In the class I’m teaching, we just finished our discussion about Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers with some comments about vicious circles and how the characters seem to be trapped in these ever repeating loops that seem to go nowhere. So I thought I would give some background on postmodernism, metanarratives, and a few other tidbits from theory that might help an understanding of this novel and other postmodern texts. First, to postmodernism…
Postmodernism can mean many things to many people. (Some scholars don’t even like to acknowledge it as a literary movement at all – they group postmodern texts with late modernism.) For our purposes, we can view postmodernism as a literary movement that sprang up as a reaction to World War II, especially the horrors of the war and the seemingly arbitrary nature of a war to end all wars happening for a second time. WWII was also a technologically advanced war, and an obsession with technology and what it does to mankind is an important aspect of some (though not all) postmodern texts. Other tropes, ideas, or techniques that occur in postmodernism include: paradoxes, an insistence on pluralities of meaning or a lack of meaning, existentialism that borders on nihilism, false nostalgia for a past that never actually existed, use of pastiche (copying an original work, but using it in a different context), an obsession with metafiction (writing about writing; stories about how to tell stories), and a contentious relationship with metanarratives.
That’s a very long list of things, and though not every text exhibits all of these, I’ll go into detail on a few so we can get a better understanding of the vicious circle of postmodernism. First, metanarrative… Jean-Françios Lyotard first made the term part of the conversation surrounding postmodernism when he began discussing the difference between the modern and the postmodern. Modernism, in his eyes, focussed on certain grand narratives. These narratives were essentially stories people told themselves to explain certain intangible ideas that seemed to run society. These ideas were usually expressed in capital letters – Progress, the Enlightenment, Science, Marxism, Religion (pick one), etc. – and tended to be things that were supposed to lead us to some kind of grand Truth or Transcendency. Science, for example, is a story of intellect, progress, and manifest destiny. It starts in the Enlightenment, leads us through the Industrial Revolution to the 20th century, out into the Age of Technology and a better world. Science, as a metanarrative, promises that those who conduct research are part of a larger whole, all striving for the betterment of mankind and the advancement of civilization.
Postmodern texts, however, mistrust metanarratives. Postmodern authors, their characters, even their plot lines, see a totalizing narrative as a false hope. Science doesn’t always better mankind and doesn’t always advance civilization – just look at what happened during the war (and pick a war here, since the ones after WWII only deepened postmodern angst). Things like Science or Progress or Art aren’t grand stories that give us archetypal heroes, great grail quests, or satisfying conclusions. Instead, postmodernism argues that metanarratives have either: 1) failed us, 2) need to be overthrown, or 3) never existed in the first place. And we therefore have a choice. We can accept the fact that metanarratives don’t exist (for whatever reason) and wander about in the void created by that loss. Or we can create or recreate our own metanarratives, building a new world that may or may not replace what was lost.
Hence the vicious circle. In The Leftovers characters become aware that metanarratives have fallen apart in the face of the Sudden Departure. When a fraction of the population just vanishes without a trace, without an explanation, there can be no more grand unifying theories. Religion doesn’t work. Science can’t explain things. Civilization falls apart, at least theoretically. Structures just can’t work anymore. So the characters in the novel have to figure out how to cope with this. Some of them choose to recreate new metanarratives. Some simply wander, lost in a world that has itself lost meaning. Some try to cling to stories that just can’t work anymore. And, at least in this novel, those who recreate or wander or cling to the past are caught in a vicious circle. They can’t move on because they can’t forge a truly new way – they can’t let go of the stories that once ruled their lives. The can’t let go of the idea of narrative. So they are caught in a constant cycle, never moving forward, never moving backward. Static. The book becomes a commentary on our need to conform to these stories, stories we write about ourselves, society, civilization, human behavior. It’s not saying we need to forego humanity completely and start from scratch, but it is pointing out the entropy inherent in our current system.
This is quite a long post at this point, so I’ll save more discussion of postmodernism for later…
Notes From the Villa Straylight 