X-Postmodernism

1. 1-Features of Postmodernism

      According to Britannica, postmodernism, in Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. In literature,  this has amounted to a reaction against an ordered view of the world and therefore against fixed ideas about the form and meaning of texts. In its reaction against Modernist ideals  such as autotelic art and the original masterpiece, postmodern writing and art emphasize devices such as pastiche and parody and the stylized technique of the antinovel and magic realism. Postmodernism has also led to a proliferation of critical theories, most notably deconstruction and its offshoots, and the breaking down of the distinction between “high” and “low” culture. (Britannica)

      The term postmodernism was coined by Arnold Toynbee in 1939. Postmodernism is an umbrella term therefore it is very difficult to define it. Different critics give different definitions of the postmodernism. There are a number of definitions, claims and counterclaims. The term Postmodernism is not to be confused with the term Postmodernity. There is a conceptual distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism. Postmodernity is a fusion of the contemporary socio cultural experiences of certain society whereas postmodernism is an approach or framework to understand and explain not only the postmodern condition but its stylistic representation. (Pardeshi2).

     Postmodernism is characterized by key features such as fragmentation, discontinuity, plurality, and a sense of indeterminacy. Postmodern critical theory often emphasizes ambiguity, focuses on textual complexities, and is sometimes criticized for its detachment from concrete social issues. The term "postmodernism" refers both to a specific historical era and to a mindset or cultural condition marked by particular social and aesthetic tendencies. It reflects the diverse intellectual and artistic developments shaping the current cultural landscape. (3)

      Postmodernism appears in a wide variety of disciplines of study. It is very hard to locate it historically or temporally, because it is not clear when postmodernism exactly began. The salient attributes of postmodernism are fragmentation, decentralization, indeterminacy, novelty in subject matter, break with tradition, self- consciousness, free verse, discontinuous composition, distracted and dehumanized subject, ambiguity, absurdity, incoherence, relativism, anti-form, anti-narrative and irony. (3). These are postmodernism features:

1. Postmodernism is a cultural movement in its own right. Considering it solely as a successor of modernism, thus putting it as a hyphenated word, i.e., post-modernism, would be reductive and misleading, and would do gross injustice to its unique richness and complexity. Nevertheless, if one is to theorize a major point of difference between the two movements, one could state that postmodern poetics is marked by “playfulness” whereas modernism could be characterized as an “aesthetics of anxiety.” (Mandal 1)

2. Postmodern literature is marked by metafictionality, involving self-referentiality. Metafiction is a narrative that does not simply tell a story but punctuates the very act of story-telling by blurring the binary of fact/fiction, by problematizing the relation between author and characters, by questioning the notion of authorship, and overall, by including reflections on the theory of fiction within the so-called fictional space itself.

3. Postmodernism has been defined as an “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Metanarratives, otherwise known as grand narratives or master narratives, aim to offer a totalizing schema for interpretation of events and experiences – historical or contemporary. For instance, Marxism could run the risk of being a metanarrative insofar as all the problems of the world are reduced to the question “class”; or, scientism could be defined as metanarrative insofar as the truth/authenticity of every experience or every event is asked to be measured in terms of scientific findings. The postmodernist considers metanarratives to be the product of totalitarian intentions and dismiss them as involving the fallacy of essentialism. Narratives subvert the assumption of any discourse being coherent or monolithic and promote the possibility of pluralism. (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition)

4. Postmodern experience is constituted by inevitable exposure to “hyperreality.” Broadly speaking, hyperreality refers to the world of simulation and the world of the virtual. In these worlds, images constitute reality – be it the proliferation of images on news channels or on the internet. Images, in the postmodern world, do not necessarily represent a given reality. Images are reality. A simulacrum is a copy without an original. These images can be doctored and edited, and can even be created on the desktop, for instance. Images and videos on social media, for example, have a tremendous impact on determining our sense of reality. Thus the difference between the virtual and the actual/physical reality collapses. The virtual does not correspond to the actual; the virtual creates the actual. (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

5. Postmodernism problematizes the notion of truth, at least in two ways. First, the questioning of metanarrative is reflected in how postmodernism, both in theory and in practice, interrogates the idea of an absolute Truth with an upper-case “T,” and demonstrates that truths always exist in plural versions. Truth is not a “universe,” but a kind of a “multiverse”  having multiple versions and variations. However, in the final analysis, the supremacy of one particular truth over others is determined by the structures of power in a given socio-economic situation. Secondly, the hyperreal and the virtual realities, in the postmodern world, influence the construction of a world of “post-truth” where truth-claims, devoid of objective and traditional idea of “facticity,” can be made, and even discursively substantiated, with control over information and data which can be generated by any and every user. (Foucault, Power/Knowledge)

6. Postmodernism questions the notion of a singular “centre.” For instance, there is no central meaning to a text; a text is always already open to multiple readings. Since the notion of an “authorial intention” promotes the idea of central meaning, the institution of the Author, with an upper-case “A,” is declared dead. At best, the biography of an author could be considered as biographemes – small narrative units comprising discursive codification of events – which, in the end, are nothing but one set of textual units among hundred others which could be used to intertextually engage with literature. The Author is redefined as “paper author” or a discursive construct. (Barthes “Death of the Author” & “From Work to Text”; Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”)

7. Inconclusiveness is the hallmark of postmodernism. The postmodern narrative not only problematizes the Aristotelian formula of a chronological and tripartite division of a plot (beginning, middle, and end); more fundamentally, it subverts the idea of “narrative closure” by evoking, as in Fowles’s text, the possibility of multiple endings. In general, definitive and conclusive statements are considered reductive and essentialist, and ideally, a postmodernist ought to doubt/avoid such statements.

8. Postmodernism blurs binaries, particularly the binary of low culture/high culture. Ideally, a postmodern narrative, unlike a Joycean text, would be accessible and readable to anybody and everybody. However, a hermeneutically equipped reader would find more reasons to appreciate a postmodern text.

9. Postmodern narratives employ the technique of rewriting an existing narrative. Such rewriting could be politically subversive, or in some cases, could be “empty parody” or “pastiche.” Examples include Foe, Wide Sargasso Sea, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead etc.

10. Reader, as opposed to Author, becomes a crucial site for meaning production in postmodernism. The reader is not just a theoretical discourse for a Roland Barthes or a Stanley Fish but, both in personal and impersonal terms, he/she/it remains a constant point of reference in postmodern texts. (Mandal 1-3)

     Comparisons with Modernist Literature

       Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works  and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. (Sharma and Chaudhary 190)