“I am, personally, the Fall of the West”: Postmodernism and the Critical Reception (and Legacy) of Barry Hannah’s Fiction

Abstract

While relatively few of the remembrances of Barry Hannah in the popular press mention the adjective ‘postmodern’ to describe Hannah’s work, and while Hannah himself was skeptical of the concept, it has largely shaped the trajectory of critical discourse on Hannah’s aesthetic among his academic readers. Indeed, as his reputation among literary scholars has grown, so has the strength of his association with postmodernism. Fred Hobson wrote nearly two decades ago of Hannah’s celebrated novel, Ray (1980), that “for once, the southern writer inhabiting the postmodern world is close to being a postmodern writer himself” (37). Hobson cannot bring himself to make a more definitive declaration (Hannah is only ‘close to being’ a postmodernist), because he wants to like Hannah’s work, but ultimately values more a southern writer who “essentially accepts, rather than invents, his world, is not given to fantasy, does not in his fiction question the whole assumed relationship between narrator and narrative, does not question the nature of fiction itself”– in other words, one who “plays by the old rules of the game” (9). Subsequent critics, however, have worked steadily toward an understanding of Hannah’s work as prototypically postmodern. This essay discusses those works that have contributed most significantly to that understanding and considers briefly the future criticism on Hannah’s work.