'The Postmodern Pigeonhole Is a Shuck'

With Tom Disch’s suicide in 2008 we lost not only one of our best poets, a fine writer of short stories and of one novel, Camp Concentration, but perhaps the most entertaining of our critics. His only recent rivals have been Turner Cassity and R.S. Gwynn. “Entertainment” and “criticism” are usually figured as incompatible as two protons but Disch was congenitally acerbic and honest and the heir to Randall Jarrell’s role as critic-as-wit.  Here is a brief sampler of his choicest mots on contemporary poetry:

“In the poetry establishment, as presently constituted, everyone gets a hug, and expects to get a Guggenheim.”

 

“Nothing can excuse dullness, except a critic intent on originality.”

 

“If deconstructive critics would only leave real literature alone and devote their entire attention to the like of the language poets, solipsism will have achieved its masterpiece, an academic ghetto that can do double duty as a quarantine ward.”

 

The book to acquire if you wish to read dozens more of such latter-day Menckenisms is Disch’s The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995). Now I find Disch also addressed the sorry state of recent fiction in “Double Talk, Double Dutch, Dutch Chocolate,” a review of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology in the Spring 1998 issue of The Hudson Review. Disch begins by pointing out “all the ways in which the modernists (not to mention the ancients) have anticipated most postmodern innovations.” His overview is useful:

 

“[I]f the postmodern pigeonhole is a shuck, so is the modernist pigeonhole. James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, and all the rest of the modernist Pantheon have as little in common as the politicians of the same era: i.e., celebrity and contemporaneity. Good artists are remarkable rather for their individuality and/or universality than for their adherence to a set of specs drawn up after the fact.”

 

This reminds me of Yvor Winters suggesting we read poems rather than poets. Academics love to cluster writers into readily recognized categories, a practice not unlike branding cattle. The individual is subsumed into the herd. Disch quotes writers who, based on the samples he provides, would never be read if not already corralled with other of their kind, as herded by English profs. J. Yellowlees Douglas, anyone? Disch neatly distills the post-mod aesthetic:

 

“These samplings are sophomoric not only in their humor (big words are thought to be  innately funny; likewise, body fluids, brand names, and unfamiliar food) but in their a priori hostility towards all forms of life other than sophomores. The message of postmodernism (as of Dada, back when) is that the Past is an oppressive burden that is best dealt with by inept parody that will show how dumb the past was.”