MODULE:

English Literature in the 20th Century IIIA+B

Course instructor: Prof. dr. Sanda Berce

L11. Postmodernism: The Change of Voice. New Tendencies in the British

Contemporary Fiction

PostMODERN(ism): a problematic term

(a) Postmodernism-modernism understood as opposition (in the modern

movement in architecture (1910-1945):
- elimination of the hegemony of Euclidian geometry (i.e an axiomatic system
producing theorems- two dimensional and three dimensional space);
- a mode specific to postmodern style: bricolage or a multiple use of elements
taken from earlier styles or periods (classical or modern): Post of
postmodernism indicates a succession (a diachronic sequence of periods), a
conversion (a new direction from the previous one).
(b) The Avant-garde of a new Zeitgeist (challenged by the techno-scientific
development and by the consumer society viewed as a process of continuous
accumulation as well as of the postindustrial society): the effacement of the older
frontier (essentially high-modernism) between high-culture and mass-culture);
(c) Expressions of Thought: outdated modernity postmodernism viewed as a
question of expressions of thought in art, literature and politics dominated by the
visual era:
- the domain of art: derision of avant-gardes regarded as the expression of an
outdated modernity (J.F.Lyotard);
(d) A new Face of Modernity (M. Clinescu, 1987, p.265):
- there are two conflicting and interdependent modernities:
(1) socially progressive, rationalistic, competitive, technological;
(2) cultural critical, self-critical, demystifying basic values of radical
modernity:
- innovation;
- rejection of authority of tradition;
- experimentalism;
Postmodernism as anti-modern:
- dismissal of dogma of progress;
- ctitique of rationality;
- sense that modern civilization has lost great integrative paradigms (grand
narratives), fragmentation of what was once a great unity (e.g. the
modern[ist] Ego).
- In the 1960s:
revolutionary- linked with counterculture; optimistic-apocalyptic
interpretation.
In the 1970s and 1980s:
- PoMo in the literary and art criticism especially architecture.

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 Other disciplines:
- epistemology;
- social sciences;
- established interpretation;
- philosophical-historical debate.

- To the 2000 (the last two decades)(268-9):

- philosophical debate;
- epistemology;
- history of science;
- HERMENEUTICS;
- Possible exhaustion of avant-garde and modernism.

II. The binary opposition MODERNISM-POSTmodernism

Postmodernism designates a new historical cycle in the Western civilization

that emerged around 1875, according to Ihab Hassan (The Postmodern Turn,
1987); the term ' Postmodernism' was used by Federico de Onis for the first
time in 1934.

MODERNISM : elitist/authoritarian/dogmatic POSTMODERNISM

- exploration of the multiple Self anti-elitist/authoritarianist
dispersal of the Ego

- Romanticism/Symbolism Paraphisics/Dadaism
- FORM ( conjunctive, closed ) Anti-FORM
- Purpose PLAY
- Design Chance
- HYERARCHY Anarchy
- Mastery/LOGOS Exhaustion/SILENCE
- Art Object/Finished work PROCESS/Performance/Happening
- Distance Participation
- Creation/TOTALIZATION Decreation/ DECONSTRUCTION
- Synthesis ANTITHESIS
- Presence Absence
- Centering Dispersal
- GENRE/Boundary TEXT/Inter-TEXT
- Semantics Rhetoric
- Paradigm Syntagm
- Hypothesis PARATAXIS
- Metaphor Metonimy
- Selection Combination
- INTERPRETATION/Reading Against interpretation/Misreading
- Signified Signifier
- Narrative/Grand Histoire Anti-Narrative/Petite Histoire

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 - Master Code Idiolect
- Symptom Desire
- Type MUTANT
- Genital/Phallic SCHIZOPHRENIA
- PARANOIA Origin/Cause Difference/Trace
- God the Father The Holy Ghost
- METAPHISICS IRONY
- Determinacy Indeterminacy
- Transcendance Immanence

What is Postmodernism? (Levels of conceptualization)

Theoretical premises:
I/ At a first level of conceptualization:
1) The Western representation was undermined by two simultaneous but contradictory
developments : (a) UNIVERSALIST ( Freedom-Equality-Fraternity , promissed by
the Enlightenment) ;
(b) anti- UNIVERSALIST (to apply those principles fully
democratized, on a truly universal scale) an attempt to make the
Enlightenment live up to its promisses .
Both tendencies act to do their best on behalf of freedom and emancipation.

The older Enlightenment dispensation is giving way to a new one to confront the
problem of THE OTHER .
2) One can see Postmodernism as Enlightenment principles while simultaneously
being subjected to a thorough deconstruction. This takes place :
(a) In a confusing social situation that mirrors the universalizing and
(simultaneously) self-destructive tendencies of modernity ;
(b) The emphasis on decentrement and difference implies
CENTRIFUGALITY ;
(c) The impressive fragmentarization is counteracted by a further
HOMOGENIZATION.
II/ At a second level of conceptualization = similar confusion: Pm. has been defined as
the ATTITUDE of the 1960s counterculture or, more restrictively as the new
sensibility of the 1960s social and artistic avant-garde (see Hand-out Canon and the
New Art).
The new sensibility is eclectic:
The new sensibility(as in Charles Jencks): juxtaposition of tastes and worldviews by
the collision of cause alternating with its effect (The consequence is disharmonious
harmony[Charles Jencks] or the simultaneity of the mutually exclusive[W.Iser],
encompassing paradoxes.
The effect is a hybrid, dissonant beauty which finds simple harmony false and
unchallenging:
- radically democratic;
- it rejects what it sees as the exclusivist and repressive character of LIBERAL
HUMANISM and the institutions with which it identifies that humanism.

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Consequences:
a) displacement of conventions or tradition reinterpreted; re-interpretation of
tradition means that conventions are affirmed and distorted simultaneously);
b) elaboration of new rhetorical figures: stylistic formulae are invented and adopted
within which fashion and function play a role.
New figures: paradox, oxymoron, ambiguity, double-coding, disharmonious harmony,
amplification, complexity, contradiction, irony)

In the course of the 1970s = Pm. drawn into a POSTSTRUCTURALIST orbit :

(a) it is identified with the deconstructionist practices (informed by the
poststructuralism of Barthes and Derrida); Derrida : Structure, sign and play in
the discourse of human sciences :1970 : = the human discourse is a freeplay
i.e. the extension ad infinitum of the interplay of signification in the absence of
metaphisical meaning ; it is based on intertextuality . Barthes: 1968 : the text is
seen as a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original blend and clash ---- the most serious attack on representation= NOT
ONLY CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION but the end of representation : an
important political act, a celebration of the death of the Subject/ of the Author.

(b) The end of representation raised questions of SUBJECTIVITY and

AUTHOSHIP redefined as AGENCY : Whose history gets told ? In whose
name ? For what purpose ? (Marshall 1992 :4). In the absence of transcendent
truth it matters WHO IS SPEAKING(or writing), and WHY, and TO WHOM.

(c) In its later stages, the debate on representation is influenced by Michel Foucault (
he assumes a reality of textuality and signs, of representations that do not
represent ; the workings of power and the constitution of the subject.

The 1980s: Knowledge is not neutral and objective as with the positivists, but powerful
and suspect). Foucaults interest in the role of representations in the constitution of
OTHERNESS , as opposed to the liberal humanist subject= white, male, heterosexual
and rational- - - -Foucaults otherness is represented by women, people of colour,
non-heterosexuals, children) and Lacans revisions of Freud ; occasionally by Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari ;

(d) The translation of J.F.Lyotard in English (1984 : 1979, The Postmodern

Condition) signaled a fully-fledged merger between an originally American
Postmodernism and French poststructuralism.
- their focus on LANGUAGE : They both reject the idea that language can
represent reality ; that the world is acessible to us through language because its
objects are mirrored in the language that we use :
(a) POSTMODERNISM : gives up on languages representational
function .
(b) POSTMODERNISM follows poststructuralism in the idea that
language CONSTITUTES rather than REFLECTS the world and that

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 KNOWLEDGE is therefore always distorted by language( i.e. by historical
circumstances and by the specific environment in which it arises).

III/ The third level of conceptualization: Postmodernism is a WELTANSCHAUNG.

- it is not the wold that is postmodern , it is the perspective from which the world is
seen that is postmodern, i.e. a set of intellectual propositions that to some people make a
lot more sense than they do to others.
e. g. Charles Olson, 1967 : Human Universe and other Essays :
- he seeks to develop an alternative to the whole Greek system in order to
recapture genuine experience (i.e The Western culture closes upon itself against
true experience, against lifes authenticity because of its orientation on
RATIONALISM, and intellectualization of all human experience );
- the condition for reaching back beyond the Greek system is a
proposed WELTANSCHAUNG ;
The new Weltanshaug involves the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the
individual as EGO, of the Subject and its replacement with LANGUAGE :

language allows a primordial experience of the world, it is not the expression of an essentialist,
transcendent subject) : it restores to experience the imanent, authentic, sacramental character .

IV/ At a fourth conceptual level of conceptualization: one can speak of a postmodern

world, i.e. the WORLD has become POSTMODERN, it entered a new historical era of
POSTMODERNITY
- limited to certain areas of contemporary culture : mass culture, mediated by the visual,
by the electronic means of communication at present, elitist yuppie (young urban
professiona) life style promoted by designer magazines, or certain sociologically
definable groups within the world ;
- as a complex of artistic startegies and as a coherent set of theoretical assumptions, a
SIGN of the TIMES (a cultural shift of epistemic proportions);
- a new cultural logic a reflex of the changed nature of the Western capitalism : the
ever increasing commodification of both the public and the private life, the penetration of
capitalism in the every day life.

The effect : obliteration of the classical Marxist distinction between the economic
and the cultural( Cf. F.Jameson and J.Baudrillard).
E.g. Baudrillards Semiurgy = the sinister production of signs- - - the economic
and the cultural representations and signs create and feed each other.

The common denominator : A CRISIS IN REPRESENTATION( loss of faith in our

representation of the real)
CONSEQUENCES :
(a) the transcendent seems to be forever out of reach- hermeneutics must replace our
former aspirations to OBJECTIVITY( rejected by Marxists) ;

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 (b) all representations are constructs that are ultimatelly politically informed : to
break away from our current ones and really confront the OTHER;
(c) the changed map of the humanities : the spectacular upgrading of the cultural
studies (in the 1980s).
Culture had become a major constitutive power in its own right, i .e. Sign= a term
that includes all forms of representation , the most important constitutive element
in the contemporary world ; an interest in the origins and history of specific
representations (the play of textuality).

The central tenets of the Modernist novel:

----- errosion of CHARACTER, EVENT and PLOT -
(1) It canceled the notions of reality and rejection (of the 1 9th century idea) of what
realistic representation consisted of;
(2) It takes shape as a manner of writing, transcending the older opposition between
the literal and the figurative (dimensions of language), the factual and the
fictional (modes of discourse);
(3) It sets aside the distinction between history and fiction (but it doesnt collapse one
into the other): it accomplishes a historical reality purified of the myths of such
grand narratives as fate, providence, Geist, progress, the dialectic (cf. H.White,
1999);
(4) The disappearance of the writer as narrator of objective facts; almost everything
stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of dramatis personae;
(5) The dissolution of any viewpoint outside the novel from which the people and
the events within it are observed;
(6) The predominance of circumspection, doubt and uncertainty and of questioning in
the narrators interpretation of events;
(7) The employment of such devices as stream of consciousness, interior monologue,
free indirect speech/erlebte Rede for aesthetic purposes (to obliterate the
impression of an objective reality completely known to the author);
(8) The use of new techniques for the representation of the experience of time and
temporality (obliteration of the distinction between exterior and interior time; the
representation of events not as successive episodes of a story but as random
occurrences, chance in releasing of processes of consciousness)(as in
E.Auerbach, Mimesis)

The central tenets of the postmodernist novel (apud Ihab Hassan/1987) :

(1) it avoids symbolism ; its reality is phenomenological ;
(2) it promotes indeterminacy ; its language slips and slides and resists interpretation (
the break down of syntax is designed to defer and postpone any absolute translation-
it is an open, dialogic and polyphonic field of possibilities) ;
(3) it seeks fragmentation (it is against holism and it is conceived with IRONY rather
than catharsis) ;
(4) it is self-reflexive (i.e. conscious of itself and opposed to realist verisimilitude) ;
(5) it is pluralist. It is a hybrid genre, an unmargined discourse which priviledges
intertextuality ;

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(6) it uses topographic variation (the fragment itself is visually and phisically figured
out) ;
(7) it celebrates PARODY, PLAY (PASTICHE); it resists any notion of textuality ;
(8) it questions the unifying voice and is anti-authorship.

1) Lawrences postmodernism
- his text is dynamically contradictory; it is given a wholy new dimension in the
context of post-modernity tensions; inconclusivenss; abrupt change of
perspectives.
- The characters are subjected to IRONY and RIDICULE (Birkin makes contradictory
remarks at different points in the novel);
- The novels radical indeterminacy (as in Gamini Salgado :

Lawrence"s novel does not merely deploy a series of paradoxes and contradictions in the
service of a larger unity. It is certainly paradoxical because it is shot through with the
continuous and continually felt tension between the necessity of articulating a vision and its
impossibility and sometimes its undesirability .

--------The texts radical indeterminacy is a function of its own impossible desire:

(a) to achieve the passionate struggle into conscious being;
(b) to struggle for verbal consciousness which should not be left out in art;
(c) to articulate the impossible: at once the propagation and the negation of its
philosophy of life;
(d) polyvocal, heteroglossic discourse.

2) Flann OBriens postmodernism : As an early postmodernist writer (or late

modernist ?), OBriens repudiation of AUTHORSHIP as the central signifying presence
in the text also rejects realist premises : Flann OBriens reality is linguistically
structured and ultimately defines it as a work of postmodernism.
the question posed by OBriens writing is to what extent the concept of literary (post)-
modernism is a valuable and proper context in which to re-consider critically the
metafiction of his novels.

(1) OBrien is usually associated with Joyce (because of their historical and cultural
proximity), the godfather of high modernism.
(2) The critical implication always assumes that Flann OBrien is a late modernist by
dafault.
Similarly, it conveniently ignores that with Finnegans Wake (1936), postmodernism
most likely finds its actual point of origin.
Cf. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (1987) :
Finnegans Wake is a monstruous prophecy of our post-modernity all the
elements of this postmodern novel crowd this "novel" : dreams, parody, play, pun,
fragment, fable, reflexiveness , kitsch the edge of pure silence and pure noise

At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is obsessed with confronting the Joyce of Dubliners, A

Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, but it is best considered as a late-modernist,

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transitory text which criticizes both REALISM and MODERNISM in an openly
deconstructive manner (an exciting new aesthetic):

(a) Flann OBrien is the creator of METAFICTION.

METAFICTION (according to J.Hawthorns definition, A Concise Glossary of

Contemporary Literary Terms ):

Metafiction is Literally fiction about fiction It is generally used to indicate fiction

including any self-referential element Metafiction typically involves games in
which levels of narrative reality ( and the reader"s perceptios of them) are confused, or
in which traditional realist conventions, governing the mimetic and diegetic
elements, are thwarted
Metafictions disrupt the artificiality of traditional narrative mode, by forcing the
distinction between the mimetic (the illusion that the author is not the speaker) and
the diegetic ( the illusion that the author is the speaker) ;
The degree of consciousness allowed to a metafictional narrator is in a constant state
of flux or narrative flicker (similar to an existential condition : the idea of being
trapped in someone elses order) ;
It involves a laying bare of the literary process ( the literary convention itself
becomes a thematic issue) ;
It is a method of unveiling(unmasking) because it mocks the accepted narrative
contract between AUTHOR-TEXT-READER and calls into question willing
suspension of disbelief which classical realist fiction is contingent upon.
The dominant textual strategies of metafiction are those which make the reader aware
that a novel is nothing but an artefact made upon words or that telling stories is
telling lies (Samuel Beckett); Lanuguage is only a hermetic circle referring only to
itself ( metafiction sets out to undermine accepted and conventional modes of
discourse bu concentrating on their inherent linguistic instability , Patricia Waugh,
Metafiction, 1984) If art traditionally held a mirror up to society, then
metafiction holds up a mirror up to the mirror.

NOTE : Modernism (for all its radical innovation) had retained and consolidated the key-
convention of Author-God.
(a) for Joyce (like Flaubert), the Author should remain embedded within the literary
machine : like the God of creation within or behind or beyond or above his
hendiwork, invisible, refined, out of existence . Through his representation of
Stephen Dedalus, Joyce reaches the limits of Modernist aesthetics ( Stephen,
though conscious of the literary symbolism of his name, is never pushed so far into
the metaliterary self-consciousness as to consider that he is the symbolic AUTHOR"
of his own texts) ;

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(b) Modernists envisage the World as a chaotic flux, but they still believed that
meaning could be salvaged and inscribed in words; filtered and negociated through
the presence of the author-god, the ultimate arbitrer of meaning;
(c) The Modernist interest in the heteroglossic text and the possibilities of
intertextuality remained rooted on an aesthetic rather than on an ontological plane.

3) James Joyce: the postmodern: Postmodernist elements in Ulysses (1922)

***Joyce used parallax as a new form of perspectivism: this principle of parallax is to
juxtapose two or more characters different constructions of the same world or of the same
part of the world.
(1) the use of parallax or counterpoint of perspectives (Blooms and Stephens);
(2) a parody of modernity itself (cf.M.Calinescu)
(3) the mobile minde contaminates the world outside consciousness :contincency and
contamination ;
(4) metamorphic reality substitute of a mobile mind ( The Oxen of the Sun, see
B.McHale, 1987) ;
(5) uncertainty as effect of pastiche ( influences : Gothic fiction/Horace Walpole ; Irish
literature/ Joseph Sheridan LeFanu : the tradition of the ghost story) ;
(6) hybrid world- a doubling/replica of really real world ;
(7) use of discursive parallax ; when discourses cannot be attributed to personified
sources within the fictional world Joyce used an ontological parallax or a parallax of
Worlds
as in B.McHale, 1987: Ontological perspectivism, the parallax of discourses and
the worlds they encode, is not a characteristic structure of modernist poetics but it is a
characteristioc of postmodernism, where it may be traced through a whole sequence of
carnivalesque, collage and cut-up or fold-in texts