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Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World Robert L. McLaughlin (bio) Setting the Scene Shelley’s 1821 pronouncement that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (632) probably marks the highpoint of the literary artist’s confidence in the ability of literature to engage with and have an impact on the social world. One can think of a few specific examples of such engagement and impact—Melville’s White-Jacket (1850) influencing legislation banning flogging on U.S. navy ships, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) crystallizing the debate over slavery, or Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) inspiring the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act—but only a few. Otherwise, we tend to think of the social impact of literature as being more subtly epistemological and ontological: variously confirming or challenging our and our culture’s values, raising consciousnesses, occasionally transforming individual lives. If, however, one believes as I do—and, I think, as many fiction writers do—that art’s social role is to question, challenge, and reimagine the ideological status quo, or, as Thomas Pynchon put it in a message of support to Salman Rushdie, “that power is as much our sworn enemy as unreason” (“Words” 29), then the kinds of influences (impact is probably too strong a word) literature can have in the social world can seem pretty vague and insubstantial. William Carlos Williams’s famous lament that T. S. Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land had taken poetry out of “local conditions” and given it “back to the academics” (Williams 146), pointy-headed English professors in ivory towers, marks the opposite extreme to Shelley’s confidence and represents, I imagine, the anxiety of many authors: they desire their work to intervene in the social arena, but they fear that their work—and literature in general—is increasingly irrelevant. [End Page 53] This fear seems to be well founded. Imagining a time past when fiction, poetry, and drama were central to cultural life in the U.S. may be false nostalgia; nevertheless, now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they may never have been less central. The popular public consciousness is concentrated on the latest American Idol or whom Donald Trump is firing on The Apprentice or whatever’s going on on some of the other gazillion cable networks or else on the latest CDs and DVDs or on video games or the infinite expanse of the World Wide Web. Print media of any kind, much less literature that aspires to serious intent, seems pretty dull in comparison. But, you might object, what about the sheer numbers of books being published today and the ease with which they can be purchased, thanks to the ubiquitous Barnes & Noble and Borders superstores and Amazon.com and other Internet stores? Surely that says something about the role of literature in our culture. Well, yes, it does, but, to my mind, not much heartening. I’ve argued elsewhere (see my “Oppositional Aesthetics/Oppositional Ideologies”) that U.S. commercial publishers have always emphasized potential profit over artistic value in the things they publish; nevertheless, in the days of the individual- or family-owned publishing house, there was the possibility for eccentric choices—that is, a decision to publish based on the publisher’s or an editor’s affection and admiration for a book’s artistic accomplishment or for the prestige it might bring the firm, despite only a slim chance of making money. There was also the possibility of eccentric publishers, like Horace Liveright, who threw financial caution to the wind, publishing at one time or another most of the major figures in American modernism. But after the era of conglomeratization, now that the independent commercial publisher is almost extinct and what used to be publishing “houses” are imprints of a very few huge multinational entertainment corporations, small, modestly performing cogs in the corporations’ gears, the chance for eccentricity, for anything of artistic merit to be published without the possibility for profit, is slim indeed. The era of conglomeratization has resulted in two interconnected trends, both of which are bad news for serious literature. First, because the many publishing imprints are owned by...
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