
good-looking chapbook you might inquire about their rates
(Dark Regions Press, PO Box 6301, Concord, CA 94524).

The two volumes from the Black Ice Series are very much
the stylistic children of Michael Butor's
Mobile
 and the
work of J.M.G.le Clezio.  The series itself has grown from
one of America's better small magazines
Black Ice
, edited by
Mark Amerika, which is dedicated to the proposition that
readers are tired of the Same Old Crap.  This simple notion
always attracts the Same Old Crowd (i.e. people who had hope
in the New Wave); however since I am a card-carrying member
of that group who holds deep in the heart that this is the
way we'll write in the future (if we're lucky) I took to
The
Kafka Chronicles
 like a pig to slop.
The Kafka Chronicles

is the further adventures of Gregor Samsa and friends such
as the talented cocksucker Mandy Bauer, Alkaloid Boy and
Blue Sky.  The parody of all and everything comes through in
a variety of stylistic voices and linguistic strategies --
from cut-up to word golf to Multiple choice:


5. Clubbing It With Weird Capitalist Connoisseur of
Carp Commodities
a) "I met her the last time I was here . . she only
likes Black guys . . ."
b) dressing for the occasion
c) undressing for the liaison
d) stripped to the bone/cellophane wrapper/love
preserved {Page 122}

I 'm sure Mark Ziesing will do good selling this, and
that it will be universally hailed by the rest of the SF
community as what not to do.  The later makes it a must for
my bookshelf.  Like the above volumes, another approach to
the literature of exhaustion, in this case Krazy Kat
exhaustion of exhaustion.  As a totally relativistic novel,
this is very likely the prototype of future writing, hence
the most normative science fiction of the five offerings.

Cris Mazza, who has also written
Animal Acts
 and
Is it
Sexual Harassment Yet?
, dazzles us (OK dazzled me) with
another collection of short fiction.  These eight tales
(reprinted from the classier small press mags --
Fiction
International
,
High Plains Literary Review
) are a wonderful
mix of strongly voiced prose and great images culled from
the strange iconography of America's heartland.  I love the
photo of the Dip Dog sign on page 112.  The gem of the
collection is "Between Signs" a smolderingly hot piece of
erotica done with roadsigns punctuation.  Mazza carefully
reproduces the shape of the lettering that adds a
sensuousness that I can't reproduce here:

RATTLESNAKE SKIN BOOTS

TURQUOISE BELT BUCKLES

BEADED MOCCASINS, SNO CONES


They took nothing.  Credit cards bought gas and food,
plastic combs, miniature toothbrushes, motel rooms tourist
t-shirts, foaming shaving cream and disposable razors.  She
watched him shaving as she lay in the bathtub.  Then he
shaved her.  Rinsing her with the showerhead, soaping her
over and over again.  Shoved a blob of jelly, from a plastic
single-serving container taken from the diner, far inside
her, went to retrieve it with his tongue, drop by drop taste
by taste, but there was always more where that came from.


See Mystic Magic Of The Southwest . . .THE THING?
(Pg
138-139)

The sharp crisp use of language and image makes this a
read-aloud must.  Of course for fullest enjoyment, be
prudent in choice of audiences.  OK so it has nothing to do
with SF, so sue me.  I should also mention that Black Ice
Books' next volume will be Delaney's
Hogg
, a book so nasty
that its publication may still cause an outcry.  Way to go,
Chip!

There are writers who feign an "on-the-edge" lifestyle.
Then there's peter plate, who has only just lost his
ten-year squat in San Francisco -- pneumonia rather than the
landlord forcing him out.  I asked him about his latest
book, and he shoplifted a copy for me.  Polygon has put out
some pretty fine writers -- Stewart Home, Paul Hammond,
Bridget Penny, but this metafictional novel by plate is very
likely their best offering.  plate's novel focuses on the
life of sam melville, a man driven by the strongest of wills
-- the desire to change what is fundamentally fucked-up in
the world -- and by the strongest of unconscious motives --
raw rage which rises up in him like a volcano.  sam is
mirrored by his boyhood friend george demmerle who driven by
the same forces makes the weaker synthesis.  george becomes
a cop -- his impulses for violence and evil become
sanctioned by the state, he has let his unconscious win by
surrendering his will to the state, and yet no one in
plate's world is entirely evil -- he is drawn again and
again to the plans of sam melville.  The particular whale,
or perhaps I should say leviathan, that sam melville rages
against is at the same time every oppressive piece of
statist force, but also every lover that his momma took.
Ultimately as sam is tried for terrorist actions, his father
appears (dead or dying) in a wheelchair.  His father's
appearance is the ultimate sign that sam has won the battle
within, despite the conventional view that having your ass
thrown in prison is the sign of failure.  That sam also is
able to accomplish two more tasks is the sign of his
synthesis of the unconscious and the will.  Firstly he is
able to lead a prison riot and escape (not just the guards
but death himself), so he becomes an external symbol for
change in the world, itself a postmodernist victory.
Secondly he is able to continue to provide plate the
inspiration to finish the novel.  Again he is invoked by
plate just as though he were a muse, so ultimately he
achieves the real sign of synthesis -- he passes into a
realm of semi-divinity, not because he was divine to begin
with, but because of his direction of the use of the
materials of his life.  Early on while visiting a recently
burned house, he receives the external sign (if you speak a
Germanic language like English) of the One who looks within
and without.  A cinder flies into his left eye and he loses
the sight of his eye.  He Becomes like Odhinn who also had
to give up an eye to gain wisdom.  In an unattributed
passage which could be either plate speaking to us or sam
melville speaking to us, the postmodern challenge is laid
out and as writers readers and just plain human beings will
have to answer it:


the future is uncertain, america's children are
reminded by her ghosts that it is the end of a century,
ghosts tell me, if i wake up from this killer sleep, i will
never die again.



 Name:  Don Webb
Address:   6304 Laird Drive
           Austin, TX 78757
Telephone: [phone]
Author of book reviewed:  Mark Amerika
Editor of book reviewed:
Translator of book reviewed:
Title:
The Kafka Chronicles

Name of press: Fiction Collective Two
Address of small press:  PO Box 494, University of
Colorado at Boulder /
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0494
Year of publication:  1993
Cloth and/or paper:  Paper
Number of pages: 189
Price:  Paper: $7.00             Cloth:


Name:  Don Webb
Address:   6304 Laird Drive
           Austin, TX 78757
Telephone: [phone]
Author of book reviewed:  Cris Mazza
Editor of book reviewed:
Translator of book reviewed:
Title:
Revelation Countdown

Name of press: Fiction Collective Two
Address of small press:  PO Box 494, University of
Colorado at Boulder /
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0494
Year of publication:  1993
Cloth and/or paper:  Paper
Number of pages: 189
Price:  Paper: $7.00             Cloth:


Name:  Don Webb
Address:   6304 Laird Drive
           Austin, TX 78757
Telephone: [phone]
Author of book reviewed:  Denise Dumars
Editor of book reviewed:
Translator of book reviewed:
Title:
Pangaea

Name of press: Wordcraft of Oregon
Address of small press:  PO Box 3235/ LaGrande, OR
97850
Year of publication:  1993
Cloth and/or paper:  Paper
Number of pages: 91
Price:  Paper: $7.95             Cloth:

Name:  Don Webb
Address:   6304 Laird Drive
           Austin, TX 78757
Telephone: [phone]
Author of book reviewed:  Rob Hollis Miller
Editor of book reviewed:
Translator of book reviewed:
Title:
Ocean of Glass and Fire

Name of press: Wordcraft of Oregon
Address of small press:  PO Box 3235,La Grande, OR
97850
Year of publication:  1993
Cloth and/or paper:  Paper
Number of pages:
Price:  Paper: $7.95             Cloth:

Name:  Don Webb
Address:   6304 Laird Drive
           Austin, TX 78757
Telephone: [phone]
Author of book reviewed:  peter plate
Editor of book reviewed:
Translator of book reviewed:
Title:
darkness throws down the sun

Name of press: Polygon
Address of small press:  22 George Square, Edinburgh,
Scotland
Year of publication:  1991
Cloth and/or paper:  Paper
Number of pages: 135
Price:  Paper: ???             Cloth: