Postmodernism in British and American literature. Its basic features. J.Fowles, M.Amis, S.Rushdie; K. Vonnegut, J. Heller, V.Nabokov, Th.Pynchon.

LITERATURE OF POSTMODERNISM (SINCE THE 70 - 90SS OF THE 20TH CENTURY)

There is no definition for postmodernism as a term. The word itself suggests that the period came after modemism.

The 20-30ss the period between the two World Wars - can be regarded as the summit of modernism (J. Joyce, V . Woolf, D. H. Lawrence). In the 50-60ss modernist and realistic tendencies coexisted in literature. "The Angry Young Men" as a phenomenon was a certain return to realism (they discussed the position of the lower middle class).

Postmodernism started inthe 70 - 90ss . It is a new phenomenon and has features which make it different from modernism and realism. The metaphorical image of literature (from the point of postmodernism) is a mirror.

There are some other important features of postmodernist literature :

1) As there are open ends in postmodernist books, (the reader is likely to ask "And what of it?" at the end. Besides it is quite difficult to say whether the characters are good or bad. The form and genre of
postmodernism is mainly the novel with elements of different genres and forms.

E.g.: Graham Swift, “Out Of This World” the novel says that human nature is very complicated, unpredictable, complex. And no one has the right to be the judge of another person. This book is a story of a grandfather, father and his daughter;

      John Fowles, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” - novel has elements of different genres: historical novel, psychological novel, detective elements, adventure elements, philosophical novel.

Postmodernist literature combines fiction and non-fiction (documentary prose, statistical facts,
quotations from different documents, etc.). So, postmodernist literature combines different forms of
literature.

2) In postmodernist works history goes side by side with the present and the future. So we may speak about overlapping of time levels in these works.

3) In postmodernist works it is common to mix high culture and mass culture (or "kitsch"- pulp culture, which is the culture of very low intellectuals).

4) Combination of different moods: comic, tragic, humorous, etc. There is usually no general tone in
the books.

5) Magic realism is another feature of postmodernist literature, though the very name of this feature is very contradictory in itself. The Latin-American writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez ) invented it.
In British literature the representatives of magic realism are Salmon Rushdie and Angela Carter. Salmon Rushdie is an Indian writer and writes about Indian reality. For his “satanic Verses” he was cursed by Muslims, and sentenced to death. In the end he had to hide. In his book "Midnight’s Children" the protagonist has a magic faculty to communicate at distance.

.Angela Carter in her novel " Nights at the Circus" discusses levitation.

6) Intertextuality - the use of previously written texts and their elements as the material for postmodernist writings. Such a use of other texts can also take the form of a parody.

Postmodernist works are like pastiche (a combination of different elements). They may even combine elements of prose and poetry at the same time.

So the writer tries to modify all such elements in order to make them look similar. They often say that postmodernist works remind a kind of patchwork. And all such things as borrowings, allusions, parody (critical altitude to the primary source), patchworks (combination of different primaly sources) are one of the most vivid and bright postmodernist features.

7) Actually, in postmodernist literature there are very few social novels. And in Great Britain even if authors touch upon the problems which would be touched upon in social (so called serious) novels, dealing with contemporary realities and issues, the authors make use of various devices: they draw parallels with the past or look into the future, resorting to magic realism. In a word they write the so called experimental novels r resort to what Martin Emis (he is one of the most well-known contemporary English writers) called postmodernist trickness. He himself resorted to such a trickness in his famous novel "Time's Arrow " . John Fowles in his novel " The French Lieutenant’s Woman" introduces himself as a character of the book, in his book " The Collector" the author resorts to the device of allusion - an allusion to Shakespeare's play "The Tempest". Marina Warner in her book "Indigo" also reworks " The Tempest".

The main themes in postmodernist works:

1) the widely exploited theme - art and literature. Novelists write fictional life stories of the writers of the former, preceding times:

E.g.: Peter Ackroyd - "The Last Testament of 0scar Wilde" - this book is an imaginary diaryof O.Wilde;

                         "Milton In America " Milton never was in America but the author imagined this fact;

        Antonia Silvia Byatt -"Possession" the book shows a parallel between the love stories of two

                                          Couples: of the 19^th century and of the 20^th century;

  2) history is another popular themein contemporary English literature;

E.g.: Graham Swift - his novel " Water Land " – presents the history of a county in Central England;

             “Out Of This World " - a story how father made bombs and then his son took pictures of the 

                                                  Ruins;

Ian mcevan - his novel "The Black Dogs" tells about the extermination of people in Holocaust 

                  During World War II;

  3) feminist literature is very rich nowadays in Great Britain:

     E.g.: Fay Weldon - "Female Friends

Margaret Drabble - " The Realms o f goid " (the writer started as "an angry young woman");

Anither Brookner - " A Start In I.ife", "Hotel de Luck" (the author is an Oxford scholar in an):

  4) still another phenomenon of postmodernist literature is the widening of ethnic paradigm: a great
number of writers born outside Britain have come into English literature lately ( Kazuo Ishiguro, Salmon Rushdie, Ben Okri);

  5) many works of the Brilisli literature of the last decades of the 20^th century is permeated with the
apocalyptical mood – fine siecle.

POSTMODERNISM IN BRITAIN

The last decades of the 20th cent saw an upsurge of literary production in England. However, literal seemed to take little interest in actualities. All critics noted the absence of "straight" novels, that is, works with a traditionally solid, coherent narrative. There were very few long prose works about the condition of England or the class system, or other themes so characteristic of the 19th 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, Margareet; 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, lan mcewan, Salman Rushdie and others. Like other national literatures the English literature of the late 20th century was permeated 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 modem 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 skeptical attitude towards all the significant books about man and society, whose ideas seemed to be disproved by the realities of the 20^th century. This scepticism and reevaluation 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 abounds in 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". Shakespeare's work was very often referred to by postmodernist authors. There are echoes of The Tempest in Fowles' novels (The Collector and The Magus), in Iris Murdoch's novels (The Sea, the Sea and The Philosopher's Pupil), of Hamlet in Angela Carter's Wise Children and in Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, as well as of Romeo and Juliet in Ben Okri's Dangerous Love and others.

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 Bames opens with the story of Noah's Ark as told by a woodworm. The same passage from the Scriptures was used by Michele Roberts for her novel The Book of Mrs. Noah, and in The Wild Girl she revised the story of Mary Magdalene. Muriel Spark built her novel The Only Problem on parallels with The Book of Job, one of the most remarkable parts of the Old Testament. And Jim Crace reworked the story of the desert temptations of Christ in his novel The Quarantine.

Many postmodernist works have a self-reflexive, or metafictional, 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. Barry Unsworth, the author of Losing Nelson, examines sceptically the myth of the British national hero and the whole process of constructing historical legends.

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. Tibor Fischer's novel The Collector Collector is about an ancient talking bowl which tells its long history to its 20th century owner.

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. James Ballard's autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun deals with an English teenager's dramatic experience in China during the Japanese occupation. 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 who were not even directly involved. A number of novels — Time's Arrow by M. Amis, Too Many Men by Lily Brett and others — condemn the atrocities of the Holocaust.

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 bom 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".

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.

      JOHN FOWLES (b. 1926)

John Fowles was born in the town of Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. Since 1950, on graduating from Oxford where he studied French language and literature, he worked as a teacher in France, Greece and England. In 1963 he gave up teaching to devote himself to writing fiction. His first novels — The Collector (1963), The Magus (1966), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) — won him international recognition. John Fowles masterfully experiments with traditional literary forms. As he himself says, his ambition is to write a book in every imaginable genre. His works are very diverse in form and contents — from an imitation of a medieval romance (Elidue, 1974) to an intricate psychological allegory (Mantissa, 1982). Fowles believes that the traditional purposes of the novel — to entertain, to satirize, to describe new moods, to record life — are still alive and that the duty of all art is to improve society at large.

   MARTIN AMIS (b. 1949)

Born in 1949 Martin Amis is the son of the famous writer Kingsley Amis. He spent his first ten years in South Wales, and during the following several years lived in the USA, Spain and the West Indies. After graduating from Oxford in 1971 he began to write book reviews and criticism for various periodicals. In 1977 he became literary editor of the weekly magazine "The New Statesman". His first novel The Rachel Papers was published when he was only 21. In 1980 after the publication of two more novels — Dead Babies and Success — he gave up his editorial work and began to write full-time. During the next two decades he wrote eight novels and several collections of stories and became acknowledged as one of the most prominent writers of his generation.

The novel Money (1984), which is considered to be the writer's most significant work so far, has the subtitle A Suicide Note, which can be interpreted in two ways — as "a note left by a suicide" or as "a banknote leading to suicide". The novel shows the destructive force of money in contemporary life. The world described in this and Amis' other novels is that of violence, crime, fraud, drug abuse and pornography. Most of his novels are written in first person narration and, as the critic Malcolm Bradbury said, "his central characters are no longer the rounded characters of traditional realist fiction, but traumatized, fragmentary, rootless figures, suffering from a contemporary waste and fatigue, and living in collapsing urban jungles on both sides of the Atlantic in an age of globalism, afflicted by nameless crisis". To describe the absurd and chaotic modem world Amis often resorts to parody, irony, the grotesque, mistaken identities and various other devices which he himself has called "postmodernist trickiness". The most unusual of his novels is Time's Arrow (1991).