Someone asked me recently if I was a postmodernist. I replied that I do not know the answer to this question. First, I need to know what postmodern means, and I recall my teacher saying that anyone who sets out to define his or her terms will end up hanging himself or herself. Having acknowledged this, I will begin with the notion of relativity. Everything is as solid as air for the post-modernist. Human identity is fluid, constructed from social pressures. Notions of good and bad are relative. Truth is something one encounters only when one encounters something one agrees with. Things fall apart and the centre cannot hold. That last sentence contains not my words, but William Butler Yeats's words, and Mr. Yeats was not a postmodernist, as far as I know. Or was he? Anyway, I return to my teacher who was decidedly not a postmodernist. But here we have a problem. In terms of art and aesthetics, modernists have this curious notion that what matters derives mostly, if not entirely, from white male persons with a European background. Postmodernism smashed the notion of the so-called "western canon." And this is good. Postmodernism smashed the notion of a hierarchy in the arts, this poet is great and this other one is mush, this genre is worthwhile and this other one is unworthy of serious attention, and so on. Postmodernism takes everything seriously and at the same time unseriously. Contronym is the condition of postmodernism, and I have much attraction to contronyms. Does this make me a postmodernist? I don't think so. I am, sigh, a humanist, and as such I take humanity as something of a universal. I know, in the large scheme of things, humanity is hardly universal. We might even say humanity is ugly, unjust, selfish, greedy, and stupid. It is all we have and so we ought to make the best of it by remaining hopeful that humanity can lift itself from the mire and become universally "better." But if we think of universal as that which unites a species, then what unites the human species is humanity itself, what William Blake called the Human Form Divine. He did not mean this in some airy-fairy transcendental sense, but rather in a very material sense. What creates the Human Form Divine is simply the human imagination, the creative imagination, that esemplastic thing that Coleridge tried to explain in the Biographia. This is a universal and so I guess I cannot be a postmodernist because I accept this universal. However, postmodernism does have its attractions. Its willingness to question and to analyze and to parse and to welcome scrutiny and difference (differance!) is refreshing and politically daring in its offence to dyed-in-the-wool conservatism. In short, postmodernism has much to teach us. But am I a postmodernist? Formally perhaps yes. Ideologically perhaps not. Are you thoroughly bored?

Oh, and about that "post" in postmodernism, post means after. But it also means a statement of, a posting of news or of information. And somehow it also makes reference to all that came before. Prior. It is a contronym, is it not? It also has something to do with quickness, perhaps even in the sense of quick and the dead. Posthaste. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. This is postmodernism. And Jack has been around for a long long time, since the beanstalk came down or since he accompanied Jill up the hill or since he set out with all the animals or since he sailed the Carribean, or since he .... endlessly. Jack is a very postmodern fellow; he keeps popping up in all sorts of places: Jack Ryan, Jack Reacher, Jack Straw. He is a trickster and the trickster is as old as old and is also post-modern.