The Coward's Art

__"Echo and Narcissus: The Fearful Logic of Postmodern Thought" by David Bosworth, in The Georgia Review (Fall 1997), Univ. of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602–9009.__

What are the forces that drive the postmodern sensibility? asks novelist Bosworth, author of From My Father, Singing (1989). "Why in our time (to cite just some of the signal shifts in value enacted by postmodern thought) has parody replaced parable, sign replaced symbol, repetition replaced originality, monologue replaced dialogue, and the celebrity replaced the hero?"

Much of the art and thought since World War II exhibits, to one degree or another, "either mechanical mimicry or obsessive selfabsorption," Bosworth contends—and these "recall, with eerie exactitude, the fates prescribed for Echo and Narcissus." The nymph Echo, in punishment for deceiving a god, is condemned never to speak an original word again, while the handsome youth Narcissus, as a curse for coldly rejecting the love of others, is made to fall in love with his own reflection. "The one unable to express herself, the other unable to see beyond himself, each is estranged not only from reciprocal love but from any form of intimate exchange," writes Bosworth. "Each is destined to pine away in a perpetually punishing loneliness."

What is now called the "postmodern" sensibility, he notes, emerged during the 1960s with the arrival of pop art. Andy Warhol, the pop art eminence and "most influential visual artist of the last 50 years," chose Echo’s imposed fate, Bosworth points out. "The very model of Echo’s form of ‘servomechanism,’ Warhol copies the world and then copies his copy again and again. An exact replica of a soup can becomes a hundred replicas (‘100 Campbell’s Soup Cans’) which then become ‘200 Campbell’s Soup Cans.’ A photographic copy of the Mona Lisa is then multiplied into four copies (‘Four Mona Lisas’) which then become a frame arrayed with 30 copies, six by five."

Warhol provides the most extreme example, but milder versions of postmodern Echo abound and can be found in virtually every area of contemporary culture, Bosworth says. In music, for instance, there is "the rise of minimalism and New Age soporifics with their mechanical repetition of simple melodies and rhythms."

Postmodern Narcissus also has become ubiquitous, Bosworth says. In literature, autobiography and memoir have become more popular than fictional narrative; in philosophy, "an extreme relativity verging on solipsism, the denial that there is a knowable truth beyond one’s own thoughts," has become fashionable. In the visual arts, "various forms of exhibitionist self-portraiture" have come into vogue. The internationally acclaimed photographer Yasumasa Morimura, for instance, photographs the figurative paintings of such past masters as Rembrandt and van Gogh; then, through computer imaging, he substitutes his own face for each of the characters’ faces within the frame. "I express Rembrandt’s theme better than he did," Morimura has boasted.

"The need to make the outside world disappear by masking its existence with reflections of one’s Self... when considered along with the opposite yet complementary need to make one’s Self disappear by reducing one’s own expressions to mere reflections of that world (the total self-effacement of Warhol’s tape recorder, his choosing to become Echo in her cave), would seem to suggest a deep fear of reality," writes Bosworth. "Or rather, a deep fear of knowing reality."

"Most of postmodern art’s favorite strategies—repetition, collage, opacity, parody— are strategies of concealment rather than conveyance," he observes. "Most of the claims of the criticism implicitly allied with that art—that language can only refer to itself, that there is no objective reality—are trying to insist that the mind is its own place and so, in some sense, safe....

"Yet like echolalia and narcissism, the pathologies it mimics, postmodern logic," Bosworth warns, "can supply only the opposite of what it would advertise: instead of immunity, ignorance; instead of real mastery, the fantasy of triumph that only ignorance allows."