Introduction to Postmodernism

At the time that I'm writing this, near the tail end of the first quarter of the 21^st century, it's easy to look at contemporary literature—which we would call postmodern—and think that Modernism never really went away. Postmodern literature looks suspiciously like Modernist literature, because they share many of the same characteristics.

Characteristic	Modernism	Postmodernism
Use of fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials. Narration comes through fragmented, internalized, or multiple perspectives or viewpoints.
Mixing high and low art, with no distinctions between the two. Art is Art.
Works are reflexive or self-conscious; each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways. Art as Art.
Objectivity is impossible, so texts are ambiguous. They can't be pinned down, so they can have multiple interpretations.
Central characters are often anti-heroes: isolated, eccentric, and anti-social. Secondary characters are often archetypes, or symbolic, or allegorical. All of them are looking to find some meaning for their lives.

The World They Both Reflect

Both Modernist and Postmodernist writers look at the world around them and see humanity, especially in the Global North, struggling with a lack of meaning in their lives, a lack of faith in social institutions, and a sense of disorientation in a world that seems essentially random. In short, there's no longer a sense of security for us, and our best days seem to be behind us. Think about postcolonial nostalgia in the face of decolonization across the globe ("The glory that was England!"), or the radical contingency of contemporary particle physics. If we can't even understand matter itself, how can we hope to understand something so esoteric as the meaning of our existence? Things like advances in technology (which have historically been first employed for militaristic and destructive means), growing distrust of governments and their agencies, changing global migration patterns, the awareness and denial of human impact on the environment, and an ever-increasing wealth gap, as the rich get richer while the poor get poorer all combine to create an overwhelming sense of insecurity.

The Big Difference

So Modernists and Postmodernists are responding to the same conditions. But the way they frame those conditions is different. Modernists see the current state of affairs—all that material in the paragraph above—as something to be mourned. They hope that art itself can provide the unity, coherenece, continuity, and meaning that seems to be missing in the world. A Modernist example of this is Eliot's The Waste Land, where the modern world is circling the drain. It is fragmented, disoriented and disorienting, and untimately incomprehensible. Western culture, once rock-solid and sure of itself, is exhausted, and has no more to offer humanity. Yet Eliot holds out hope that some meaning can still be found, can still save modern society. He looks to the East, and to the discipline of self-awareness, to restore the meaning that has been lost.

Modernists hold out hope that things will eventually make sense, that coherence, stability, and unity are all possible. For them, the way to get there is through rationaility, which will allow humanity to regain a sense of order, both on the personal and societal levels. We'd call this a Modernist metanarrative.

Postmodernists, on the other hand, question the value of things like metanarratives. For them, this sense of disorientation and loss is not tragic. Postmodernists revel in fragmentation and disunity; given the world around us, it's the only authentic way to live. Searching for or claiming that there is such a thing as a Grand Narrative, or a larger purpose, or an objective understanding of the world and our place in it, is just self-delusion. We know too much, we've seen too much, to retreat into some idyllic past where things just made sense. There's no way back to that garden, so we should enjoy the path we're on now.

MODERNISM		POSTMODERNISM
Places faith in the ideas, values, beliefs, culture, and norms of the West, then laments when those things are not present.		Places Western values and beliefs in a larger context, where they are only a small part of the human experience. Oten denies the existence of such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms.
Attempts to reveal profound truths of experience and life.		Is suspicious of being "profound," because such ideas are based on one particular Western value systems.
Attempts to find depth and interior meaning beneath the surface of objects and events.		Focuses on the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects and events.
Focuses on central themes and a united vision in a particular piece of literature. The world may be unstable, but human nature is not.		The human experience is unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, and discontinuous, with no one specific reality possible.
Authors guide and control a reader's response to their work, through gaps, or pastiche, or unreliable narrators, etc.		Authors creates an "open" work in which readers must supply their own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide their own (unguided) interpretations.

Characteristics of Postmodern Writing

Irony, playfulness, black humor

Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists. It's common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way.

Pastiche

To combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity.

Intertextuality

Interdependence of literary texts based on the theory that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the "absorption and transformation of another". One literary text depends on some other literary work.

Metafiction

Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willful suspension of disbelief". It is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling.

Temporal distortion

This is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and non-linear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony.

Technoculture and hyperreality

Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the "cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism" implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche.

Paranoia

The sense of paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd.

Maximalism

Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narratives of many writers have generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and polytropic novels are one way of reflecting the postmodern world.

Minimalism

Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story.

Faction

Fiction which is based on and combined with fact. Think Roots.

Fabulation

A term used to describe the anti-novel. It involves allegory, verbal acrobatics and surrealistic effects.

Magic Realism

Literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable.

Some Attributes of Postmodernist Literature

"Postmodernism" is a broad range of

1. Responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between "high" culture and commonly lived life.
2. Responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism.
3. Acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which, under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been replaced by simulation and spectacle.
4. Resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather than as a weave.
5. Reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence as rhetorical constructs.

However, there are "postmodernisms" even more than there were "modernisms," and not all postmodernism partakes of all of the following attributes:

• A reaction to, refusal of, and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be:
  1. a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations none of which can claim any authority,
  2. parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form,
  3. the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,
  4. the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society.

     (The "problem" with grand narratives is that they bring all of experience under one explanatory and one implicitly or explicitly regulative order, and hence are potentially (some would say, inevitably) totalitarian and repressive; the problem of trying to live without them is that without their explanatory frame there is no way in which acts can be validated (once one tries, one uncovers a hidden grand narrative) other than through the validation of pleasure or pain, some would say beauty or ugliness. It comes down to what one believes: is living without grand narratives an act of courage and freedom in the face of inevitable doubt and instability, or merely an opening of oneself to the worst forces of the libido and an abandonment of necessary principles?)

• A sense that life is lived in a world with no transcendent warrant, nothing to guarantee or to underwrite our being as meaningful moral creatures. Life just is. We no longer look for a pattern. We live between the 1's and the 0's, in the interstices of meaning; we live on the bleak terrain of an endless uncreated happenstance universe. We may celebrate its specificity, its immediacy; or not. Postmodernism goes different directions here.
• The writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is in the first instance aware of itself as fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable fictionality of all experience, on the other.
• A reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of modernist form-- of the dominance in modernism of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which concept created a "special world" for art, cut off from the variety and everydayness of life (a negative judgment on this "refusal" is that postmodernism simply aestheticizes everything; see the next point)
• An attempt to integrate art and life-- the inclusion of popular forms, popular culture, everyday reality; Bakhtin's notion of "carnival," of joyous, anti-authoritarian, riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration, makes sense in this context and adds a sense of energy and freedom to some post modern work
• The notion of carnival, above, is taken to the limit in the idea of transgression, the idea that to live and think beyond the structures of capitalist ideology and of totalizing concepts one must deliberately violate what appear to be standards of sense and decency but are (if the truth were known) methods of social and imaginative control. A more benign conception than transgression is the concept of the paralogical: a revelation of the non-rational immediacy of life (considered thus to be implicitly revolutionary, liberating); as with ideas such as carnival and transgression, the paralogical gives access to the energy of the world, and allows us to experience outside of the strictures of the grand narratives which form our usual sense of our reality.
• The use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical shifts, in order to undercut any legitimization of reality, subject, ontological ground
• A refusal of seriousness or an undercutting of or problematizing of seriousness-- achieved through such things as the above-mentioned notion of carnival, of the turning upside-down of everything, and through the use of parody, play, black humour and wit; this refusal and these methods of undercutting seriousness are associated as well with fragmentation, as traditional notions of narrative coherence are challenged, undone. The "problem" with seriousness is that is has no room for the disruptions necessary to expose the oppressions and repressions of master narratives, in fact seriousness tends almost inevitably to reinforce them and hence the ideologies they support; to attack seriousness does not mean, in this context, to abandon conviction or good intentions.
• A crossing or dissolving of borders-- between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture
• A sense that the world is a world made up of rhetoric-- of language and cultural constructs and images and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity
• A move away from perspectivism, from the located, unified "subject" and the associated grounding of the authority of experience in the sovereign subject and its processes of perception and reflection (see the next point)
• A fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or flatness-- the self, or subject, is no longer a "psychological" reality but henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically (in terms of the kinds of language used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured in different situations
• The dramatization to a world in which there are no depths, in which there is nothing "under" appearances
• A greater emphasis on the body, on the human as incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world. This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism and of the ideology of the Enlightenment. This emphasis on the physicality of our being leads in several directions, including
• an emphasis on chance and contingency as fundamental conditions of our being and
• a positing of aesthetics rather than rationalism as guide to truth, hence ultimately as the ground for ethics.
• A rethinking of modernism's break with history. There are (at least) two directions in which this rethinking may go:
  • a greater awareness of history as a narrative, that is, a human construct; history is accessible to us, but only as text-- its documents are texts, its institutions are social texts. This does not mean that history did not happen; it means that what we know as history is known to us only through what is configured for our understandings by language, by narratives with their own shaping forces, by figures of speech.
  • an insistence of the incarnate and the contingent, human life as located, specific, grounded in the body and in circumstance.