Explain Postmodernism In Literature

 Modernism and its chief features

Chief Features of Metaphysical Poetry

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    Postmodernism in literature started in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Adding post as a prefix to the word ‘Modern’ shows that the new period is different from the last one yet was influenced by it. Postmodernism’s fascination is with popular art forms and its mood is less elegiac than that of Modernism. However, it does not fully abandon modernism’s mood of alienation. We can say, Postmodernism is satisfied with surfaces whereas Modernism did strive for certain kind of depth.

    Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard provided the philosophical framework for Postmodernism. Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition proved to be the major text for debate on the topic. His main argument is that the ‘truth claims’ and assumed consensus on which a lot of history and its grand narratives stand are an illusion. Baudrillard’s main contention is that ‘the real’ is now defined in terms of the media in which it moves, which leads to loss of distinction between the real and the imagined (reality and illusion).

    Two literary critics- Ihab Hassan and Linda Hutcheon are considered as important chroniclers of Postmodernism. Hassan’s book Paracriticisms (1975) equates postmodernism with anti-elitism and anti-authoritarianism. Linda Hutcheon the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism (1989) sees postmodernist fiction as subversive and complicit at the same time. She visualises postmodernist fiction as ‘historiographic metafiction’ and envisions it as a mode which self-consciously problematises the making of fiction and history.

Chief Features of Postmodernism

Playfulness: Considering Postmodernism as a follower of Modernism would be injustice with its unique features. One can analyse that modernism is marked by ‘aesthetics of anxiety’ whereas, postmodern literature is characterized by ‘playfulness’.

Metafiction: Postmodernism is marked by metafiction, involving self-referentiality. It considers metafiction to be the product of totalitarian intentions and dismiss them on involving the fallacy of essentialism. According to postmodernist writers, language not only expresses reality but also creates it. As such, there is no way of knowing reality as it really is.

Randomness: It rejects the idea of absolute meaning and embraces randomness. The postmodernist writers foreground the small narratives; thereby opposing the grand narratives of modernism. They imply randomness in their works.

Intertextuality: Postmodernist writers employ the technique of rewriting an existing narrative called as pastiche. According to them, intertextuality is important as no work exists in isolation. They positively look forward to existing works to shape current texts.

Fragmentation: Postmodernism distrusts the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories and prefers to deal with other ways of structuring narratives. They depart from the realistic depictions of events and characters in their narratives. One way is multiple ending in which instead of offering only one outcome, they opt to offer two or more endings, leaving much for the reader to decide the plausible outcome.

 Postmodernist writers

Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1983) which is concerned with the life of Saleem Sinai who was born at midnight on 15^th August 1947 is a good example of postmodernist text. Rushdie seeks to challenge the conventional narrative through blurred boundaries of discourse, through textual play, through explicit or implicit parody and through hybridization of language.

Samuel Beckett’s ‘theatre of absurd’ emphasized the disintegration of narrative. His Waiting for Godot (1953) has a palpable presence of postmodernist features. The writer creates an entire existential narrative featuring two characters who contemplate their day as they wait for the ambiguous godot to appear.

John Barth’s novel Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is an example of the metafiction characteristic of postmodernism, featuring several fictional disclaimers in the beginning and end.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a playful novel that follows several characters sprawled out over an extended length of time.

Guntur Grass’s novel The Tin Drum is written in variety of styles. The protagonist Oskar narrates the novel from asylum for the insane. Detached from people and events, he comments on the horrors, injustices and eccentricities he observes. The novel exquisitely and lucidly captures the dazed, eerie strangeness of misfortune times.