1Jonathan Baumbach’s writing spans most of the postmodern era. His first novel, A Man to Conjure With, was released in 1965. He then published eleven novels and four short story collections until his death in 2019. All through this fifty-four-year period, he cultivated a writing style associating the formal and aesthetic experimentations of his fellow postmodernists (both on the micro and on the macro level) with a focus on the potentialities of metatextual narratives. His postmodern aesthetics, despite lacking the strain of linguistic experimentation typical of many of his fellow writers, has been a steady one in his writing career. In his fiction as well as in his various books of criticism, he problematizes form, structure and language, contributing alongside Coover, Gass, and Pynchon to setting some of the (admittedly loose) parameters of the postmodern endeavor.
- 1 “[Movies] occupy me, the good and the bad alike, like secret dreams” (Baumbach, 1987 16).
2Much like his contemporaries, Baumbach’s bibliography is marked by recurring motifs, the most significant of which is cinema. His personal fascination with film is an important component of his experiments with fiction and operates as his very own medium of “replenishment,” to reuse John Barth’s analogy.1 Film scenarios and the situation of the viewer in relation to what plays on screen—both metaphorically and literally, in the actual movie theater—have influenced his writing throughout the years.
- 2 Reruns was translated into French by Marc Chénetier in 1983 as Ce soir on joue mes rêves.
3In 1974, he published Reruns2 with the newly-founded Fiction Collective, a publishing cooperative he created with fellow authors and critics Ronald Sukenick, Peter Spielberg, and B. H. Friedman, dedicated to anti-realistic fiction. Divided into thirty-three loosely (and sometimes not) connected micro-narratives, this novel follows the adventures of Jack, the first-person narrator, who appears to be an avatar of Baumbach. On the first page, he presents himself as a writer, “guide,” and “reporter” who endeavors to take the reader on a journey through the metafictional exploration of his past. The chapters that follow are thirty-three numbered dream sequences, nights in which Jack recounts mostly ludicrous episodes of his life in the form of dreams, using cinematic scenes, tropes and archetypes. Each night is more extravagant and more illogical than the next, without the narrative ever returning to the metadiegetic level of the explanatory prologue that precedes them.
4Coming out at the same time as Baumbach started writing a film column for the Partisan Review, Reruns uses cinematic motifs and codes to play with the recognizable conventions of mass culture while experimenting with dynamic techniques of storytelling. Marc Chénetier, in a yet to be published article entitled “Films, Dreams, Writing and the Real in Jonathan Baumbach’s Reruns” calls his prose “overcoded” as it offers variations on several recognizable movie genres like the western, the slasher or the “corny” romantic movie, by using “clichés, anthologized sequences [and] unavoidable types.” This came to be Baumbach’s recognizable style: a typically postmodern form of reflexive metafiction, his narratives finding echoes in his biography, and in genre cinema. By writing Reruns at the intersection of these two distinctive modes, Baumbach explores parody and pastiche with the help of the reference to the film productions of the late twentieth century.
- 3 Before being published in 2011 as Dreams of Molly, the novel appeared in the form of an excerpt ent (...)
5Jonathan Baumbach’s last novel, Dreams of Molly, whose title is a humorous hint at his first book, a critical essay about postwar US literature called The Landscape of Nightmare, was released in 2011. It illustrates Baumbach’s late postmodern style, insofar as it plays with the tenets of traditional postmodern aesthetics while at the same time distancing itself from them in an almost satirical, or at the very least reflexive, manner. It is considered by reviewers as a sequel to Reruns: the novel begins with an epigraph from the latter and is narrated by a character named Jack who is looking for his ex-wife Molly in a series of cinematic dream sequences divided into numbered nights, from thirty-five to one hundred and one.3 Although there are no explicit references to Reruns, the proximity between the latter’s last chapter (“33rd Night”) and Dream of Molly’s opening one (“35th Night”) confirms once and for all the hypothesis of consecutive novels. However, despite its very similar premise, Dreams of Molly differs significantly from Reruns. Jack is older, if not wiser, and the novel does not quite pick up where the previous one left off: one night is missing between the two books (the 34th), and the events of the first one are mostly ignored in the second, except when they come back in the form of echoes or are arbitrarily rewritten.
- 4 His last book is a collection of short stories entitled The Pavilion of Former Wives, published in (...)
6In his 2006 essay On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Edward Said theorizes the transformation in style that occurs at the end of an artist’s career. For Said, the work and thought of great artists “acquire a new idiom” that he calls their “late style,” involving “a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberate productiveness going against” (16-17). Borrowing the phrase from Adorno, Said suggests that this tension “abjures mere bourgeois aging and […] insists on the increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism” (24) through the manipulation of form, “in but oddly apart from the present” (29), granting entrance to death, but only in a refracted mode (29), and eluding easy understanding (122). Published thirty-seven years after Reruns, Dreams of Molly, Jonathan Baumbach’s last novel,4 exhibits the author’s late style that merges a retrospective reflection on postmodern aesthetics with a radicalization of some of its experiments that, somewhat paradoxically, allow him to distance himself from them.
7This late style, as exemplified in Dreams of Molly, is fueled by a double movement on the part of the aging author. By choosing to write a continuation of one of his most metafictional and personal novels, he is simultaneously looking backward at his past and at postmodernism. As he reshapes his literary practice by toying less with language and fragmentation, and more with affect and the human experience, he is looking toward what comes after postmodernism. Looking forward, he faces the possibility of death and oblivion in a creative gesture that opens his prose up to new experiments.
8After publishing three books of criticism—The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1965), an extended version of his thesis; Moderns and Contemporaries: Nine Masters of the Short Story (1968); Writers as Teachers/Teachers as Writers (1970)—and two quite successful novels (A Man to Conjure With in 1965; What Comes Next in 1968), Jonathan Baumbach did not expect to struggle so much to find a home for the manuscript of his next novel, Reruns, initially entitled Dreambook, then Jack in the Box. It was rejected thirty-four times over a period of two years. In the autobiographical notice he wrote for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, he analyzes the possible reasons for the difficulties he encountered then:
Was it the nature of the book? It seemed to me extremely accessible, entertaining even. […] On five occasions, young editors wanted to publish the book only to be overruled from on top. Publishing houses were becoming more cautious perhaps, wanted fiction that was recognizably commercial. […] The story of how the Fiction Collective got started has been told so many times, it has ceased to be interesting or even true. I discovered that my problem with Reruns was not unique, that a number of other writers whose work I admired, had had similar experiences. After close to a year of discussions, we decided to form a publishing cooperative for serious fiction. To publish the kind of fiction—risky, imaginative, original—that most commercial houses seemed not to want to chance. Reruns came out with the Fiction Collective in October 1974, three years after its completion. (Baumbach, 1987 26)
9Baumbach’s trouble with finding a home for Reruns illustrates the mainstream presses’ reticence towards postmodern aesthetics and experiments with form and content. Although this particular novel is indeed accessible and entertaining, it does pose several problems to the average reader, making the reading experience one of constantly thwarted expectations in a collection of fragmented vignettes. These seem to inhabit the space of the book in a completely unmoored fashion. Baumbach experiments with flashes of memories scattered across the most unstable of environments: dreams. Endowing his narrator-protagonist with attributes from his own biography, he posits his own novel as the product of a potentially mad, almost certainly shameless, and probably unreliable craftsman.
10The world of Reruns corresponds to what Brian McHale called a heterotopia, borrowing the term from Michel Foucault (McHale, 1987 44). In the novel, space is continually constructed and deconstructed as the reading progresses, using strategies of juxtaposition, interpolation, superimposition, and misattribution. This process spatializes on the page what McHale sees as the specificities of the postmodern literary space (56). Baumbach’s use of film tropes that borrow from various genres, associated with the unstable nature of the dream, further contributes to problematizing the process of the representation of reality—something that Linda Hutcheon theorizes as one of the significant features of the postmodern (223)—without sacrificing the potential of the affective response of the reader, something that has been intuited by scholars like Mary K. Holland as a possible tipping point between postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics (1-2). Baumbach is consequently simultaneously engaging with and critically distancing himself from the postmodern endeavors of his contemporaries. Where, according to McHale, postmodern texts generally “hesitate between the literal and the allegorical” (1987 82), Reruns testifies to their superimposition thanks to Baumbach’s use of polysemy and a multiplicity of converging and diverging storylines.
11However, this complexity is never quite rendered on the scale of the sentence in the novel. Where some postmodern writers favor what McHale deems “deliberate nonfluency” in the wake of their modernist precursors like Stein, Joyce, or even Flaubert (McHale, 1987 154), Baumbach experiments with the polysemy of locutions through the radicalization of metaphors. Chénetier attributes Baumbach’s relatively straightforward prose to a transfer of the linguistic manipulations typical of postmodernism to the movie matter. Baumbach uses language to represent myriad technical effects by playing with pace, repetitions or distortion of time. According to Chénetier, he also toys with:
systematic displacements, protean characters trading names, identities, fragments of personality and identification signs and tags, the diverse manias of disguise, mark and accoutrement, a fascination for the grotesque, the bloated, the surreal […] [and] an unending flow of transformations, disappearances and metamorphoses.
12Another marker of his postmodern aesthetics is Baumbach’s use of carnivalesque forms nestled in his hallucinatory dream sequences. This is not a new practice, as dreams have been one of the trademarks of his prose since the beginning of his career. According to Baumbach himself, his first novel, A Man to Conjure With, is distinguished by the retelling of his protagonist’s dreams (Baumbach, 1987 24). Critic Jerome Klinkowitz, in his analysis of What Comes Next (1968), Baumbach’s second novel, sees his efforts to blur the line between the protagonist’s dreams and waking life that both end up becoming nightmarish as a radicalization of this device (183).
13Baumbach’s writing in Reruns destabilizes the ontology of the world he projects, lays bare his process of world construction, all the while practicing a form of reflexive metafiction that, instead of “duping” the reader into a faulty level of emotional engagement (McHale, 1987 103) gradually induces an affective response thanks to a dual process of recognition and projection: the reader’s recognition of and investment in the familiar cinematic scenes and patterns offered by his copious reference to genre and B-movies, on the one hand, and his reflexive writing, fueled by autobiographical allusions, psychoanalytic explorations, and the projection onto the page of the practice of his craft, on the other hand.
14Reruns functions primarily on the mode of recognition, all the more so since, as Chénetier notes, many postmodern writers like Coover or Hawkes have represented the relationship between films and dreams on the page before Baumbach. The movie scenarios that Jack dreams through are all meant to be recognized by the reader as belonging to long-established and highly codified genres. The familiarity then experienced by the reader, potentialized by the regular intimacy they might associate with the dream-chapter structure, encourages them to have a somewhat critical response to the cinematic intertext, something the postmodern literary experiments generally trigger. According to Chénetier, however, the use of films in Reruns contributes, in a minor way, to what he calls a “mise-en-abyme of absence,” an “imaginaire au cube,” that draws the reader’s attention to the metafictional and to the reflexive aspects of the novel, thus conflating phenomena of recognition and projection, and so multiplying the reader’s engagement with the book.
15Dreams of Molly operates the opposite balance, focusing primarily on projection: Baumbach uses reflexive metafiction more intensely here, not just as a pretext to experiment with form—as is mainly the case in Reruns—but as an alternatively de-structuring and restructuring tool within a slightly more stable world than the one presented in Reruns. Contrary to the first novel, in which the majority of night-chapters are independent from others in the book (although there are echoes between them and recurring motifs), Dream of Molly presents a more traditional linearity, each chapter being connected to the previous one in a straightforward storyline. Jack’s adventures within the science-fictional or detective realms are not to be merely recognized as a play on codified narratives, but as stemming from a doubly-potentialized intertext, that of mass fiction, on the one hand, and that of Baumbach’s own oeuvre, on the other hand, never resolving the contradiction, the tension between “disenchantment and pleasure” that Edward Said identifies as a prerogative of late style (122). Baumbach’s return to linearity might even be considered as harking back to what Said considered the unashamed fallibility—but not failure—of late style (122).
16Jonathan Baumbach’s oeuvre is, maybe more than many others in the postmodern endeavor, concerned with time and memory, and so with repetition. Each novel and collection deals, to one extent or another, with their protagonist’s relationship to time and to history, be it personal or collective, which structures their frequent journeys through memory lane. In an interview with John Graham, Baumbach describes A Man to Conjure With as the story of a man “who tries to make sense of his life twenty years after the disintegration of a marriage,” and who is “trying to return to what he left behind” (Graham and Garrett 216). He then later confesses: “one of my haunting themes is memory. One of the obsessions of A Man to Conjure With is he begins to keep a diary long after the event. And he becomes obsessed with recalling things exactly as they were” (217).
17In the first third of Reruns, Jack delves into childhood and teenage memories that unmistakably recall Baumbach’s own experiences in school and with girls. If the second novel is less of a book about memories, it however constitutes the writing of the memory of a book. Both novels are literary explorations of some sort of postmodern Proustian backwards glance, except the writer’s attempt to conjure up the sensations of the past go awry as they conflate with his fascination for movies, agents of disorder. However, where Reruns encourages the reader to adopt an analytical stance toward the book through the proliferating cinematic intertext, Dreams of Molly places them de facto at an additional distance, by adding another intertextual and critical layer between them and the text.
18The prologue of Reruns that sets (albeit loosely) the terms of the narrative, is included in the first of the three parts the novel is divided into, right after the title page that indicates: “Part One.” It is also immediately followed, without a page jump (contrary to the other chapters in the book), by the first chapter, “First Night.” This juxtaposition allows Baumbach to start the novel with a metaleptic transgression, blurring the line between the different levels of narration and emphasizing the importance of the embedded text compared to its hypertext, what we would suppose to be the referential level grounded in reality. Here, the disruption of the narrative hierarchy is the first of many postmodern metafictional gestures, radicalized in subsequent novels and short stories like “From the Life of the President” (The Life and Times of Major Fiction, 1987), Separate Hours (1990) and Seven Wives (1994). In these narratives, the protagonists also experience unsatisfactory marriages and try to reinject meaning into their realities through the exploration or recognition of the significance of their dreams. The juxtaposition of the prologue and the dreams might also be interpreted as the ultimate rejection of a structuring embedding text, and so of all textual hierarchies. After all, according to McHale, “disclaimers [in postmodern fiction] are not to be trusted” (1987 141).
19The structure of Reruns and Dreams of Molly, both divided into three parts and numbered nights, gives an illusion of order that is soon dispelled by the permeability of each section in Reruns and by the jamming of the order of the chapter titles in Dreams of Molly, which, however, does not alter the linearity of the story in both cases. For all intents and purposes, the books strive to recreate the failure of memory. In what Chénetier deems “an unreliable parodically Dostoevskean prologue,” Jack even issues a warning to the reader in Reruns:
Memory is insufficient. Recollections are not to be trusted. The remembered past, even if real, is only one face of the reality. A false face at that—an acceptable public face. I sit here, bare-assed on a yellow-cracked toilet seat in a private bathroom adjoining pisshole of a hotel room—a subterranean draft shriveling my parts—and re-dream my life. The following is a memoir of my exile. Don’t take the word too literally. The word ‘exile’; the word ‘memoir.’ Take no word. (1)
20Every attempt from the reader to re-establish order or logic is vain as image associations and cinematic genre proximity overrule any form of chronological order. The narrative is marked by the absence of rules that characterizes the oneiric context. Throughout the novel, Baumbach continuously disjoints narrative and narrated time, creating moments where temporality is on the verge of being abolished. The absence of linearity in Reruns in which, according to Chénetier, “nothing seems further removed from [its] texture than the double fallacy of heres and nows, or theres and thens in a book where they can never be pinned down,” might be ascribed both to the oneiric quality of the narrative, as well as to Baumbach’s attempt to accurately depict the labyrinthine structure of memory. Worse still, most chapters end abruptly, ambiguously, leaving the reader’s few expectations unfulfilled. They are completely unable to establish a reliable timeline of the events. Memory is never an agent of stability in Reruns. According to Chénetier, Baumbach systematically “assault[s], crush[es], dynamit[es]” “the appearances of reality conferred to the narrative by memory,” “reduc[ing] [it] to skeletons or regularly recurring motifs, rebonds, echoes, reprints.” The text appears to be characterized by “potential stabilities and points of anchorage [that] are exploded by negatives and reverses, fragments, shadows, disquieting hyperplasticities, gooey developments and soft, sticky objects that make diegesis slippery and funfair like a Coney Island mimesis” (Chénetier).
21Logically, repetitions and echoes abound in Baumbach’s fiction, often modelled on cinematic remakes and, of course, “reruns”, something he explains in his autobiographical piece: “[Reruns] was held together by recurring configurations—the same things happening again and again to the central character in different metaphoric disguise” (1987 26). Dreams of Molly may be understood as a hybrid between a sequel and a rewriting (or remake) of Reruns—as the author oscillates between a regime of iteration (precisely that used in Reruns itself) and one of variation, in which the first novel serves as the major intertext of the second. Baumbach himself initially entitled “RERUNS2” then “Reruns Rezoomed” the parts from the manuscript he published in The Brooklyn Rail in 2007 and 2009-2010. Several characters from the latter also appear in the former, like Lenny, Jack’s childhood friend, and, of course, Molly, one of Jack’s ex-wives, who gets kidnapped more or less of her own will in both novels. Some passages of Dreams of Molly, like Jack’s encounter with soldiers during the 96th night, seem to be rewritten versions of scenes from Reruns. During the 44th night, Jack even tells Molly: “Hey, it’s like déjà vu” (34). The worlds of the two books function as intertextual spaces (McHale, 1987 57), both on the macro and micro levels, insofar as the communication (of plot, characters and motifs) between them is never stable in terms of intensity.
22Jack’s project to “rerun” the past in the 1974 novel (1) is potentialized in Dreams of Molly which seeks to to “rezoom” Reruns (Baumbach 2007) through displacements, repetitions and reversals. Donald, Molly’s new husband, is presented as Jack’s “replacement” in the 43rd night and is described wearing one of Jack’s old jackets (31). In the process of “rezooming” Reruns, Baumbach also takes a closer look at the cinematic material he used in the first novel. So close that he actually exposes the material’s exaggerations and, ultimately, its absurdity. The detective-movie chase is ridiculed as Jack decides to pursue the pink Cadillac that has been following him once he realizes he has forgotten where he was going (58). The science fiction villain is a female extraterrestrial succubus who wants to breed half human children (53). The horror movie scene takes place in the very unsubtle “Unit 13 at the Hope’s End Motel” (52). The efforts of the “students at a counter-cultural college for gifted misfits in New Hampshire that specialized in the study of unseen realities, or some such thing” (69) from the 55th night are mocked: “I admired their courage, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something foolhardy, even self-destructive in continuing their pursuit” (69). The Eyes Wide Shut-inspired erotic thriller takes a farcical turn as Jack visits the lazily mysterious Nameless Club where one guest is described wearing a very unsexy orangutan mask and another a Nicole Kidman one; here, Baumbach goes as far as exposing the scene’s artificiality: “it could have been the set of a vampire movie” (61). Finally, the naiveté of the spy movie protagonist is ridiculed: “I was hired and subsequently trained by an ultra-secret subgovernment organization as an assassin. […] For some reason, perhaps shyness, I never bothered to verify the credentials of the shadowy men that hired me” (93). Jack’s circulation between movie genres, whose absurdity is highlighted by the prose, makes Dreams of Molly a form of paratextual commentary on Reruns and on the erosion of film clichés, not through postmodern irony and word play, but through a hybridization of genre writing and proto-critical theory. Dreams of Molly, to an extent, is a critique of Reruns and of itself through the exploration of eroded genres.
23In Dreams of Molly, the prelude to the dreams within the text is replaced by a paratextual gesture. Baumbach uses a quote from the prologue of Reruns as the epigraph to the novel and the only introduction to its specific context and structure:
- 5 Here, “(no pleasant place to be)” has been removed by Baumbach (Reruns 1).
I am here without wife or woman,5 your guide and reporter, a hostage to the habits of rerunning the dead past in the cause of waking from the dream.
When Molly left, everything burned. I was vulnerable to the touch of air. (7)
- 6 Here, “everything burned” has been removed by Baumbach (Reruns 1).
24The use of the last two sentences, as well as their repetition in one of its final sections6 epitomizes the complex relationship of proximity and distance between the two novels. The paratextual relationship between the two books is stressed by the title of the 2011 novel that unequivocally refers to the plot of Reruns. Moreover, if Jack is “redream[ing] [his] life […] ready to begin […] pencil sharpened to a fine point” in Reruns (1), in Dreams of Molly, he is “dreaming” he is “in Italy at the Villa Mondare, which was a made-up place in any event, writing the first sentence of a fictional memoir” (11), making the two books tied by the act of writing.
25Dreams of Molly, despite retaining many of the structural characteristics of Reruns, tones down the first novel’s very postmodern parody and ironic distance in aid of a more affective representation of and reaction to the passing of time on Jack’s part. Whereas Reruns’ relationship to pace is greatly influenced by the succession of unfinished vignettes that borrow from accumulating cinematic tropes, Dreams of Molly adopts the painstakingly slow pace of writing. In the first chapter entitled “35th Night,” Jack narrates himself stuck in his room at the Villa Mondare, sitting at his desk, suffering from writer’s block, while he’s waiting for his wife (or ex-wife) who is getting ready in the bathroom:
I reinvested my concentration on the first sentence of my new book, a sentence so important in the scheme of things, it produced near-unbearable anxiety just to be in its presence, a sentence that, if it were doing its job, which was to segue between the distant past and the relatively near past, would probably need to resist conclusion indefinitely. (11)
26The mise-en-abyme of the act of writing, described here as a connecting gesture, metafictionalizes the book’s relation to time and contributes to setting a pace that differs greatly from that of Reruns. It is emphasized by the fact that Jack mentions that he is writing “a fictional memoir” (11). Here, the interruption of the writing, resisting closure, doesn’t lead to an endless deferral in the form of slapstick scenes, chases and sexual encounters. Well, it does, but Jack’s increased self-awareness in Dreams of Molly—after all, he’s not a young man anymore—allows him to push through the distractions to get to the page:
I had always been impatient. Everyone knew I had a history of impatience. Anecdotes abounded, whispered exaggerations. As soon as I started a piece of writing—story, novel, memoir, poem, shopping list—I felt driven to complete the job. […] And yet more often than not the trip itself, the daily skirmishes with the page, has its own grudgingly acknowledged pleasure.
I returned to my chore. […] The sentence I was contending with stalled. Plagued by distraction, I wondered if all the scholars at the Villa Mondare had a former wife […]. (11-12)
27This winding relationship to time in Dreams of Molly may be explained by the fact that, rather than mostly looking at the past, as Reruns does, the novel is looking at the future—Baumbach’s, and that of postmodern literature—through a deconstructive, metafictional lens.
28When Baumbach published Dreams of Molly in 2011, theorists had been announcing the death of postmodernism and the rise of its post-postmodernist heir since 1993 (Hoberek 233). The mourning of this era of deconstructive poetics further intensified around the 2000s, notably with Andrew Hoberek’s “After Postmodernism” (2007) and Mary K. Holland’s Succeeding Postmodernism (2013). In his article, Hoberek posits that post-postmodern texts “depart in some way from postmodern forms” (237) not through dramatic aesthetic statement, as postmodernists did with their predecessors, but through “uneven, tentative, local shifts that in some cases reach back to the postmodern period, […] at the intersections of specific stylistic and historical phenomena” (241). Periodization and aesthetic departures from the postmodern trends is key to identify those shifts. Although Dreams of Molly can hardly be divorced from postmodern poetics, it nonetheless offers a critical look at some of its late twentieth-century iterations, as well as a glimpse into what might be coming next in terms of experimentation. It is located on a spectrum or, more accurately, a metaxis (to use Plato’s image) between postmodernism and post-postmodernism.
- 7 It might be a humorous hint at the thirty-four rejections from presses received by Baumbach for Rer (...)
29Theorist Jeremy Green sees late postmodernism as a way of reckoning with what he terms the “explosion” of consensual reality, “encourage[ing] the invention of new ways of engaging with a hallucinatory social reality” (212). In Dreams of Molly, the dream-device is radicalized compared to Reruns as no prologue serves as a frame narrative in which the dreams are embedded. Only the epigraph, a slightly amended quotation from the prologue of Reruns, establishes a similar framing of the dream-narrative. This is emphasized by the title and content of the first chapter, “35th Night,” with which the novel opens in medias res. However, the novel does not start where Reruns ended, as the 34th night that would have been expected to follow the last chapter of the previous novel that appears to have been elided.7 The absence of frame appears as the first deconstruction of the fictional space, and allows Jack to engage with linearity in a way that he could not in Reruns. This seems to be a reaffirmation of the resolutely postmodern and experimental aesthetics of Baumbach’s work, as well as a way for the author to engage with the formal issue of linearity (or absence thereof) reflexively and critically.
30With this disappearance of the frame comes the powerlessness of the figure of the writer who does not appear to be in charge anymore. Instead of “honcho,” a slang term for “leader” that was used as a nickname for Jack by other characters in Reruns, some now use the term “cowboy,” linguistically removing him from a position of power. The figure of the author, ambiguous—to say the least—when it comes to the late postmodern period, takes center stage in Dreams of Molly, but often to be knocked off his pedestal. Baumbach plays with idioms by using numerous syllepses in the novel, as if entrusting the reader with his own semantic prerogatives by abolishing the difference between the literal and the metaphorical: “you have a long way to go fill Donald’s shoes,” Molly tells Jack, summoning the symbolically threatening figure of her new husband. To which the narrator remarks: “When she said that, I realized that I was at the time actually wearing a pair of Donald’s shoes” (37).
31Baumbach’s late postmodernism uses the dichotomy between presence and absence that has informed much of the poetics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as an intellectual and aesthetic progression towards death. Molly’s constant apparitions and disappearances mirror the writer’s (Jack’s and Baumbach’s) quest for meaning in a resolutely meaningless world. For example, much like the real world of the early 2000s, Jack’s reality is plagued by war, echoing the conflict in Iraq (and Reruns’ own reckoning with the absurdity of the Vietnam war). Elsewhere, small towns have become bankrupt because of an economic crisis evoking that of 2008. Finally, religious extremism and ultra-capitalism conflate in an often-deserted America that only bears rare ludicrous landmarks, from the “Church of Laundered Money” to the “Puritan Farms” self-service gas station. Jack goes as far as doubting, despite Baumbach’s obvious social commentary on the state of his own country, that he is indeed in the United States (128).
32Jack frequently seems to be parodying postmodern poetics in the novel, particularly in the passages dedicated to writing and art-making. For example, Leonora, the “avant-garde visual artist” (14) that Jack meets in Italy, is said to paint “black-on-black nightscape[s]” (17). He mocks maximalist aesthetics and inaccessible prose (“I reread my opening sentence in progress, which ran two pages without conclusion. Which seemed to have lost a few words in my absence” [ 15]); fragmentation (“I gave up my unresolved sentence” [15]); the obsession with metaphor and abstraction (“I thought it might be fun to write in a room that had an erotic subtext though I worried that the prospect of real sex might become distracting” [16]); digression and vacuous prose (“When you’re riding in a car with a silent person, there is a temptation to fill the void. I told her about the first time I had been to Maine and the story branched off in areas I had not intended to enter” [49]); and celebrity writers in performance (“my writerly outfit of workshirt and jeans” [16]). He also makes fun of the fickleness of trends and literary movements: “I’ve seen the new regulations—you’re going to love them when you see them, lots more freedom of initiative, they just ask for creativity—though they don’t actually go into effect until 3:00 this afternoon” (26).
33Jonathan Baumbach’s late postmodern voice is characterized by an increasingly reflexive metafictional prose. Oftentimes, it is self-deprecating, as the author pokes fun at himself by mocking his alter ego (“I tend to be self-involved” [90]). In Dreams of Molly, the reader embarks on a stunted epistemological quest to reconcile mechanisms of identification and differentiation entrenched in Baumbach’s own biography and affective life, as illustrated when Jack becomes enraged as Molly tells him to read Donald’s book and follow his example: “And so I made my long delayed move which led to a hectic chase around the apartment, chairs and tables flying in our wake, everything that had been together coming apart, questions and answers, unexpressed feelings, pages of a long discarded uncompleted manuscript” (38). The zeugmatic enumeration hints at Baumbach’s conception of a writing practice that is tightly bound to the author’s personal life.
34The text reflects Baumbach’s experience as a writer and as an aging man, while simultaneously drawing upon material that he already introduced in Reruns. From the very first chapter, characters (Molly), objects (a “selectric typewriter” [12]), and memories (“trying to remember what she looked like that fateful day fifteen years ago when she announced it was over between us” [12]) confine Jack (and Baumbach) to the past of Reruns, much like the epigraph and the structure of the book do. Contrary to Reruns, however, in which Jack’s announced purpose was to “rerun the dead past” (1), this new (and older) version of the protagonist is set to look at the future: “Perhaps I’d seen nothing, but my expectations, minimal in the best seasons, glowed with promise” (13). Where Reruns replays, in a carnivalesque way, events inspired by Baumbach’s own life underlined in his autobiography—the need to seduce girls, to be the hero of his own story, his love for cinema, his numerous failed marriages—Dreams of Molly offers in its “rezooming” a closer reading, a literary exegesis of the various performances Jack puts on as an aging male writer.
35In Dreams of Molly, Jack tackles old age and its manifestations in the male subject. Despite the use of the narrative past tense, Jack eschews a completely retrospective glance by reverting to his 15-year-old self on the 101st and last night of the novel. The 60-year-old narrator’s gesture then becomes nothing short of proleptic, prophetic even: “I knew what was awaiting me, remembered in thinly veiled outline the essential details of the next forty-five years of my life. […] But at this moment I was just one day past fifteen and all of my failed relationships were still out there in the murky distance of the future time” (135).
36Initially, however, Jack tries to put on a bloated performance of masculinity in a strong man act on an Italian street during which he “huff[s] and puff[s] and groan[s],” provoking in his female partner “scream[s] [of] pleasure” (21). However, when he later has to perform in front of an archetypal figure of masculinity, a carabinieri, he fails (23). He also attempts to follow the script of male comradery that is offered to him in the various movie scenes he traverses. After getting rid of the female alien, he is invited to celebrate with the team of scientists who assisted him: “I agreed to accompany them to a private sex club […]. Killing the dangerous alien, they told me, would not seem like the accomplishment it was unless they celebrated it appropriately” (59). The club will turn out to be a parody of itself (61-63).
37The fact is that Jack has grown old. He is described experiencing the humiliations of the failing male body. After he was diagnosed with priapism by Molly’s new husband Donald, who wrote a self-help book laughably entitled “You Are The Best You Even If You Don’t Know It” at the beginning of the novel (36), he faces the ills associated with old age, from urinary incontinence (“my pants had an alarming stain below the crotch” [88]), to faulty mechanics (“I had a broomstick with me to use as a walking stick” [115]), failing memory (“I knock at the door of memory and no one answers” [109]), and erectile dysfunction (“I […] told her I had meds in the glove compartment of the car that enhanced sexual performance” [53]). These are accompanied by Jack’s failure to produce a manuscript, to “get it right” (136), which appears, particularly in the last part of the novel, as a prolongation of his failure as a husband, a father, a man and, possibly, as a writer.
- 8 “In the twenty-first century, we have seen a proliferation of novels that shift their foci toward t (...)
- 9 The first chapter shows Molly and the narrator playing hide and seek between the room where he writ (...)
38In the same way many theorists, along with Linda Hutcheon, understand postmodernism as a continuation—or at least not a rupture with—modernism (4), Baumbach’s later work shows that despite the many harbingers of the death of postmodernism since the 1990s, it has in many ways survived in what came next. Dreams of Molly straddles late postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics. On the one hand, it illustrates a continuation or a “spectral repetition” (294), to quote Clayton Crockett, of metafictional and self-reflexive strategies. On the other hand, it gestures toward the post-postmodern paradigm described by Mary K. Holland in Succeeding Postmodernism as a shift toward presence and the real, and away from absence and the word (7).8 Baumbach aims at deconstructing the epistemological regime of the novel from within the metafictional frame. More than just showing the ropes to the reader, he seems to be handing those to them. By exposing the workings of literary inspiration through the continuously present and absent quality of Molly,9 he shows his own failure to summon the muse and make her stay: “The terms of my residence in your quarters—read the small print in your contract—is to be in the shadows of the room during working hours. If you turn the ugly overhead on, I’ll have to leave” (14). Through his very own brand of reflexive metafiction, brought over from earlier postmodern aesthetics, Baumbach engages in Dreams of Molly in a constant renegotiation of his relationship to the text that also includes the reader, notably through overexplaining metaphors and tropes, something that Holland notes as one of the markers of post-postmodernism (14). Consider this other example from the opening chapter of the novel:
“You can turn around when I tell you to,” she said. “Deal?”
I nodded my agreement, used the time standing with my back to her trying to remember what she looked like that fateful day fifteen years ago when she announced it was over between us... No image offered itself.
“What happens, Molly, if I turn around?” I asked, eager to see her even with the unattractive plastic bonnet over her hair.
I meant to keep my part of the bargain, but the extended silence intensified my curiosity. I sensed her shadow moving stealthily in the direction of the bed.
I turned my head warily, barely an inch, then turned back quickly, catching a glimpse of red dress as evanescent as a flash bulb explosion.
Perhaps I’d seen nothing, but my expectations, minimal in the best of seasons, glowed with promise. (13)
39Through this contemporary retelling of the worn-down myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Baumbach takes a humorous dig at the image of the sacrificed muse and of the heartbroken artist traditionally ascending from the underworld, with the mention of the “unattractive plastic bonnet,” on the one hand, and Jack’s immobility, on the other hand. Molly’s disappearing figure is even compared to “a flash bulb explosion,” the prosaic image somewhat ridiculing the woman’s poetic vanishing in the original story. Here, and all through the novel, the trope is rendered inoperative by its repetition almost ad nauseam, Jack perennially failing to write as Molly constantly disappears and reappears.
40One of Baumbach’s most significant narrative gestures toward post-postmodernism in Dreams of Molly is to restore continuity by displacing fragmentation from the narrative level to that of the setting and the characters. Contrary to Reruns, the chapters relate consecutive events. Even when the progression of chapter titles is interrupted, the diegesis remains linear—as linear as dreams may be. The novel returns to an aesthetics Linda Hutcheon deemed incompatible with postmodern writing, in the form of a formal and thematic “unifying coherence” and an acknowledgement of the possibility of closure (12). Baumbach challenges the reader to think about literary experimentation in different ways than they used to during the postmodern era. He does so, for instance, by playing with the chapter titles, giving the impression that the narrative is non-chronological, while the story is told in a linear way throughout. For example, in “Part Two (Confessions)” (82), the 68th Night is followed by the 67th, itself followed by the 70th, without the narration seeming to operate any analepsis or prolepsis. This encourages the reader to be wary of the craftsman’s tricks.
41Contrary to the last sentence of Reruns that seems to deny closure by suddenly switching narrators and reshuffling the rules of the narrative (“In the room he had given up, it was rumored, the friends of his dreams were making an old movie, a rerun of his former life” [160]), Dreams of Molly’s last paragraph offers the possibility of a diegetic ending: “Nevertheless, at fifteen years and a day, setting hypocrisy aside, all I really wanted in this life—the be-all and end-all of my childhood aspirations—was to get my ashes hauled, get laid, get screwed, get fucked, get going” (137). The movement of the text in this passage hints at a potential step taken beyond the limits of the narrative, of the page, and of the novel. Baumbach opens up Jack’s story—and his own—to renewal and happenstance in this comical anaphora based on colloquial locutions describing sexual activity. He proposes a marriage of pleasure and language in this climactic and impudently polysemic last word. However, true to his postmodern impertinence, he also forcefully exhorts the reader, who will understand the last three locutions as imperative forms, to go their own way, and to experience life beyond the page.
42Baumbach’s late style is a form of writing that looks directly at death, that of postmodernism, and his own. Dreams of Molly, sequel, rewriting, “rezooming” of Reruns, Baumbach summons the past in a nostalgic gesture—toward youth and postmodern aesthetics alike—while keeping his style future-oriented, toward something that is bound to outlast him. Straddling different aesthetics, poetics and time periods, his late style stems from his unblinking look at his imminent dissolution, as both man and artist that recalls Patricia Waugh’s description of the Nietzschean origins of postmodern aesthetics and poetics:
Aesthetic activity allows us the biological delight of experiencing the ultimate impulse of the will to power as chaos coming into form: Dionysian fragmentation of energy willing itself into coherence. Order must be created out of oneself for the gods have fled, metaphysical certainties are in disarray and only one’s own bodily desire, disciplined and aesthetically shaped, may provide a foundation for truth. Life is the supreme artistic challenge and the human body both the material to be shaped and the source of shaping energy. Self is an endless gathering and interpretation of fragments of experience; this is a postmodern self which is still recognizably a Romantic one. (8)
43The abrupt closure of each chapter from Dreams of Molly, borrowing from the cinematic cliffhanger, encourages the reader to look at endings in a slightly slanted way, to see in the absence of fulfillment a step taken toward myriad literary configurations that he invites them to seize. Life and art stem from Baumbach’s ability to look at the likelihood of death and oblivion. Much like Jack who, deserted in his prison cell by interrogators who do not believe him useful anymore, keeps making up stories in his mind, Baumbach’s late postmodern style is one of excess and misbehavior that impertinently claims the possibility of immortality, even just for laughs.
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