The Fifth Column: the biggest post-modern literary joke.

I don't say that as a bad thing. The Fifth Column (not the Hemingway story)is a novel that was published I think sometime around 1996 in the pages of The Village Voice. 15 weeks, 15 chapters, 15 authors (David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Irvine Welsh, Jonathan Franzen, etc). An Exquisite Cadaver some people call those types of things. From what I read it seems that most of the writers of this thang are rather fond of wordy, long sentences with a bent towards stream-of-consciousness and solipsism. If I got it somewhat right, the story is about a femme fatale and ex-Miss Ohio named Una, a mercenary that now works in a bar called the Rusty Drum and that might just be a character in a manuscript, that then came back to life to haunt its creator, or she could be a transexual with a mechanical larynx, and it goes from there.

The story obviously doesn't take itself seriously as anything, much less as fiction, a textbook characteristic of "post-modernism". The novel curiously has a life of its own, delineated by the attempts of the authors to one-up each other, screw the story up by sending it in a different direction, or by simply not caring much and writing whatever the fuck they wanted to write. This can be seen in how the first couple of chapters actually try make sense together, the authors try to work with each other and do something with the character and the plot. The changes arrive promptly around chapter five, when things get playfully metafictional, and the rest of the authors embrace that playfulness completely, creating something that at times becomes really funny (in a nerdy way). Self-references to the fact that the thing is an exquisite cadaver are made more than once in the form of body parts mailed in manuscript envelopes to editors, quite clever eh!

In the end, the story is unable to pull itself out of the literary joke zone. It's entertaining, sure. But as good and interesting the joke became through the different obligatory changes that having different authors meant, I feel like it could have been so much more, without taking the funny factor or entertaining factor from it. If the authors would have taken the exquisite cadaver a little more seriously (not too seriously), it could have gone from a pleasant novelty, to a something worth publishing in a large scale. I have to say I am not surprised, for someone like David Foster Wallace (i admiteddly havent read him, but the fact that he has a novel a 1000 pages long tells me something about his chapter of the novel) and his contemporaries doing something like that is totally cool. What I think is not cool is when "post-modernity" goes so far in being "post-modern" that it ends up ironically taking itself seriously by thinking that anything written in a crazed up pace with strange vocabularies and sometimes hard to understand stream-of-consciousness is cool. But what is cool? I dont know. Not being a show-off is cool. Being a show-off for the hell of it, for the sake of post-modernity, not cool.