Postmodernism in English literature

 

 

 

 

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The last decades of the 20th century saw an upsurge of literary production in England. However, literature seemed to take little interest in actualities. All critics noted the absence of "straight" novels, that is, works with a traditionally solid, coheren narrative. There were very few long prose works about the condition of England or the class system, or other themes so characteristic of the 19lh century and pre-WW II novels focusing on the life of an individual or a family. Instead of writing about here and now, more and more writers set their novels either in the past or in the future. They intertwined past, present and future and often sent their characters abroad. Alongside such well-established men of letters as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Margaret Drabble, who went on writing actively in the 1980s, there emerged a group of young writers who brought into literature new themes, ideas and techniques: Martin Amis, Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and others. Like other national literatures the English literature of the late 20th century was saturated with fin de siecle spirit — an apocalyptic feeling typical of the end of every century, more so the end of the millennium. Characteristic of this was the atmosphere of dismay and uncertainty. "The modern situation is full of suspense: no one, no one at all has any idea how things will turn out", said Martin Amis.

The new period of literature came to be known as Postmodernism. Since it emerged at the end of the century and of the millennium, it tended to re-evaluate the accomplishments of the preceding stages of literary history. One of the contemporary scholars said that postmodernist writing is characterized by distrust of great, or "master" narratives, by which he meant a sceptical attitude towards all the significant books about man and society, whose ideas seemed to be disproved by the realities of the 20th century. This scepticism and re-evaluation resulted in parodying the works of predecessors. Parody, however, did not necessarily mean mocking them. Most often it took the form of revision: using old plots, images, characters for creating new literary works with new ideas, new attitudes and new approaches to eternal and topical problems. As one of the writers put it, "books always speak of other books and every story tells a story that has already been told". The presence of these incorporated images could be either explicit or implicit, but it was always clearly manifest.

This phenomenon is called "intertextuality", that is, interaction of texts. Thus, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) by John Fowles, which was one of the first to display postmodernist traits, is all built on parallels with the works of 19th century writers. Not only do his characters resemble those of Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte and Hardy, but the novel is full of numerous allusions to and quotations from the works of writers, poets, sociologists and thinkers of the previous age — Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mathew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, etc. The kind of literary creation which combines elements of other works is known as "pastiche" (коллаж, попурри).

Shakespeare's work was very often referred to by postmodernist authors. Other classical works of English literature were revised and reworked, too. W. Golding's Lord of the Flies, which is a parody of J.Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island, was also reworked by Emma Tennant in her The Queen of Stones, a novel about a group of girls from 6 to 12 years of age who became separated from their teacher and lost their way in the mist. They then invented a game in which they beheaded the commonest and the most miserable of them, acting out the story of Queen Elisabeth and her niece Mary Stuart.

No less popular with postmodernist writers is the Bible. The novel The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by John Barnes opens with the story of Noah's Ark as told by a woodworm.

Many postmodernist works have a self-reflexive, or meta-fictional, character which means that they deal with the problems of novel-writing. As a rule, these novels have writers or poets as protagonists. Typical of this are John Fowles's novels Daniel Martin (1977) and Mantissa (1982), as well as Peter Ackroyd's novels The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and Chatterton (1987).

One of the key issues of postmodernist writing is the interrelation of literature and history. Postmodernists think that everything in this world, including history, can be viewed as a text, that is why the borderline between literature and history has become very vague. They both are intertextual, relying on the texts of the past. Postmodernists are keen on re-evaluating history, on giving their own interpretation of historical facts and events, blending, as in The French Lieutenant's Woman, historical and documentary materials with fiction.

The historicism of British postmodernist prose is different from the traditional treatment of the past. Unlike W. Scott and his followers, contemporary writers do not try to immerse their readers in the past, so that they should entirely forget the present. On the contrary, they keep reminding readers of it, stressing that the present is closely interwoven with the past. The means of dealing with history in postmodernist literature are very diverse. In his novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in the 19th century, John Fowles constantly draws parallels between the past and the present, thus stressing that, basically, human nature remains unchanged. Peter Ackroyd's novel The House of Dr. Dee is based on the monologues of two protagonists — our contemporary and his 16th century predecessor; and these monologues echo one another. Julian Barnes managed to "squeeze" the history of the world into 10 1/2 chapters.

One of the most important historical themes is that of WW II. Writers keep turning to it in attempts to remind mankind of its tragic past and in the hopes that the remembrance of it will prevent another world disaster. In his two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist in the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro shows how the war affected the lives of people. An Artist of the Floating World is set in Ishiguro's home town of Nagasaki during the period of reconstruction following the detonation of the atomic bomb there in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in the Second World War. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan's misguided foreign policy, and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern times as represented in his grandson.

Time's Arrow by M. Amis is the autobiography of a doctor who helped torture Jews during the Holocaust, drew notice both for its unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel, down to the dialogue initially being spoken backwards —  as well as for its topic. The narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse, as the main character becomes younger and younger during the course of the novel. Amis engages in several forms of reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation. Amis' use of these techniques is aimed to create an unsettling and irrational aura for the reader; indeed, one of the recurrent themes in the novel is the narrator's persistent misinterpretation of events. The doctor, Odilo Unverdorben, assists "Uncle Pepi" (modelled on Josef Mengele) in his torture and murder of Jews. While at Auschwitz, the reverse chronology means that he returns the dead to life and heals the sick, rather than the opposite. The broader image presented is that all those that died in the Holocaust are revived and returned to their homes. Eventually they become children, then babies, and then reenter their mothers' wombs, where they finally cease to exist. One message is that the only positive way to see (or even to comprehend) the holocaust is by looking at it backwards, as beautiful lives are created out of nothingness, rather than destroyed.

However, even when writing on explicitly moral issues, postmodernist writers try not to impose their views; they seem to leave it to their readers to pass their own judgement. This indeterminacy of the message and freedom of interpretation made some postmodernist scholars speak about the "death of the author" in modern literature, by which they meant that it is the reader, rather than the writer, who "owns" a literary work. Indeterminacy is one of the "games" that authors can play with their readers. Another kind of game is "an open end", when the author leaves his reader in the dark about the fate of his characters or gives alternative endings to his novels. A similar result is achieved by introducing multiple narrators, that is, letting several characters give different stories of the same events, thus forcing the readers to make their own interpretation of the plot.

Indeterminacy affects the form of contemporary literature, too. Postmodernist authors tend to combine elements of various genres and forms of writing. Fiction can go hand-in-hand with documentary material and historical facts; philosophy can intermingle with detective episodes or elements of horror stories. Thus, the traditional borderline between high and mass culture has been eliminated. In a word, "anything goes", as one critic put it.

The literature today is no longer dominated by writers from the metropolitan Britain. A number of people born in its former colonies and immigrants from other countries entered the British literary scene at the end of the 20th century. V. S. Naipaul (from Trinidad), Salman Rushdie (from India), Ben Okri (from Nigeria), Kazuo Ishiguro (from Japan) and others have brought a fresh stream into English literature with their national themes and a new, original mode of writing. This new phenomenon is called "postcolonial literature".

Theatre in the middle of 60s-70s was most notable for the Theatre of the Absurd  and the Theatre of Menace. The prominent playwrights who we can’t but mention are Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond. Their plays possess complex metaphorical forms; they are full of underlying themes, alogism and psychological implications.

The representatives of modern English poetry are Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Adrian Mitchell.

English literature remains an active and living force. The role of light fiction and detective fiction still remains prevailing. The middle level of detective stories has been reached by successful and gifted novelists like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, John Le Carre and others. These authors are masters of a craft not devoid of psychological and artistic interest. Within the limits of the genre their fiction offers a commentary upon human nature and insight into the century’s social changes.

Thus, the English literature of the last decades of the 20th century is rich and varied. John Fowles is the leading figure of English postmodernist literature. He belongs to the older generation of postmodernist writers while Martin Amis represents the younger one.