10. Postmodernism

An international movement, affecting all the contemporary arts, which has succeeded Modernism. In literature, it has its origins in the rejection of traditional mimetic fiction in favor of a heightened sense of artifice, a delight in games and verbal pyrotechnics, a suspicion of absolute truth a resulting inclination to stress the fictionality of fiction.

Stressing socio-historical and political conditions, the critic Larry McCaffrey has identified 22 November 1963 – the day Kennedy was short – as the beginning of postmodernism. Later events – the Vietnam war, the proliferation of nuclear weapons – encouraged the fantasies of William Burroughs, the schizophrenic abstractions of Kurt Vonnegut and intricate structures favoured by John Barth and V. Nabokov.

Postmodern literature argues for expansion, the return of reference, the celebration of fragmentation, and the role of reference in literature.

Modernism’s passion for the new was rejected by postmodernism in 50’s and 60’s for conservative reasons.

Postmodernists wanted to maintain elements of modern utility while returning to the reassuring classical forms of the past. The result of this was an eclectic, ironic brick-a-brack or collage approach to construction that combines several traditional styles into one structure

One can distinguish three major usages of the word “POSTMODERNISM”:

1) to refer to the non-realist and non-traditional literature and art of the post-World War II period;

2) to refer to literature and art which takes certain modernist characteristics to an extreme stage;

3) to refer to a more general human condition in the “late-capitalist” world of the post 1950s, a period marked by the end of the grand “metanarratives” of western culture.

Some critics condemn postmodernists for having given up the world of social and political engagement for the solipsistic pleasures of world play.

Many works of English writers of the period were dedicated to the philosophical problems. The most influential philosophical trends of twentieth-century thought often evoked an existentional attitude.

EXISTENTIALISM as a philosophical movement views human existence as having a set of underlying themes and characteristics, such as human values, the meaning of life, anxiety, dread, freedom, suffering, awareness of death, and consciousness of existing, that are primary. Human beings are exposed to or to use the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s phrase, “thrown” into, existence. The existentialists deny that essence is primary. Existence is the only concrete thing, the rest is mere abstraction. For existentialism, human beings can be understood only from the inside, in terms of their lived and experienced reality and dilemmas, not from the outside, in terms of a biological, psychological, or other scientific theory of human nature. It emphasizes action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to human existence and is fundamentally opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism.

For J.P. Sartre, the central question is the meaning of human existence. His answer is that human beings and their existence in the world have no meaning. There is no reason why reason why the world and people should exist at all. God cannot ne the reason, since there is no God. For Sartre, consciousness is the main reality, and yet it is incomprehensible with regard to its origin and continuity. In the typical existential vein, people do have freedom and choice. They are constantly plagued with making decisions. If they try to escape this freedom, they are left only with anxiety and despair. We are aware of our own existence and what will happen when we reach nonexistence. As such, existential philosophy is not materialistic, or pragmatic, or rationalistic. It focuses on the human side of human beings on the subjective experience.

Thus, existentialism implied a certain skepticism about ever knowing the nature of a human being. Existentialist philosophy placed limitation on man’s knowledge and power (Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, F. Nietzsche, Nikolai Berdyaev,etc ).

The influence of existentialist ideas left a profound impression on the creation of:

Iris Murdock (“A Severed head” (1961), “The Bell” (1958), “The Black Prince” (1973), “The See, The See” (1978)),

John Fowles (“The Collector” (1963), “The Magus”(1966), “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1969), “Mantissa” (1983)).

With Murdock the trend in creative writing moved to philosophical fiction. She created a serious of intricate novels that deal with the nature of man and his delusions.

William Golding’s novels and especially his most successful “Lord of the Flies” are notable for their symbolic treatment of human nature.

Graham Green with his books (“The Quiet American”(1955), “England Made Me”(19350, “The Power and the Glory” (1940)) introduced his characteristic genre, the thriller with theological and moral significance.

“The Golden Notebook” (1062), by Doris Lessing, hailed if not conceived as the expression of feminist politics, examines the experience of a woman writer. The narrative is split into a conventional novel, ironically entitled “Free Woman”, and a series of lyrical and exploratory asides represented by the four notebooks kept by the protagonist, Anna Wulf.

The pessimistic and satirical depiction of the violent and unjust world - the world of military offices, political men, priests and soldiers – finds its realization in the works of Evelyn Waugh (“Brideshead Revisited”)

ANGRY YOUNG MEN – a group of writers of the late 1950’s characterized by what Kenneth Allsop defines in “The Angry Decade” (1958) as “Irreverence, stridency, impatience with tradition, vigour, vulgarity, sulky resentment against the cultivated”. These feelings were founded in the sense of betrayal and futility which succeeded the exalted aspirations generated by post-war reforms. Colin Wilson’s study of alienation, “The Outsider” (1956), was judged by many an important manifesto for the movement. The classic dramatic embodiment is in John Osborn’s “Look Back in Anger”, whose anti-hero Jimmy Porter has come to represent the definitive ‘angry young man’. Among the other exponents: John Wain, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe.

Theatre of the Absurd - Literally meaning ‘out of harmony’, absurd was Albert Camus’s designation for the dilemma of modern man, a stranger in an inhuman universe. Recognizing such strangers in stage characters in the 1950s, critic Martin Esslin’s influential Theatre of the Absurd (1961) applied the term to contemporary playwrights who presented man’s metaphysical absurdity in an aberrant dramatic style mirroring the situation. His main examples were Adamov, Ionesco, Genet and Becket, whose Waiting for Godot brought international acclaim to the Theatre of the Absurd. Albee and Pinter received less attention. Journalists soon seized upon the term, confusing it with the everyday meaning of absurd as outrageously comic and applying it to almost non-realistic modern dramatist.

Certain of the techniques used by absurdist writers have established themselves in the contemporary theatre. The carrying of logic ad absurdum, the dissolution of language, the bizarre relationship of stage properties to dramatic situation, the diminution of sense by repetition or unexplained intensification, the rejection of narrative continuity and the refusal to allow characters or even scenery to be self-defining have become acceptable stage conventions.

The distrust of traditional mimetic genres, allied to the philosophical climate of structuralism and deconstruction, has encouraged postmodernism to embrace popular forms, such as:

DETECTIVE FICTION -

(Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, 1983)

SCIENCE FICTION -

(Doris Lessing (“Canopus in Argos” (1974), “The Sirian Experiments” (1981),

Angela Carter (“Nights at the Circus” (1984), “Wise Children” (1991))

Equally post-modernism is the blurring of boundaries between the novel and journalism in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (1966).

Elsewhere, the incipient independence of nations like Colombia catalyzed the emergence of MAGIC REALISM, a central subject of postmodernism.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is often celebrated as the key postmodernist text. It is generally regarded as the paradigm of magic realism.

This term was first employed as a literary definition by the American critic Alastair Reid, and referred then to the large body of spectacular, fantastic fiction produced in South American countries after World War II. Major exponents are: Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, etc.

Essentially a manifestation of postmodernism, the genre is characterized by the juxtaposition of apparently reliable, realistic reportage and extravagant fantasy.

Among English Magic Realists are: Angela Carter, Emma Tennet, Muriel' Spark, Margaret Drabble, Stanley Middleton, Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis.

The principal examples in British fiction are the novels of the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie: “Midnight Children” (1981), “Shame” (1983), “Satanic Verses” (1988).

In the European tradition, it is possible to see Rabelais and Kafka as precursors of the Magic realist idiom.