Professor Stromler is an associate professor of English literature at Wilde College in southeastern Maine. He has written the critical works "Eye of the Beholder: Magical Realism and the Modern Supernatural," "The Anglo-Saxon Road Trip," "Boundaries Overthrown: Genres and Why They Fail" and "Transnation," a collection of transgressive poetry. He is the recipient of two Whitesail scholarships and was recently awarded Maine's Critical Progression Award for "Boundaries Overthrown." He lives in Jonesboro with his wife and two children.

Thank you for agreeing to be here.

Thank you for having me.

So I guess we should get right to the heart of the issue: postmodernism.

[Laughs] Oh Christ, that term...

[Laughs] I know, I know, but hear me out. You're quoted as saying that postmodernism has been "reduced to a categorical essence, yet another genre that fails to transcend the malaise of hyper-specialization and ironic self-awareness it so painstakingly documents." It's quite interesting that you refer to it as a genre.

Well yes, that's because its become one. The moment you start speaking of postmodernism as anything other than a lens for perceiving reality, it's dead in the water. There was this tradition starting with the French Deconstructionists in the '50s that wanted to question the nature of narrative, the idea of an "author," the importance of authorial authority, et cetera. And from that you started to get cross-pollination with the Beats in New York and Berkeley, the magical realists in Latin America, the Native American movement and the slam poetry movement in Chicago. But the key difference between those old Frenchmen and where we're at now is the fragmentation. It's actually ironic -- and how I hate to use that word, a word that's been so cruelly plastered onto anything unwilling to acknowledge its own worth -- that those Frenchmen started out by deconstructing literature and managed to deconstruct our entire society, our entire culture. 

The deconstructionists aren't really known in American popular culture, at least not in a broad sense. I would say something like the events of 9/11 have had a greater deconstructive effect on American culture.

Oh sure. There are greater social disturbances that have engendered this shift, definitely. The rise of globalized commercial consumerism, the recognition of language as rhetoric, the influence of Internet culture, sure. But when it comes to art, and I mean art in a broad manner, comic books, popular films, crayon drawings, whatever... when it comes to art, fragmentation is glaringly obvious. You have so many different voices coming from so many different parts of the world that it's impossible to form any sort of movement, because there is no movement, movements are to be spat at! [Laughs] There's just a scattered jigsaw puzzle and no one wants to reform it. That's why postmodernism as a genre is baffling to me. Critics like to describe recent work as "postmodern" or "self-aware" or "genre-hopping" or whatever vague critical phrases are floating around the faculty lounge. But it's in that very categorization of narrative that postmodernism fails. The whole point was to say "Hey, there is no way to categorize this, narrative is completely unreliable, no text is more important than the other, literature shouldn't be bound by convention," blah blah blah. Yet it has become the most important critical tool today! Yet whether it's the critical culture that's trapped the literature or the literary culture that's trapped the criticism remains to be seen.

It sounds like you're less dissatisfied with the artistic community than with the cultural community that interprets that art.

My dissatisfaction with both communities are well documented. But you're right to think that, because the cultural community is paralyzed by its own inability to grasp art on human terms. Art  isn't static, it isn't scholarly, it isn't easily interpreted; it can't be. By necessity it is in constant evolution. Scholars just have a hard time catching up. Their need to analyze huge changes in the cultural kaleidoscope make them ineffective as cultural commentators. They are unable to see what is right in front of them.

And what is right in front of them, Professor?

Life! The rawness and soiled beauty of life, however banal and boring it may be. We have become so accustomed to fantastic feats of literary genius, brash, daring strokes across the cultural canvas that we have failed to connect with the very material we wish to represent. I am a human being, you are a human being, we are not talking heads, we are hearts pressed together on a subway car.

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Let me put it this way by using a trite example. Let's say you and I were stranded on a desert island. There's no food to be found, no water, not even coconuts or fruit. It's just a desert island. What would you and I be talking about?

Um...

You have kids, don't you?

Yes, one five-year-old, but I don't see --

Well, we'd take our wallets out and show each other pictures of our kids. And we'd compare their faces and tell funny stories about how they used our thousand dollar pen set to draw their favorite cartoon characters all over the walls. We'd peek into all the little cracks of our lives, the alleyways between the paragraphs in our doctoral theses, and pull out our wriggling existence. We would have nothing left to live for in our professional lives. We would only have our families, our loved ones, our connection to other people. That's what we would miss. Critical theory has nothing to do with it. Postmodernism has nothing to do with it. Even art has nothing to do with it, although art is the only mode to express this ontological desire to say "I was here, I did this, this is what I left behind, please remember me." We'd cry for the life we wasted writing about why we didn't like art instead of creating art that spoke to us and the people around us.

What exactly are you saying, Professor? 

Aren't you tired of being an interviewer? I know I'm tired of being a professor from a small liberal arts college in southeastern Maine who has received two Whitesail scholarships and that tacky plague shipped from the governor's office. It's in every interview byline and I'm sick of it... anyways. What I'm saying is that we need to reaffirm ourselves as entities in a world that is completely uncaring and indifferent to us. We must make our own meaning, not mock it like some high school sophomore sitting in a detention hall. We must actively transcend the meaninglessness of postmodernity, the utter hopelessness of it. We must face it and then do something completely different, something completely revolutionary. We must become poets again.

Passionate Embodiment: An Encounter Between Andrew Pullman, an Interviewer Who Has One Baby Boy Named Colm and a Newfound Lover Who is Just Beginning to Understand the Complicated Relationship He Has with His Son, and Timothy Stromler, a Professor Who Has Two Children, a Loving Wife and a Layaway Payment on a Cruel and Demeaning Existence as a Dissector of The Culture He So Desperately Wants to Create.

I don't want that up there. That's my private life you're putting up there.

All part of the experience, Andy. May I call you Andy? Why do you interview people? Is it because you like asking questions to others instead of questioning yourself?

Now don't try and psychoanalyze me Stromler, this is MY interview--

Technically it's an encounter.

You just made it an encounter. You--

I hijacked the narrative.

...Yes. You hijacked the narrative. But it's something I don't want to see put into print.

But what if it isn't even true? What if I just put that you had a lover when in fact you had a wife at home?

That's not true though. I do have a woman I'm seeing and my son is named Colm. You can't just do that to people, you can't do that, Stromler.

Don't get defensive, now. I'm only trying to explain my point.

This interview is over. [Gets up to leave]

No no no wait! Don't leave just yet.

[Sits down]

We haven't even gotten to the bloody core of it yet.

Well before we go any further into this... "raw humanity" or whatever the fuck you're calling it, I'd like to point out that this whole "hijacking the narrative" thing is very postmodern.

And why is that, Andy?

Because you're subverting a conventional form. You're letting the reader know that this is in fact a simulacra, a ruse, a game. You're making the art aware of itself.

It isn't art yet, Andy. It isn't art yet.

Why not?

We haven't said anything worthwhile. We've been spewing nonsense at each other and for what purpose? To skirt around the real possibility of human connection. Avoidance. Detachment. The ironic composure of our times. These are the defense mechanisms we put up to avoid love.

This is making me uncomfortable.

Good! I'm so glad it's making you uncomfortable. Don't think of that admittance as mean-spirited. Think of it as the first step towards artistic enlightenment, towards finding your true self. Only when we become uncomfortable with vulnerability, with honesty, with authentic representation, only then can we progress.

[Silence]

[Pulls out an expensive-looking ink pen set] I want you to participate in an experiment with me, Andy.

Alright.

Take this pen.

[Takes the pen]

Now let's write on the walls. Just like my toddler.

No. This is the magazine's property, we can't deface it.

It's not defacement if it's beautiful. If it's sprawled in

a messy handprint of meaning, little flowers

tucked into the bottom corner of the scene,

a bright sun flickering into life over a box home,

stick figure parents calling a child back in. 

Do you remember those times, Andy?

I can't... I don't want to.

The sequoias on the breeze, the filtered sunlight illuminating

chalk drawings on the sidewalks, your older neighbors

staring in disapproval, the first ounce of shame squeezed out

of your adolescent being. That's when we first knew shame,

knew obedience, knew our audience. That's when our dips

in the pool became thrashing exercises at the six feet line. I remember

my mother, dressed in a cotton t-shirt two sizes big for her.

 I'm reminded every time I see a passenger on a freight car 

going somewhere, to some unspecified location on the distant horizon, 

just a pointillist dot under the sun's paternal grandeur. I remember at fifteen

screaming at father under the stairs as he burned my comic books,

called them filth, my tears staining the comforter I kept

in my secret sleeping area, pasted photos of Disneyland and Peru

entreating me to another place where I could draw and write

and run around like a wild thing and never be found, never be unearthed.

They called me premature but I matured like the bamboo,

skinny and pliable, able to break but never touched by anything

except the pale hands of the breeze. I was weightless then,

bound by nothing except my store-bought conviction, my cloudy cravings,

my backdoor cigarette runs and primary color vacations. They laughed

at me before smirking with self-righteous aggrandizement, the pigs, the

MEANINGLESS ASSORTMENT OF WORDS INTO SENTENCES

CLIPPED FROM THEIR MOUTHS LIKE OBITUARIES, SAYING

"punk is dead" "god is dead" "literature is dead" "the world is dead"

AND NEVER KNOWING, NEVER TOUCHING, NEVER EVEN

ONCE ACKNOWLEDGING THE SIMPLE TOUCH OF DEFIANCE,

HOW IT KNOCKS YOU BACK ONTO YOUR FEET LIKE RAILWAY PISTONS,

PUMPING, FURIOUSLY, LASHING BACK AND BACK AGAIN INTO

A INCANDESCENT FUTURE. WE ARE LAYING on our backs in the summer grass

waiting for something to hold us, to cherish us, to know that our minds

are more than just pulp for the scholarly press, more than martini drinks

thrown in disgust at a waiter, more than thousands and thousands of faces

crying out for something, anything to pull them out of this post-anything mess,

this hopeless pulp of meaningless, the gag and ball of culture that throws us

down into the dirt and muddies us with pretense, with snorts, with irony,

with the shape of a thing molded into formless guttersnipe.

I think I got it now.

That's good, Andy. Just open up your veins and let it flow out of you.

This is no blood spilt, professor, there is no blood spilt for you,

this is retribution for the countless hours sat in front of a Powerpoint screen

memorizing endless numbers, endless figures, endless names to service some 

grand machine that spits out a genius every five years or so then calls it good,

calls it grand, culls Indians and Chinese and South African and British and Irish and

Spanish and Nordic voices and puts it in a file cabinet on a big screen, shows it's

irrational fervor, it's fire-tipped tongue, it's reptilian distillery of words.

I am done with words which are fodder for thought.

I want words that sleep in terra cotta cots,

that play slots and hold lots to sell off shots

of pure adrenaline, pure feeling, pure unconscious consciousness,

what is this writhing mass of self-aware debauchery at my feet,

let's kick it dead. There shall be nothing meta about the event,

nothing even remotely beautiful in it's destruction.

Let's tear it all down and forget the fear of authenticity.

Let's do it sincerely, casually, playfully, forcefully, angrily,

passionately, lovingly, caressingly, simply

raw

parts

of

narrative

composed

into

duets,

a part for

the tongue

another for

the teeth.

Let's live again.

Let's give again.

Thank you for your time, professor.