INTRODUCTION TO POSTMODERNISM
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"What is labelled as postmodernism includes the following diverse and often contradictory phenomena: neo-conservative ideology, reactionary sentiments, cynicism, a rejection of narrative structure, parody, stylistic promiscuity, pastiche, schizoid culture, excremental culture, a preference for visual images over words, fantasy, a 'post-tourist' search for spectacle, the epistemological equivalence of past and present, end of the Eurocentric perspective, commercialism, nihilism, and a penchant for 'hyper-reality' in which distinctions between the real and the unreal are no longer valid. Above all, postmodernism is defined as an attack on the 'myth' of modernity, the belief that the progressive liberation of humanity shall occur through science."
(S.Mestrovic, The Coming Fin de Siècle, Routledge, 1991)To offer a systematic description of postmodernism like that above is akin to organizing an anarchists' meeting: knowingly self-contradictory. Therefore the following comments, quotations, and part-definitions are meant only to build up a mosaic of postmodernism which offers one picture of it. Like the description of an elephant offered by three blindfolded individuals who grabbed, respectively, its trunk, leg, and tail, postmodernism appears differently depending on where you begin and which part of it you are holding on to.
However, another way of approaching the question 'what is postmodernism', is to ask when it occurs. Again, there are many answers to this but here are three. Someone strolling by the Victorian architecture of Rodney Street, eating a kebab and drinking Dr.Pepper, thinking about Australian soaps and the conflict in 'the former Yugoslavia', listening to Bhangra on a walkman, wearing retro clothes, with a copy of Hello magazine in one pocket and Marx in the other, has entered the era of postmodernism.
A different version might claim that a world economy in which someone might be working for a multinational company, buying cards from Traidcraft and clothes from M&S, owning a bank account whose funds are invested across the globe, and taking a holiday in Cuba, defines postmodernism.
Lastly, another version might argue that you have yourself entered the postmodern if you have ever surfed the 'World Wide Web' (this sounds familiar!?), or repeatedly pressed the remote control only to find you are watching something 'live', or phoned someone up hoping to speak to their answerphone.
Postmodernism, to most critics, is a phase - but of what?
a) Capitalism ?
b) Art ?
c) Identity ?
d) Language ?
e) the West ?
f) History ?
g) All of the above ?
THE SHIFT FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM
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- Some critics see postmodernist fiction as a development of/from modernist fiction: "Postmodernism extends modernist uncertainty, often by assuming that reality, if it exists at all, is unknowable or inaccessible through a language grown detached from it. Postmodernism investigates instead what worlds can be projected or constructed by texts and language." (Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, Harvester, 1993)
- Many see Postmodernism as a reaction to modernism's monotonous universal world vision and its values of individuality, progress, and human self-determination. While modernism was serious, formally experimental, and apocalyptic, postmodernism is more often parodic, playful, and carnivalesque (transitional figures like Beckett, Nabokov, and Borges often seem to retain the pessimistic worldview). Theories of modernist art are based on the notion of finding the limits of the particular artform. Postmodernist art is by comparison, either an art of exhaustion or of celebration.
- Modernism (in English fiction) has a paradoxical aesthetic unity in its emphasis on disunity, or fragmentation, as though art could contain life's chaos: could create an order. Postmodernist writing often mocks this pretension to pursue order through language and shows language breaking down or going into overdrive. For a discussion of these aspects see the section on postmodernism in David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, Edward Arnold, 1978.
- Postmodernism suggests that our interpretations are comforting illusions - Henry James's modernist pattern of the form and artistry of literature as akin to 'The Figure in the Carpet' is reinterpreted as 'just carpet'. Experience is 'just carpet' - a pattern is imposed on life, not discerned. Reality is 'constructed' rather than 'perceived' - it does not exist separately from its construction.
- Modernist 'alienation' is no longer tenable because there is no coherent 'self' to be alienated. Individuals are now 'schizophrenic' in the sense that each individual is many subjects - not because of urban experience, but because the individual is only the site of, a meeting-place for, competing and diverse discourses. There is no 'real' identity, no stable transcendent ego, only a series of different roles the individual (mostly unconsciously) aspires to or at least thinks in terms of. There are many ways to read the world and different languages and groups are constantly competing for our 'identification'. In this sense, advertising has parallels with all uses of language and all sign systems: each one allocates subject-positions that the individual is asked to slot her/himself into: 'Your country/church/party/family/school needs you!'.
- Modernism says that the house is a machine for living in... postmodernism says the house is an antique for living in. Postmodernism thinks it is not divorced from everyday life, as modernism was, but is of it. Distinctions between 'high' and 'popular', 'secular' and 'religious', 'past' and 'present' are taken apart - not to leave an amorphous mass of indistinguishable practices and artefacts, but to think of the world in a different way, where hierarchies are not generated by universal transcendent values ('art' 'god' or 'man') but by the ideologies and discourses that enable/persuade people to understand the world in terms of their narratives. This does not result in sheer cultural relativism but in the apprehension of different cultural, economic, and social interests who benefit from these various weltanschauung.
- Peter Brooker in his introduction to Modernism/Postmodernism writes: "Postmodernism, we can say, splices high with low culture, it raids and parodies past art, it questions all absolutes, it swamps reality in a culture of recycled images, it has to do with deconstruction and consumerism, television, the end of communism...the rise of the information society."
POSTMODERNIST FICTION
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- To begin with, we need to say that a lot of postmodernist writing questions the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, as it does that between history and mythology or other kinds of writing.
- Terry Eagleton says: 'There is perhaps a degree of consensus that the typical postmodernist artefact is playful, self-ironizing, and even schizoid; and that it reacts to the austere autonomy of high modernism by impudently embracing the language of commerce and the commodity. Its stance toward cultural cultural tradition is one of irreverent pastiche, and its contrived depthlessness undermines all metaphysical solemnities, sometimes by a brutal aesthetics of squalor and shock.'
POSTMODERN STYLISTICS (according to David Lodge):
- "Like much contemporary literary theory, the postmodernist novel puts into question that entire series of interconnected concepts that have come to be associated with what we can conveniently label as liberal humanism: autonomy, transcendence, certainty, authority, unity, totalization, system, universalization, centre, continuity, teleology, closure, hierarchy, homogeneity, uniqueness, origin." Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Routledge, 1988. p.57
- Alternatively, John Mepham, in "Narratives of Postmodernism" (in Edmund Smyth, Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, Batsford, 1991) argues that postmodernism is a condition of reading - a position that undermines the common response that postmodernist writing can be found in modernist writing (like Joyce) or in the 18th century (Sterne) or before. The contemporary Western world is informed by post-structuralist theory and so postmodernism is a reading strategy that emerges now. Mepham says there are four kinds of postmodernist fiction.
- Post-structuralism suggests that the best image for the postmodernuist text is the Labyrinth: "The text as a reified locus of determinacy is replaced by textuality, often figured by the metaphor of the labyrinth. As it incorporates decentring, difference, differance and other grammatological moves, the labyrinth (image of the text) places writing before us as the setting of the abyss. Mise en abyme (to throw into the abyss) = the vertigo produced by the endless play of signifiers."
- Raymond Federman (from Surfiction, 1975):
"the people of fiction, the fictitious beings, will also no longer be well-made characters who carry with them a fixed identity, a stable set of social and psychological attributes - a name, a situation, a profession, a condition etc. The creatures of the new fiction will be as changeable, as illusory, as nameless, as unnamable, as fraudulent, as unpredictable as the discourse that makes them. This does not mean, however, that they will be mere puppets. On the contrary their being will be more genuine, more complex, more true-to-life in fact, because they will not appear to be simply what they are; they will be what they are: word-beings... That creature will be, in a sense, present to his own making, present to his own absence."
- Thomas Docherty (in E.Smyth ed. see, pp.175-6) argues that there is a category confusion in postmodernism: fictional characters, which have been seen as epistemologically constituted (as bundles of traits encompassed by a fixed set of textual events) are purposely confused with 'real' personalities, the ontologically constituted people with complex existential dimensions we take ourselves to be. In postmodernist fiction, the depth approach - seeing people as multi-faceted beings with unique hidden depths - is replaced by surface only, and by not spatial 'depth' but temporal multiplicity. History and politics also recur as liberalism's eternal immanent truths and values are replaced by choices forced on the individual from the outside and temporal character development is reseen as conditioned by historical external change. The inconsistencies of character in p/m fiction serve to undermine the reader's possible attempt to pin the 'character' to a list of qualities or properties - to resist essentialism and notions of identity. The reading-subject is therefore like Kristeva's notion of the subject-in-process: a subject whose subjectivity is itself both endlessly deferred, endlessly differing: the political dimension to this is to prevent 'identification' of reader with character and therefore preserve difference and prevent the reader from becoming omniscient or feeling like a centre of consciousness: it involves a marginalization of the reader from a centralized or totalized narrative of selfhood, thus rendering the reading subject-in-process as the figure of the dissident (Kristeva's term for women or experimental writers who find themselves exiled from a centred identity of meaning and its claims to a totalized law or truth).