249- ] English Literature
Postmodern Literature
The Birth of Postmodernism
In
the late 20th century a reaction against Modernism set in. Architecture saw a
return to traditional materials and forms and sometimes to the use of
decoration for the sake of decoration itself, as in the work of Michael Graves
and, after the 1970s, that of Philip Johnson. In literature, irony and
self-awareness became the postmodern fashion and the blurring of fiction and
nonfiction a favored method. Such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and
Angela Carter employed a postmodern approach in their work.
Postmodern literature
Postmodern
literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of
metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which
often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of
experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s
through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William
Gaddis, Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, and John Barth. Postmodernists often
challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this
style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the
1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern
literature is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to.
Precursors
to postmodern literature include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605–1615),
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760–1767), James Hogg's Private Memoires
and Convessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
(1833–1834), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), but postmodern literature
was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 21st century,
American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like
the postironic Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000),
and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). These works also
further develop the postmodern form.
Sometimes
the term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things
ranging from architecture to historical theory to philosophy and film. Because
of this fact, several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism
and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism: Postmodernity is
understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present, which is
different from the theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories
developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault
and others. The third category is the "cultural postmodernism", which
includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements.
Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism.
Background
Notable
influences
Late
19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced the aesthetics of
postmodernism include August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello,[9] and Bertolt
Brecht. Another precursor to postmodernism was Dadaism, which challenged the
authority of the artist and highlighted elements of chance, whim, parody, and
irony. Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to
create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them
out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the
development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement
or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example).
Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued
experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the
subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that
automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the
creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used
photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists
he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte's experiments with signification
are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses
examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many
postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist,
although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with
metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American
world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest
stratification of criticism among scholars.
Other
early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique [fr]
(1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico's Hebdomeros (1929) have
also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]".
Comparisons
with modernist literature
Postmodern
literature represents a break from the 19th century realism. In character
development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism,
turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many
cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness"
styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, or explorative poems like The Waste
Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore
fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is
often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern
literature.[citation needed] The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much
postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these
fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees
fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian
internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited
as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this
chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against
"ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many
modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Woolf's Orlando, for example) and
they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism
playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning
becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein's playful experiment with metafiction and
genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as
postmodern.
Shift
to postmodernism
As
with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of
postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce
and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough
boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed The
Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained
supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called
The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before
O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance, the literary theorist
Keith Hopper regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they
call the postmodern novel.
The
prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather,
it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second
World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva
Convention, through the rape of Nanjing, the Bataan Death March, the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the
Katyn massacre, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment).
It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of
the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, postcolonialism (Postcolonial
literature), and the rise of the personal computer (Cyberpunk and Hypertext
fiction).
Some
further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by
significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the
beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes' The
Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953 (Waiting
for Godot, 1955), the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in
1959.[citation needed] For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical
theory: Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture in 1966
or as late as Ihab Hassan's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971.
Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern
works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an
epistemological dominant while postmodern works are primarily concerned with
questions of ontology.
Post-war
developments and transition figures
Though
postmodernist literature does not include everything written in the postmodern
period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the
Absurd, the Beat Generation, and magic realism) have significant similarities.
These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern";
more commonly, some key figures (Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge
Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez) are cited as
significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic.
The
work of Alfred Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and so
on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd. The
term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe
a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus's concept of
the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction
in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco is essentially a
series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important
figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett.
The work of Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to
postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his
friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of
literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism,
celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that,
in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of
language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters
stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only
recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner
says:
Mostly
concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of
characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the
rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form
and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won
him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are
mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories
and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres.
... Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988),
breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the
collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his
previous work ... He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern
movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical
coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically
explained characters.
The
"Beat Generation" was the youth of America during the materialistic
1950s; Jack Kerouac, who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into
what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic,
multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust's In
Search of Lost Time. More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes
several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the
New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. These writers have
occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see
especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by
Donald Allen). Though this is now a less common usage of
"postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists"
still appear and many writers associated with this group (John Ashbery, Richard
Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern
writers. One writer associated with the Beat Generation who appears most often
on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs. Burroughs published
Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some
the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central
narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such
as detective fiction and science fiction; it's full of parody, paradox, and
playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion
Gysin, for the creation of the "cut-up" technique, a technique
(similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are
cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message.
This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The
Ticket That Exploded.
Magic
realism is a style popular among Latin American writers (and can also be
considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane
(a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive
treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez's "A
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"). Though the technique has its roots in
traditional storytelling, it was a center piece of the Latin American
"boom", a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major
figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel
García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists.
This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin
America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary
movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in
English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism is
an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of
Latin America.
Along
with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir
Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the
beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most
famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist
novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A
Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern.
Scope
Some
of the earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s: William
Gaddis' The Recognitions (1955), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), and William
Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959). It then rose to prominence in the 1960s and
1970s with the publication of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 in 1961, John Barth's
Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and
many others. Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow is "often
considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel
in general."
The
1980s, however, also saw several key works of postmodern literature. Don
DeLillo's White Noise, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and this is also the era
when literary critics wrote some of the classic works of literary history,
charting American postmodern literature: works by Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon,
and Paul Maltby who argues that it was not until the 1980s that the term
"postmodern" caught on as the label for this style of writing.
A new
generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, Dave
Eggers, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Neil
Gaiman, Carole Maso, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem—and publications such as
McSweeney's, The Believer, and the fiction pages of The New Yorker, herald
either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism. Many of
these authors emphasize a strong urge for sincerity in literature.
Common
themes and techniques
Several
themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These
themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and
pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists,
nor is this an exclusive list of features.
Irony,
playfulness, black humor
Linda
Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the
ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This
irony, along with black humor and the general concept of "play"
(related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The
Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism.
Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the
postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became
central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to
be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John
Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, etc.
It is common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and
humorous way: for example, the way Heller and Vonnegut address the events of
World War II. The central concept of Heller's Catch-22 is the irony of the
now-idiomatic "catch-22", and the narrative is structured around a
long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in
particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly
wordplay, within a serious context. For example, it contains characters named
Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the
novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure.
Intertextuality
Since
postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual
works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern
literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel
for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary
history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or
parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the
adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as
references to fairy tales—as in works by Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme, and
many others—or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective
fiction. Often intertextuality is more complicated than a single reference to
another text. Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice, for example, links Pinocchio
to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Also, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose
takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as
Aristotle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Borges. An early 20th century example of
intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists is "Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges, a story with significant
references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with
its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with
postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream.
References to Don Quixote can also be found in Paul Auster's post-modern
detective story, City of Glass. Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism
is John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke's poem of
the same name.
Pastiche
Related
to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste"
together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be a homage
to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the
chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It
can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to
comment on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses
science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science
fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and
science fiction, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of
genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal
distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). In
Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, Coover mixes historically inaccurate
accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional
characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can instead involve a
compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by
Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson's 1969 novel The Unfortunates; it
was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however
they chose.
Metafiction
Metafiction
is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the
apparatus", as is typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the
artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and
generally disregards the necessity for "willing suspension of
disbelief". For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that
works of parody should parody the idea of parody itself.
Metafiction
is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected
narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance,
or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino's 1979
novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a
novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique: the
first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of
writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel.
Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the
firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of
the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as
aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien's 1990 short story cycle The
Things They Carried, about one platoon's experiences during the Vietnam War,
features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran,
the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality
of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book,
"How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling
stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be
unbelievable, and heroic, moral war stories don't capture the truth. David
Foster Wallace in The Pale King writes that the copyright page claims it is
fiction only for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel is
non-fiction. He employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace.
Giannina Braschi also has a namesake character and uses metafiction and
pastiche in her novels Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana about the
collapse of the American empire.
Fabulation
Fabulation
is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to
pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the
notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis
and verisimilitude. Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of
literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for
example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including
fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres
such as science fiction. By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert
Scholes in his book The Fabulators. Strong examples of fabulation in
contemporary literature are found in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of
Stories.
Poioumena
Poioumenon
(plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek: ποιούμενον, "product") is a
term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in
which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler,
"the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the
boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth." In many
cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a
central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle's
Sartor Resartus, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which is about the
narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern
example is Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), in which the narrator, Kinbote,
claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale
Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is
presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the
self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children parallels the
creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent
India. Anagrams (1970), by David R. Slavitt, describes a week in the life of a
poet and his creation of a poem which, by the last couple of pages, proves
remarkably prophetic. In The Comforters, Muriel Spark's protagonist hears the
sound of a typewriter and voices that later may transform into the novel
itself. Jan Křesadlo purports to be merely the translator of a
"chrononaut's" handed down Homeric Greek science fiction epic, the
Astronautilia. Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett's
trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable); Doris Lessing's The Golden
Notebook; John Fowles's Mantissa; William Golding's The Paper Men; Gilbert
Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew; and S. D. Chrostowska's Permission.
Historiographic
metafiction
Linda
Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction" to refer to
works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples
include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón
Bolívar), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini,
Henry Ford, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund
Freud, and Carl Jung), and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War which
makes references to the Lebanese Civil War and various real life political
figures. Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for
example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included.
John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian period in The French
Lieutenant's Woman. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been said to
feature a metafictional, "Janus-headed" outlook in the way the novel
seeks to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at
the same time, problematizes the very notion of doing exactly that.
Temporal
distortion
Temporal
distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and
nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern
literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of
ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above) is
an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt
Vonnegut's nonlinear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim
in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to
Canada, Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a
telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into
multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover's "The
Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants, the author presents multiple
possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is
murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of
the story is favored as the correct version.
Magic
realism
Magic
realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined,
smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic
manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and
fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic
features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the
realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and
even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and
fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane
erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the
inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the works of Massimo
Bontempelli, author of Eva Ultima (1923), and of Jorge Luis Borges, author of
Historia universal de la infamia (1935), considered a bridge between modernism
and postmodernism in world literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez
is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction—especially his
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier (The Kingdom of
This World, 1949) is another described as a "magic realist".
Postmodernists such as Italo Calvino (The Baron in the Trees, 1957), and Salman
Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999), commonly use magic realism in
their work. A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early
21st-century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier's "The
Ceiling", Dan Chaon's "Big Me", Jacob M. Appel's
"Exposure", and Elizabeth Graver's "The Mourning Door".
Technoculture
and hyperreality
Fredric
Jameson called postmodernism the "cultural logic of late capitalism".
"Late capitalism" implies that society has moved past the industrial
age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed
postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations
have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information,
technology has become a central focus in many lives, and one's understanding of
the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have
dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche.
For example, the virtual reality of "empathy boxes" in Philip K.
Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which a new
technology-based religion called Mercerism arises. Another example is Don
DeLillo's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with a "white
noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk
fiction of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and many others use science fiction
techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment.
Paranoia
Perhaps
demonstrated most famously and effectively in Heller's Catch-22, the sense of
paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the
world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering
is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line
between delusion and brilliant insight. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49,
long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation
which may be "coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke". This
often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example,
in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Dwayne Hoover becomes
violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he
is the only human. This theme is likewise present in the satirical dystopian
science-fiction tabletop role-playing game Paranoia.
Maximalism
and the "Systems Novel"
Dubbed
maximalism by some critics, and overlapping with the related term systems
novel, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave
Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the
"purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it
should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be
appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples
in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer,
which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its
engagement with a work.
In
The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto
Bolano's 2666, (2014) Stefano Ercolino characterised maximalism as "an
aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the
second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then 'emigrates' to
Europe and Latin America at the threshold the twenty-first." Ercolino
singled out seven novels for particular attention: Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite
Jest, Underworld, White Teeth, The Corrections, 2666, and 2005 dopo Cristo by
Babette Factory.
Tom
LeClair had previously coined the term systems novel in his 1987 book In the
Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, exploring the concept further in his
1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Having
introduced the term in relation to Don DeLillo, Tom LeClair chose seven novels
as the focus of The Art of Excess. They were: Gravity's Rainbow (by Thomas
Pynchon), Something Happened (by Joseph Heller), J R (by William Gaddis), The
Public Burning (by Robert Coover), Women and Men (by Joseph McElroy), LETTERS
(by John Barth) and Always Coming Home (by Ursula Le Guin). LeClair's systems
novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving
for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom!
in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound
effect." LeClair wrote, "These seven novels are about mastery,
about excesses of power, force, and authority in arenas small and large: the
self's mastery of itself, economic and political hegemony, force in history and
culture, the transforming power of science and technology, the control of
information and art. These novels are also about the size and scale of
contemporary experience: how multiplicity and magnitude create new relations
and new proportions among persons and entities, how quantity affects quality,
how massiveness is related to mastery."
Although
Ercolino's "maximalist" examples overlapped with LeClair's earlier
systems novel examples, Ercolino did not see "mastery" as a defining
feature. According to Ercolino, "it would make more sense to speak of an
ambiguous relationship between maximalist narrative forms and power."
Many
modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto,
attack the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with
language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore
empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's
Mason & Dixon and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where postmodern
narrative coexists with emotional commitment.
In a
2022 GQ article, "Is the 'systems novel' the future of fiction?", Sam
Leith compared Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation with Dave Eggers' The
Every. Leith wrote, "The question ultimately posed, or pointed to, by
systems novels is: can novels do without people? And the answer I would give
is: not completely. The problem is, perhaps, that the part of our minds that
responds to old-fashioned novels hasn't changed as fast as the world around
it."
Minimalism
Literary
minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where
readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The
characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.
Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism,
the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and
necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate
to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every
minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the
reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as
postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Jon Fosse
and especially Samuel Beckett.
Fragmentation
Fragmentation
is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements,
concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are
fragmented and dispersed throughout the entire work. In general, there is an
interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at
first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a
metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence
structure or grammar. In Z213: Exit, a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris
Lyacos, one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature,
an almost telegraphic style is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and
conjunctions. The text is interspersed with lacunae and everyday language
combines with poetry and biblical references leading up to syntax disruption
and distortion of grammar. A sense of alienation of character and world is
created by a language medium invented to form a kind of intermittent syntax
structure which complements the illustration of the main character's
subconscious fears and paranoia in the course of his exploration of a seemingly
chaotic world.
Patricia
Lockwood's 2021 Booker-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This is a
recent example of fragmentation, employing the technique to consider the
effects of internet usage on quality of life and the creative process.
Different
perspectives
John
Barth, a postmodernist novelist who talks often about the label
"postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called "The
Literature of Exhaustion" and in 1980 published "The Literature of
Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "The Literature
of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after
modernism had exhausted itself. In "The Literature of Replenishment"
Barth says:
My
ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either
his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist
grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on
his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy
craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he
nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such
late-Modernist marvels as Beckett's Texts for Nothing... The ideal
Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and
irrealism, formalism and "contentism", pure and committed literature,
coterie fiction and junk fiction...
Many
of the well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II, one of the most
famous of which being Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Heller claimed his novel and
many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of
the country after the war:
The
antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following
World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the 1950s. A general
disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the
form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not
in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware
of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22,
J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the
Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Pynchon was
writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle. I don't think any one
of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever
forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all
of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong
in Cat's Cradle.
In
his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose', the novelist and theorist Umberto
Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a
transhistorical phenomenon:
[P]ostmodernism
... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal
category – or better still a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. ... I think of
the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and
knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows
that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been
written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As
Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having
avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk
innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that
he loves her in an age of lost innocence.
Novelist
David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and
U.S. Fiction" makes the connection between the rise of postmodernism and
the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic
juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the
preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature:
It
was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something
more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air,
mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of
symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the
post-Nabokovian Black Humorists, the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and
latinophiles only later comprised by "postmodern". The erudite,
sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction
writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan
and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one
region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of a culture that said its most
important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks
particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR, the Barth of The End of
the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor, and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 ...
Here's Robert Coover's 1966 A Public Burning, in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon
on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for
president.
Hans-Peter
Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature:
Postmodernism
... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period
after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative
and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature
produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the
1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the
"Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what
follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially
Durrell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while
"post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative.
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