Chapter 13
Postmodernism
Defining postmodernism
You all know what “realism” is: It is a mode of narrative which is “natural”, presents a
“slice of life” and captures the “verisimilitude.” However, twentieth-century fiction and
narrative theory has undergone a major change, where we have witnessed the
deconstruction of realism.
Postmodernist literature embodies “a case against realism,” and encourages the
“dialogic” as opposed to the “monologic” closure, in a variety of ways. This anti-realist
revolt is intended to function as a dissenting art that challenges the unreliability of
realism.
Notice the word: post + modern. What does it mean?
Of course you know that literally it means something after modern or contemporary. Still,
the difficulty with the term is its meaning is relative to the interests of the inquirer. In this
context, ‘relativism’ and ‘nihilism’ are often termed as the key characteristics of
postmodernity. Many scholars feel that postmodernity is simply the post-industrial, and
includes the information technology boom. However, this move could also be understood
as an example of the very kind of fundamental change which modernity stood for.
A major theorist of postmodernism is the French critic Jean-Francois Lyotard, who wrote
the influential book The Postmodern Condition (1979). A key concept in Lyotard is
metanarrative, indicating the overarching mythic narratives which individuals and
societies tell in order to situate their particular time and place within the context of a
larger story, thereby giving it a deeper significance. A metanarrative locates a current
situation within a larger narrative structure. These narratives are contained in or implied
by major philosophers, such as Kant, Hegel and Marx. The two main narratives Lyotard
attacks are: Christian redemption to Marxist Utopia, and the triumph of science. The
postmodern condition is one in which there is an increasing distrust towards
metanarratives.
Lyotard argues that metanarratives are being replaced by a proliferation of petits recits
(or little stories) that draw attention to particular as opposed to universals, including local
events, individual experiences, heterodox ideas, and other practices that do not fit within
a larger, universal metanarrative.
Another interesting concept in Lyotard is performativity. His idea of performativity is a
quantifiable measure of efficiency, which has become the dominant form of legitimation
in postmodern society. Here, information is power: the more information one has, the
greater performativity one can achieve. With the increasing amount of information
gathered in digital form and databases, the questions of the ownership and accessibility to
them become ever more urgent.
Postmodernity according to David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), is
emergence of flexible labour markets and capitalist enterprises. He also focuses on the
compression of time and space, the loss of community and the rise of individualism.
Case study
Read the following excerpt from Snow White a story by Donald Barthelme. Note that
the questions given after the story are Barthelme’s :
Snow White by Donald Barthelme
“Which prince?” Snow White wondered brushing her teeth. “Which prince will come?
Will it be Prince Andrey? Prince Igor? Prince Alf? Prince Alphonso? Prince Malcolm?
Prince Donalbain? Prince Fernando?Prince Siegfried? Prince Philip? Prince Albert?
Prince Paul? Prince Akihito? Prince Rainier? Prince Porus? Prince Myshkin? Prince
Rupert? Prince Pericles? Prince Karl? Prince Clarence? Prince George? Prince Hal?
Prince John? Prince Mamillius? Prince Florizel? Prince Kropotkin? Prince Humphrey?
Prince Charlie? Prince Matchabelli? Prince Escalus? Prince Valiant? Prince Fortinbras?”
Then Snow White pulled herself together. “Well it is terrific to be anticipating a prince─
to be waiting and knowing that what you are waiting for is a prince, packed with grace─
but it is still waiting, and waiting as a mode of existence is, as Brack has noted, a
darksome mode. I would rather be doing a hundred other things. But slash me if I will let
it, this waiting, bring down my lofty feelings of anticipation from the bedroom ceiling
where they dance overhead like so many French letters filled with lifting gas. I wonder if
he will have the Hapsburg Lip.”
THE President looked out of his window. He was not very happy. "I worry about Bill,
Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, Dan and their lover, Snow White. I sense that all is
not well with them. Now, looking out over this green lawn, and these fine rosebushes,
and into the night and the yellow buildings, and the falling Dow-Jones index and the
screams of the poor, I am concerned. I have many important things to worry about, but I
worry about Bill and the boys too. Because I am the
President. Finally.
The story is interrupted by the writer asking the readers a set of questions:
QUESTIONS:
•
•
•
Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( )
Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember? Yes ( ) No ( )
Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure? Yes
No ( )
• Do you feel that the Authors Guild has been sufficiently vigorous in representing
writers before the Congress in matters pertaining to copyright legislation? Yes ( )
No ( )
• Holding in mind all works of fiction since the War, in all languages, how would
you rate the present work, on a scale of one to ten, so far? (Please circle your
answer) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
• Do you stand up when you read? ( ) Lie down? ( ) Sit? ( )
• In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders?
( ) Two sets of shoulders? ( ) Three? ( )
Analysis
The above story is an example of the realistic fiction making way for the sort of writing
that takes unprecedented liberties with the tradition of fiction. What I would like you to
notice is how a postmodernist fiction unsettles and deconstructs traditional notions about
language, about representations, and also about writing. Focus on the absence of closure
and the text opening itself to multiple interpretations. All this leads us to dwell on the
problematic nature of language, absurdity (the manner in which the questions make fun
of the act of reading) and the intertextual nature of texts (Snow White, as you know, is a
popular children’s story).
Now go to the following link for Barthelme’s story The Glass Mountain:
http://www.fti.uab.es/sgolden/docencia/glassmountain.htm
Quiz I
True/False
i. Postmodernist thought supports a case against realism.
ii. Metanarrative is a narrative of the self.
iii. Postmodernism is restricted only to literature and not other art forms.
iv. The two main narratives Jean Lyotard attacks are Marxism and Capitalism.
v. Postmodernism is easy to define.
Major characteristics
Apart from the concepts of metanarrative and performativity, postmodernists also take
into account the following:
Deconstruction: The roots of deconstruction can be found in Ferdinand de Saussure’s
semiotic theory of language. Deconstructionists hold the view that truth itself is always
relative to the differing standpoints, thus denying the final definitions or truths. The term
was introduced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and points to the fact that the
relationship of language to reality is not given, or even reliable, since all language
systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs. Derrida talks about the false
logocentric dependence on language as the mirror of nature. He interrogates the Western
tradition, which in his belief, had falsely supposed that the relationship between language
and world was well founded and reliable.
For Derrida, differance is the groundlessness of language; the sphere of linguistic
indeterminacy. Out of this indeterminacy and the instability of language, its defiance of
meaning as spurious closure and its sense of “aporia” (impasse of incompatible
meanings), deconstruction discloses the literary texts as a “dissemination” of
contradictions.
The Death of the Author: For the postulators of ‘The Death of the Author’, language and
conventions of texts (inclusive of pictures and music) became something to play with.
Theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault posit that authorial (or author’s)
intentions should no more be trusted than realism. Attention to meanings intended by an
author while reading a text is an example of the logocentric privileging of a particular set
of meanings.
Anecdotal information
Roland Barthes’s Mythologies
A pioneer structuralist critic, Barthes applied the
tools of linguistic and psychoanalysis to social
phenomena and uncovered a complex signlanguage working to establish the myths by
which the media-saturated, affluent world lived.
In one of his essays in Mythologies (1957),
Barthes observes:
“I am at the barber’s, and a copy of Paris-Match
is offered to me. On the cover a young negro in a
French uniform is saluting, with his eyes
uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolor.
All this is the meaning of the picture. But,
whether naively or not, I see very well what it
signifies to me; that France is a great Empire,
that all her sons, without any color
discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag,
and that there is no better answer to the
detractors of an alleged colonialism that the zeal
shown by this Negro in serving his so-called
oppressors.”
Defamiliarization: The term owes its existence to the Russian Formalist, Viktor
Shklovsky (1893-1984), who gave us the concept ostranenie, or making strange. The
term suggests that the function of literature is to make the familiar unfamiliar or/and
renew a perception that promotes a new awareness of the already familiar world.
The Postmodern Novel
Some of the classics of postmodernist fiction are: John Barth’s Lost in the funhouse;
fiction for print, tape, live voice (1968), Jorge L Borges’ Ficciones(1962), William S
Burroughs’ Naked lunch (1966), Italo Calvino If on a winter's night a traveler (1981),
Umberto Eco The name of the rose (1983), Carlos Fuentes. Terra nostra (1976), Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Don DeLillo’s White noise (1985), Alasdair Gray’s
Lanark (1981), Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
The most well-known relationship between postmodernist ideas and literature and art has
resulted in a sustained critique of the claims of mimesis or realism. Postmodernist doubts
on the truthfully descriptive relationship of language to the world helped fostering the art
which included the French ‘new novel’ to magic realist fiction.
Scholars have identified the following as the core characteristics of postmodernist
literature:
Undecidability: Undecidability suggests the impossibility of deciding between two or
more competing interpretations. This involves celebration of multiplicity, heterogeneity
and differences.
Apocryphal history: In postmodernist thought, history is just a narrative, a slave to its
myths, metaphors and stereotypes. Apocryphal history contradicts the official history by
either supplementing the public record or by displacing the official history altogether.
The purpose is to demystify and reinterpret the traditional version of the past.
Science fiction and fantasy framework: Science fiction and fantasy by creating new
ideas about truth, have become vehicles for postmodern condition. Consider works such
as Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Thomas Pynchon’s V
which debate the nature of truth and reality. (For more information,
visit:http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/luckhurst55art.htm).
Chinese-box structure: Skewed and distorted narratives, subject to abrupt shifts and
transformations, and ambiguous as to its boundaries. It suspends normal categories of
time and space, social and rational categories which are built up in everyday architecture
and behaviour, to become “irrational” or quite literally impossible to figure out.
Mise-en-abyme: This involves the paradoxical reproduction within the fictional world of
the fictional world itself. Its literal meaning is thrown into the abyss. The form of a miseen-abyme involves the recurring internal duplication of images of an artistic whole, such
that an infinite series of images disappearing/dissolving into invisibility is produced.
Pastiche: Postmodernist fiction asks us to make distinction but not choices between high
and low art. For example, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose brings together the
elements of the popular detective genre, medieval history, life in a monastery, philosophy
and theories of semiotics. This mixing of levels of cultures creates a kind of hybridity that
challenges the traditional notions of uniformity in literature. You may think of the film
Synecdoche, New York (2008) and Inception (2010) as examples of this device.
Carnival: Mikhail Bakhtin (1995-1975) uses the term Carnival to suggest a defiance of
any “official” closure or the authority of a single fixed sense of any kind. The term is also
used to expose the violence, falsehood and invention of official institutions, practices and
prescriptions. During carnival time, “official” life comes to a temporary halt, and an
inversion of high and low. This provides for a subversion of sensibility, and encourages
question, contest, and annul. A denial of closure leads to the defiance of authority, a faith
of indeterminacy and a reversal of hierarchies.
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts’ meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s
borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in
reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed
many times since it was coined by poststructuralist scholar Julia Kristeva in 1966, where
she synthesized Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist semiotics with Mikhail Bakhtin’s
dialogism.
Case study
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles
Read the following extract from the novel:
It is a time-proven rule of the novelist’s craft never to introduce any but very minor new
characters at the end of a book. I hope Lalage may be forgiven; but the extremely
important-looking person that has, during the last scene, been leaning against the parapet
of the embankment across the way from 16 Cheyne Walk, the residence of Mr Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (who took─and died of─chloral, by the way, not opium) may seem at
first sight to represent a gross breach of the rule. I did not want to introduce him; but
since he is the sort of man who cannot bear to be left out of the limelight, the kind of man
who travels first class or not at all, for whom the first is the only pronoun, who in short
has first things on the brain, and since I am the kind of man who refuses to intervene in
nature (even the worst), he has got himself in ─or as he would put it, has got himself in
as he really is….but rest assured that this personage is, in spite of appearances, a very
minor figure─as minimal, in fact, as a gamma ray particle.
(Also, read the novel for the two alternative endings offered by the author)
Analysis
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a love story between Charles, a Darwinian, his
fiancée, Ernestina, and a mysterious young woman, Sarah Woodruff. The novel contains
an ironical commentary by the author on the events described. Consider how the author
comments on the Victorian period, particularly on the Victorian prudery, along with his
own plot which parodies a typical Victorian novel. The novel is a good example of selfconsciousness, reflexivity, and relativism. You must notice how the postmodern novel
does not create a sustained realist illusion, but displays itself to all those narrative
manipulations , multiple interpretations, and self-contradictions which are at the core of
postmodernist philosophy and thought.
Influenced by the French nouveau roman, Fowles tells us, in the guise of the narrator, that
he has “cheated” by creating three different endings. He teases the readers, “These
characters I create never existed outside my own mind.” At one point, Fowles makes an
appearance as an anonymous bearded character to turn back his watch and give us the
final, existential ending.
For more on postmodern novel:
cscanada.net/index.php/css/article/view/1319/1404
Quiz II
Complete the following:
i. For the postmodernists, the author is dead because…………………………
ii. A Carnival suggests………………………………………………………….
iii. A pastiche means……………………………………………………………
iv. For Derrida, differance stands for the ……………………………………..
v. In the postmodernist thought, history is……………………………………..
Supplementary reading:
1. Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
2. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987.
Selected websites
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0242.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanarrative
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Metanarrative
http://vc.ws.edu/engl2265/unit4/Modernism/all.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html
www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/deconessay.pdf
Answer key
1. a- False; b.-True ; c-False; d. False