Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives,” Journal of American Studies, 9, 1 (April 1975), 69–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002187580001015X
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s essay “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives” (1975) was published four years after Ihab Hassan’s pioneering monograph The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971), two years after Thomas Pynchon’s wildly influential Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and two years prior to Vladimir Nabokov’s death in 1977. In other words, the essay appeared at a key critical juncture in what is now known as the postmodern era. My brief reflection upon the essay’s legacy consists of two interrelated strands. I begin by examining the ways in which the “absurdity” of American politics – an issue that Zavarzadeh focusses on throughout his essay, specifically in the context of the merging of fact and fiction – is as evident today as it was in the mid-1970s. I then situate the essay in the broader context of postmodern literary studies, outlining the ways in which Zavarzadeh’s ideas have enabled significant developments within the field by future scholars. In these respects, the essay is undoubtedly groundbreaking and even prophetic.
Zavarzadeh begins his essay with the premise that the “mistrust of the epistemological authority of the fictive novelist is mainly caused by the pressures of the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of ‘reality’ arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd”; more pointedly, to Zavarzadeh, “the boundaries of fact and fiction are constantly shifting, making the traditional categories of reality ridiculously naïve” (69–71). Given the emergence of such terms as “fake news” and “alternative facts” heralded by President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 – and his belated reelection in 2024 – the “boundaries” between fiction and reality continue to blur in American politics today, particularly given the ubiquity of social-media platforms and alternative news sources. Today, reality is consistently filtered through and curated on television shows such as Mark Burnett’s The Apprentice (which was hosted by Trump from 2004 to 2015), along with apps and websites like TikTok and Instagram. Conspiracy theories are given free rein thanks to Elon Musk’s controversial purchase of Twitter in October 2022. In 1975 Zavarzadeh contended – by pithily quoting novelist Bruce Friedman – “The satirist has had his ground usurped by the newspaper reporter” (71). Today, the newspaper reporter has been “usurped,” in turn, by both far-right-wing “news” hosts like Alex Jones of InfoWars and podcasters like Joe Rogan, both of whom are immensely popular amongst supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Both Jones and Rogan urge their viewers to reject mainstream “interpretations of reality” as fictional and, instead, to consider “alternative facts” and truths. For instance, the improper use of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine was touted as a means of supposedly combating illness during the COVID-19 pandemic by Jones, Rogan, and Trump because of an irrational distrust of “big pharma” and “big government.”Footnote 1 In other words, reality itself has consistently been the subject of debate and speculation during the Trump era, and has had an incalculable effect on both global politics and everyday life in ways that Zavarzadeh’s essay seems to predict.
As Zavarzadeh makes clear throughout his piece, novels have often been key reference points that have helped to explain or interpret sociohistorical events in the United States, a phenomenon that has continued long after 1975. President Barack Obama has frequently been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby by both literary scholars and political pundits.Footnote 2 Sinclair Lewis’s obscure 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, meanwhile, reentered the transatlantic cultural zeitgeist in 2016, when Trump began to be widely likened to Lewis’s dictatorial antagonist President Buzz Windrip.Footnote 3 In fact, when seen in the context of Zavarzadeh’s claim that “[w]hat seems to be fictitious is, of course, real” (72), a case can be made that American political history itself often stretches credulity and can easily be interpreted as the stuff that fiction is made of. Virtually any major US sociopolitical event after 1975 seems to bear out this characterization, including (but not limited to) the election of “aging Hollywood idol” Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the disastrous response of his administration to the HIV/AIDS crisis; the Iran–Contra scandal; the Gulf War; the pernicious threat of al Qaeda and Islamist extremism, exemplified through the tragedy of 11 September 2001; the disastrous impact of the “war on terror,” including the falsified insistence upon weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and the atrocities of Guantánamo Bay; the mythical notion that the US became “post-race” and colour-blind following Obama’s electoral victory; and the global financial crisis of 2008. Taken in isolation and divorced from sociohistorical context, any of these events would make a compelling novel, film, or play. Cumulatively, their impact upon American and world politics validates Zavarzadeh’s central claim that “the boundary between the ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ areas of experience is getting less and less distinguishable” (72).
From a standpoint of literary studies, by far the most interesting aspect of Zavarzadeh’s essay is his resistance towards the term “postmodernism.” Instead, Zavarzadeh formalizes the “fusion of fact and fiction [that] blurs the dichotomy between ‘life’ and ‘art’” as “Metamodernist” (75), which, to him, “refers to a cluster of ideas which have emerged since the mid-1950s,” namely the “Anti-modernist” and “Para-modernist” schools. Zavarzadeh emphatically rejects “the single term ‘post-modern’ to describe these new developments” because “the term is too general to catch all the nuances” (75 n. 17). This rejection of “postmodern” as a critical and artistic term has been contested by thinkers including Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Frederic Jameson, each of whom has adopted postmodernism as a lens through which to interpret mid- to late twentieth-century life and art.Footnote 4 In other words, “postmodernism” has had a much more pronounced sociocultural and intellectual relevance than “metamodernism,” not least because many of the characteristics that Zavarzadeh attributes to metamodernism are also core features of postmodernism. For example, Zavarzadeh laments that “the dividing line between fact and fiction has gradually faded away” (69), but he does not acknowledge that such a theme was pursued throughout, for instance, the works of Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels, including The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1949), Lolita (1955), and Pale Fire (1962), are central to the postmodern aesthetic. Moreover, to Zavarzadeh, “What used to be almost universally recognizable as fictional and associated with the conjured illusion of reality in the fictive novel has become everyday lived reality on the international, national, and individual levels” (70). However, one could also argue that, again, this issue has been repeatedly taken up in postmodern tomes such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Gaddis’s J R (1975), and Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). These novels follow a similar logic to Zavarzadeh’s formulation here in that each can be described as an assemblage of ideas or, in Roland Barthes’s terms, “tissue[s] of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” – in other words, “everyday lived reality.”Footnote 5 None of what I have just said is meant to imply, of course, that the essay’s critical blind spots and limitations render Zavarzadeh’s contribution to postmodern literary studies obsolete. The essay, in my opinion, is a revolutionary, pioneering critical work which directly impacted the work of McHale, Hutcheon, and countless others.
Zavarzadeh concludes by saying that “Metafiction and the nonfiction novel are, each in its unique narrative manner, enactments of a refusal to reduce the puzzling multiplicity of the contemporary experience into a monolithic fictive construct” (83). Such a characterization has also been complicated by subsequent scholars. McHale, for example, asserts,
Postmodernism is not post-modern, whatever that might mean, but post modernism; it does not come after the present (a solecism), but after the modernist movement. Thus the term “postmodernism,” if we take it literally enough, à la lettre, signifies a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth-century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future.Footnote 6
In other words, what Zavarzadeh considers “para-modernist” has been interpreted by McHale to be quintessentially postmodern. Where the issue of “metafiction” specifically is concerned, Hutcheon suggests that a useful way of conceptualizing postmodernism generally is to think of it as “historiographic metafiction,” or novels which are “both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages”: the “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructions (historiographic metafiction)” within such novels “is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.”Footnote 7 Hutcheon’s work combines metafiction and postmodernism, rather than privileging one above the other, in complete contrast to Zavarzadeh’s methodology. These differences notwithstanding, Zavarzadeh’s essay, in my opinion, is a lasting testament not only to the eclectic and vibrant field of literary studies as a whole, but also to the Journal of American Studies’ long-standing reputation for attracting the best, most influential scholarship in our discipline.
In closing, Zavarzadeh’s reticence towards the concept of postmodernism is, I contend, deliciously postmodern in nature. After all, postmodernism is notoriously difficult to accurately or succinctly define without ambiguities, caveats, and qualifications. Zavarzadeh’s reluctance is therefore best seen as, concurrently, both a marker of resistance against postmodernism and an ironic symptom of postmodernism itself.
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Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives,” Journal of American Studies, 9, 1 (April 1975), 69–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002187580001015X
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s essay “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives” (1975) was published four years after Ihab Hassan’s pioneering monograph The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971), two years after Thomas Pynchon’s wildly influential Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and two years prior to Vladimir Nabokov’s death in 1977. In other words, the essay appeared at a key critical juncture in what is now known as the postmodern era. My brief reflection upon the essay’s legacy consists of two interrelated strands. I begin by examining the ways in which the “absurdity” of American politics – an issue that Zavarzadeh focusses on throughout his essay, specifically in the context of the merging of fact and fiction – is as evident today as it was in the mid-1970s. I then situate the essay in the broader context of postmodern literary studies, outlining the ways in which Zavarzadeh’s ideas have enabled significant developments within the field by future scholars. In these respects, the essay is undoubtedly groundbreaking and even prophetic.
Zavarzadeh begins his essay with the premise that the “mistrust of the epistemological authority of the fictive novelist is mainly caused by the pressures of the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of ‘reality’ arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd”; more pointedly, to Zavarzadeh, “the boundaries of fact and fiction are constantly shifting, making the traditional categories of reality ridiculously naïve” (69–71). Given the emergence of such terms as “fake news” and “alternative facts” heralded by President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 – and his belated reelection in 2024 – the “boundaries” between fiction and reality continue to blur in American politics today, particularly given the ubiquity of social-media platforms and alternative news sources. Today, reality is consistently filtered through and curated on television shows such as Mark Burnett’s The Apprentice (which was hosted by Trump from 2004 to 2015), along with apps and websites like TikTok and Instagram. Conspiracy theories are given free rein thanks to Elon Musk’s controversial purchase of Twitter in October 2022. In 1975 Zavarzadeh contended – by pithily quoting novelist Bruce Friedman – “The satirist has had his ground usurped by the newspaper reporter” (71). Today, the newspaper reporter has been “usurped,” in turn, by both far-right-wing “news” hosts like Alex Jones of InfoWars and podcasters like Joe Rogan, both of whom are immensely popular amongst supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Both Jones and Rogan urge their viewers to reject mainstream “interpretations of reality” as fictional and, instead, to consider “alternative facts” and truths. For instance, the improper use of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine was touted as a means of supposedly combating illness during the COVID-19 pandemic by Jones, Rogan, and Trump because of an irrational distrust of “big pharma” and “big government.”Footnote 1 In other words, reality itself has consistently been the subject of debate and speculation during the Trump era, and has had an incalculable effect on both global politics and everyday life in ways that Zavarzadeh’s essay seems to predict.
As Zavarzadeh makes clear throughout his piece, novels have often been key reference points that have helped to explain or interpret sociohistorical events in the United States, a phenomenon that has continued long after 1975. President Barack Obama has frequently been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby by both literary scholars and political pundits.Footnote 2 Sinclair Lewis’s obscure 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, meanwhile, reentered the transatlantic cultural zeitgeist in 2016, when Trump began to be widely likened to Lewis’s dictatorial antagonist President Buzz Windrip.Footnote 3 In fact, when seen in the context of Zavarzadeh’s claim that “[w]hat seems to be fictitious is, of course, real” (72), a case can be made that American political history itself often stretches credulity and can easily be interpreted as the stuff that fiction is made of. Virtually any major US sociopolitical event after 1975 seems to bear out this characterization, including (but not limited to) the election of “aging Hollywood idol” Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the disastrous response of his administration to the HIV/AIDS crisis; the Iran–Contra scandal; the Gulf War; the pernicious threat of al Qaeda and Islamist extremism, exemplified through the tragedy of 11 September 2001; the disastrous impact of the “war on terror,” including the falsified insistence upon weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and the atrocities of Guantánamo Bay; the mythical notion that the US became “post-race” and colour-blind following Obama’s electoral victory; and the global financial crisis of 2008. Taken in isolation and divorced from sociohistorical context, any of these events would make a compelling novel, film, or play. Cumulatively, their impact upon American and world politics validates Zavarzadeh’s central claim that “the boundary between the ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ areas of experience is getting less and less distinguishable” (72).
From a standpoint of literary studies, by far the most interesting aspect of Zavarzadeh’s essay is his resistance towards the term “postmodernism.” Instead, Zavarzadeh formalizes the “fusion of fact and fiction [that] blurs the dichotomy between ‘life’ and ‘art’” as “Metamodernist” (75), which, to him, “refers to a cluster of ideas which have emerged since the mid-1950s,” namely the “Anti-modernist” and “Para-modernist” schools. Zavarzadeh emphatically rejects “the single term ‘post-modern’ to describe these new developments” because “the term is too general to catch all the nuances” (75 n. 17). This rejection of “postmodern” as a critical and artistic term has been contested by thinkers including Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and Frederic Jameson, each of whom has adopted postmodernism as a lens through which to interpret mid- to late twentieth-century life and art.Footnote 4 In other words, “postmodernism” has had a much more pronounced sociocultural and intellectual relevance than “metamodernism,” not least because many of the characteristics that Zavarzadeh attributes to metamodernism are also core features of postmodernism. For example, Zavarzadeh laments that “the dividing line between fact and fiction has gradually faded away” (69), but he does not acknowledge that such a theme was pursued throughout, for instance, the works of Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels, including The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1949), Lolita (1955), and Pale Fire (1962), are central to the postmodern aesthetic. Moreover, to Zavarzadeh, “What used to be almost universally recognizable as fictional and associated with the conjured illusion of reality in the fictive novel has become everyday lived reality on the international, national, and individual levels” (70). However, one could also argue that, again, this issue has been repeatedly taken up in postmodern tomes such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Gaddis’s J R (1975), and Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). These novels follow a similar logic to Zavarzadeh’s formulation here in that each can be described as an assemblage of ideas or, in Roland Barthes’s terms, “tissue[s] of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” – in other words, “everyday lived reality.”Footnote 5 None of what I have just said is meant to imply, of course, that the essay’s critical blind spots and limitations render Zavarzadeh’s contribution to postmodern literary studies obsolete. The essay, in my opinion, is a revolutionary, pioneering critical work which directly impacted the work of McHale, Hutcheon, and countless others.
Zavarzadeh concludes by saying that “Metafiction and the nonfiction novel are, each in its unique narrative manner, enactments of a refusal to reduce the puzzling multiplicity of the contemporary experience into a monolithic fictive construct” (83). Such a characterization has also been complicated by subsequent scholars. McHale, for example, asserts,
Postmodernism is not post-modern, whatever that might mean, but post modernism; it does not come after the present (a solecism), but after the modernist movement. Thus the term “postmodernism,” if we take it literally enough, à la lettre, signifies a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth-century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future.Footnote 6
In other words, what Zavarzadeh considers “para-modernist” has been interpreted by McHale to be quintessentially postmodern. Where the issue of “metafiction” specifically is concerned, Hutcheon suggests that a useful way of conceptualizing postmodernism generally is to think of it as “historiographic metafiction,” or novels which are “both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages”: the “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructions (historiographic metafiction)” within such novels “is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.”Footnote 7 Hutcheon’s work combines metafiction and postmodernism, rather than privileging one above the other, in complete contrast to Zavarzadeh’s methodology. These differences notwithstanding, Zavarzadeh’s essay, in my opinion, is a lasting testament not only to the eclectic and vibrant field of literary studies as a whole, but also to the Journal of American Studies’ long-standing reputation for attracting the best, most influential scholarship in our discipline.
In closing, Zavarzadeh’s reticence towards the concept of postmodernism is, I contend, deliciously postmodern in nature. After all, postmodernism is notoriously difficult to accurately or succinctly define without ambiguities, caveats, and qualifications. Zavarzadeh’s reluctance is therefore best seen as, concurrently, both a marker of resistance against postmodernism and an ironic symptom of postmodernism itself.