Nabokov’s lessons were taken up by the American literary youth of the late 50s and 60s exceptionally quickly, because they lay down on ground that had been prepared by the entire course of recent world and national history: the spiritual instability generated by World War II and the comprehension of genocide and Hiroshima, and then the disturbing atmosphere of the “bloody 60s” – race riots and political killings. Nabokov’s skepticism and detachment, his sense of the unreality of events, and his bitter self-irony were in the best possible way immanent to the spirit of the time.
Time did not inspire hope, left no way out. Exit was an exciting way of literary game, daring experiment, parody. These two moments: firstly, the feeling of absurdity of social life and history and, secondly, the taste for the literary game, – in various combinations, defined the essence of American postmodernism, which was the mainstream of American literature in the 60-70s, remained an important factor in its development until the mid-80s and largely influenced its future fate.
As you know, literary postmodernism is not specific to American literature. And that is why it is paradoxical to hear some critics say: “Unlike modernism, which appeared in Europe, postmodernism is a purely American phenomenon.” Meanwhile, in this paradox, there is a great deal of truth. Indeed, unlike in Europe, postmodernism in the U.S. is not genetically linked to the “high” modernism of the beginning of the century.
The connection in general turns out to be rather shaky: expatriate writers, American modernists who lived in Europe in the twenties (H. Stein, H. Miller, T.S. Eliot, S. Anderson, to some extent, E. Hemingway and some others) and V. Nabokov, whose English-language work is a strong, but rather narrow bridge between European modernism and American postmodernism. Besides, domestic modernism was a phenomenon so specific and individual that it could not be used as a platform for a large-scale experiment.
The result was twofold. On the one hand, if Europeans have “been through it all already,” then American literature has practically for the first time discarded the crutches of both literary and moral conventions and felt the freedom of self-expression. Hence the intensity, scope, and staggering audacity of the experiment. On the other hand, virtually devoid of a literary basis, postmodernism in the United States arose solely on a sociocultural basis. Modern America, with its purely technological superiority, cultural heterogeneity, and the rapid washout of moral and political beliefs from recent American life, was a country of distinctly postmodern culture. This is what determined the specific reversal of postmodernism in the United States and its particular expressiveness.
Postmodernism here has never been a departure from reality, even if such a departure is an indirect response to contemporary anxieties (as in the European version). American postmodernism very often finds itself directly involved in the world of big politics and history and seeks to reflect it directly. It reflected social reality in a fundamentally different way, however, than the ideological realism of the “reds of the 30s” or the psychological “war” prose of the late 40s.
Postmodernism put before the country a kind of mirror, but not an ordinary one, but one that concentrated and sometimes grotesquely distorted proportions – like in a laughing room. In doing so, such “immutable” notions as “freedom,” “democracy,” the “American way of life” were also reconsidered, authorities – social, political, religious, even the supreme authority of God – were debunked.
This is the case, for example, in Ken Kesey’s novel Above the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), which depicts a model madhouse that serves as a transparent metaphor for contemporary America. The only living and whole person here, the subversive, tomboy, rowdy, and womanizing McMurphy, is given the traits of Christ the Savior. Such is the case with Joseph Heller’s Amendment-22 (1961), a novel about World War II in which the military operations and laws of the American army are presented as utterly absurd.
At the center of “Massacre No. 5” К. Vonnegut’s centerpiece is the apocalyptic absurdity of the bombing of Dresden at the end of World War II. Not only the war, but the entire life of human society, seen from a distant Tralfamador, appears to be a complete absurdity. At the same time, the technologically advanced Tralfamador itself appears as a kind of anti-utopian parody of American civilization, its reflection in a concentrating mirror.
Along the way, the authors rethink and sometimes defiantly violate literary conventions: verisimilitude, chronological and logical sequence of events, genre and style unity. For example, Heller’s “Amendment-22” mixes the comic book and the war novel, favored by mainstream fiction. Vonnegut melds the classic genre of popular literature of science fiction with military prose in “Boyne No. 5.
