Postmodernism: Catastrophe Or Opportunity — Or Both?
As the human race enters the third millennium of the Christian era there is a widespread feeling that more than a mere chronological mark on the calendar has passed. Very often it is said that the modern age, that great edifice which like a colossus bestrode first the Western world and then the entire globe, has ended and that we are entering, or have entered, the post-modern era. What exactly the post-modern era is, and whether it is something Catholics ought to welcome or deplore, will be the subject of this article.
In the first place I must say a word about terminology. The word "modern" often denotes simply today, now: the contemporary.1 So one could argue that it is as absurd to speak of the post-modern as of the post-today or the post-now. When tomorrow comes we shall call it simply today. But long usage has termed the historical era which began sometime between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries as the modern age, and no matter what any descendants of ours might call their times, since we have used modern to denote such a specific period of time, it was inevitable, I suppose, that people would begin to speak of the end of the modern age and the beginning of the post-modern. In any case, conventional usage has now sanctioned "post-modern" and it seems vain to resist it, at least for the time being.
Part of the reason that the usage post-modern seems appropriate is that the characteristics of the post-modern era are usually framed in contrast with those features that are considered as distinguishing the modern age. If the modern age has ended, then something that is not modern has taken its place, but something whose meaning can be understood only as a reaction against modernity, something that could have come into being only as a result of modernity. Thus our task must be to set out what are the distinguishing marks of the modern age in order to understand the post-modern. But in fact, since the modern age itself is a development of or successor to what came before, namely the pre-modern, we will have to start with an account of what came before modernity. However, in labeling ages as pre-modern, modern or post-modern, this does not mean that we are taking the modern age as the standard and valuing other ages only in relation to modern times. It is simply a linguistic convention, and later I will suggest other terms that seem to me to describe more accurately what has really occurred in these great historical cultural shifts.
Pre-Modern And Modern Ages
The development of rational thought, of philosophy, took place only in one place on the earth, Greece.
In Greece, alone in the ancient world, the wisdom of man found the right path, and as the result of a fortunate harmony of the soul's powers and of a long effort to achieve mental order and discipline human reason attained its full vigour and maturity.2
As Western philosophy developed from the Greeks, different philosophers took different paths, but at its best, especially in the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas, pre-modern philosophy had certain characteristics which are important to note. In the first place, such philosophers did not generally attempt to build philosophical systems, rather they strove to provide a philosophical description of reality. Nor did each philosopher feel he must create his own original and unique philosophy, but was often content to build upon the work of his predecessors. But in contrast, the modern age has been marked by the proliferation of philosophical systems. Each philosopher and major thinker has elaborated his own philosophy, usually in marked disagreement with those who came before him, and indeed the hallmark of a philosopher has been that he had his own unique brand of thought. Thus a long parade of individual geniuses strode over the Western world, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and many others, each of whom created his own intellectual edifice, his own personal system.
What do I mean by a system? As I am using the term, a system is a body of thought with these characteristics: It usually denies the ordinary experience of our senses or thought-processes, it is in contact with reality at only one or a few points, and it claims to be the one, true, all-encompassing explanation of everything. These characteristics can be illustrated by the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650). In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes resolved to doubt the reality of
the sky, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things . . . I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, but as falsely opining myself to possess all these things.3
Descartes next proves his own existence by the fact that he thinks, his famous Cogito ergo sum, and then in analyzing his thoughts he arrives at a knowledge of God, and only from that does he come to acknowledge the material world around him, including his own body. Here we see the marks of the modern system builders: First, Descartes denies the ordinary experience of our senses, and our common-sense knowledge that not only we ourselves exist but the world around us. This is in contrast with pre-modern philosophers who did not doubt such ordinary knowledge, even when, as in Plato, they argued that it essentially masked deeper and greater realities.
Secondly, Descartes's philosophy is in contact with reality at only one or a few points. Descartes is correct when he says that he thinks, but he is wrong when he pretends to deduce his existence from that fact, for one surely is as obvious as the other. And by basing all his knowledge, his knowledge of his own existence, of God, of the material world, on that one narrow point of contact with reality, his recognition of his own thinking, he is constructing a veritable castle in the air on that small foundation, his only point of immediate contact with the real world.
Thirdly, Descartes's system strives to be the one, true and all-encompassing explanation of reality. Though naive people might think they see a world about them, and though even some philosophers might claim to prove God's existence from the created world, those who have adopted Descartes' outlook know that all this is mere illusion, and to those who have the key to knowledge, reality must be based on his Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.
Much of the same could be said of the other major modern system builders. With Freud, for example, though one might think that he desired such and such a thing for such and such a reason, upon accepting the theories of Freud he would learn that, no, in reality, his desires were prompted by deep unconscious urges, probably related to sex. So again we have the attempted explanation of all reality, the denial of ordinary experience and contact with the real world at only a few points.
The modern age has been characterized by such grand myths, in fact gnostic myths, propagated by powerful individual thinkers. And as a result of their systems, other myths, equally or more basic and far-reaching, have come to have almost universal influence over the population at least of the Western world. These are such myths as progress, science, democracy, the myth of the emancipation of mankind from ignorance by modern enlightenment and education, myths which are sometimes called meta-narratives by post-modernists, because they attempt to provide an explanation for everything.4 To a greater extent than we realize, Catholics have grown comfortable with the myths of modernism, even when they directly contravene the tenets of the Faith. As we will see, we must have a certain gratitude toward post-modernism for exploding the modernist myths.
The modern age, then, flourished in the creation of such meta-narratives. But even in the midst of such systems the first stirrings of post-modernism began to be heard. When did post-modernism begin? That is difficult to say. Perhaps one can discern some proto-post-modernists with the invention of non-Euclidean geometries in the mid-nineteenth century, the geometries that by denying or ignoring the fifth or parallel postulate of Euclid — the postulate that states (in effect) that parallel lines will never meet — conjured up a world in which truth seemed manufactured at the whim of the thinker and the world had no firm reality of its own. Others have seen in the artistic movements of the 1920s, dada and surrealism, or in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake (1939), the beginnings of post-modernism. But whatever may have been the early signs of this cultural shift, it was after World War II that the first unmistakable evidences of post-modernism can be discerned.
The Arrival Of Post-Modernism
The first manifestations of what is universally agreed to be post-modernism were literary and artistic, and only later was this movement embodied as a philosophy. In fact, this philosophical expression has been seen as largely an ex post facto attempt to justify the literary movement. "When the mood of a period is looking for an ideology it finds philosophical contradictions and objections no barrier . . ."5 And the hallmark of this new "mood" in literature was an attack on humanism, indeed, an attack on man himself. Modernism had sought to exalt man, in fact, had erroneously thought that it must deny God in order to do so. Post-modernism began by denying man, who was seen as simply a substitute for God in humanist thinking.6
One of the earliest and chief of these literary representatives was the French novelist, short story writer and film writer and director, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who "claimed that the novel ought to describe man as an object, at the most as an insect among insects."7 Robbe-Grillet embodied this technique in his own works beginning with Les Gommes (The Erasers) in 1953. One of his short stories, "The Beach," illustrates how this works. In this story there are hardly real characters, no plot, no climax. Three children walk along a beach with scarcely a word exchanged among them. Twice a bell rings somewhere in the distance and they remark that it is getting late. But what seems to be emphasized is the similarity between the characters and a flock of birds that regularly flies and then alights again in tandem with the children, and even with the ebb and flow of the waves on the sand. At the end of the story nothing has changed except that the three have moved farther down the beach, but to where or why is unknown. The story ends in this way:
The sea is continually obliterating the star-shaped traces of their [the birds'] feet. The children, on the other hand, who are walking nearer to the cliff, side by side, holding hands, leave deep footprints behind them, whose triple line lengthens parallel to the shore across the very long beach.
On the right, on the side of the level, motionless sea, always in the same place, the same little wave is breaking.8
This anti-humanist movement in literature soon conjured up a sort of similar movement in philosophy. But as a philosophy, post-modernism is not an exact or coherent set of doctrines. As one commentator has noted:
They do not form a school of thought, nor even a movement. Indeed, even the word "trend" gives them too much unity, a unity which they would be the first to reject. Nevertheless, however broad, loose and flexible they are, they have introduced into philosophy what I will call a distinctive atmosphere, a tonality that already announced their arrival in the 1950s.9
But nonetheless the doctrines of post-modernism, however hard they may be to define, do have some things in common.
What we have is a broad and elusive movement of thought that is as differentiated internally as it is generalizable externally as a new philosophical development. Indeed, deconstruction, which might be presented as an extreme form of postmodernism, is explicitly an antidefinition theory of thought.10
This anti-philosophy philosophy was presented in an increasing number of books and articles in the 1960s, 70s and thereafter. Most of its leading writers were French philosophers and literary critics, notably Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard and others.
Post-modernist philosophy took its origin from the anti-humanist novels and short stories of the 1950s and early 60s. But as a philosophy it has attacked man chiefly on the level of his rationality. Post-modernism has attacked modernism's grand schemes or meta-narratives because post-modernism has called into question the idea that man is capable of seeing the truth enough to construct such intellectual edifices.11 Post-modernism is deeply hostile to systems or schemes that purport to describe reality, because they are seen as in fact attempts to prescribe or circumscribe reality, to control others by setting up the bounds of reality and thus of behavior. Not only the statement of grand meta-narratives, but "any claim to the theoretical pursuit of truth will raise the question: What is really behind this claim?"12 As we will see below, post-modernism is generally not interested in arguing truth claims, but simply refuses to accept their possibility.
In fact, post-modernism goes so far as to reject the truth of nature, for example, the natural distinction of mankind into two sexes, regarding this as an unwarranted restriction on our behavior.
A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education13 about a young male college student who announces to his parents that he is really a girl and begins to wear dresses and asks his parents to refer to him as their daughter, captures well this radical assault on nature. This unfortunate young man asserts, "I'm a girl. I want to wear dresses, makeup and challenge the whole patriarchal, bourgeois idea of gender." To them, male and female are only two of many possible stopping points on the sexuality spectrum, and indeed, by trying to separate sex from what they call gender, the social and cultural expression of one's sexuality, they make the expression of one's sexuality something utterly separable from one's biological sex.14
Another feature that may be considered as central to post-modern thought is the technique of deconstruction, or what is sometimes called the decentering of the text. This involves what is known as working at the margins and proceeds to take away both the author and the meaning of the written text. Deconstruction, moreover, is connected with the attack on man that I discussed above, for it rids the world of both author and even the ability to communicate with others. Let us look in some detail at how this works, first with regard to deconstruction of the author, then of the text itself.
Deconstruction Of Authorship
Since no error, however bizarre, can make headway without some shadow of truth, post-modernism proceeds by attacking the exaggerations of modernism on the question of authorship. For example, Martha Woodmansee, a post-modernist critic and professor of English, attempts to dissolve authorship into the many people responsible for the production of the physical book. She begins by quoting a typical modernist pronouncement about original genius by the English poet, William Wordsworth (1770-1850):
Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before: Of genius in the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe: or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which they had not before been exercised, or the employment of them in such a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown.15
To this she contrasts a passage from St. Bonaventure (1221-1274):
A man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a 'scribe' (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a 'compiler' (compilator). Another writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a 'commentator' (commentator) . . . Another writes both his own work and others' but with his own work in principal place adding others' for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an 'author' (auctor).16
Now there is certainly a difference between the passage from Wordsworth and that of St. Bonaventure. Wordsworth emphasizes the uniqueness of the artistic creator, while Bonaventure puts the true author in a kind of gradation with the simple scribe. And in the pre-modern period there was generally much less concern for authorship and whether a writer has introduced precisely a "new element into the intellectual universe," and if so, by whom exactly was it written. Several works of Thomas Aquinas, for example, were not completed by the saint, but by colleagues or students or others, and exactly where the pen of St. Thomas stopped and the pen of someone else took over we do not always know. But the modernist approach to literature and art has been preoccupied with such questions. Who collaborated with Shakespeare, exactly which lines were written by the Bard and which by his collaborators? But in fact in sixteenth century drama there was a fluidity about the text and about authorship that reveals a fundamentally different attitude from that of the modern age. Often the director or the actors would add, subtract or change lines, depending on the audience or other factors. Readers might recall that in Shakespeare's Hamlet exactly this takes place, as Hamlet asks the players to add a few lines of his own composition as part of his plot against the king.17 And in general, pre-modern writers, composers and other artists worked more collaboratively, borrowed freely from one another and from their own works and seemed to care less that every work of their own would be attributed to their own unique genius. And, of course, this occurs even today, with speech writing, ghost writing, editing and other kinds of cooperative or assisted writing. But granting all this as true, we can still very obviously make a distinction, and an important distinction, between a scribe and an author, even though we might well agree that authorship frequently depends on the efforts of others as well. But the post-modernists go far beyond this and attempt to dissolve authorship altogether. For example, Martha Woodmansee comments as follows on the passage from St. Bonaventure that I quoted before:
While Bonaventura's auctor seems to be making a substantial (original) contribution of his own, he does so as part of an enterprise conceived collaboratively. Nor is this mode of book production privileged over the other three — over transcription, compilation, and commentary.18
But this is surely not the case. Just because Bonaventure sees authorship as in a series with transcription does not mean that he does not see the obvious differences between the two. Probably most ancient and medieval writers were in the habit of using a scribe or secretary to whom they dictated their works, but clearly these scribes are largely unknown, and no one credits them with the importance that the author himself has. Generally we do not even know their names.19
Simply because most pre-modern writers cared less about who was the unique and original author and readily accepted the fact that often the final text was the result of many different writers' and editors' pens, we need not acquiesce in the post-modern destruction or deconstruction of authorship. So while it is certainly the case that we assume the model of the solitary author too often and forget that much of the writing in the world is the result of some sort of collaboration, it is too much to suggest that because of this authors and authorship somehow disappear.
Next let us consider how post-modernists dissolve the meaning of the text itself, and then we will see what use they make of their deconstruction of both writer and text.
Deconstruction Of The Text
The destruction or deconstruction of the text begins in the text itself.
The strategy is not to bring some alien force against the text, but rather to exploit the text's own resources against itself. It is meant to probe its blind spots, to do "violence" to the text, but from within the text itself, to expose the moments of inner stress. That is why Derrida can claim that he does not go beyond the text, but rather that he simply puts it to the test.
The strategy is to catch whatever there is in the text that cannot quite be brought to rational concepts, and then to worry the text until the central meaning gives way to a plurality of different possible meanings.20
That is, anything in a text which does not quite seem to fit — something on the "margins" — is pounced upon, and then the critic seeks to show how this one bit could be understood differently from the presumed message of the entire text, and then, little by little, the text and its meaning begins to fall apart.
It does not attempt to contradict the argument of the text; it merely saps its strength. The deconstructionist fights somewhat in the Parthian manner; if not exactly by fleeing from the main argument, still by striking side-glancing blows. The strategy, especially Derrida's, is to put an accepted interpretation off balance, and once tilted, to put it out of play.21
Now a text takes its meaning both from its unity in the author's mind and intention and in the meaning of the words themselves. But if the author has been dissolved and the actual meaning of the words called into question, this, obviously, results in the dissolution of meaning. As we saw above, post-modernism is hostile to truth claims, but hostile not by making counter arguments, but by attempting to destroy argument itself. Thus the celebration of contradiction, or of play or parody in the post-modern. What the following quote says about image can also be taken to apply to text and meaning.
The role of the image in post-modern culture is essentially one of parody. By this is meant that the image no longer refers primarily to some 'original', situated outside of itself in the 'real' world or inside of human consciousness. Devoid of any fixed reference to an origin, the image appears to refer only to other images. The post-modern image circulates in a seemingly endless play of imitation. Each image becomes a parody of another which precedes it . . . and so on."22
So we end up with the situation in which a "message is now no longer a unique expression sent from an author to a reader."23 A text is no longer about the world outside the mind of the author or even about the thoughts inside the mind of the author. Texts are simply about other texts.
Hence we note that the pre-modern model of the image as mirror . . . and the modern model as lamp . . . give way to the post-modern model of a circle of looking glasses — each one reproducing the surface images of the other in a play of infinite multiplication.24
Clearly we have here the death of reason. Texts are no longer arguments made to convince someone of some point of view, for, as we saw, post-modernism suspects every such argument to be a covert attempt to grab power. Instead in the last resort it is play, it becomes trivial. While modernism very often espoused error and made wrong arguments, post-modernism is not interested in making an argument. Rather it seeks to destroy every argument, every possibility of argument. Many of the modernist systems of thought contained implicit contradictions, which, if pressed, would logically have destroyed the very foundations of that system, but which the systems' creators and expounders overlooked, and apparently hoped everyone else would overlook too. But, in theory, if you pointed out such a logical contradiction to the systems' upholders, they would be embarrassed and seek somehow to explain themselves. But if you point out to the post-modernists that their arguments destroy the very possibility of argument and truth, that they can hardly uphold their own point of view if what they assert is true, they will not react with embarrassment or anger. They are likely to react instead with a shrug, a smile, a nod in agreement. For yes, they have destroyed all argument, all truth, including their own. They do not desire to replace modernist systems with a new one of their own creation, but to remove any rational floor, any starting point, any fixed position about which we can have rational confidence. Absolute intellectual nihilism is the logical result of this. Man's reason is dead, and truly now he is "at the most as an insect among insects."
Post-Modern Affinities With Pre-Modern Thought
The negative aspects of post-modernism are obvious. But above I suggested that, since modernism itself was inimical to Catholic thought and faith, we should be grateful, to a certain extent, to the post-modernists for dissolving the modernist worldview. And in fact there are certain features of post-modern thought and art which approximate, to some degree, pre-modern thought and practice. For example, in the theater, post-modern practice, beginning in the 1960s, duplicated certain of the features of the medieval theater, such as direct interaction between actor and audience and experimenting with different arrangements of the stage, rather than simply the proscenium stage so typical of the modern era, which allowed the spectator to gaze into the make-believe world of the play, a world kept strictly separate from the real world of the audience.
And more fundamentally, since post-modernists both claim that the text is everything25 and then subvert the text, we might ask whether the place of writing and of purely rational thought, has differed in modern times from its pre-modern role. In the Middle Ages books were very often heavily decorated, with pictures in the margins and various other kinds of designs and illustrations. Different colors were used for letters, so that in the medieval book the text danced, as it were, amid a sea of beauty. The text was within a context. But with the invention of printing this soon changed, and eventually the medieval face of the book vanished and the modern book, in which text is everything, or almost everything, became the rule. Text came to rule the modern world. This can be seen especially in Protestantism, which erected a text, Sacred Scripture, into a rule it was never meant to be. And in general, the modern world has seen the tyranny of the text because our world has lost the sense of approaching man on every level of his being, rational and non-rational. At the very beginning of the modern era Descartes had stamped modern thought with the notion that man was only a mind, and the body merely an appendage. But medieval Catholicism approached man through all his five senses, with music, the smell of incense, pictures and statues, even the taste of salt at baptism. One wonders if the modern age had not distorted text and made it supreme, whether the post-modernists would have felt the need to overthrow this tyranny of words and wordy systems.
I said above that the terms pre-modern, modern, and post-modern were not the best to describe the great cultural shifts that have occurred in our civilization. In pre-modern times the Catholic faith approached man according to his entire nature, the best foundation on which grace can build. With Descartes and his successors, all this changed, so perhaps one could call modernity and all that has followed simply the post-human. For modernism and post-modernism both basically have refused to look at man as he is and persist in distorting both man and all of reality in one way or another.
Naturally post-modernism, as a reaction against modernism, was bound to discover some truths rejected by modernism, but as we have seen, it also embraced many new errors, especially the view that all assertions of truth are attempts to dominate and the accompanying deconstruction of meaning and even of man himself. And while Catholics can take some legitimate pleasure, after the long journey through the desert of modernism, in some facets of post-modernism, in reality it provides for us an opportunity, or rather two opportunities. In the first place, post-modernism gives us the opportunity of looking at our own thoughts and seeing to what extent we have compromised with modernism in our own understanding of things. Modernism has been around for so long that we Catholics have grown too comfortable with it, and sometimes even defend modernist theses against post-modernism. But we ought to purge our minds of both these sorts of error as we look toward St. Thomas as the philosopher able to cope with both modernism and post-modernism.
The second opportunity that post-modernism gives us is directed not to ourselves, but ad extra. That is, post-modernism demands that we take a look at our methods of apostolate and see to what extent the post-modern worldview needs a different approach, an approach that may seem new, but that in reality is old. It is the approach that includes the creation of atmosphere, in the liturgy, for example, an atmosphere which approaches man in his essential nature, not just as thinker but on every level of being, as a rational animal, in fact, with body and soul, senses, affections, loves and hates. Here again, since St. Thomas deals with man in all these ways, by a true recovery of his philosophy we may more easily, not only see through and refute post-modernist nonsense, but appeal to the post-modern man, that man for whom Christ our God lived, suffered and died, as much as he did for medieval and for modern man.
And so our methods of evangelization ought to reflect a world which feels itself stifled under texts and which is looking, in its confused way, for something different. And it may be that if we can offer to them the pre-modern in a way that is fresh, not simply a tame and stale compromise with modernism, then what is old will seem indeed very new. As Chesterton wrote in a very different era in the life of the Church and of our culture:
The Catholic faith used to be called the Old Religion; but at the present moment it has a recognized place among the New Religions. This has nothing to do with its truth or falsehood; but it is a fact that has a great deal to do with the understanding of the modern world.
It would be very undesirable that modern man should accept Catholicism merely as a novelty; but it is a novelty. It does act upon its existing environment with the peculiar force and freshness of a novelty . . . The worthy merchant of the middle class, the worthy farmer of the Middle West, when he sends his son to college, does now feel a faint alarm lest the boy should fall among thieves, in the sense of Communists; but he has the same sort of fear lest he should fall among Catholics.26
If we are to have an apostolate to post-modern man that has hope of any success, then it is in such a manner that we must proceed. We must show that the Faith is the one exciting thing in the universe, the one thing that can appeal to man in soul and body, the thing that does not repress but offers man his true fulfillment, and imports a beauty not just from another age, but from outside our world altogether.
Notes
1. The first recorded use of modern, in Latin modernus, meaning new or contemporary, was about the year 495 A.D. (Peter Henrici, "Modernity and Christianity," Communio, vol. 17, no. 2, summer 1990, p. 141.) It was used widely from the end of the Middle Ages in this sense. Henrici gives other examples in both Latin and English and more can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary.
2. Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy (London: Sheed & Ward, 1947) p. 33.
3. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, "Meditation I."
4. It is necessary to distinguish between something held as a myth and the same thing otherwise conceived. Thus there is nothing wrong with democracy conceived as simply one among the various legitimate forms of government, but this is a far cry from democracy looked upon as the only valid form of government and the key to solving all the problems of nations. This latter is what I mean by the myth of democracy.
5. Jean-Marie Domenach, "The Attack on Humanism in Contemporary Culture" in Claude Geffré, ed., Humanism and Christianity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1973) p. 19.
6. Michel Foucault, "echoing Nietzsche's prophecy of the death of God" had announced the death of man in his book, Les mots et les choses in 1967. (Louis Marin, "The Disappearance of Man in the Humane Sciences — A Linguistic Model and Signifying Subject" in Geffré, ed., Humanism and Christianity, p. 29.) Moreover, "if deconstruction seems to oppose Humanism, it is because Humanism operates by substituting the concept 'man' for the concept 'God'. . . and so placing 'man' as the unproblematic ground of meaningfulness for human life." (John Lye, "Deconstruction, Some Assumptions," p. 4. Brock University, English 4F70, Contemporary Literary Theory).
7. Jean-Marie Domenach, "The Attack on Humanism in Contemporary Culture," p. 25.
8. Alain Robbe-Grillet, "The Beach" in French Short Stories edited by Pamela Lyon. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, c. 1966) p. 23.
9. Kenneth L. Schmitz, "Postmodernism and the Catholic Tradition," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 2, spring 1999, pp. 233-34.
10. William Grassie, "Postmodernism: What One Needs to Know," Zygon, Journal of Religion and Science, March 1997.
11. In fact, Jean-Francois Lyotard (in his The Postmodern Condition, 1979) gave "incredulity toward metanarratives" as a kind of definition of post-modernism. Quoted in Huston Smith, "Postmodernism and the World's Religions" in Walter Truett Anderson, ed., The Truth About the Truth (New York: G. P. Putnam's, c. 1995) p. 206.
12. Kenneth L. Schmitz, "Postmodern or Modern-plus?" Communio, vol. 17, no. 2, summer 1990, p. 163.
13. "Gaining a Daughter: a Father's Transgendered Tale," March 24, 2000, p. B4.
14. For more on this rejection of the two God-given and natural sexes and on the alleged distinction between sex and gender, see two recent articles of mine: "Hating the Body," New Oxford Review, vol. 64, no. 11, December 1999 and "Liberalism's Three Assaults," Homiletic & Pastoral Review, vol. 100, no. 4, January 2000.
15. William Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, quoted in Martha Woodmansee, "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1992, p. 280.
16. Quoted in ibid., p. 281.
17. "You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in't, could you not?" Act II, scene 3.
18. Woodmansee, "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity," p. 281.
19. One interesting exception is the scribe who took down St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, Tertius. Toward the end of the letter (16:22) he adds a greeting in his own name.
20. Schmitz, "Postmodern or Modern-plus?" p. 159.
21. Ibid., p. 161.
22. Richard Kearney, "The Crisis of the Post-modern Image" in A. Phillips Griffiths, ed., Contemporary French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University, c. 1987) p. 113.
23. Ibid., p. 115.
24. Ibid., p. 113.
25. Derrida has written (in Of Grammatology): "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" that is, "There is nothing outside the text."
26. The Catholic Church and Conversion in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 3 (San Francisco: Ignatius, c. 1990) pp. 64-65.
Mr. Thomas Storck's latest book is Christendom and the West: Essays on Culture, Society and History. His articles have appeared in Catholic Faith, Faith and Reason, New Oxford Review and elsewhere. He holds an M.L.S. from Louisiana State University and an M.A. from St. John's College, Santa Fe, N.M. Mr. Storck is a regular contributor to HPR.
© Ignatius Press 2001.
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