Postmodernism in English literature

Postmodernism in English literature.

1. Postmodernism in the English literature of the last decades of the 20th century.
2. John Fowles’s novels as an example of postmodern writing.

In the 1960s the cultural layers changed and grew confused; the emergence of the mass media and the technological revolution changed the nature of culture and publishing.
Here started the era of postmodernism, manifesting the philosophical, cultural, and political instability of the contemporary world, and the difficulty of knowing it.

Postmodernism is hard to define. Is it a period term, a social diagnosis, a cultural dominant, an anti-aesthetic posture, a philosophical endgame, a sign of political defeat? Postmodernism is all of those. The all-embracing prefix is part of the problem.
Ihab Hassan saw postmodernism as a vast unmaking of the western mind. Indeterminacy and doubt are the new signifiers of pluralistic and multicultural democracies.

Postmodernism was predetermined by cultural changes (the emergence of post-industrialization and sub-cultures, widening democracy and globalization, the boom in information technologies and the development of molecular biology and genetics) and changes in literary and artistic expression.

The only simple definition that can be given of post-modernism is that it is “after modernism”, which does not help much.
Does (post)modernism, coming after modernism in the 1950s, extend or negate the earlier movement? Or does it paradoxically precede modernism conceptually, bearing witness to what modernism could not represent?
These unsettled questions suggest that postmodernism is both an overdetermined heir of modernist influences and an open-ended set of practices and theories whose relationship to modernism remains vexed.

The inclusion of post in the name does suggest that is not only after-modernism but is in some way different from it:

1) It sees the complexities of life in different ways from earlier writers.
2) It is less narrowly ego-centred than much of the literature of modernism was.
3) Indeed it seems to demand a number of different centres of interest, often in different historical periods, countries or existences.
4) It likes playing intellectual games with inter-textuality, or patterns of different kinds of writing or texts woven together, providing different, sometimes contrary information.
5) Novels often have more than one ending, and almost never present one single truth because of the different truths that different people see.
6) Most works reveal, in a variety of ways, a self-conscious anxiety about the authority and the status of the authorial voice of the novelist.

Besides,
7) hostile to the tradition of the social novel, they rejected it in favour of extreme linguistic and narrative innovation, metafictional devices.
8) They subverted cultural and literary ideologies by deconstructing and rewriting them.
9) Nothing can be taken for granted. That’s why postmodern fiction typically defamiliarizes, by means of parody, pastiche, fantasy, and magic realism, what we take for granted in social and literary convention.
10) It cultivates the unconscious, the irrational, and the absurd, for comedic purposes.
11) Most post-war novelists found it useful to reinstate traditional fictional modes and conventions, putting them to new (often ironical) uses.
12) The post-war novelists’ attitude towards tradition is also a result of their reconsideration of the usefulness of conventional moulds.
13) There is a manifest desire to work out a synthesis of suggestions and motifs coming from the literature of all ages. Intertextuality reigns supreme, even though through subtle allusion, rather than through direct reference or distorted quotation.
It rereads and rewrites the past, concentrating on dominant narrative models by which accounts of history are constructed. Oscar Wilde’s remark, “The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”, can be taken as a motto.
14) Here we may find authors becoming characters in their own fictions and characters trying to out of their scripts; historical personages wandering into fantastic worlds; and time running in reverse.

The fictional and the historical discourses intermingle in postmodernist fiction:
1. Postmodernism does not deny that the Past existed, but states that its accessibility to us today is entirely conditioned by textuality, as we cannot know the Past except through its texts;
2. Postmodernist fiction establishes a dialogue with the Past, carried out in the light of the present, so the past is presentified;
3. History is revisited ironically (for details, see John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”).

Thus, irony, parody, black humour, pastiche, intertexuality, quotation, play, multi-layered construction, open final, fragmentation, symbolism are the major devices of postmodern fiction.

The typology of postmodern novel:
1) the comic-ironical novel (A. Burgess, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Julian Barnes);
2) the campus novel (David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury);
3) the experimental “art” novel (John Fowles, Julian Barnes);
4) the historiographic novel (John Fowles, Julian Barnes);
5) the biographical novel or fictional biography (Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes).

2. John Fowles’s novels as an example of postmodern writing.

John Fowles (1926–2005) is often described not only as an English novelist, poet, literary critic and essayist, but as a master of multi-layered story-telling, illusionism, and purposefully ambiguous endings.

He is the author of six novels: The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985); a novella The Ebony Tower (1974); some short-stories; a collection of philosophical thoughts and essays on art and human nature entitled The Aristos (1971), and a book of essays Wormholes (1998).
His novel partly continues the traditional realistic novel, but is enriched with existential motifs, psychological insight and postmodern literary techniques.

Peculiarities of style and method:

1) His protagonists often confront their past, self-delusions and illusions, in order to gain their personal freedom or peace of mind.
2) Not only in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, with its salvaging of Victorian mentalities and reconstruction of Victorian intellectual life and backgrounds, but also in A Maggot (1985), a kind of murder mystery dealing with the 18th century beginnings of the Shaker sect, Fowles ‘attempts to build a bridge, a serious artistic bridge, between the deconstructing present and the difficult past’.
3) In his fiction Fowles is not depicting but creating the reality.
4) His novels, being the “novels of ideas” are complicated by means of literary allusions, quotations and literary references, reinterpreting classical plots.
5) His novels manifest the idea of life as play, magical theatre.
6) The novels, usually, do not explore reality directly, but by means of metaphor, by a sort of artificial enacting of the problems, as in a game or in a stage play. The recurrent ideas are that of the writer as a demiurge, that of freedom of choice vs.
7) Fowles’s The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) explore existentialist dilemmas in stories that are as much about fictions by which people live as they are about worlds they inhabit.
8) Fowles’s conceptual focus remains on the nature and limits of human freedom, the power and responsibility that freedom entails and the cruelty and necessity of conscious choice.

The critical acclaim and great commercial success Fowles had with the psychological thriller The Collector (1963) enabled him to forsake a teaching career and to become a full-time writer.
The Collector is a novel about the crime, a kind of psychological detective novel, but at the same time it is an existential fable with conventional time and space (though the action takes place in the suburb of London in 1958). The conflict of the novel develops on two levels: the close-to-life one and the symbolic-philosophical one.
The conflict between the protagonists – Frederick Clegg and Miranda Grey – is the conflict between the aggressor and the victim, the conflict between the mass (middle-class) consciousness shaped on newspapers, pornographic magazines and the book “Secrets of the Gestapo” (Clegg), and the ellite, admiring art, reading classics, taking part in international movements for peace (Miranda).
The Collector tackles the problem of individual and creative freedom in a kidnapper-victim relationship, thus, raising the problem of Beauty and Property (whether it is possible to possess beauty (in this case human beauty – Miranda).
Fowles tests Clegg with existential concepts of Freedom, Love and Beauty. But he has never been free and does not care about it. He cannot love. He is blind to beauty.
His only passion is his butterfly collections and his photos, he can only possess the dead beauty.
But when he shows Miranda his butterfly collection, she tells him that he thinks like a scientist rather than an artist, someone who classifies and names and then forgets about things. She sees a deadening tendency, too, in his photography, and his decoration of the house. Miranda gets Clegg to read Catcher in the Rye, but he doesn’t understand it.
They are different: he fails to understand human relations except in terms of things (buying things a person likes cannot make a person like you), their vision of life and its significant constituents is also different.
The Collector offers the reader two complementary versions of the same sequence of events: Clegg’s ‘objective’ first-person narrative is counterpointed by Miranda’s diary (her name refers to Prosperos daughter in Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest”).
The story of the abduction and imprisonment of Miranda Grey by Frederick Clegg is told first from his point of view (Clegg’s narrative provides the frame of the story), and then from hers by means of a diary she has kept, with a return in the last few pages to Clegg’s narration of her illness and death.
Clegg states facts, his language is plain as he himself is.
Miranda reveals her emotions, impressions, feelings, phychological states, and the whole situation. Miranda describes her thoughts about Clegg as she tries to understand him. She describes her view of the house and ponders the unfairness of the whole situation.
In the final section, less than three pages long, Clegg describes awakening to a new outlook. He decides that he is not responsible for Miranda’s death, that his mistake was kidnapping someone too far above him, socially. So he needs a more suitable girl.
The most commercially successful of Fowles’s novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, appeared in 1969.
It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, but pushes the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern (or postmodern) manner.
In fact, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is an ingenous pastiche of a 19th century novel, undercut by 20th century literary and social insight.
This novel does not only have a considerable literary interest, but also a very high general cultural one, as it is, in essence, a dialogue between two centuries, between two different civilizations, to which some of the best minds of the two epochs contribute.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman revolves around the fascination of Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman, paleontologist, with Sarah Woodruff, a mysterious young woman believed to have been seduced and abandoned by the eponymous lieutenant (she is treated as a disgraced woman).
Set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s, the novel regards Victorian debates about science, religion, and gender roles, barely mentioning political and military events.
At the same time it has deliberate anachronisms – references to the Gestapo, to film, to the atom bomb, to the twentieth-century publicists and the Valley of the Dolls – which continually remind readers that they and the narrator, belong to a later period.
Although The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in a Victorian England that it depicts in careful detail, the novel is less concerned with historical veracity than with pursuing ontological dilemmas. Fowles reproduces a Victorian convention, but takes a contemporary perspective.
Fowles recreates not only the Victorian world, but the Victorian novel as well, and the juxtaposition of historical periods described also has its stylistic counterpart.
While the book provides an authentic pastiche of Victorian novelistic conventions, it also parodies these conventions and introduces some interesting variations on the most familiar structural features, especially the omniscient narrative voice.
It pastiches the style of numerous Victorian novels through the discourse of an author who sometimes appears in the novel as a character, sometimes uses and abuses the omniscience of the implied author of realism.
In one sentence the narrator sounds like a Victorian. In the next sentence he sounds modern. The narrator’s double vision and double voice make him as important as the characters in this novel.
So, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is both a historical novel and an experimental one. The tension between fiction and reality and between the historical past and the present are manipulated from the first page to the last.
Calling attention to the artificiality of literary endings, the narrator proposes to give us three different endings.
The first ending tidies up the plot to accord with Victorian convention: Charles marries Ernestina and never sees Sarah again.
In the second ending, Charles has sex with Sarah and breaks his engagement to Ernestina, which brings unpleasant consequences of its own. Sarah flees to London without telling Charles, who looks for her for several years before finding her again. He then sees that he has a child. Their future as a family is left open, they, probably, marry.
In the third ending, Charles finds Sarah after nearly two years of roaming again in London, living with the Rossettis. Although Sarah has given birth to Charles’s daughter, she refuses to marry him, making a twentieth-century speech about needing space.
Which ending we consider plausible, Fowles suggests, depends not on the logic of the characters, but on our assumptions about narrative.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is probably the best example of historiographic metafiction with John Fowles.

Fowles’s other books are also ‘selfconscious’. Both The Magus (1965) and Daniel Martin (1977) investigate a much debated issue in 20th century fiction: the mingling of the real and the make-believe. In both books the protagonists undergo adventures, searching for the authenticity of their own beings and the authenticity of experience.
In The Magus the problem of choice is important, and both books draw heavily on existentialist thought. The Magus is a traditional quest story, made complex by its dillemas involving freedom, hazard and many existential uncertainities. Before going to the Greek island of Phraxos, where he was invited to teach English in a private school, the protagonist of the book, Nicholas Urfe, used to shape his response to the world strictly in aesthetic terms, avoiding all action that might involve him in a human relationship. As a consequence of his misreading of French existentialist novels, he valued personal freedom above anything else.
Thinking that a sustained interest in any other person would jeopardize his life-style, he rejects Alison, the girl who really cares for him, thus making a serious existential mistake, of which he becomes aware only when the game (the Godgame) Conchis forces him to take part in on Phraxos comes to an end. By appealing to Urfe’s aesthetic sense, every scene in Conchis’s drama keeps his interest alive and gradually absorbs him, until he is no longer willing to see the mask of the actor as separate from the person who wears it.
Daniel Martin, on the other hand, may be seen as a contemporary version of Henry James’s novels inspired by the ‘international theme’. It is a long and somewhat autobiographical novel.
This time, John Fowles’s protagonist is a script-writer who lives the present as well as the past with equal intensity. The plot of the novel covers a span of about forty years of his life. Fowles projects in him the feeling that the identity of the 20th century writer is in large measure a matter of cultural and literary awareness.