Cosmically Irreverant and Comically Cosmic

John McClure on postmodern fiction:

“The postmodern works that most interest me (Pynchon’s, Reed’s, Denis Potter’s, Tarentino’s) read, to borrow Italo Calvino’s title, like “cosmic comics.” Wild and defiantly unrealistic exercises in irreverent citation, genre-splicing, excess, caricature, and the grotesque, they run so against the grain of realistic or even modernist seriousness that it seems absurd, at first, to treat them as taking any issues seriously. And yet if they seem cosmically irreverent, they are also comically cosmic: they address sacred alternatives to secular constructions of reality in ways that invest these alternatives with a certain authority and invite us to reflection. If we accept this invitation, of course, the joke may be on us: there’s always the suggestion, in these texts, that any kind of faith, secular or spiritual, is folly. But if we refuse the invitation, the case is the same: for the texts also suggest that secularism is a form of mystification and that those who accept its definition of possibility are victims of a world historical ruse.”

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