UC Berkeley

Postmodern Realism and That Class Which Is Not One explores the social and epistemological significance of realist description in white lower-middle-class fiction of the American seventies and eighties. As that period’s most canonized fiction reached the height of postmodernism, a cohort of fiction writers depicting white lower-middle-class characters – including Raymond Carver, Marilynne Robinson, and Lucia Berlin – turned its back on metafictional play, finding kinship instead with the political realist novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who brought working-class characters into visibility for a literary readership. I argue that the realist practice of these fiction writers can best be understood in terms of their desire for class-based solidarity, at the moment of the American labor movement’s collapse and the political climate’s neoliberal turn. In our own era of right-wing populism, their attempt to imagine such solidarity has become more salient than ever.

Through my close readings of these writers’ representational strategies, I work out the defining dialectic of postmodern realism. On the one hand, the aim to portray the white lower middle class as a material reality and social identity, beyond the reach of postmodern relativism, leads these writers to reinvest in narrative notations of unmediated referentiality. Particularly in its narrative description, that is, white lower-middle-class fiction supposes a social reality that can be objectively known. But on the other hand, knowledge that the social world is ideologically constituted leads these writers to upset the realist norms established within their literary works, each through a different formal invention. This disruption is not performed in an act of postmodern play but in an effort to better represent the characters’ latent class-consciousness, both as an ideological construction and as an unrealized potential for solidarity among white lower-middle-class subjects of the postmodern period. The negotiation of this dialectic forges the connection among the writers who are the focus of my dissertation. In addition to fiction by Carver, Berlin, and Robinson, I examine the contribution New Journalism makes to the realist project through Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) and the view of white class identity, seen from the African-American lower-middle-class position, offered by Alice Walker’s fiction. By bringing these varied writers into conversation, my study re-conceptualizes the period’s literary history, foregrounding realism as a predominant and politically significant form.

In the cases my project explores, realist description, defined by the ethnographic detail, conjures a race-class specific social reality. But in each case, a different formal response to one aspect of white lower-middle-class culture simultaneously disavows the realist description’s claim to positive social knowledge. Carver’s minimalist short stories, for example, have the effect of stripping away as many ethnographically suggestive brand names or consumer artifacts as possible, without jettisoning referentiality entirely. “Cathedral” (1983) exemplifies this operation in that it not only prunes consumer artifacts, but also deploys an anti-realist mode – allegory – to represent the utopian possibility of experience removed from commodification. In this way, his fiction undermines its own positivist impetus, erasing the social specificity of its realist description. This erasure universalizes whiteness and middle-class-ness, reproducing their cultural hegemony, as Bharati Mukherjee has said of minimalism; however, removing social specificity allows the characters to momentarily break out of the ideologies endemic to their race-class position. This break is only a utopian possibility, but it imagines lower-middle-class whites as capable of social critique and class-based solidarity that could transcend racial categories. In other words, it is precisely the reactionary gesture of treating lower-middle-class white experience as a given in no need of social contextualization that begins to envision a critical consciousness for allegedly apolitical subjects.