English Studies Forum

Losing Your Head or, Parody and Postmodernism: Knowing When to Stop (A Critical Fiction in Three Parts)

Zachary Dobbins

Part One

“What is post-postmodernism?” No, really.

Really, no: “no, really.”

What’s popomo?

Oh, mopop.

Oh, no.

No real(X)ty.

X = i, I

What is popomopoopoop?

(x) don’t care, know.

Know really.

For real, though.

F. oriole, thou, carest not.

That’s a good point. No?

Really?

Oh, Mopop. What is you?

Part Two

“The Postmodern Imagination and Beyond: Writing for the 21st Century: ‘What are we imagining, and how?’ This site explores the postmodern imagination as well as the postmodern understanding of the nature/role of imagination in contemporary literature and culture. What is post-postmodernism?”

“Parody: Submissions to this forum might address all forms of parody (from Chaucer to This is Spinal Tap and The Onion) and/or parody as literary/socio-cultural/political critique (from Aristophanes to The Daily Show). We are interested in manuscripts that theorize parody, as well as those that are themselves parodies.”

Part Three

The kid must have been seven, eight when it happened. Horrible, just terrible. The whole thing is unreal, in fact. As if in a trance, hands rummaging through the bag, the kid just walks into the classroom.

That’s right, the room has no gender. The author of this piece unapologetically apologizes for having assigned the room no gender. Having come under fire for failed, past attempts at representing gendered rooms—some garbage about doorknobs and hallways the critics just could not drop—the author now plays it safe. Especially with issues of agency, authority—discourse, too, no doubt. As every twenty-seven year old professional academic who has a considerably myopic perspective on imaginative literature and no discernible convictions, moral or otherwise—and a parodic sense of self?—well knows, these are serious issues. Issues such as these. These issues of ideas and the people they don’t concern. The people for whom ideas don’t concern. Or touch. Or care about. The people or the ideas? Doesn’t matter. Either way the room has no gender. It’s not a big deal. The room is also white, and was painted that color intentionally. The kid must have been seven, eight.

Sounds to me like the kid represents a stand-in for a type, a trope really for what is often best described as a symbol. A universal, that kid. Mythical, mythological, mytho-historical, historical, actual. Real. The kid is real. Hyper-real. Like a “choose-your-own-adventure” kid. Pastiche, collage, bricolage—that’s it totally. A stand-trope in for symbol type kid about universal. “The kid” is not real. A particular, that kid, from which we should not (repeat, not) generalize. Issues of authenticity, of essentialism, of something akin to discourse but really more like dialogue if not dialectic is of little use when talking about the kid. The kid is not real. Repeat. [Note: I didn’t repeat.] “The kid is rummaging.” Have I said that yet? Ok. Anyway, the kid is. Not real? No. Rummaging. In a bag. That is not real? Yes.

In that bag is this: “In that bag is this:”

Rummaging for this: a book, a gun, a dissertation on guns in books perhaps.

The kid is in the room . . .

. . . which is white, or just this side of off-white.

Then there is a shot, for which there is no explanation. Not just intentions and causality. Not only moral, emotional, psychological, sociological, historical, etc. But also linguistic. There is no way to describe the shot in words. Namely because it did not happen. At least not the way I didn’t describe it. That is, the kid did not pull a gun out of the bag. The kid did not put a gun to the head of another kid. There was no screaming. There were no horrified, traumatized classmates and teacher.

There was no shot.

There is little reason for us to be discussing something that did not happen, I might add, regardless of how immoral or merely annoying it might be for the author not to describe in detail how the kid did not put a gun to the head of another kid in the room whose walls were once painted white. “Once” not because the white walls have been splattered red with bits of head and face of another kid. “Once” because this you are reading is not real and is subject to shift according to the author’s will and whims. Because words are just that, words. And what is not real cannot hurt you anyway, no? It cannot make you feel sick or thankful or terrified or sad or enlightened or fucking enraged. What you’ve read is pure fiction, yes? (Think news, think history.) It’s only language, right? (Think laws, think rights.) And the author has no obligations, correct? No responsibility, huh? Because how representation, language, communication, intentions intertwine “represents” but mere games, signs. That’s a fact. Or a theory made fact. The author, like the not-real kid, is dead. Remember that. Dead. Like irony. It’s kinda hard to get your head around. Especially if your head is pasted on a white wall. And especially if your head is not real.

The walls, which weren’t real, weren’t even white. The kid, homeless let us say, not even a student in this class, wasn’t seven, eight either. More like twenty-seven, -eight. Homeless sounds good, yeah. For the purposes of fiction, I mean. It actually sounds goddamned awful in reality. But no time for that shit. Realism, naturalism and the like. Representation and all. Authors dead and all. Age of irony and all. Or the death of it and all. And all.

The kid does not sleep in a bed in a room with white walls. The kid does not have a bag with a gun or book or dissertation in it. The kid does not have two pairs of shoes. The kid cannot afford new camping gear, so the kid uses what’s available nearest where he crashes each night: cardboard, plastic, leaves, abandoned building, bridge, stairwell, john’s car, etc. The kid hitchhikes from Texas to California and back to Texas, sucking off married men and what might, in the next few days and weeks at youth centers and public restrooms across New Mexico and Arizona, prove to be child molesters. All this for transportation. Sometimes food.

The kid does other things, too. (You might think the kid is male at this point; perhaps this assumption says more about you . . . perhaps it says more about me . . . perhaps it says more about that unnamed kid you’re imagining than the kid we’ve been talking about who is also unnamed that I’ve imagined.)

Regarding the “story” you now either imagine something, playing along and helping invent what is happening or will happen next, or you are not impressed, and have either stopped reading before this point or will now or will soon or will continue to read for whatever reasons seem best, appropriate, or not.

Which reminds me. A book is filled with words. Sometimes a book is filled with people quoting other peoples’ words, which, I admit, can be annoying for a number of reasons. Sartre quoting Brice-Parrain says that words are loaded pistols. Yet, we’ve heard that guns don’t kill people—except when there is a book that diminishes a particular prophet through parody. Then it’s like “get the fatwa out of dodge.”

Speaking of words: “The kid just walks into the classroom.”

Writing a dissertation about guns in books, a student somewhere in a room so fucking white stops writing. Someone rummages through a bag. There is a shot.

At this moment, there is something being written here that you are reading that I am typing and that I can’t help but feel a little guilty, even embarrassed about.

Parody and postmodernism: two good things, especially good together and especially good in small doses. Right?

The kid walks into the room and puts a book to the head of another student.