Postmodernism in Russian literature of the late 20th - early 21st centuries. Postmodernism in literature

Abstract on the topic:

"Literature of postmodernism of the late 20th century"

Recently, it has become popular to declare that at the beginning of the new century, postmodernism has finally passed through all possible stages of its self-determination, having exhausted the possibilities of existing as a phenomenon with signs of universality. modern culture. Along with this, manifestations of postmodernism in the last third of the twentieth century. are often considered as an intellectual game, beloved by the elite part of the creative intelligentsia both in the West and in Russia.

Meanwhile, researchers who turned to the problems of postmodernism in the situation of the seeming dominance of the postmodern worldview and the appearance of a huge number of works devoted to postmodernism, come to the conclusion that “numerous publications turned out to be confusing and contradictory: the new aesthetic phenomenon was fluid, vague and could not be defined.” D. V. Zatonsky, turning to theoretical and artistic texts in order to identify and formulate general conclusions about postmodernism, called the term itself an “unintelligible word”, the use of which does little to help organize the picture of the world in the usual sense of the word. One way or another, we have to follow the scientists in admitting that the most significant reason for the spread of postmodernism was the state of general crisis, and its significance lies in the fact that it called into question the traditional “system of existence of spirit and culture.”

Indeed, the emergence of postmodernism is primarily associated with those profound changes in the picture of the world that accompany the post-industrial, information and computer stage of development of modern civilization. In practice, this turned into a deep and often irrevocable disbelief in the universal significance of both the objective and subjective principles of knowledge of the real world. For many, the events and phenomena of the modern world perceived by consciousness have ceased to have the character of images, signs, concepts that contain any objective significant meaning or spiritual and moral meaning, correlated with the idea of ​​real progressive historical development or free spiritual activity. According to J.-F. Lyotard, now the so-called "zeitgeist" "may express itself in all sorts of reactive or even reactionary attitudes or utopias, but there is no positive orientation that could open up to us any new perspective." In general, postmodernism was “a symptom of the collapse of the previous world and, at the same time, the lowest point on the scale of ideological storms” that the coming 21st century is fraught with. This characteristic of postmodernism can find many confirmations in theoretical works and literary texts.

At the same time, the definition of postmodernism as a phenomenon that states the general crisis and chaos that opened up after the collapse of the traditional system of understanding and knowledge of the world sometimes does not allow us to see some essential aspects of the postmodern period of the state of mind. It's about about the intellectual and aesthetic efforts undertaken in line with postmodernism to develop new coordinates and determine the outlines of that new type of society, culture and worldview that have emerged at the modern post-industrial stage of development of Western civilization. The matter was not limited to general denial or parody cultural heritage. For some writers, called postmodernists, it has become more important to determine those new relationships between culture and man that develop when the principle of progressive, progressive development of society and culture in a society existing in the era of information and computer civilization loses its dominant significance.

As a result, in works of literature, a coherent picture of life based on the plot as the unfolding of events was often replaced not so much by the traditional genre plot principle of selection and arrangement of material in the spatio-temporal dimension and linear sequence, but by the creation of a certain integrity built on the combination of various layers of material , united by characters or the figure of the author-narrator. In fact, the specificity of such a text can be determined by using the term “discourse”. Among the numerous concepts that reveal the concept of “discourse”, it is worth highlighting its understanding, which allows us to go beyond the boundaries of linguistics. After all, discourse can be interpreted as “a superphrasal unity of words,” as well as “any meaningful unity, regardless of whether it is verbal or visual.” In this case, discourse is a system of sociocultural and spiritual phenomena, fixed in one form or another, external to to an individual and offered to him, for example, as a cultural heritage sanctified by tradition. From this point of view, the writers of postmodernism conveyed a rather acute feeling that for a modern person living in a world of formalized, “ready-to-use” diverse social and cultural material, there are two options left: conformist acceptance of all this or awareness of his state of alienation and lack of freedom. Thus, postmodernism in creativity begins with the fact that the writer comes to the understanding that any creation of works of traditional form degenerates into the reproduction of one or another discourse. Therefore, in some works of modern prose, the main thing becomes a description of a person’s existence in the world of various types of discourses.

In this regard, the work of J. Barnes is characteristic, who in the novel “England, England” (1998) proposed to reflect on the question “What is real England?” for a person of the post-industrial era living in a “consumer society”. The novel is divided into two parts: one is called “England”, and in it we meet the main character Martha, who grew up in a simple family. Having met her father, who once left the family, she reminds him that as a child she put together the “Counties of England” puzzle, and she was always missing one piece, because... his father was hiding him. In other words, she presented the geography of the country as a set of external outlines of individual territories, and this puzzle can be considered a postmodern concept that reveals the level of knowledge of an ordinary person about his country.

This is how the novel defines the fundamental question “What is reality”, and the second part of the novel is devoted to a certain project to create the territory of “Good Old England” next to modern England. Barnes proposes to present the entire culture of England in the form of a sociocultural discourse consisting of 50 concepts of “Englishness”. These included the Royal Family and Queen Victoria, Big Ben, Parliament, Shakespeare, snobbery, The Times, homosexuality, Manchester United Football Club, beer, pudding, Oxford, imperialism, cricket, etc. Additionally, the text provides an extensive menu of real “English” dishes and drinks. All this is placed in a designed and specially created socio-cultural spatial analogue, which is a kind of grandiose reconstruction or reproduction of “old England” on a certain island territory chosen for this purpose. The organizers of this project proceed from the fact that historical knowledge does not resemble an accurate video recording of real events of the past, and modern man lives in a world of copies, myths, signs and archetypes. In other words, if we want to reproduce the life of English society and cultural heritage, it will not be a presentation, but a representation of this world, in other words, “its improved and enriched, ironized and summarized version,” when “the reality of the copy will become the reality that we will meet in our own paths." Barnes points out that the postmodern condition modern society manifests itself, among other things, in the fact that in the sphere of culture, i.e. spiritual life of a person, now certain technologies are also used. The world of culture is designed and systematically created in the same way as is done, for example, in the field industrial production.

“England, England” is a space where the archetypes and myths about this country are presented as a spectacle and where only clouds, photographers and tourists are genuine, and everything else is the creation of the best restorers, actors, costumers and designers using the most modern technology to create the effect of antiquity and historicity. This product of modern show business in the era of the “consumer society” represents a “repositioning” of myths about England: the England that foreign tourists want to see for their money was created, without experiencing some of the inconveniences that accompany guests when traveling through a real country - Great Britain.

In this case, the literature of postmodernism highlighted one of the phenomena of the post-industrial world as a world of realized utopia of universal consumption. Modern man finds himself in a situation where, placed in the sphere of mass culture, he acts as a consumer, whose “I” is perceived as “a system of desires and their satisfaction” (E. Fromm), and the principle of unhindered consumption now extends to the sphere of classical culture and all cultural heritage. Thus, the concept of discourse as a sociocultural phenomenon gives Barnes the opportunity to show that the picture of the world within which modern man exists is essentially not the fruit of his own life experience, but was imposed on him from the outside by certain technologists, “developers of Concepts” as they are called in the novel.

At the same time, it is very characteristic that, recreating some essential aspects of the postmodern state of the modern world and man, the writers themselves perceive their work as a series of procedures for creating texts outside classical tradition prose. We are talking about understanding creativity as a process of individual processing, combination and combination of individual already formed layers of material, parts of cultural texts, individual images and archetypes. In the second half of the twentieth century. It is precisely this postmodern type of activity that temporarily becomes dominant in protecting, preserving and realizing the primordial human need and ability to cognition and creativity.

In this case internal relationships fragments of text, images and motifs in a postmodern text are reproduced as discourse, which is generally characterized as one of the evidence of the so-called “post-historical state” of artistic consciousness in the last third of the twentieth century. In postmodernism, there is a consistent replacement of the real historical perspective of the transition from the past to the future by the process of deconstruction individual painting a world whose integrity is entirely based on discourse, in the process of recreating which this picture of the world acquires for the reader a certain coherence, sometimes opening the way for him to a new understanding of this world and his position in it. In other words, postmodernism draws new sources of artistry in recreating a picture of the world from various historical, socio-cultural and informational fragments. Thus, it is proposed to evaluate the existence and spiritual life of an individual not so much in social and everyday circumstances, but in the modern historical and cultural context.

At the same time, it is the informational and cultural aspect of the selection and organization of material that constitutes the specificity of postmodernism texts, which look like a multi-level system. Most often, three levels can be distinguished: artistic (figurative), informational and cultural. At the information level, the use of extra-literary text fragments, which are commonly called documents, occurs, which is extremely characteristic of postmodernism. The stories about the heroes and their lives are supplemented by heterogeneous material that has already been processed and organized for understanding. In some cases, parts of the texts may be some genuine formalized samples or their imitations: for example, diaries and diary entries, letters, files, protocols trials, data from the field of sociology or psychology, excerpts from newspapers, quotes from books, including works of poetry and prose written in a variety of eras. All this is assembled into a literary text, contributes to the creation of a cultural context for the narrative and becomes part of the discourse accompanying the description, which has the genre characteristics of a novel at the plot level and reveals the problems of the individual fate of the hero.

This informational and cultural layer most often represents the postmodern component of artistic storytelling. It is at this level that a combination of material from different eras occurs, when images, plots, symbols from the history of culture and art are correlated with a system of norms, values ​​and concepts at the level of modern theoretical knowledge and humanitarian issues. For example, in U. Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum,” excerpts from scientific, philosophical, and theological literature from different eras are given as epigraphs to individual chapters. Other examples of the intellectual saturation of postmodern prose with informational, cultural and theoretical material are various types of prefaces by the authors, which have the nature of independent essays. Such are, for example, “Marginal Notes on “The Name of the Rose” by W. Eco or “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to the novel “The Worm” by J. Fowles, “Interlude” between two chapters in “History of the World in 10 ½ chapters" by J. Barnes. Following the model of a scientific treatise, J. Barnes ends his History of the World with a list of books that he used to describe the Middle Ages and the history of the creation of the canvas French artist Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, and his novel Flaubert's Parrot provides a fairly detailed chronology of the life of the French writer.

In these cases, it is important for authors to prove the possibility of fruitful spiritual activity and intellectual freedom based on literary work. For example, A. Robbe-Grillet believes that modern writer cannot, as before, transform outwardly solid and real everyday life into a source of creativity and give his works the character of a totalitarian truth about the norms and laws of virtue and complete knowledge about the world. Now the author “is not against individual provisions of this or that system, no, he denies any system.” Only in his inner world can he find a source of free inspiration and a basis for creating an individual picture of the world as a text without the overarching pressure of the principle of pseudo-plausibility of form and content. Living with the hope of intellectual and aesthetic liberation from the world, the modern writer pays the price by “perceiving himself as a certain shift, a crack in the usual orderly course of things and events...”.

It is not without reason that in U. Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, for the narrator, the computer becomes a symbol of unprecedented freedom in handling creative material and, thereby, the intellectual liberation of the individual. “Oh happiness, oh the dizziness of dissimilarity, oh, my ideal reader, overwhelmed by the ideal “sleeplessness”... “The mechanism of one hundred percent spirituality. If you write with a quill pen, creaking on greasy paper and dipping it every minute into the inkwell, thoughts get ahead of each other and the hand cannot keep up with the thought; if you type on a typewriter, the letters get mixed up, it is impossible to keep up with the speed of your own synapses, the stupid one wins mechanical rhythm. But with him (maybe with her?) your fingers dance as they please, your brain is united with the keyboard, and you flutter in the middle of the sky, you have wings like a bird, you compose a psychological critique of the feelings of your first wedding night...” “Proust, in comparison with such a thing, is a child’s spillie.” Access to an unprecedented variety of knowledge and information from the most diverse areas of the sociocultural past and present, the possibility of their immediate perception, free combination and comparison, the combination of pluralism of values ​​and norms with their conflict and totalitarian pressure on human consciousness - all determine the contradictory foundations of the postmodern method of creating artistic painting life. In practice, postmodern manifestations of the technique creative process appear as a clearly defined repertoire in various ways, techniques and “technologies” for processing source material to create multi-level text.

However, the appearance in the 80s. a number of works of prose allows us to see that such features as quotation, fragmentation, eclecticism and playfulness do not exhaust the possibilities of literary postmodernism. Such features of postmodern prose as the creation of a cultural, philosophical and artistic narrative (for example, a historical novel or detective story) that do not correspond to the rooted traditional ideas about prose genres have revealed their dominant significance. Such non-genre qualities are possessed, for example, by “The Name of the Rose” (1980) and “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1989), the “illustrated novel” “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (2004) by W. Eco, the historical novel - “fantasy” by J. Fowles “ Worm" (1985), "History of the World in 10 ½ chapters" (1989) by J. Barnes, autobiographical trilogy A. Robbe-Grillet “Romanesque” (1985-1994). These works show that the choice of postmodernist creativity methodology is largely due to the desire to move away from the image of a virtual picture of the world imposed on a person from the outside in line with the entrenched genre discourse, when the content and plot are determined by the generally accepted aesthetic, ideological and moral canons of modern society and mass culture. Therefore, Robbe-Grillet refused to mislead readers simply by extracting reality from the material in the form of a “simple and honest story.” The writer, for example, sees untapped creative possibilities in the fact that in the imagination of an author writing about the war of 1914, historically reliable military episodes may well be combined with images of heroes from medieval epic tales and chivalric novels. According to J. Barnes, artistic deconstruction of the world is necessary because, as a rule, “we invent our own story to circumvent facts that we do not want to accept” and, as a result, “we live in an atmosphere of general triumph of untruth.” Only art as a result of freedom from outside pressure creative activity a person can overcome the rigid fable of an ideologized picture of the world, reviving old themes, images and concepts through their individual rethinking, combination and interpretation. In “History of the World,” the author set the task of overcoming the superficial plotliness and approximateness of the generally accepted panorama of the historical past and present. The transition from one “elegant plot” to another over a complex flow of events can only be justified by the fact that by limiting his knowledge about life to selective fragments connected into a kind of plot, modern man moderates his panic and pain from the perception of the chaos and cruelty of the real world.

On the other hand, it is precisely the transformation of actual historical or contemporary events and facts into piece of art remains the most important asset of a creative personality. Barnes sees a significant difference in the understanding of fidelity to the “truth of life” in classical art and now, when in modern popular culture Through literature, newspapers and television, the practice of imposing a false view of the world on people has taken root. He draws attention to the obvious differences between the picturesque scene depicted in Gericault’s canvas “The Raft of the Medusa” and the real terrible facts of the sea disaster of this ship. Freeing his viewers from contemplating wounds, abrasions and scenes of cannibalism, Géricault created an outstanding work of art that carries a charge of energy that liberates the viewer's inner world through the contemplation of powerful figures of characters suffering and maintaining hope. In the modern post-industrial era, in the postmodern state, literature poses an essentially eternal question: will art be able to preserve and increase its intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic potential for comprehending and depicting the world and man.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that in postmodernism of the 80s. attempts to create literary texts containing modern concept life, turn out to be connected with the development of humanistic issues, which was one of the main assets classical literature. Therefore, in the novel “The Worm” by J. Fowles, episodes of origin in England in the 18th century. one of the unorthodox religious movements is interpreted as a story about “how the sprout of personality painfully breaks through the rocky soil of an irrational, tradition-bound society.” Thus, in the last decades of the twentieth century. postmodernism reveals a clear tendency to return man to the field of art and creativity as a valuable individual, freed from the pressure of society and generally accepted ideological and worldview canons and principles. postmodernism creativity cultural text

Used Books

1. Kuzmichev I.K. Literary studies of the twentieth century. Crisis of methodology. Nizhny Novgorod: 1999.

Zatonsky D.V. Modernism and postmodernism. Kharkov: 2000.

Foreign literature. 1994. No. 1.

Vladimirova T. E. Called to communication: Russian discourse in intercultural communication. M.: 2010.

Bart R. Selected works: Semiotics: Poetics. M., 1989.

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Postmodernism as a literary movement originates at the end of the 20th century. It arises as a protest to the foundations, excluding any restrictions on actions and techniques, erases the boundaries between styles and gives authors absolute freedom of creativity. The main vector of development of postmodernism is the overthrow of all established norms, the mixing of “high” values ​​and “low” needs.

The convergence of elite modernist literature, which was difficult for most of society to understand, and primitivism, rejected by intellectuals due to its stereotypes, aimed to get rid of the shortcomings of each style.

(Irene Cheri "Behind the Book")

The exact origins of this style are uncertain. However, its origin is the reaction of society to the results of the era of modernism, the end of World War II, the horrors that occurred in the concentration camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the first works include “The Dismemberment of Orpheus” (Ihab Hassan), “Cannibal” (John Hawkes) and “The Scream” (Allen Ginsberg).

Postmodernism received its conceptual design and theoretical definition only in the 1980s. This was facilitated, first of all, by the developments of Zh.F. Lyotara. The magazine "October", published in the USA, actively promoted the postmodernist ideas of outstanding representatives of cultural studies, philosophy and literary studies.

Postmodernism in Russian literature of the 20th century

The contrast between avant-garde and modernism, where the mood was felt Silver Age, in Russian postmodernism was expressed by a rejection of realism. Writers in their works describe harmony as a utopia. They find a compromise with chaos and space. The first independent response to postmodernism in Russia is Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House. However, the reader was able to enjoy it only 10 years after its release, since its publication was banned.

(Andrey Anatolyevich Shustov "Ballad")

Russian postmodernism owes the versatility of its images to domestic socialist realism. He is the one Starting point for reflection and development of characters in books of this direction.

Representatives

The ideas of comparing opposing concepts are clearly expressed in the works of the following writers:

• S. Sokolov, A. Bitov, V. Erofeev - paradoxical compromises between life and death;
• V. Pelevin, T. Tolstaya - the contact between the real and the fantasy;
• Pietsukh - the border between foundations and absurdity;
• V. Aksyonov, A. Sinyavsky, L. Petrushevskaya, S. Dovlatov - denial of any authority, organic chaos, combination of several trends, genres and eras on the pages of one work.

(Nazim Gadzhiev "Eight" (seven dogs, one cat))

Directions

Based on the concepts of “world as text”, “world as chaos”, “author’s mask”, “double move”, the directions of postmodernism, by definition, have no specific boundaries. However, analyzing domestic literature the end of the 20th century, some features stand out:

• The orientation of culture towards itself, and not towards real world;
• The texts originate from the drains historical eras;
• Ephemerality and illusoryness, artificiality of actions,
• Metaphysical closure;
• Nonselection;
• Fantastic parody and irony;
• Logic and absurdity are combined in a single image;
• Violation of the law of sufficient justification and exclusion of third meaning.

Postmodernism in foreign literature of the 20th century

The literary concepts of the French poststructuralists are of particular interest to the American literary community. It is against this background that Western theories of postmodernism are formed.

(Portrait - collage from a mosaic of works of art)

The point of no return to modernism becomes an article by Leslie Fiedler published in Playboy. The very title of the text blatantly demonstrates the convergence of opposites - “Cross borders, fill ditches.” During the formation of literary postmodernity, the tendency to overcome the boundaries between “books for intellectuals” and “stories for the ignorant” is gaining more and more momentum. As a result of development, certain characteristic features are visible between foreign works.

Some features of postmodernism in the works of Western authors:

• Decanonization of official norms;
• Ironic attitude towards values;
• Filling with quotes, short statements;
• Denial of the singular self in favor of the many;
• Innovations in forms and methods of expressing thoughts in the course of changing genres;
• Hybridization of techniques;
• A humorous look at everyday situations, laughter as one of the aspects of life's disorder;
• Theatricality. Playing with plots, images, text and the reader;
• Acceptance of the diversity of life through humility with chaotic events. Pluralism.

The USA is considered the birthplace of postmodernism as a literary movement. Postmodernism is reflected most clearly in the works of American writers, namely the followers of the “school of black humor” in the person of Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelemy, John Barth, James Patrick Dunleavy.

It is believed that postmodernism in literature first appeared in the United States, and then gradually spread to many European countries. People became more interested

• literary studies
• post-Freudian,
• intellectual concepts.

Moreover, for many reasons for the perception of such the latest trends It was the American “soil” that turned out to be the most favorable. The fact is that in the 50s many unknown and completely new trends in literature and art appeared. All these growing trends needed to be comprehended. As a result, it turned out that in the 70s a change in the cultural paradigm gradually began to occur, where postmodernism in literature took the place of modernism.

The first examples of postmodernism in literature

Already in 1969, an article entitled “Cross Borders, Fill Ditches” was published, which turned out to be significant in this regard. The author of this sensational article was Leslie Fiedler, a famous literary critic. In this article one could clearly see all the pathos of combining the language of mass literature with the language of modernism. Both completely different poles were combined and brought closer to each other in order to make it possible to erase the boundaries between fiction, which was despised by aesthetes, and elitist and modernist literature.

The ideas of poststructuralists from France, who migrated to the United States at that time, not only made it possible to much better understand all the processes emerging in American art, but also added new impetus to discussions regarding postmodernism.

Development of postmodernism

The new concept of postmodernism (which originated in the USA) over time influenced not only art and literature, but also many sciences:

• political,
• business,
• right,
• psychoanalysis,
• management,
• sociology,
• psychology,
• criminology.

Moreover, when rethinking American culture, art and literature, postmodernism served as a methodological basis as theoretical basis poststructuralism. All of this contributed to changing racial and ethnic attitudes among Americans. Postmodernism in literature has also become fertile ground for the emergence of a feminist approach.

And in the 90s, postmodernism gradually penetrated the spiritual culture of society.

Main features of postmodernism in literature

Most researchers believe that with postmodernism, an artificial destruction of traditional views and ideas about the completeness, harmony, and integrity of all aesthetic systems arose. The first attempts to identify the main features of postmodernism also appeared:

1. predilection for quotation compound incompatible;
2. blurring of binary and too rigid oppositions;
3. hybridization of different genres, which gives rise to mutant new forms;
4. ironic revaluation of many values, decanonization of most conventions and canons;
5. erasure of identity;
6. playing with texts, metalinguistic games, theatricalization of texts;
7. rethinking the history of human culture and intertextuality;
8. mastering Chaos in a playful manner;
9. pluralism of styles, models and cultural languages;
10. organization of texts in a two- or multi-level version, adapted simultaneously for mass and elite readers;
11. the phenomenon of “death of the author” and the author’s mask;
12. multiplicity of points of view and meanings;
13. incompleteness, openness to designs, fundamental unsystematicity;
14. "double coding" technique.

Texts with a capital T have become the most basic object of postmodernism. In addition, cultural mediation, ridicule and general confusion began to appear in this direction.

Term "postmodernism" still causes controversy here and in the West. Coming into circulation in the sixties, in a purely historical sense it refers to the culture of the West after the Second World War, to post-industrial society, to the era of consumer capitalism, new technologies, electronic communications. All this destabilizes and modifies traditional cultural mechanisms and, which is especially important for literature, leads to the loss of the privileged position of a book, text, or work. The processes taking place in the culture of the postmodern era are described by scientists in different ways. Some consider postmodernism to be a continuation and development of modernism, and postmodern literature turns out to be simply a continuation of the trends of modernist literature at a new historical stage, then postmodernism is simply what follows after modernism. Others see in the culture of postmodernism a break with classical modernism of the first half of the century, others are busy looking for writers in the past whose work already carries the ideas and principles of modernism (with this approach, postmodernists turn out to be French writer the end of the 18th century, the Marquis de Sade, the American poet Ezra Pound, who is usually considered one of the classics of modernism, and many others).

One way or another, the term “postmodernism” itself indicates the connection of this phenomenon with the culture of the previous era, and postmodernism recognizes itself in relation to modernism. At the same time, modernism itself is subject to constant revision, and postmodernism theorists offer the following system of oppositions that describe the difference between modernism of the first half of the twentieth century and postmodernism. The following table is borrowed from the work of the American theorist I. Hassan, “The Culture of Postmodernism” (1985).

Theorists of postmodernism argue that postmodernism rejects the elitism and formal experimentation inherent in modernism, the tragedy in the experience of alienation. If modernism was the dehumanization of art, postmodernism is experiencing the dehumanization of the planet, the end of history, the end of man. If Joyce, Kafka and Proust are the all-powerful masters of the artistic worlds they create, they still believe in the ability of words to express the essential truth about the human condition, in the eternal existence of a perfect work of art, then the postmodernist artist knows that word and language are subjective and best case scenario are capable of reflecting some aspects of an individual point of view, and a book purchased at an airport kiosk will be read during the flight, left behind when leaving the plane, and the reader is unlikely to ever remember it. Modernist literature still depicted the tragedy of the earthly existence of the individual, that is, it retained the heroic principle; The postmodernist writer expresses man’s weariness from life’s struggle, the emptiness of existence. In short, in the era of modernism, the art of words still retained a high value status in society, the artist could still feel like a creator and prophet, but in postmodernism art becomes optional, anarchic, and completely ironic.

At the core of postmodern literature is the concept of play, which has moved far away from romantic irony. The game in postmodernism fills everything and absorbs itself, leading to the loss of the purpose and meaning of the game. Postmodernists say that the time has come to abandon the traditional categories of beauty and authenticity, because we live in a world of ephemeral fakes, false realities, in a world of imitations. The shock of humanity from new historical circumstances that cannot be comprehended by consciousness alone (the Holocaust - the extermination of Jews during the Second World War; the use of nuclear weapons; pollution environment; the extreme leveling of personality in modern Western democracies) leads to the loss of original guidelines and a total revision of the value system, the very ways of thinking. The idea of ​​a single world order, and therefore of a single center of any system, any concept, is lost. It becomes impossible to distinguish the important from the unimportant, to highlight the main meaning of any concept.

The idea of ​​the absence of absolutes, final truths, the idea that reality is given to us only in the differences between its phenomena, was most consistently developed by the French poststructuralists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Francois Lyotard. These philosophers preached a rejection of the entire tradition of classical philosophy, a revision of the entire system of scientific knowledge, and their unusually complex, “breakthrough” works will still be given a final assessment by time.

The same exhaustion of rebellion, fatigue characterizes the attitude of postmodernists to tradition. They do not reject it outright, like their predecessors: the postmodern writer can be compared to a shopper in a supermarket of world history and world literature, who rolls his cart along the aisles, looking around and dumping into it everything that attracts his attention or curiosity. Postmodernism is a product of such a late stage in the development of Western civilization, when “everything has been said” and new ideas in literature are impossible; Moreover, postmodern writers themselves very often teach literature at universities or are critics and literary theorists, so they easily directly introduce all these new theories of literature into their works, immediately parody and play on them.

In postmodern works, the degree of self-awareness and self-criticism within the text increases sharply; the writer does not hide from the reader how he achieves this or that effect, he offers the reader for discussion the choices that the author of the text faces, and this discussion with the reader also takes on the character of a sophisticated game.

All the major writers of the late twentieth century were, to one degree or another, affected by postmodernism, which equally manifests itself in the old national literatures West (French "new novelists" - Nathalie Sarraute, Henri Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon; Germans - Günter Grass and Patrick Suskind; Americans - John Barth and Thomas Pynchon; English - Julian Barnes and Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie; Italians Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco), and in the heyday of the Latin American novel (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar), and in the work of Eastern European writers (Milan Kundera, Agotha ​​Christophe, Victor Pelevin).

Let us turn to two examples of postmodern literature, which were chosen for purely pragmatic reasons: both belong to the greatest masters of postmodernism, are small in volume and are available in Russian translation.

Postmodern literature

Term "postmodern literature" describes the characteristic features of literature of the second half of the 20th century (fragmentation, irony, black humor, etc.), as well as the reaction to the ideas of the Enlightenment inherent in modernist literature.

Postmodernism in literature, like postmodernism in general, is difficult to define - there is no clear opinion regarding the exact characteristics of the phenomenon, its boundaries and significance. But, as with other art styles, postmodern literature can be described by comparing it to the style that preceded it. For example, by denying the modernist search for meaning in a chaotic world, the author of a postmodern work avoids, often in a playful form, the very possibility of meaning, and his novel is often a parody of this search. Postmodern writers value chance over talent and use self-parody and metafiction to question the authority and power of the author. The existence of a difference between high and mass art, which the postmodernist author blurs by using pastiche and combining themes and genres that were previously considered inappropriate for literature.

Origin

Significant influences

Postmodern authors point to some works of classical literature as influencing their experiments with narrative and structure: these are “Don Quixote”, “1001 and the Night”, “Decameron”, “Candide”, etc. In English-language literature, Laurence Sterne’s novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristan” Shandy, the Gentleman (1759), with its strong emphasis on parody and experimentation with storytelling, is often cited as an early precursor of postmodernism. In the literature of the 19th century there are also attacks on the ideas of the Enlightenment, parodies and literary games, including Byron's satire (especially his Don Juan); “Sartor Resartus” by Thomas Carlyle, “King Ubu” by Alfred Jarry and his own pataphysics; Lewis Carroll's playful experiments with meaning and meaning; works by Lautréamont, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde. Playwrights active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who influenced postmodern aesthetics included the Swede August Strindberg, the Italian Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. At the beginning of the 20th century, Dada artists began to glorify chance, parody, jokes and were the first to challenge the authority of the artist. Tristan Tzara argued in the article "For a Dadaist Poem": to make one, you only need to write random words, put them in a hat and take them out one by one. The Dadaist influence on postmodernism was also evident in the creation of collages. Artist Max Ernst used advertising clippings and illustrations in his works popular novels. Surrealist artists, successors to the Dadaists, continued experimenting with chance and parody, glorifying the activities of the subconscious. André Breton, the founder of surrealism, argued that automatic writing and the description of dreams should play a vital role in the creation of literature. In the novel “Nadya” he used automatic writing, as well as photographs, which replaced descriptions, thus ironizing the overly verbose novelists. Postmodernist philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault turned to experiments with the meanings of the surrealist artist Rene Magritte in their works. Foucault often turned to Jorge Luis Borges, a writer who has had a significant influence on postmodern literature. Sometimes Borges is considered a postmodernist, although he began writing in the 1920s. His experiments with metafiction techniques and magical realism were only appreciated with the advent of postmodernism.

Comparison with modernist literature

Both the modernist and postmodernist movements in literature break with the realism of the 19th century. In constructing characters, these directions are subjective, they move away from external reality to research internal states consciousness, using "stream of consciousness" (a technique perfected in the works of modernist writers Virginia Woolf and James Joyce) or combining lyricism and philosophy in "exploratory poetry" like Thomas Eliot's The Waste Land. Fragmentation - in the structure of the narrative and characters - is another common feature modernist and postmodernist literature. The Waste Land is often cited as a borderline example between modernist and postmodernist literature. The fragmentary nature of the poem, the parts of which are not formally connected with each other, and the use of pastiche bring it closer to postmodern literature, however, the narrator of “The Waste Land” says that “with these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In modernist literature, fragmentation and extreme subjectivity reflect an existential crisis or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that needs to be solved, and the artist is often the one who can and must do this. Postmodernists, however, show the insurmountability of this chaos: the artist is helpless, and the only refuge from the “ruins” is play among the chaos. The play form is present in many modernist works (in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, for example), which may seem very close to postmodernism, but in the latter the play form becomes central, and the actual achievement of order and meaning is undesirable.

Literary scholar Brian McHale, speaking about the transition from modernism to postmodernism, notes that epistemological issues are at the center of modernist literature, while postmodernists are mainly interested in ontological issues.

Transition to postmodernism

As is the case with other eras, there are no exact dates that could indicate the rise and fall of the popularity of postmodernism. 1941, the year in which they died Irish writer James Joyce and English writer Virginia Woolf is sometimes cited as the approximate beginning of postmodernism.

The prefix “post-” indicates not only opposition to modernism, but also continuity in relation to it. Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism (and the results of its era), which followed the Second World War with its disrespect for human rights, just approved by the Geneva Convention, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the horrors of concentration camps and the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. It can also be considered a reaction to other post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the civil rights movement in the United States, post-colonialism, the emergence of the personal computer (cyberpunk and hypertext literature).

The beginning of literary postmodernism can be identified through significant publications and events in literature. Some researchers name among these the release of “Cannibal” by John Hawkes (1949), the first performance of the play “Waiting for Godot” (1953), the first publication of “The Scream” (1956) or “Naked Lunch” (1959). Events can also serve as a starting point literary criticism: Jacques Derrida’s lecture “Structure, Sign and Play” in 1966 or the essay “The Dismemberment of Orpheus” by Ihab Hassan in 1971.

Post-war period and key figures

Although the term "postmodern literature" does not refer to everything written during the postmodern period, some postwar movements (such as theater of the absurd, beatniks, and magical realism) have significant similarities. These movements are sometimes collectively classified as postmodernism, since the key figures of these movements (Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez) made significant contributions to the aesthetics of postmodernism.

The works of Jarry, the surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and other writers of the first half of the 20th century, in turn, influenced the playwrights of the theater of the absurd. The term "Theater of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe the theatrical movement of the 1950s; he relied on Albert Camus's concept of the absurd. The plays of the theater of the absurd are in many ways parallel to postmodern prose. For example, “The Bald Singer” by Eugene Ionesco is, in fact, a set of clichés from a textbook in English. One of the largest figures who are classified as both absurdists and postmodernists is Samuel Beckett. His works are often considered transitional from modernism to postmodernism. Beckett was closely associated with modernism through his friendship with James Joyce; however, it was his work that helped literature overcome modernism. Joyce, one of the representatives of modernism, glorified the powers of language; Beckett said in 1945 that in order to emerge from the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language, turn to the theme of man as a misunderstanding. His later works show characters stuck in hopeless situations, trying to communicate with each other and realizing that the best they can do is play. Researcher Hans-Peter Wagner writes:

"Most concerned with what he saw as the impossibilities of literature (the individuality of characters; the certainty of consciousness; the reliability of language itself and the division of literature into genres), Beckett's experiments with form and the breakdown of narrative and character in prose and drama gave him Nobel Prize on literature 1969. His works published after 1969 are, for the most part, metaliterary endeavors that must be read in the light of his own theories and previous works; these are attempts to deconstruct literary forms and genres. ‹…› Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings in Still (1988), blurs the boundaries between drama, prose and poetry, between Beckett's own texts, being composed almost entirely of echoes and repetitions from his previous works. ‹…› He was, of course, one of the fathers of the postmodern prose movement, which continues to undermine the ideas of logical narrative sequence, formal plot, regular temporal sequence and psychologically explainable characters.

Borders

Postmodernism in literature is not an organized movement with leaders and key figures; for this reason it is much more difficult to say whether it has ended, or whether it will end at all (like, for example, modernism, which ended with the deaths of Joyce and Woolf). Postmodernism arguably reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of Catch-22 (1961), John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Rainbow gravity" by Thomas Pynchon (1973), etc. Some point to the death of postmodernism in the 1980s, when new wave realism, as represented by Raymond Carver and his followers. Tom Wolfe, in the 1989 article "The Hunt for the Billion-Legged Monster", announces a new emphasis on realism in prose to replace postmodernism. With this new emphasis in mind, some have cited Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) and The Satanic Verses (1988) as the last great novels of the postmodern era.

Nevertheless, a new generation of writers around the world continue to write, if not a new chapter of postmodernism, then something that could be called post-postmodernism.

Common Topics and Techniques

Irony, game, black humor

Canadian literary critic Linda Hutcheon calls postmodern fiction "ironic quotes" because much of this literature is parodic and ironic. This irony, as well as the dark humor and playful form (associated with Derrida's concept of play and the ideas expressed by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are the most recognizable features of postmodernism, although they were first used by modernists.

Many American postmodern writers were first classified as “black humorists”: these were John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. Postmodernists are typical of handling serious topics in a playful and humorous way: for example, Heller, Vonnegut and Pynchon talk about the events of World War II. Thomas Pynchon often uses ridiculous puns within a serious context. Thus, his Lot 49 Shouts out features characters named Mike Fallopiev and Stanley Kotex, and also mentions the radio station KCUF, while the novel's theme is serious and the novel itself has a complex structure.

Intertextuality

Since postmodernism represents the idea of ​​a decentered universe, in which the work of an individual is not an isolated creation, intertextuality is of great importance in the literature of postmodernism: the relationship between texts, the inevitable inclusion of any of them in the context of world literature. Critics of postmodernism see this as a lack of originality and dependence on cliches. Intertextuality can be a reference to another literary work, by comparison with it, can provoke a lengthy discussion of it or borrow its style. In postmodern literature big role references to fairy tales and myths play (see the works of Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelemy, etc.), as well as popular genres such as science fiction or detective fiction. An early turn to intertextuality in the 20th century, which influenced subsequent postmodernists, is the story "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" by Borges, whose protagonist rewrites Cervantes' Don Quixote, a book that in turn harkens back to the tradition of medieval romances. “Don Quixote” is often mentioned by postmodernists (see, for example, Kathy Acker’s novel “Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream”). Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism is John Barth's The Dope Merchant, which references Ebenezer Cook's poem of the same name. Intertextuality often takes on more complex shape than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice connects Pinocchio with Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco takes the form of a detective novel and references texts by Aristotle, Arthur Conan Doyle and Borges.

Pastiche

Metafiction

Historical metafiction

Linda Khachen coined the term "historical metafiction" to refer to works in which real events and the figures are thought out and changed; famous examples are Gabriel Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth (about Simon Bolivar), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (about Gustave Flaubert), and E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, which features historical figures such as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford , Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon also uses this technique; for example, there is a scene in the book where George Washington smokes marijuana. John Fowles does a similar thing with the Victorian era in The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Time distortion

Fragmentation and nonlinear storytelling are the main features of both modern and postmodern literature. Time distortion is used in various forms in postmodern literature, often to add a hint of irony. Time distortions appear in many of Kurt Vonnegut's non-linear novels; the most famous example is the "timeless" Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five. In the story “The Nanny” by Robert Coover from the collection “Pricksongs & Descants,” the author shows several versions of the event occurring simultaneously - in one version the nanny is killed, in the other nothing happens to her, etc. Thus, none of the versions of the story is not the only correct one.

Magic realism

Technoculture and hyperreality

Paranoia

Maximalism

Postmodern sensibility requires that the parody work parodies the very idea of ​​parody, and that the narrative correspond to what is depicted (i.e., the modern information society), spreading and fragmenting.

Some critics, such as B. R. Myers, accuse the maximalist novels of writers like Dave Eggers of lacking structure, of sterile language, language play for its own sake, and lack of emotional involvement of the reader. All this, in their opinion, reduces the value of such a novel to zero. However, there are examples modern novels, where postmodern storytelling coexists with the emotional involvement of the reader: Pynchon's Mason and Dixon and D. F. Wallace's Infinite Jest.

Minimalism

Literary minimalism is characterized by superficial descriptiveness, thanks to which the reader can take an active part in the narrative. Characters in minimalist works, as a rule, do not have characteristic features. Minimalism, unlike maximalism, depicts only the most necessary, basic things; economy of words is specific to it. Minimalist authors avoid adjectives, adverbs, and meaningless details. The author, instead of describing every detail and minute of the story, gives only the main context, inviting the reader’s imagination to “complete” the story. Most often, minimalism is associated with the work of Samuel Beckett.

Different views

Postmodernist writer John Barth, who has spoken extensively about the phenomenon of postmodernism, wrote the essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" in 1967; in 1979 he published a new essay, "The Literature of Replenishment", in which he clarified his previous article. "Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after the exhaustion of modernism. In The Literature of Replenishment, Barth wrote:

“In my opinion, the ideal postmodern writer does not copy, but also does not reject his fathers from the twentieth century and his grandfathers from the nineteenth. He carries the first half of the century not on his hump, but in his stomach: he managed to digest it. ‹…› He may not hope to shake the fans of James Michener and Irving Wallace, not to mention the ignoramuses lobotomized by mass culture. But he must hope that he will be able to penetrate and captivate (at least someday) a certain layer of the public - wider than the circle of those whom Mann called the first Christians, that is, than the circle of professional ministers of high art. ‹…› The ideal novel of postmodernism must somehow be above the battle of realism with irrealism, formalism with “contentism,” pure art with biased art, elitist prose with mass prose. ‹…› According to my ideas, a comparison with good jazz or classical music. Listening again, following the score, you notice what you missed the first time. But this first time should be so amazing - and not only in the opinion of a specialist - that you want to repeat it."

Many postmodern novels deal with World War II. One of the most famous examples is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. However, Heller argued that his novel, like many others American works of that time, was more connected with the post-war situation in the country:

“The anti-war and anti-government sentiment in the book belongs to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the Cold War of the 1950s. A general decline in faith followed the war, and it affected Catch-22 in the sense that the novel itself almost fell apart. “Catch-22” was a collage: if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself... Without knowing it, I was part of an almost-movement in literature. When I was writing Catch-22, Dunleavy was writing The Lightning Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cradle cats." I don't think either of us knew about each other. At least I didn't know anyone. Whatever forces shaped trends in art, they affected not only me, but all of us. The feeling of helplessness, the fear of persecution, is equally strong in Catch-22, in Pynchon, and in Cat's Cradle.

Researcher Hans-Peter Wagner proposes the following approach to define postmodern literature:

"The term 'postmodernism'... can be used in two ways - firstly, to designate the period after 1968 (which would embrace all forms of literature, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe highly experimental a literature that began with the works of Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and which suffocated with the works of Martin Amis and the Scottish "Chemical Generation" of the turn of the century. It follows that the term "postmodernist literature" is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd and Martin Amis), while the term "postmodern literature" “(post-modern) applies to less innovative authors.”

Significant works of postmodern literature