The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation by Charles Newman (review)

Abstract

108Rocky Mountain Review agreed, a new bourgeois image of virtue. Margolies characterizes him as "hardworking yet sociable, open handed yet thrifty" (148). It is not fair, however, to present Margolies only in terms of his reading of Elizabethan fiction as social history. He is not guilty of seeing fiction as merely reflective of social norms and values. In fact, he makes an effort to comment upon relationships between style and what critics have called most broadly life. This effort is particularly visible in his chapter on Nashe, in which, in commenting on The Terrors ofthe Night, he says that "style is everything" (102). He goes on to characterize Nashe's sense of his own style as that of the biting satirist, but, curiously, as a somewhat toothless one. As a stylist Nashe is individualistic and isolated, without a clear notion of an actual audience. His own audience remains his own fiction. In general, however, what Margolies adds to the common critical perspective on Elizabethan fiction is a fresh emphasis upon the lively imaginative constructions as commentary upon the rich texture of English sixteenth-century culture . BETTIE ANNE DOEBLER Arizona State University CHARLES NEWMAN. The Post-Modern Aura: The Act ofFiction in an Age ofInflation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985. 203 p. If "aura" exists in the postmodern condition, surely it needs to be fabricated more readily than it will be found. This "cultural history of recent attitudes" (13) — in high and mass culture, literary criticism, and the communications industry — situates and reassesses the status of fiction among the ' 'consciousness industries," while rendering an exposition and critique of several trends in contemporary fiction and the avant-garde. Speculative, polemic, Newman's essay disrupts all internal boundaries of formalist literary history. It focuses on economic phenomena, institutional frameworks, and "concepts which hover around artistic transactions . . ." (13; emphasis added). Rather than close readings of individual works or authors, this hybrid study interrogates avenues of transmission: the publishing business, interpretive paradigms channeling the reception of fiction, and the complex relations which transform texts into cultural commodities. "Newman recognizes," Gerald Graff writes in the preface, "that one of the constituents of Post-Modern culture is the license to talk about anything in the context of anything else ..." (ii). Registering in passim remarks on pessimism, "mediating institutions," baseball, the ' 'willed absence of any historical sense" (38), ' 'the temporality of all experience " (148), plus the "conspiracy of greedy publishers and a distracted, mindless reading public" (149), the rhetoric here is charged with the task of apprehending the overlapping realities at work in the current scene of reading and writing. The relation between writer and audience is thoroughly mediated. The "aura" of literary art is now constituted through a "very odd series of relations" (33) — academic, economic, commercial — where "inflation" is the rule. The metaphor of inflation indicates not only an economic concept, but also the inflation of discourse: in "apocalyptic criticism," also in late Modernism's inflated convictions about the alternatively subversive/sacerdotal claim of Book Reviews109 "art." Newman shows how the avant-garde's expectations for revolution in art inflate through the 50s and 60s, even while, ironically, its audience dwindles, producing only "diminishing returns." Inflation occurs in and around art, in "the reckless growth of the academy" and the "sheer quantity and incoherence of information" (9). This breeds a state of "irrational consumption," where "all goods, intellectual as well as material," come to seem "nondurable" (6). Fiction belongs to this "malaise," its status uncertain despite the (inflated) proliferation. "In the last thirty years," Newman writes, "more novels have been published than in any comparable period of history, and yet, quality aside, no age has been less sure about what a novel is, or more skeptical of the value and function of 'imaginative' literature" (9). Following a chapter on the etymology of "Post-Modern" — ranging from Toynbee's The Study ofHistory through Louis Simpson (on Ginsberg), Charles Olson, and Ihab Hassan — this fashionable concept is defined by Newman in terms of its multiple confusions (of genres and cultural cross-currents), its linguistic determinisms, and finally by its "pretensions." The Post-Modern scenario witnesses the devaluation of language, its transformation into arbitrary sign-functions, and, with that...