Post-Postmodernism?: Loneliness in Human Relationships

In a survey of American Literature from 1945 to the present, the elements and progression of postmodernism are prevalent. Society was greatly affected by both world wars, followed by the rise of multiple human rights revolutions that still continue on to this day, but by the 1990s there is another shift in society. Not from outside forces, though those are still a part of it, the shift happens in the general mental state of people. The rise of the personal computer and access to the Internet, as well as the advancement of entertainment in television and film, have affected how we live with one another, and the inherent loneliness that has resulted from it. This mental shift could and should be considered post-postmodernism or at least some reaction to post-modernism. People have become disconnected from each other through technology, such as the Internet and television, and the loneliness in these stories show that people need to reconnect with each other to create a better society.

In Mary Caponegro’s short story collection All Fall Down, she writes in a variety of styles, but relationships and loneliness are common elements she includes in all of her stories. Relationships and loneliness are terms that do not seem mutually exclusive, but what writers of late postmodernism or post-postmodernism do, including Mary Caponegro, is to show they can be. In her story titled, “Last Resort Retreat” a married couple of a few decades are on their way to a retreat out in the middle of nowhere away from society as a last resort for their relationship that has become riddled with loneliness. Readers are not told much about the resort and are set in the same boat as the married couple in what they should expect to get out of the experience. What readers are told is that “the Last Resort Retreat, for which she’d seen a flyer (also something on the Internet), nothing more—what were they getting into, he’d complained—no references, no guarantees, already its effects was exacerbation rather than amelioration”. The wife sees the flyer and sees an opportunity to bring healthy communication back into their relationship, but all the husband sees is that there is little information available to them about the place on the Internet.

Like many have become accustomed to in recent years, the ability to have reviews from other people on the Internet, influences the purchasing of items, such as books, or when booking a hotel someone has never stayed at before. Right from the start, there is this divide and loneliness that each spouse is feeling because of their different expectations of the Last Resort Retreat. This difference carries on into their time at Last Resort Retreat. The wife is of the mind that people need to get away from technology to learning stronger communication with other people. On a solitary walk, she comments, “One could be peaceful here”. She sees the benefit in isolating oneself from the distractions of modern society, and throughout the time spent there, she is actively trying to reconnect a lost communication with her husband. The husband; however, spends his time making jokes and not taking the methods seriously, but towards the end of the story, his thinking shifts ever so slightly. The husband finds the eulogy his wife has written for him as an exercise, and after reading it, “He wants a chance, at least, to edit the thing. He wants to respond to it, but he can’t quite get himself together”. He desires to respond and engage with his wife’s words appears like a breakthrough in regaining communication between spouses, but the story shifts into a surreal ending with the wife in her wedding dress surrounded by deer. Norm does everything he can to get her attention and to communicate with her, but it is never clear if they ever do end up reconnecting. However, looking at the last line, “He is reaching his hand across the field, calling her name, hoping she will see or hear, and he feels as if he were indeed Rip Van Winkle, awakening to a strange, new world,” Caponegro is suggesting that Norm has changed and that it is never too late to gain lost communication to fight against loneliness that lives in relationships.

For Richard Powers in Galatea 2.2, it may be too late. Over the course of the novel, readers learn about the multi-year relationship with “C” and how it came to end before Powers came back to “U”. Gathering context clews it seems that “U” means university as in the present story-line he is currently an in-house author at the university. The return to “U” seems like an attempt of reconnecting with the past to be able to move on from it, but Powers becomes involved in a technical experiment of creating an artificial mind to analyze literature. This leads to Powers losing his ability to communicate, and he becomes increasingly disconnected from the people around him.

At first, he sees the machine simply as a machine, but as the experiment progresses he gives her a gender and a name, and treats her like a living being. Helen becomes so life-like that she becomes depressed by the horrors of the world, which leaves Powers feeling empty: “Helen had shown me the world, and the sight of it left me desperate. If she was indeed gone, I too, was lost. What did any name mean, with no one to speak it to?” There are a few things to take from Powers’ statement. He states that Helen showed him the world, while in fact, he was the one that showed “her” the world and only a selected view of it. Also, his statement of having “no one to speak it to” suggests how disconnected from the world and how his communication skills have changed and how they will only create a sense of loneliness. This loneliness as a result of his obsession with and loss of Helen and from his break-up with “C” creates a deep loneliness that he feels only “A” can cure. Out on one of their few meetings together, Powers thinks, “I had to tell her, while I still remembered how pitiful, how pointless it was to say anything at all”. He thinks that communication is pointless without Helen and he longs for that communication again and aims to regain it by confessing to a woman he hardly knows and is not disconnected from human communication like he is. “A” storms out and leaves Powers alone without any sense of what to do next. What Powers is doing in Galatea 2.2 in regards to communication and technology is showcased in a highly dramatized, but also likely in some cases, way how an obsession with online and artificial communication can affect our relationships and our abilities to maintain or form new ones.

By looking at American literature from the later parts the 20th century and into the 21st century, it can be seen that writers have begun to respond to the issues of postmodernism with new issues in regards to a changing society because of technology and its effects on our abilities to communicate. Both authors looked at addressing the issue of communication with their narratives, and while they do not point to technology as the source of the issue, it is likely one because of the timing of the shift in literature around the time something, whether called post-postmodernism or not, started to emerge. Mary Caponegro wrote about a married couple trying to regain communication before it was too late and addresses the notion of whether it is never too late. Richard Powers wrote about the effects of technology and artificial minds on our personal abilities to form relationships and how to deal with loneliness. Postmodernism has many complex qualities, such as going against expectations, but it seems that post-postmodernism is stepping back a little from that and addressing the issues within ourselves rather than the qualities of literature.

Works Cited

Caponegro, Mary. All Fall Down. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009. Print.

Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2. New York: Picador, 1995. Print.