Postmodernism: Antitexts and Antiheroes

Philosophical background

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992.

Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 1979

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991

Brian Mc Hale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987

A. PRECURSORS: FROM THE 1940'S TO THE 60'S

Dictatorship as a modern form of evil

Totalitarianism as a religion

Death of illusions

A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self‑abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early‑acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. (pp. 220-221)

Text available at https://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/

Children, education, institutions, freedom

The evolution/ involution of homo ludens

Symbols and their stylistic effects

AKill the beast ! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!

Now out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind.

AKill the beast! Cut his throat. Spill his blood!'

Again the blue‑white scar jagged above them and the sulphurous explosion beat down. The littluns screamed and blundered about, fleeing from the edge of the forest, and one of them broke the ring of biguns in his terror.

AHim! Him!

The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe.

AKill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!

The blue‑white scar was constant, the noise unendurable. Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill.

AKill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!

The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws. (pp. 138‑139)

MOLLOY (1950), MALONE DIES (1951), THE UNNAMABLE (1952)

Minimalism

Life and death, subjectivity and objectivity, inside and outside

Antiplots, antiheroes

New novelistic forms

- David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads, 1971

- new generation of experimenters - John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Christine Brooke Rose, S. B. Johnson.

THE MAGUS (1966, rewritten in 1977)

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WOMAN

Chapter 13 AWho is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to known my characters minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and >voice of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe ‑ Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised. Perhaps it is only a game. Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them. Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed book of essays on you. Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should have written >On the Horizontality of Existence >The Illusion of Progress >The History of the Novel Form >The Aetiology of Freedom >Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian Age what you will.

Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions. (p. 85)

David Lodge, The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?, 1992

The Great Natives: Peter Ackroyd, Ian McEwan, Marin Amis, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Penelope Lively, etc.

The Great International Writers: Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Timothy Mo, etc.

Themes

the exile, identity quest, otherness

Englishness/Britishness, Romanianness, Europeanness

The city, the body, the text

Kazuo Ishiguro, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, 1989

the English landscape at its finest - such as I saw it this morning - possesses a quality that the landscape of other nations , however more superficially dramatic inevitably fail to possess. It is, I  believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term greatness. //

And yet what precisely is greatness ? Just where or in what does it lie ? I am quite aware - it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as if the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout about it. (p. 28)

Techniques of antiform and deconstruction

influence of the media, virtual and hyperreality

participation, performance, happening

ambiguity

openness

dispersal, fragmentation, randomness, permutation

excess

playfulness

irony

intertextuality, pastiche.

Salman Rushdie, The Moor s Last Sigh

A Like the city itself, Bombay of my joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my experience or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection. How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess ? A ( p. 161 )

A He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she and then he, and then they, and after that she and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, untilphew! Boy! Over and done with! - No. There s more. The whole thing must be told. A p. 89 )

the term postcolonial covers all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back, 1989, p. 2

THE DEVALUED OTHER

Postcolonial theory

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1967:  the devalued Other

Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978: a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient

POSTCOLONIALISM

colonial inscribings into postcolonial texts

imagological perceptions

the periphery: uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and evil

in-between spaces

colliding cultures

identity problems

exile

aIMAGINARY HOMELANDS

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge -- which gives rise to profound uncertainties -- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (p.10)

The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawedOur (diasporic writers) identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles. (pp. 11-15)

Realism

themes: family history, relationships and family life

social and natural catastrophes or cataclysms

setting: a real and specific historical, geographical and cultural context

a wide range of characters

Magical

a mixture of fact and fable, fantasy and absurdity, comedy and tragedy

inexplicable coincidences, supernatural abilities, beings or events, prophecies and premonitions

death and the afterlife, spiritism

dreams, imagination, emotions, the subconscious and the spiritual

myths, legends, fairy-tales, magic astrology, mythology, spirituality, religion

humour, disgust, absurd, grotesque and macabre events

time and space: time-shifts, flash-backs and flash-forwards, mythical and archetypal places

plot: non-linear, labyrinthine, circular or spiral-like, intertwined, anachronic or sporadically chaotic; sometimes parallel, double, co-existing or multiple plots or subplots occur.

the narrators have an idiosyncratic perspective

comedy, irony, satire, but dark, solemn and sober tone

detailed description of objects

participation of the reader

unconventional spelling and punctuation

original metaphors and similes, frequent juxtaposition; hyperbole and litotes; repetition; symbolism; oxymorons and paradoxes

GRIMUS, 1975

SHAME, 1983

MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN, 1981

THE SATANIC VERSES, 1988

THE MOORS LAST SIGH,1996

THE GROUND UNDER HER FEET, 1999

FURY, 2001

SHALIMAR THE CLOWN, 2005

MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN, 1981

1981Booker Prize

the English Speaking Union Literary Award

1993 the James Tait Prize and the Booker of Bookers Prize.

In 2003 the novel was adapted to the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company

What I was actually doing was a novel of memory about memory, so that my India was just that: my India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions (p.10)

Saleem Sinai, August 15, 1947

the son of poor parents, switched with another child at birth

his ability to read others' thoughts

'Once upon a time,' Saleem muses, 'there were Radna and Krisna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn' (259)

He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she and then he, and then they, and after that she and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, untilphew! Boy! Over and done with! - No. Theres more. The whole thing must be told. ( p. 89 )

SATANIC VERSES, 1988

re-narration of the life of the prophet Muhammad, Mohammed, Mahomet (called 'Mahound' or 'the Messenger' in the novel) in Mecca ('Jahilia')

the prophet pronounces a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities in order to win over the population

complementarity

Singapore was the first country and India the second to ban the book

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa that called for the death of Rushdie and claimed that it was the duty of every Muslim to obey, despite never having read the book

the two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background

Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specializes in playing Hindu deities and keeps his Indian identity

Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his past Indian identity

Rosa Diamond, Willie the Conk

HAUNTING SAMENESS

cultural difference as universal ambivalence

'Ellowen Deeowen'

'Babylondon' : 'There is no Proper London: not this improper city. Airstrip One, Mahagonny, Alphaville. He (Gibreel) wanders through a confusion of languages. Babel: a contraction of the Assyrian 'babilu.' 'The gate of God.' Babylondon.

proper/improper naming/being, mutations or metamorphoses, and embodiments

THE MOORS LAST SIGH

Whitbread Prize for 'Best novel' in 1995, and the Aristeion Prize in 1996

Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Granada

The spot from which Boabdil last looked upon Granada after surrendering it is known as 'the last sigh of the Moor

Moraes Zogoiby

asthma, withered right hand, a thirty-six year old elderly man of seventy-two sitting atop a tombstone within sight of the Alhambra

family life, good and evil, love and art, cultural mixture, bastards and cross-breeds

his bloodline is as mixed as India herself

father: Abraham Zogoiby, a South Indian Jew who is probably the illegitimate descendant of Boabdil, the last Muslim Sultan of Granada

mother: a well-known artist, Aurora da Gama, a Christian descendant from the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama

Like the city itself, Bombay of my joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my experience or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection. How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess? ( p. 161 )

GOOD ART VERSUS BAD

two paintings : The Moor's Last Sigh, by Aurora and by her admirer Vasco Miranda

Aurora's work - a masterpiece, the last in a series of allegorical paintings in which her son serves as subject

Miranda's picture is a sentimental kitsch of Sultan Boabdil's final departure from Granada