Conclusion

The Conclusion summarizes this book’s thesis, arguing that the complexity of a postmodernism conceived in spherical terms involves principled resistance to flat models of any kind. It suggests that postmodernism is not inherently defined by any specific political or religious position, and that the geography of the Oceania and the Pacific, too often regarded as illegible within postmodern designs, offers a more rounded perspective on this field, one that opens it out to global and environmental issues. With reference to the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, Michel Butor, and David Mitchell, this Conclusion indicates that conditions of distance, transition, and reciprocity across different vectors of the world system should contribute to the reformulation of postmodernism according to a more planetary perspective.

Reorchestrating the Past

Taking its title from Australian novelist Alexis Wright’s description of her novel Carpentaria as a ‘long song, following ancient tradition’, this chapter considers how antipodean relations of place interrupt abstract notions of globalization as a financial system. The first section exemplifies this by focusing on Australian/American director Baz Luhrmann, whose version of The Great Gatsby (2013), filmed in Sydney, resituates Fitzgerald’s classic novel within an antipodean context. The second section develops this through consideration of Wright’s fiction, along with that of New Zealand/Maori author Keri Hulme, so as to illuminate ways in which spiral conceptions of time, where ends merge into beginnings, contest Western epistemological frames. In the final section, this ‘long song’ is related to the musical aesthetics of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and English composers George Benjamin and Harrison Birtwistle. The chapter concludes by arguing that musical modes are an overlooked dimension of postmodernist culture more generally.

Antipodean Alice

This chapter discusses how the Alice in Wonderland prototype developed by Lewis Carroll became influential for writers and artists after 1945. It aligns its treatment of sexuality with what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht called the ‘frozen time’ of the Cold War era, showing how Australian painter Charles Blackman deployed representations of Alice to project a world in which time was reversed. This is linked to Blackman’s interest in Indigenous culture and to explorations of temporality in the work of English film director Nicolas Roeg. Similarly reflexive representations of time in playwright Jean Genet and film-maker Ingmar Bergman are counterpointed with the absurdist style of composer György Ligeti, whose opera Le Grand Macabre frames Cold War politics within a burlesque setting. This chapter concludes with an analysis of Vladimir Nabokov, also much influenced by Carroll, who in his later fictions seeks explicitly to put time and space into reverse.

‘Reverse-Thinking’

Starting from Hayden White’s Metahistory, this chapter considers how what White called a ‘retroactive’ style of writing becomes naturalized in postmodernist aesthetics. The first section ranges widely over contemporary US fiction, and it also considers antipodean influences on the music of Philip Glass and John Cage, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the video installations of Christian Marclay. The second section tracks this reverse-thinking through celebrated postmodern fabulists John Barth and Salman Rushdie, showing how their playful narratives address changing social conditions. The third section discusses the shift away from progressive sequence in the films of David Lynch and Michael Haneke, indicating how this relates to surrealism, psychoanalysis, and geographical displacement. The final section analyses contemporary Australian fiction in terms of its spatio-temporal recalibrations, exploring how the planetary turn common to the fiction of Tim Winton, Gail Jones, and Christos Tsiolkas has become characteristic of postmodernism more widely.

Introduction

This chapter outlines the underlying theoretical argument informing this work. The first section, ‘Four-Dimensional Postmodernism’, summarizes various ways in which postmodernism has been understood, arguing that a broad historical definition functions most effectively. It discusses the ramifications of postmodernism as a term with social and economic as well as cultural implications, along with the complex relation between postmodernism and religion. The second section, ‘Ironies of the Anthropocene’, engages environmentalist theory, suggesting that the Anthropocene can usefully be understood as (among other things) a rhetorical concept. It traces how such representations have influenced art marked by the prospect of climate change. The final section, ‘Genealogies of the Planetary’, tracks how ideas of the planetary have been critically framed, from the nineteenth century through to the present day. It discusses how planetary time is represented in postmodernist Indigenous painting and how such disruptions of linear sequence are also manifested in musical temporalities.

Queer Poetic Time

This chapter argues that the representation of ‘queer’ time in postmodernist poetry extends beyond sexuality to encompass heterodox approaches to temporality more broadly. It starts by considering English poet Philip Larkin, suggesting how he reworked modernism within burlesque forms to evoke shifts in spatio-temporal scale. The second section, ‘Against Chrononormativity’, extends this analysis across various American postmodernist poets, arguing that interrogations of normative temporality in relation to gay sexuality (particularly in Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn) can be understood as commensurate with reconstitutions of linear time in the work of John Ashbery and Louise Glück. It concludes by drawing comparisons with two Australian postmodernist poets, John Tranter and Les Murray, both of whom seek to reorient the direction of time. It discusses Tranter’s crossing of postcolonial theory with formalism, while also examining how Murray draws upon Indigenous culture and human/animal relations to reconfigure Western culture from a posthumanist perspective.

Two-Way Time Travel

This chapter considers the new relations of past and present to future that have emerged in the wake of scientific discoveries in genetics and other medical technologies. The first section links Australian novelist Gerald Murnane with established English writer Ian McEwan, suggesting how for both writers the representation of memory, cultural as well as personal, has been mediated by developments in science. The second section, ‘The American Systems Novel’, extends this analysis by considering how genetics shape the plot of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and how 9/11 scrambles understandings of temporal sequence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It concludes by discussing how the historical context of postmodernist science inflects representations of temporal sequence in the novels of Richard Powers, which address issues of computer technology, ecology, and environmentalism, while also representing the aesthetics of temporality in relation to the abstract language of music.

Répétition Planétaire

This chapter starts by considering the general relation between postmodernism and religion. It suggests that, as postmodernism becomes increasingly susceptible to historicization, so it is possible to understand more clearly the projection of religion as a hybrid cultural entity combining sacred and secular motifs. It then goes on to examine treatments of temporality in the work of two French artists, composer Olivier Messiaen and film-maker Eric Rohmer, who both bridged the modernist and postmodernist eras. It discusses how Messiaen’s music was shaped by World War II and surrealism, as well as by religion. This chapter’s final section focuses upon the films of Rohmer, with whom Messiaen was acquainted. There is a discussion of Rohmer’s particular interests in postmodern architecture, environmentalism, and globalization, along with an indication of how these themes manifest themselves in his films, particularly in his last great film cycle ‘Tales of the Four Seasons’.

Postmodern Slave Narratives

This chapter considers the representation of time in postmodern slave narratives. It argues they work through a style of black humour within which the politics of slavery are mediated in complex and ambiguous ways. Starting from the comic fiction of Ishmael Reed, it discusses how scientific discourses turn racial politics into a complicated affair in the novels of Octavia Butler. It finds a similar tension in the recursive fictions of Toni Morrison, where time frequently circles back on itself. This chapter’s second section considers how such inversions are played out in the films of Quentin Tarantino, arguing the disjunctive temporality of his historical films is marked by systematic invocations of antipodean space. Such strategic forms of anachronism and disorientation are associated with the politics of the Obama era, which combined traditional pragmatism with recognition of how transnational pressures were pushing questions about slavery’s historical legacy in a new direction.