The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature

by Ihab Hassan

In this book, the first edition of which was published in 1971 by Oxford University Press, Ihab Hassan takes Orphic dismemberment and regeneration as his metaphor for a radical crisis in art and language, culture and consciousness, which prefigures postmodern literature. The modern Orpheus, he writes, “sings on a lyre without strings.” Thus, his sensitive critique traces a hypothetical line from Sade through four modern authors—Hemingway, Kafka, Genet, and Beckett—to a literature still to come. But the line also breaks into two Interludes, one concerning ’Pataphysics, Dada, and Surrealism, and the other concerning Existentialism and Aliterature. For this new edition, Hassan has added a new preface and postface on the developing character of postmodernism, a concept which has gained currency since the first edition of this work, and which he himself has done much to theorize.

Genres: Theory, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy

315 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

He was born in Cairo, Egypt, and emigrated to the United States in 1946. Currently he is Emeritus Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His writings include Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1961), The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1967), The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971, 1982), Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (1975), The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change (1980), The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (1987), Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters (1990), and Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades (1995), as well as two memoirs, Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1985) and Between the Eagle and the Sun: Traces of Japan (1996). Recently, he has published many short stories in various literary magazines and is completing a novel, The Changeling. His most recent work is In Quest of Nothing: Selected Essays, 1998-2008 (2010). In addition, he has written more than 300 essays and reviews on literary and cultural subjects.

Hassan received honorary degrees from the University of Uppsala (1996) and the University of Giessen (1999), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958, 1962), and three Senior Fulbright Lectureships (1966, 1974, 1975). He was on the Faculty of the School of Letters, Indiana University (1964), Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1972), twice on the Faculty of the Salzburg Summer Seminars in American Studies (1965,1975), Senior Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis (1974–1975), Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio (1978), twice a Senior Fellow at the Humanities Research Center in Canberra (1990, 2003), Resident Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, Irvine (1990), on the Faculty of the Stuttgart Summer Seminars in Cultural Studies (1991), and three times on the Faculty of the Scandinavian Summer School of Literary Theory and Criticism in Karlskrona (2000, 20001, 2004). He has also received the Alumni Teaching Award and the Honors Program Teaching Award at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he has taught for 29 years. In addition he has delivered more than 500 public lectures in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

The following table is taken from a part of The Dismemberment of Orpheus that was reprinted in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1998). It seeks to explain the differences, both concrete and abstract, between modernism and postmodernism.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Hassan's study of postmodern literature, the metaphor of silence emblematizes the way that works by writers like Hemingway, Kafka, Genet and Beckett call attention to the inadequacy of conventional literary devices, and language itself, to represent any reality beyond that of the individual consciousness. For Hassan, such works can be characterized as "solipsistic" and "autistic," and the suspicion with regard to language that they reflect can be traced to the emergence of radical doubt earlier in the literary tradition, for instance in the writings of Marquis de Sade, whose works reflect a militant scepticism toward reason, authority, and conventional morality.

In addition to Hassan's interesting argument, in which he discusses irony, paradox and self-reflexivity, a positive thing about this book is his writing style; even if you have not read them, Hassan communicates something of the emotional experience you can have reading these writers; in this way, Hassan writes more like a fan than like an academic critic, and for me this contributes to making his book an entertaining read.

Acquired Apr 15, 2010
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently Hassan is one of the earlier critics to advocate the term "postmodern" for that time that comes after modernism. This book is especially concerned with a lineage of writers whose focus is expressing the silence that is most coincident with nature. Not that this is the especial concern of only these writers. What Hassan argues, though, is that these writers try to use language, and the reader's experience while reading, as method to make that language more real. Examples are Beckett's Godot. Or Hemingway's stripped-down style.

Does he succeed? Once he concedes in the postlude that these writers aren't exclusive to the lineage, only the ones he thought best exemplars, yes. And perhaps what I like most is the complementary argument he makes, that anxiety is as much a part of nature, and should be expressed just as nobility is.

[Mihai Zodian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postmodernists are the boomers of culture. They think they are the critics, but they are the mainstream. Once, they were representing something new and inspiring and Ihab Hassan's book is from that time. The Dismemberment of Orpheus investigates the work of modern writers and shows the presence of a subversive counter-current against canonical literary values.

This is one of the best-written works of literary theory that I've read. Ihab Hassan managed to achieve a rare balance between depth and accessibility. The author attempted a difficult work of clarification, in a period of intense and controversial social and cultural change. This process is often labeled as postmodernism, out of which the cultural and literary critique drew a lot of attention.

This skeptical current questioned both society's values and writing as practice. I especially enjoyed the pages on Alfred Jarry and his Ubu Roi and the section on Hemingway. The first writer was unfamiliar to me so Ihab Hassan's writing allowed me to extend my knowledge. This is one of the best qualities that a book may have and I would recommend The Dismemberment of Orpheus to anyone interest in literary exploration.

The emphasis on intertextuality and the presence of lesser known authors are one of the few achievements owed to postmodernism. More often, the current's overblown skepticism turned into ashes. For example, Pierre Hadot's and Michel Foucault's emphasis on the body and the practices by which it was constructed fed the consumerism of personal development. Still, Ihab Hassan's book of 1971 offered more clarity and fewer illusions than most writing on postmodernism.

The Dismemberment of Orpheus is a good book on its own and as a classic. The main drawback is that it requires some secondary reading. Even if I enjoyed that, it took me almost one year to finish Ihab Hassan's work. The style, the tone, and his treatment of the writers convinced me to keep going on and I would recommend it any day.

[Naeem Baig · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, the first edition of which was published in 1971 by Oxford University Press, Ihab Hassan takes Orphic dismemberment and regeneration as his metaphor for a radical crisis in art and language, culture and consciousness, which prefigures postmodern literature. The modern Orpheus, he writes, “sings on a lyre without strings.” Thus, his sensitive critique traces a hypothetical line from Sade through four modern authors—Hemingway, Kafka, Genet, and Beckett—to a literature still to come. But the line also breaks into two Interludes, one concerning ’Pataphysics, Dada, and Surrealism, and the other concerning Existentialism and Aliterature.

Combining literary history, brief biography, and critical analysis, Hassan surrounds these authors with a complement of avant-garde writers whose works also foreshadow the postmodern temper. These include Jarry, Apollinaire, Tzara, Breton, Sartre, Camus, Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and in America, Cage, Salinger, Ginsberg, Barth, and Burroughs. Hassan takes account also of related contemporary developments in art, music, and philosophy, and of many works of literary theory and criticism.

For this new edition, Hassan has added a new preface and postface on the developing character of postmodernism, a concept which has gained currency since the first edition of this work, and which he himself has done much to theorize.

Ihab Hassan (1925–2015) was emeritus Vilas Professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and author of more than 300 articles and reviews and of numerous books including The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture.

[Laika Ulokovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

First piece of long-form literary theory I ever read. Meaning, I had a lot of trouble with it. However, I pushed through and really enjoyed it despite how verbose Hassan is. Even amongst literary theorists, he is especially dense (I think. I've only read a few other essays so maybe I'm talking out of my ass). Been working on a side-project related to contemporary literature, and this dissection of post-modernism gave me a much clearer sense of what postmodernism actually is, rather than the nebulous definition ignorant people give it. Do I agree with him on everything? No. Do I think his stance on constant negation is productive? Maybe then, but not anymore. but this was still very useful as a historical text to study how post-modernism came to be. Taught me a lot more about Sade than I ever wanted to know, too.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

quotes:
Postmodern literature moves, in nihilist play or mystic transcendence, toward the vanishing point.
sade: there is not a living man who does not wish to play the despot when he is stiff
Language as deceit reminds us of the anti-languages of propaganda in our own century. We have now seen the extremes: for Herr Goebbels, all official speech is truth; for William Burroughs, all speech is lying.
Sade is aware that the torturer's real crime will be not simply to inflict pain but to seduce and corrupt the victim into being his accomplice and wanting pain to be inflicted. The relation comes close to being a game. This is the game that may become the apocalypse of our time.
The works of Sade prefigure the destructive element of our world, and the claims he makes upon us are hard, perhaps impossible, to meet. Yet we dare no longer ignore these claims. There can be no life for men until Sade is answered.
Ubu is the all-gut gutless wonder, the bulging monument of bourgeois clichés, the end of history.
Tzara and Lenin play chess in Zurich and each leaves that haven to start a revolution.
Petty betrayals mark the path of Dada and vanity remains one of its avatars. The critics say Dada is futile, is sterile, it leads nowhere. It leads to the nervous present.
Dada speaks best when it speaks without words, as children and psychopaths do in their art, or as an insane culture may express itself in its daily facts.
The humor is neither black nor white. It is the laughter of an outlaw and a Zen master, a visionary clown choking on outrage, a machine clanking in its nightmare.
In the end, the antics of Dada are perhaps more arresting than its theories, its manifestos more exciting than its verse.
Breton: Everything leads us to believe that there exists, in the mind, a certain point from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, above and below, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
Breton: A poem must be a [collapse] of the intellect.
Jean Paulhan: It seems that one cannot be an honest man of letters, unless one is disgusted with literature.
Camus: I rebel; therefore we exist.
Camus: To be nothing--that is the cry of the mind exhausted by its own rebellion
Camus can only give dignity to art by presenting it as an aspect of continuous rebellion.
Camus is critical of Surrealism which "places itself at the mercy of impatience," existing "in a condition of wounded frenzy: at once inflexible and self-righteous," and "while simultaneously exalting human innocence," extols both murder and suicide.

[Andrew]

There's a lot of really interesting literary commentary in here, on Sade, Hemingway, Genet, Beckett, Camus, Sarraute, etc etc. But as a whole, it falls short. While the idea of a discordant "postmodernism" running a current through the history of modernism is interesting (and valuable), Hassan seems to have a relatively unclear idea of what the postmodern actually is. Granted, this is a very thorny issue, but it still would be nice to get an overarching thesis.