Postmodernist Literature

Postmodernism is the name given to the period of literary criticism that is now in full bloom. Just as the name implies it is the period that comes after the modern period and is often applied to the literature and art after W.W.II when the consequences of the war were aggravated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism, mass murder, the threat of total destruction by atomic bomb, the progressive destruction of natural environment and the ominous fact of overpopulation. It is usually a reaction against anti-traditionalism of modernists as well as the modernist appreciation of “high art” by recourse to folklore and popular art and popular culture. It is an anti-authoritarian movement that advocates living and thinking beyond the structures of capitalist ideology and totalizing concepts. Postmodernism is concerned with uncertainty and unreliability of language. At the same time Jacques Derrida presented his first paper Of Grammatology, outlining the principles of Deconstruction. Novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Toni Morrison, and Allain Robbe-Grillet, poetry of Ishmael Reed, literary theory of Julia Kristeva, Marxism of Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, etc.

 

 

1. The nouveau roman: Stemming from France by Allain Robbe-Grillet’s book Pour un Nouveau Roman, it is a fictional form in which the accepted conventions of fictional composition are deliberately distorted or disobeyed in order to mislead the reader to achieve a special effect. There is a systematic rejection of the traditional framework of fiction—chronology, plot, character—and of the omniscient author. In place of these reassuring conventions, they offer texts that demand more of the reader, who is presented with compressed, repetitive, or only partially explained events from which to derive a meaning that will not, in any case, be definitive. (Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie)

 

2. Metafiction (anti-novel):in which the narrator jokes with and teases the reader in various ways-advising him or her to turn back several pages to read a passage again, for example. The best-known recent example of such writing is John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant Woman (1969). The word literally means fiction about fiction- normally denoting the sort of novel or short story which deliberately breaks fictive illusions and comments directly upon its own fictive nature or process of composition. The English father figure of metafiction is Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

 

3. Magic Realism (Faction): The term is a portmanteau word (fact + fiction) and refers to novels such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) in which novelistic techniques are used to depict actual historical events, using a real person or event with imagined detail. In other words, it is a style of writing that incorporates magical or supernatural events into realistic narrative without questioning the improbability of these events. Fact, fantasy, history, mythology and folklore are fused to reveal the social injustices and political instability. In fact, it has its roots in the movement of surrealism. It is a Latin-American movement in the mid 20^th C. which was pioneered by Alejo Carpentier and later perfected by Gabriel Garcia Marquez but spread into all parts of the world.

 

 

1) Exploration of Latin-American identity: Since Latin-American countries had been colonized by US and European countries, its literature tended to depict its history, culture, the history of its colonization, slavery and immigrants.

 

2) Importance of magic and myth: This genre used the power of magic and myth to create a version of reality that differentiates itself from what is normally perceived as “real life,” loss of traditional values as in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, loss of intimate relationship between human and animals.

 

3) A critique of rationality, progress and traditional ethics: South-American countries were continually exploited by the industrialized west and American imperialism which imposed some values on Latin-Americans to justify their exploitation. Magic Realist writers subverted these values. Thus, Logic and progress were replaced by reliance on emotions, senses and ritual.

 

4) Questioning the reality: These writers believed that reality is not external from human thought but is created by humans. Therefore, they used variety of techniques to question the nature of reality.

 

5) Deconstruction: As the basic premise of postmodernist literature, it does not mean destruction. It is a critique of certainty, identity and truth. It emphasizes that the text has many internal meanings that are in conflict with themselves, as a result there is no solid and guaranteed meaning to a text. Thus, there is no final meaning to any text.

 

 

1. Schizophrenia: suggested by Frederic Jameson means that the time line of the story has two things happening at the same time. The writer shows an event and another which happened at the same time.

 

2. Recurring characters: Some of the characters appear in two or three of the author’s works.

 

3. Irony and paradox: In postmodernist novels usually the opposite of what is said is intended and the texts are often self-contradictory.

 

4. Authorial Intrusion: The author speaks indirectly to the audience or a character in the course of the novel not as a character but as the writer.

 

5. Self-reflexivity: The work makes critical comment about itself.

 

6. Collage: is random association of dissimilar objects without any intentional connection between them without a specified purpose for these associations. (Rapid representation of bits and pictures from old news tapes that are often used at the beginning of news programs is collage.) In this technique, the author incorporates pieces of poetry, other artistic works, newspapers, photos, part of a play, and biography of real characters into his own writing.

 

7. Fragmentation: In postmodernist works there is no cohesion and interrelatedness in the narration of the story. Like the speaking of a schizophrenic, the dialogues are short, scattered and jumping from one point to another. But it does not mean that there is no plot at all.

 

8. Indeterminacy: Based on Derrida’s theory of Deconstruction, postmodernist works tend not to represent a determinate conception of truth. This indeterminacy in spite of its disconnectedness and incoherence emphasizes that all mental, ethical, psychological and ideological determinacies are doubted and attacked.

 

9. A refusal of seriousness: In most of the postmodernist works there is an undercurrent of the absurd by making use parody, black humour, wit, etc.

 

10. Parody: These works tend to make a parody of all literary forms, genres, conventions, even of themselves as a literary medium.