Rembrandt and Classic Literature: Finnegan's Wake, The Unnamable

He painted this at 25.

Yesterday I went to the Frick to see the Rembrandt and School exhibit. Rembrandt was a master by the time he was 25. If I had to choose one painting from the Frick to have in my home, it would be the Hans Holbein of Sir Thomas More. The thing about this museum is that it has representative works by most of the masters of Western art.

Now I'm sitting at Barnes & Noble (an activity which will become historical within a few years after all the bricks and mortar bookstores close) reading Finnegan's Wake. Very unlike Rembrandt stylistically. It's like Joyce was just talking out loud for six hundred pages, messing around, and he wrote it all down. Except it took him seventeen years.

Meanwhile I'm almost done with Beckett's The Unnamable, from his prose contribution to classic literature, Three Novels. When you run across three page sentences, it's easy to see the influence of the elder on the younger. The intensity's there, but I tellya, it can get tiresome after a while. That doesn't mean I won't incorporate those stylistic tendencies, especially into a passage I call the big city feeling, which my old man has helped me with writing. I find these techniques very good for building tension, in the same way a Woody Allen joke does.

Postmodernism Began in 1968

Today we’re going to talk about what came before post postmodernism: postmodernism. Postmodernism began around 1968, due to shifting values in the United States and in Europe. A generation had settled down to have children since WWII, and the Baby Boomers were coming of age. Vietnam and the ascension of America as the pre-eminent global power brought to the zeitgeist a self-concerned, slightly ironic viewpoint. The power of corporations became recognized and the idea that power corrupts absolutely was reinforced after Watergate, perhaps the height of the historical movement.

In literature, we can examine postmodernism in the works of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace, all of whom experiment with notions of assortment and conglomeration in terms of plot, content, and character. In the visual arts, Warhol’s “Marilyn” is the best known example. Postmodern art works on the premise that it can be reproduced with variation to evoke emotion – even when those emotions are base, as in the case of the pervasive ennui,  shock, and irony  we find in many postmodern works.

I’ve written that we’re emerging from the throes of postmodernism today, and that very soon we can expect to see the beginnings of a new movement. Perhaps it will be in 2011, when the seventh billion person is born. Perhaps it will be in 2012, before the putative end of the world. Or perhaps it could take another ten years or more. Although with all that’s changed recently, I doubt it will take that long.