FEIWEL KUPFERBERG
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with the illusions of the Maoist-anarchist new left. Aesthetically, it is
sterile, relying on eclecticism and loss of faith in the power of free
imagination and creativity. Because of its constant tendency to over–
politicize art, it has come to identify the death of the avant garde with
the death of the novel, literature, and art itself But there are also deeper
forces at work here. The transition towards a postindustrial, knowledge–
based society has enhanced the role of the "specialist" tremendously,
transforming the writer or intellectual into an obsolete and at the same
time mythical figure, a voice out of a distant past with no clear contours,
a beaten hero, whom a society denying the very existence of the
extraordinary finds it hard to recognize. Latin America and Central and
Eastern Europe seem to be more fortunate in this respect. Here the
writer and the intellectual are still regarded as something of prophets
whom one can rely on to tell the inconvenient truths, not only to the
leaders but also to the people.
The very function of the aesthetic differs in these diverging contexts.
In postindustrial society knowledge is coded into all institutions; all pub–
lic life becomes rationalized and socialized, and as a consequence our in–
tellectual experience becomes overheated and overloaded. The underside
of this is that, paradoxically, our emotional experience becomes decoded.
Private, affective life is more varied, rich, and exuberant, but at the same
time it is fragmented and deprived of meaning and significance. This leads
to the following dilemma: Either art has to be true to itself, that is, to
describe reality as it is, fragmentary and without meaning and significance
- precisely what postmodernism in this sense does - or art must satisfy the
quest for wholeness, meaning, and significance. In the second instance, art
ceases to be art and becomes entertainment. It becomes kitsch, art that
has betrayed its mission, sentimentalizing reality, presenting a picture that
refuses to take life as it is seriously. In Latin American and Central Euro–
pean literature, this split between high art and kitsch seems not to have
occurred. The novels of the foremost Latin American writers are loved
by mass audiences. Kundera's novels lose nothing in seriousness by being
entertaining as well.
The most important difference between the postmodernism of Latin
America and Central Europe and that of Western Europe and North
America, then, lies elsewhere. If a minimum definition of postmodernism
is inter-textuality, a self-conscious attitude toward the text that situates it
in relation to tradition, the main difference here lies in the attitudes to–
ward tradition, visible in aesthetic techniques employed. In Western Eu–
rope and North America, the predominance of the aesthetic technique of
pastiche seems to suggest an attitude of debunking and levelling, more
revealing of the holder of such an attitude than of the object held in
contempt. Under a shallow arrogance and enforced indifference, it is easy
