What’s beyond post-modernism?

In this week’s column, we examine, briefly, the development of literary theory beyond post-modernism. What is important to observe is that although postmodernism and post- structuralism have become buzz words in the contemporary literary landscape apparently to justify substandard literary creations, it seems that post-modernism has almost lost its lustre in the West.

Like any other goods such as Blue-Ray players, literary theories hit Sri Lankan literary landscape much later than they appeared in the West. By the time, the Sri Lankan literati adopted them to analyse and in some instances, to eulogise contemporary literary productions, they became obsolete in the West and a gamut of new developments has taken place in the international literary scene.

In a Cambridge publication titled Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions, group of academics and literary theorists have observed latest literary trends and theoretical underpinnings after the Post-modernism and post-structuralism.

In presenting a series of academic papers, academics observe the plight of post-modernism in contemporary international literary scene. In an introduction to the publication Regina Rudaityte says, “Interestingly enough, forty years after the publication of John Barth’s seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), one is tempted to diagnose the exhaustion of postmodernism.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that there are signs in contemporary British literature indicating that post-modernism, is past its heyday, that it is losing or has lost its shine, fascination and attraction and that writers have been turning to the “old” or pre-modern forms, practices and strategies.

It seems to me that novels with metahistorical dimension, the ethical component, the revival of realist storytelling in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Kate Atkinson, Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George (2005) attest to the new mode which reaches beyond post-modernism.

Narrative technique

Metafiction, post-modernist experiment with narrative technique, attacks on mimetic referentiality, delight in popular culture became mainstream, they lost their subversive power and shock effect and no longer produce the effect of novelty; thus to reach alterity the post-modernist and modernist novel are deconstructed:old, pre-modern forms are used to achieve defamiliarisation.

David Lodge predicted it already two decades ago: “Experiment can become so familiar that it ceases to stimulate our powers of perception, and then more simple and straightforward modes of writing may seem wonderfully fresh and daring”. At some later date, in the 1990’s, writing about the British novel Malcolm Bradbury made a similar observation: “There was a general feeling that Eighties experiments had become Nineties conventions, and that serious young writers were becoming imitative clones of their elders”

It was Ihab Hassan, a distinguished American professor and scholar, who started the critique of post-modernism; in his thought-provoking article “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust” is advocating for what he calls “a fiduciary realism”, “a post-modern realism” based on believing there is truth and we have to be committed to it. It is not, Hassan argues, “an absolute, transcendent, or foundational Truth”, it is Truth which “rests on trust, personal, social, cognitive trust”, trust as “the premise to realism” which “is no light matter” and which “refers us to the enigma of representation, the conundrum of signs, the riddle of language, the chimera of consciousness itself”. We have to believe there is truth, because “if truth is dead, then everything is permitted”, asserts Hassan, araphrasing Dostoyevsky and challenging postmodern relativism.

The current processes in literary culture undoubtedly invite reconsideration and reconceptualisation of such key notions as “truth”, meaning production, textuality and literary interpretation. Some attempts at reassessment have already been undertaken. Andrzej Gasiorek disputes the clear-cut realism/experimentalism divide in contemporary British fiction, arguing that some writers incorporate modernist and post-modernist insights into their works, fuse technical innovations with strong social concerns, this way extending realism in new directions. Acknowledging the role played by linguistic codes and narrative forms in the construction of meaning, the scholar does not dismiss the external world that literature engages with, claiming that “out of this tension between the word and the world emerges a wide range of new realisms.”

New realisms

In a paper entitled, ‘From Post-modern to Pre-modern; more recent changes in literature, arts and theory’, Herbert Grabes observes, “ In the domain of literature, the changes that occurred in the late nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties were just as significant. The most remarkable new development was the return of more or less ‘realistic’ storytelling, something observable on an international scale, although I will take my examples from British and American literature. In the United States, ‘mainstream American realism’ never stopped flowing even during the heyday of postmodernism (as, for instance, the successful series of John Updike’s Rabbit-novels that began in 1960 testifies). Yet with the ‘minimalist’, ‘dirty’ or ‘new’ realism of Raymond Carver (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 1981) and Frederick Barthelme (Moon Deluxe, 1983), comparatively ‘straight’ storytelling became more widespread again. “

What is significant is that Grabes observes that one of the prominent literary trends that emerges after the Postmodernism is the revival of the historical novel. He observes “ In Britain, where the postmodern excesses were never as massive as in American literature, the nineteen-eighties brought a revival of the historical novel that included works with a metahistorical stance aptly called historiographic metafiction. Among them were such successful novels as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), as well as Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1983) and Nigel Williams’ Witchcraft (1987). And it is important to see that in the nineteen-eighties, feminist critique of society was also expressed in historiographic metafiction like Maureen Duffy’s Illuminations: A Fable (1991) and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987).

The revival of the historical novel comprised, however, also a considerable amount of more traditional story-telling, which began already with J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and continued with J.G. Ballard’s Empire of The Sun (1984), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982) as well as Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992) and MoralityPlay (1995) and Louise de Bernière’s Birds Without Wings (2004). More or less straight storytelling has also continued through this whole period in the novels of Ian McEwan (from The Cement Garden, 1978, to Atonement, 2001) and Martin Amis (from The Rachel Papers, 1974, to Yellow Dog, 2003).

And it has to be noted that the British equivalents to the American novels belonging to the “hyphenated literatures”, the very successful works of the so-called British ‘diaspora’ writers Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, 1989) and Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990), also rely above all on the persuasiveness of more or less realistic storytelling. ”

What is obvious from the above publication is that significant developments have already taken place in the international literary scene as well as in the sphere of literary theories while Sri Lankan literati and some of the literary theorists are still harping on the literary trends such as post-modernism and poststructuralism as the ‘be all and the end all’ in literature.