Postmodernism as the phonomenon of american culturein the second half of the XX century

English literature in XX century

The history of twentieth century literature is often nowadays written in two broad strokes: there was Modernism and Postmodernism , two large periods of the 20^th century experiment . The belief that we have been through and are still in an extremely vital period in British writing , a time of great literary power and considerable innovation and experiment , and at the moment an exciting revival of serious fiction that I trust will go on , are valuable words belonging to M. Bradbury. There was a need for the novel to discover both the world and the word a new , the novel as a self-questioning form , new forms of exploration , enquiring modes of knowledge . Modern scientific methods of analysis have been established; linguistics and philosophy and anthropology , psychology and sociology and narratology , Marxism and feminism and structuralism and deconstruction have proved the great theorem , the revised new syllabus , the complete and total picture. Iris Murdoch asserts that the twentieth century novel is either crystalline or journalistic . Traditional narrative techniques are incapable of integrating all the new relations created in the world . It is impossible for our consciousness to organize all the information which assails it , because it lacks adequate tools. ³
The turn of the century marked a new form of fiction represented by Henry James . He was an innovator and exigent artist , expert stylist and subtle theoretician . The explorer of inner worlds , he dwelt upon the process of the spiritual world ; he pointed out the idea that a novelist’s work should be inspired fromlife ; he also claimed the necessity of a “commanding centre “, emphasizing on the manner of presentation and point of view . He paved the way for the modern novel , being one of the pioneers of the impressionistic novel (behind facts , there lies an impenetrable reality which cannot be grasped in totality ). H.James analyzed human behaviour and consciousness , showing great interest in style .
Improving the narrative technique , Joseph Conrad proved his greatness as an artist in rendering feeling and delineating character in the stress of daily life , illuminatingthe whole world of nature , men and action ; he presents this in an authentic , graphic and dramatic detail. In his opinion the artist has no object but to transmit the impression ofreality ; he combined the novel of adventure with the objective spirit of French naturalism ; he owes something to Henry James in his psychological approach ; the spirit of Russian novelists is betrayed in his philosophy of life . Conradwas fascinated by hysteron-proteron , the rhetorical procedure of reversalwhereby the later is recounted before the earlier , by linguistic virtuosity, anticipating twentieth century preoccupations : “ my task … is , before all , to make you see “ . The narrative techniques dexterously imply literary theories which had yet to receive critical formulation : “defamiliarization “ entailing delayed decoding ( procedures which challenge conventional understanding ) , covert plotting , and deconstruction ( the exploitation of tension , paradox and contradiction ) .
Towards a new theory of the novel , Ford Madox Ford was an original fiction writer and theoretician who sensed the new directions of the novel in accordance with the social and cultural changes at the beginning of our age ; he manifested a protest against accepted ideas and the use of conventional forms in fiction ; the new theory of the novel was also shaped in Ford’s endless discussions with his collaborator , Joseph Conrad . All the creative efforts aspired to the re-shaping of the most Protean of literary genres , in closest contact with the ever changing reality . The novel mustexpress the human impossibility to express the whole truth about anything happening in life , and produce the effect that life has upon us ; the process of rendering impressions in an unchronological , even chaotic way by an
ego instead of a systemic report given by the omniscient author. Experience does not close at the end of the novel , it opens for an infinite numberof readers , with infinite possibilities of interpretations ; the linear development of the plot has been replaced by temporal shifts and chronological looping ( a termcoined by Conrad and Ford ) . One of Ford’s major contributions to the elaboration of a modern poetics of the novel , is the discussion of the relationship between the text and its receiver which anticipates some aspects of the contemporary reader-response criticism . He formulated the requirement that the artist should master the rhetorical possibilities of his craft so as to be able to create certain effects upon the reader which challenge conventional understanding ) , covert plotting , and deconstruction ( the exploitation of tension , paradox and contradiction ) . ⁴
He emphasizes the personal response to the literary message and is definitely against overt moral didacticism ; he says that the novel isthe only genre “born and nourished in the modern epoch of world history and attached to it “.
D. H. Lawrence explored myth , symbol and feeling ; Frank Kermode wrote that “ his life-long quest for a solution to the existential problems he encountered – apocalypticism- was “the chief mould of his imaginative activity “. His fascination with mythology and distant cultures rooted in a general revival during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of an interestin ancient mythology , together wi tha new and widespread curiosity for distant cultures and esoteric doctrines . Lawrence attacked the practical results of science (industrialization and the machine culture ) , as the principal evil of the modern age , a strong factor of dehumanization , closely connected with his interest in history and prehistory , is Lawrence’s highly personal use of the new scientific study of the human mind and the theories concerning mythand symbol : “our civilization … has almostdestroyed the natural flow of sympathy between men and men , and men and women . And it is this that I want to restore into life “ .
Virginia Woolf saw the future of fiction linked to changing attitudes to sex gender roles; the novelist and the life she tries to capture are revealingly gendered , with life taking the floor as an endlessly attractive and attracting modern woman ( the essay “ Life and the Novel “ in vol . “ The Crowded Dance of Modern Life “ . The disruptive impurity is represented as feminine and the secondary force of control as masculine : “ though we seethe same world , we see it through different eyes “ ( “ Three Guineas “ ).
James Joyce made his contribution in fiction : his self-conscious concern with art and its methods , the problematics of language and style , the mythical method, impersonality, the stream of conciousness technique, unusual chronological structures . The intellectual vein in literature was represented by Aldous Huxley ; he brought a huge impact of his thinking in his work , a unique and complex approach to the twentieth century world by the novelty of his style , cultivating the literature of ideas . When the great movement of Modernism developed , declaring itself as the twentieth century art and overturning the art and tradition of the past , there was a major supporting movement in criticism . The modernist revolution in fiction was a major change , even for those writers who sought to deny the transformation . But it was those writers who most explored the change , and sought to force themselves from the moral and social practices of popular and conventional fiction , who found the greatest kinship with writers .
In that massive change of forms and sensibility that came around the turn of the
century and which we call Modernism , the arts of parody took on a far more central role. Perhaps all major new movements are a rewriting of the forms of art , of the function of artists , of the notion of tradition and literary institution , and modernism was an overwhelming one . Its particular challenge was to realism , out of the self-challenges of which it was born[…] modernism proposed the disintegration of social substance , of first order references , secure narrative traditions . In defamiliarized , derealised , made fragments the essence , aestheticised , abstractified , conceptualized . In the modernist arts , the concept of the art and the manifest presence of the artist become aspects of the text , and the work is usually seen in the light of its own begetting , becoming not what is written , but what is in the writing .(M.Bradbury ) .
Modernism was dominated by epistemological questions , while postmodernism is dominated by ontological ones ; the epistemological shift led , in modernism , to questioning and experiment which reflect uncertainty about how reality can be known or assimilated by mind or text ( Brian Mc Hale , “ Postmodernist Fiction “) . Modernism is usually looked at by postmodernism in three ways : the validity of historical narratives ( the tradition in which we think of ourselves ) , the question of originality as regards the artist , representation , language and the question of difference and other voices ; modernism was also an aesthetic response to a moment of rupture , a breakdown in the Western social and cultural order .
A particular interest of recent women ‘s fiction has been its necessary evolution of new narrative forms , and these have often been developed , at least partly , upon some already available techniques adapted to the representation of women’s consciousness . They are present in the work of V. Woolf – creating sensitive registers of inner thoughts and feelings – and such techniques are extended into the later decades by Elizabeth Bowen , who got interested in Woolf’s interior monologue . Her influence is apparent in the minuteness with which Stella’s inner life ( “ The Heat of the Day “ ) is envisaged . E. Bowen’s writing also follows H. James in its attention to style and its subtle delineation of character ( especially
female character ) and setting . Roman Jakobson has argued that realistic prose fiction is largely metonymic , and the narrative is “forwarded essentially by contiguity “ . He argues that a different law governs poetry ; that of metaphor , which works through similarity ; metaphor allows the mind to juxtapose the disparate fragments of the world and reveal their hidden correspondences . And modernism , as M. Bradbury defines it , relies upon the metaphoric: “ the distortion of the familiar surface of observed reality , and the disposition of artistic contents according to the logic of metaphor , form , or symbol …” As D. Lodge argues in “ The Modes of Modern Writing “ , modernism’s reliance upon metaphor extends to the novel ; the modernist novel tries to create its own order out of chaos , to construct a meaning for a world otherwise without one . Richard Shiff’s study “ Art and Life : A Metaphoric Relationship “ throws more light upon this issue . He sees metaphor as a bridge , a means used by the modern artist in the complex process of capturing life ( immediate experience ) in art ( established truth ).
The development of modernist techniques can be traced in the works of Malcom Lowry , especially “Under the Volcano “ , a novel which strongly recalls the strengths of Joyce’s fiction. ⁵
Wyndham Lewis , a commentator on modernist issues made himself into more of a critic than purely creative writer . In the 1920s , in such volumes as “ Time and the Western Man “ and “The Art of Being Ruled “.He was responsive to the new concern with time in the life and art of the 1920s . He explains that the new conception of time , which he sees as such a distinctive feature in the writing of his period , directly resulted from “ what was originally a philosophic theory usedcurrently in the practice of the arts of expression , and become a second nature for the practitioners “ . The philosophic theory Lewis believed so universally influential was “the philosophy of psychological time “ , as he called it , expounded in the theory of Henri Bergs. He also suggested that Einstein’s influence may have revived Bergson’s ; relativity kept new ideas of psychological time in the forefront of general interest in the 1920s .
At times there was hostile criticism of modernism , on the grounds of its supposed evasiveness and self-indulgence , refusal to deal directly with political issues . In his essay “Inside the Whale “ (1940 ) , George Orwell denounced modernism in the following terms : “there’s no attention to the urgent problems of the moment , above all no politics in the narrower sense “ . Some British critics were quickly aware of Karl Radeck’s famous denunciation of modernism in 1934 , and inclined to extend some of its implications in their own work .
Philip Henderson , for example , regrets that “ many modern writers dare not look too closely at social reality “ but chose instead to remain “ enmeshed in the chaos of subjectivism “ ( see the highly critical view of modernism he outlines in “ The Novel Today : Studies in Contemporary Attitudes “, 1936 ) . The views expressed by Henderson and others indicate a direction followed by some later criticism and expanded into a more throughgoing , substantial rejection of modernism . Thus , in “The Ideology of Modernism “ (1955 ) the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs develops more fully and articulately the same sort of thinking , providing what is still the most substantial negative view of modernism . For Lukacs , modernism is limited by its characters existence in private worlds , detached from social reality . Henderson’s criticism was echoed by Alick West, in “ Crisis and Criticism “ (1937 ) , or Ralph Fox , in “ The Novel and the People “ ( 1937 ) . Hugh Wapole considers modernism out of touch with the world and bereft of another central dimension in its experience – the moral one . Any assessment of modernism should take into account its major influence on subsequent generations of writersand writing . Stemming from the difficulty and complexity with which modernist texts confront their reader Roland Barthes distinguishes “ readerly “ ( lisible ) and “writerly “ ( scriptible ) texts . His views provide an answer to Lukacs and other critics of modernism . FredericJameson’s answer is that modernism offers a utopian compensation for increasing dehumanization ( reification ) on the level of daily life , using the term “ political unconscious “ .
The end of the WW II marked a new phase in literature . After the war , British writers shared a desire for change and a mood of re-creation against political ideology - revultion from fascism , disillusionment with communism . But only a few of them , such as Samuel Becket and John Fowles , had any interest , at first , in the theoretically based innovations that were being made in continental literatures , particularlyFrench . The “split “ between advanced and traditional writing had already existed in earlier modernism . The new literature ( Neomodernist or Postmodernist ) partly reacted against its ideology and its
historical orientation . What it pretended to be was NEW . It attempted to cut off its brancof the past , by proposing new methods , a fresh “ syllabus “ and a new register of allusions . Supporting all these innovations was a new aesthetic , based at first on existentialism , then on structuralist literary theory . Postmodern writing has been closely responsive to deconstruction . A certain insularity characterized much post- war English fiction , so postmodernism came to constitute a distinct period in English fiction too .
The term “postmodernism “ – a style of art , especially in the 1980s , which uses an unusual mixing of old and new forms – was itself a movable feast , and its theoretical associations were changing again ; it meant the “postmodern condition “ itself . It was explained by the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard : there were no Grand Narratives left on which thinkers or writers , could depend ; “simplifying to the extreme , I define postmodern as incredulity
toward meta – narratives “ . Some writers set out to damage narrative illusion deliberately , by alienation devices : J. Fowles in “ The French Lieutenant ‘s Woman “ (1969 ) . Another possibility was to multiply versions of reality , as L . Durrell did in “ Alexandria Quartet “ , or J. Fowles in “The Collector “ (1963 ) and “ The Magus “ (1966 , rev . 1977 ) . Traditional fiction continued to develop strongly , in a more expressionist way , in the work of such novelists as G . Green ,
A. Wilson and I. Murdoch . When the main emphasis falls on the story’s meaning , he term Fabulation is used – a postmodernist way of saying “fable “ . Instead of having their structure based on character development , fabulations often depend on that of another literary work . Thus , W . Golding’s “Lord of the Flies “ ( 1954 ) answers Ballantyne’s “ The Coral Island “. Fabulations may have a non –literary framework ; all these works haves omething to say as well as narrative statements about it : G. Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty- Four “ (1949 ), A. Burgess’s “ A Clockwork Orange “ ( 1962 ) – about a group of young men who live in a future time and behave in a very violent way ; it was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971 , but he stopped allowing it to be shown in the U.K because he believed that people were copying the violent actionsof the actors in the film . Many literary works are “ timeless “ fableswith enigmatic messages for society . Postmodernists departed from the modernists and returned to anolder tradition : one going back to the Twain of “ Huckleberry Finn “ , and to Rabelais and More .
The Postmodernists went further toward a radical restructuring of literature . They removed so much as to reach Minimalism , in which the functioning of the remaining elements was based on the principle of “ less means more “ . Narrative was reduced ( in “Ulysses “ and in the French nouveau roman ) . Tendencies have cristalized to shape new genres . One broad grouping is the Metafiction , or the novel that exposes conventions only
to discard , perhaps by the use ofan obviously naïve narrator .
Recent writers have gained confidence into the Magic Realist or Poetic novel ( Salman Rushdie , J . Irving , A. Carter ) . Here real places and traditional events are often introduced , but all in a distorted or poetically moulded form . These fabulators return to the loose Dikensian form of the novel .
A narrower grouping , of Poioumena , or self-begetting novels appeared . in this genre the central wire of the action is the work’s own composition , although it is really about something else , as Rushdie ‘s “ Midnight’s Children “ (1981 ) is about the composition of India after Independence . Often the writing is a metaphor for constructing a world . Even the most considerable writers attempted the genre : Doris Lessing – “ the Golden Notebook ( 1962 , rev. 1972 ) , Fowels in “ Mantissa “ ( 1982 ) and W . Golding in “ Paper Man “ (1983 ) .
This genre offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality – the limits of narrative truth. Experimental metafiction has produced some bizarre styleslike Christine Brooke Rose’s with its unreadable course of self-referring devices . One of the most interesting individual styles is that of the Australian Patrick White ( 1912- ) . One can notice the emergence of feminist writing of a new type . Angela Carter writes inventive fictions , such as “ Nights at the Circus “ (1984 ) , rewrites fairy tales and rework gothic romance motifs , to present an inverted. Her earlier novels “The Ballad of Peckham Rye “ , “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie “, belong to popular modernism . The novel knew a wide variety ; aesthetic argument pointed in many different directions : traditional forms continued , but novelists abounded .
These artistically plural, confusing culturally various , and troubled times were very productive . Postmodernism can be seen to have a distinct character of its own: literature has been influenced by literary criticism , there is an academic context for literature and the enrichment of forms will be immense .

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