The theory of postmodernism in literature. Postmodern literature

Term "postmodernism" still causes controversy here and in the West. Entered into circulation in the sixties, in a purely historical sense, it refers to the culture of the West after the Second World War, to a post-industrial society, to the era of consumer capitalism, new technologies, and 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 the book, text, work. The processes taking place in the culture of the postmodern era are described by scientists in different ways. Some consider postmodernism a continuation and development of modernism, and postmodern literature turns out to be simply a continuation of the trends of modernist literature on 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 of the late 18th century Marquis de Sade, American poet Ezra Pound, who is usually ranked among 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 is aware of itself in relation to modernism. At the same time, modernism itself is subject to constant revision, and postmodernist theorists propose next system contrasts that describe the difference between modernism of the first half of the twentieth century and postmodernism. The following table is taken from the work of the American theorist I. Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" (1985).

Postmodernist theorists argue that postmodernism rejects the elitism and formal experimentation inherent in modernism, the tragedy in experiencing 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 all-powerful masters of the artistic worlds, they still believe in the ability of the word to express the essential truth about the human condition, in the eternal existence of a perfect work of art, then the postmodern artist knows that the word and language are subjective and, at best, can reflect some moments of an individual point of view, and a book bought in an airport kiosk, will be read during the flight, left at the exit of the plane, and it is unlikely that the reader will ever remember about it. Modernist literature still depicted the tragedy of the earthly existence of the individual, that is, the heroic principle was preserved in it; the postmodernist writer expresses the weariness of a person from life's struggle, the emptiness of existence. In short, in the era of modernism, the art of the word still retained a high value status in society, the artist could still feel like a creator and a prophet, and in postmodernism, art becomes optional, anarchic, ironic through and through.

At the heart of the literature of postmodernism lies the concept of the game, far removed 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 the beautiful and the authentic, because we live in a world of one-day fakes, fake data, in a world of imitations. The shock of mankind from new historical circumstances that cannot be comprehended by consciousness alone (the Holocaust - the extermination of Jews during the Second World War; application nuclear weapons; environmental pollution; the ultimate leveling of the individual in modern Western democracies), leads to the loss of initial guidelines and a total revision of the value system, the very ways of thinking. The idea of ​​a single world order is being lost, and, consequently, of a single center of any system, any concept. 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, finite truths, the idea that reality is given to us only in the differences between its phenomena, was most consistently developed by the French post-structuralists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Francois Lyotard. These philosophers preached the rejection of the entire tradition of classical philosophy, the revision of the entire system of scientific knowledge, and time will give their unusually complex, "breakthrough" works a final assessment.

The same exhaustion of rebellion, fatigue characterizes the attitude of postmodernists towards tradition. They do not reject it outright, as their predecessors did: the postmodernist writer can be compared to a shopper in a supermarket of world history and world literature, who rolls his cart down the aisles, looking around and dumping in it whatever catches 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; Furthermore, postmodern writers themselves very often teach literature at universities or are critics, literary theorists, so they easily introduce all these latest literary theories directly into their works, immediately parody and beat them.

In postmodern works, the degree of self-awareness, self-criticism within the text rises sharply; the writer does not hide from the reader how he achieves this or that effect, 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 20th century were to some extent affected by postmodernism, which is equally manifested in the old national literatures of the West (French "new novelists" - Nathalie Sarrot, Henri Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon; Germans - Günther Grass and Patrick Suskind; Americans - John Bart and Thomas Pynchon; British - Julian Barnes and Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie; Italians Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco), and in the heyday of the Latin American novel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar), and in the work of Eastern European writers (Milan Kundera, Agota Christoph, 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 size and are available in Russian translation.

All over the world, it is generally accepted that postmodernism in literature is a special intellectual style, the texts of which are written as if out of time, and where a certain hero (not the author) checks his own conclusions, playing non-committal games, getting into various life situations. Postmodernism is viewed by critics as an elite reaction to the widespread commercialization of culture, as an opposition to the general culture of cheap tinsel and glitter. In general, this is a rather interesting direction, and today we present to your attention the most famous literary works in the mentioned style.

10. Samuel Beckett "Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable"

Samuel Beckett is a recognized master of abstract minimalism, whose pen technique allows us to objectively view our subjective world, taking into account the psychology of an individual character. The author's unforgettable work, "Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable", is recognized as one of the best - by the way, the translation can be found on lib.ru

9. Mark Danilewski "House of Leaves"

This book is a real work literary art, since Danilewski plays not only with words, but also with the color of words, combining textual and emotional information. The associations caused by the color combination of different words help to imbue the atmosphere of this book, which contains both elements of mythology and metaphysics. The famous Rorschach color test prompted the idea of ​​coloring the author's words.

8. Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions"

Here is what the author himself says about his book: “This book is my gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday. At fifty, I'm so programmed that I act childish; talking disrespectfully about the American anthem, drawing the Nazi flag with a felt-tip pen, and buttocks, and all that.

I think that this is an attempt to get everything out of my head so that it becomes completely empty, like on that day fifty years ago when I appeared on this badly damaged planet.

In my opinion, all Americans should do this - both whites and non-whites who imitate whites. In any case, other people filled my head with all sorts of things - there is a lot of both useless and ugly, and one does not fit with the other and does not correspond to that at all. real life that goes outside of me, outside of my head."

7. Jorge Luis Borges "Labyrinths"

It is impossible to describe this book without resorting to deep analysis. In general, this characterization is applicable to most of the author's works, many of which are still waiting for an objective interpretation.

6. Hunter Thompson "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

The book tells the story of the adventures of lovers of psychotropic drugs in Las Vegas. Through seemingly simple situations, the author creates a complex political satire of his era.

5. Bret Easton Ellis "American Psycho"

No other work is able to show the life of an ordinary Wall Street yuppie. Patrick Bateman, main character works, lives ordinary life, on which the author imposes interesting focus, in order to show the undisguised reality of such a way of being.

4. Joseph Geller "Catch-22"

This is probably the most paradoxical novel that has ever been written. Geller's work is widely recognized, and most importantly, recognized by most literary critics of our time. It is safe to say that Geller is one of the greatest writers of our time.

3. Thomas Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow"

All attempts to describe the plot of this novel will obviously fail: it is a symbiosis of paranoia, pop culture, sex and politics. All these elements merge in a special way, creating an unsurpassed literary work new era.

2. William Burroughs "Naked Lunch"

Too much has been written about the influence of this work on the minds of our time to write about it again. This work occupies a worthy place in literary heritage contemporaries of the era - here you can find elements of science fiction, erotica and detective. All this wild mixture in some mysterious way captivates the reader, forcing him to read everything from the first to the last page - however, it is not a fact that the reader will understand all this from the very first time.

1. David Foster Wallace "Infinite Jest"

This work is a classic of the genre, of course, if you can say so about the literature of postmodernism. Again, here you can find sadness and fun, intelligence and stupidity, intrigue and vulgarity. The opposition of two large organizations is the main plot line that leads to an understanding of some factors in our lives.

In general, these works are very difficult, and this is what makes them extremely popular. I would like to hear from our readers who have read some of these works, objective reviews - perhaps this will allow others to pay attention to books of this genre.

Abstract on the topic:

"Postmodern Literature of the End of the 20th Century"

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

Meanwhile, researchers who turned to the issue of postmodernism in a situation of apparent dominance of the postmodern worldview and the emergence of a huge number of works devoted to postmodernism come to the conclusion that “numerous publications turned out to be inconsistent and contradictory: the new aesthetic phenomenon was fluid, vague and defying definition.” D. V. Zatonsky, referring to theoretical and literary 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 streamline the picture of the world in in the usual sense words. One way or another, we have to admit, following the scientist, 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 the existence of spirit and culture."

Indeed, the formation 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 the 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 cognition 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 before us any new perspective." In general, postmodernism was "a symptom of the collapse of the previous world and, at the same time, the lowest mark on the scale of ideological storms" with which the twenty-first century is fraught. This characterization of postmodernism can find many confirmations in theoretical works and literary texts.

At the same time, the definition of postmodernism as a phenomenon stating a general crisis and chaos that opened after the collapse of the traditional system of understanding and cognition of the world sometimes does not allow us to see some significant aspects of the postmodern period of the state of mind. We are talking about the intellectual and aesthetic efforts undertaken in line with postmodernism to develop new coordinates and define the outlines of that new type of society, culture and worldview that have emerged at the present post-industrial stage in the development of Western civilization. The case 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 that exists in the era of information and computer civilization loses its dominant value.

As a result, in works of literature, a coherent picture of life based on the plot as the unfolding of events has often been replaced not so much by the traditional genre plot principle of selecting and arranging material in the spatio-temporal dimension and linear sequence, but by creating a certain integrity built on a combination of different layers of material. , united by characters or the figure of the author-narrator. In fact, the specifics of such a text can be defined by using the term "discourse". Among the numerous concepts that reveal the concept of "discourse", one should single out its understanding, which allows one to go beyond linguistics. After all, discourse can be interpreted as a "supra-phrasal unity of words", as well as "any meaningful unity, regardless of whether it is verbal or visual." In this case, the discourse is a system of socio-cultural and spiritual phenomena fixed in one form or another, external to the individual and offered to him, for example, as a cultural heritage consecrated by tradition. From this point of view, the writers of postmodernism conveyed quite thrill the fact that for a modern person living in a world of formed, “ready-to-use” diverse social and cultural material, there are two ways left: a conformist acceptance of all this or an awareness of one’s state of alienation and lack of freedom. Thus, postmodernism in creativity begins with the fact that the writer comes to understand that any creation of works of a traditional form degenerates into the reproduction of one or another discourse. Therefore, in some works modern prose the main thing is the description of a person's stay 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) suggested reflecting 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 get acquainted with the main character Martha, who grew up in a simple family. When she meets her father, who once left the family, she reminds him that as a child she used to put together the Counties of England puzzle, and she was always missing one piece, because. his father hid him. In other words, she represented 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 their country.

This is how the fundamental question “What is reality” is defined in the novel, 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 socio-cultural discourse consisting of 50 concepts of "Englishness". This 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 gives an extensive menu of real "English" dishes and drinks. All this is placed in a specially 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 is not like an accurate video recording. real events 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 on our way." Barnes draws attention to the fact that the postmodern state modern society manifests itself, among other things, in the fact that in the sphere of culture, i.e. spiritual life of a person, certain technologies are now also being used, the world of culture is being designed and systematically created in the same way as it is done, for example, in the field of 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 authentic, and everything else is the creation of the best restorers, actors, costume designers and designers using the most modern technology to create the effect of antiquity and historicity. This product of the modern show business of the era of the "consumer society" is a "repositioning" of the myths about England: the England that they want to see was created Foreign tourists for their money, without experiencing some of the inconveniences that accompany guests when traveling through real country- Great Britain.

In this case, the literature of postmodernism highlighted one of the phenomena of the postindustrial world as a world of realized utopia of universal consumption. Modern man found 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 a modern person exists is essentially not the fruit of his own life experience, but is imposed on him from the outside by certain technologists, “Concept developers”, as they are called in novel.

At the same time, it is very characteristic that, while recreating some of the 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 the classical tradition of 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 this postmodern type of activity that temporarily becomes dominant in protecting, preserving and realizing the primordial human need and ability for cognition and creativity.

In this case, the internal interconnections of text fragments, images and motifs in the postmodern text are reproduced as a 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 20th 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 deconstructing an individual picture of the world, whose integrity is entirely based on discourse, in the process of recreating which this picture of the world acquires a certain connection for the reader, sometimes opening the way for him to a new understanding of this world and his own. positions 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 the individual not so much in social 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 makes up the specifics of postmodernist texts, which look like a multi-level system. Most often, three levels can be distinguished: artistic (figurative), informational and cultural. At the informational level, there is an extremely characteristic use of postmodernism outside literary texts fragments, which are commonly called documents. Narratives about the heroes and their lives are supplemented by heterogeneous material already processed and ordered for understanding. In some cases, parts of the texts may be any genuine formalized samples or their imitations: for example, diaries and diary entries, letters, files, trial records, data from the field of sociology or psychology, excerpts from newspapers, quotations from books, including including from literary works of poetry and prose, written in a variety of eras. All this is assembled into a literary text, contributes to the creation of the cultural context of the narrative and becomes part of the discourse that accompanies the description, which has genre features novel at the plot-plot level and revealing the problems of the hero's individual fate.

This information and cultural layer most often represents the postmodern component artistic narrative. It is at this level that the 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 W. Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" excerpts from scientific, philosophical, theological literature of 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 of the authors, which have the character of independent essays. Such, for example, are “Notes on the margins of the Name of the Rose” by W. Eco or “Prologue” and “Conclusion” to the novel by J. Fowles “The Worm”, “Intermedia” between two chapters in the “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 painting by the French artist Géricault "The Raft of the Medusa", and his novel "Flaubert's Parrot" is provided with a rather detailed chronology of the life of the French writer.

In these cases, it is important for the authors to prove the possibility of fruitful spiritual activity and intellectual freedom based on literary work. For example, A. Robbe-Grillet believes that contemporary writer cannot, as before, turn outwardly solid and real everyday life into a source of creativity and give its works the character of a totalitarian truth about the norms and laws of virtue and complete knowledge about the world. Now the author "does not oppose 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 all-encompassing pressure of the principle of pseudo-plausibility of form and content. Living in the hope of an intellectual and aesthetic liberation from the world, the modern writer pays the price by "feeling himself as a kind of shift, a crack in the usual orderly course of things and events ...".

Not without reason, in W. Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" for the narrator, the computer becomes a symbol of unprecedented freedom in handling the material of creativity and, thereby, the intellectual liberation of the individual. “Oh happiness, oh dizziness of dissimilarity, oh, my ideal reader, overwhelmed by the ideal “insomnia” ... “The mechanism of one hundred percent spirituality. If you write with a quill pen, squeaking on greasy paper and dipping it into the inkwell every minute, thoughts run ahead of each other and the hand does not 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, a dull mechanical rhythm wins. But with him (perhaps with her?), the fingers dance as they please, the brain is combined with the keyboard, and you flutter in the middle of the sky, you have wings like a bird, you compose a psychological critical analysis of the sensations of the wedding night ... ". "Proust is like a child's spill compared to such a thing." Access to an unprecedented variety of knowledge and information from the most diverse areas of the socio-cultural past and present, the possibility of their simultaneous 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 an artistic pictures of life. In practice, postmodern manifestations of the methodology of the creative process look like a clearly defined repertoire various ways, techniques and "technologies" of processing the source material to create a multi-level text.

However, the appearance in the 1980s a number of works of prose allows us to see that such features as quotation, fragmentation, eclecticism and playfulness, far from 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 a detective story) that do not correspond to rooted traditional ideas about prose genres. For example, “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) J. Barnes, autobiographical trilogy A. Robbe-Grillet "Romanesque" (1985-1994). These works show that the choice of the postmodernist methodology of creativity is largely due to the desire to get away from the image of the virtual picture of the world imposed on a person from the outside in line with the rooted 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 from the material of reality the form of "innocent and honest story". The writer, for example, sees unused opportunities for creativity 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, the artistic deconstruction of the world is necessary because, as a rule, “we invent our own story in order to bypass the facts that we do not want to accept” and, as a result, “we live in an atmosphere of universal triumph of untruth.” Only art, as a result of human creative activity free from outside pressure, can overcome the rigid plot of an ideologized picture of the world, reviving old themes, images and concepts through their individual rethinking, combination and interpretation. In The History of the World, the author set the task of overcoming the superficial plot and approximateness of the generally accepted panorama of the historical past and present. The transition from one “elegant plot” to another over a complex stream of events can only be justified by the fact that by limiting his knowledge of life to selective fragments connected into a certain plot, modern man moderates his panic and pain from the perception of chaos and cruelty of the real world.

On the other hand, it is the transformation of actual historical or contemporary events and facts into a work of art that remains the most important asset of a creative person. Barnes sees a significant difference in the understanding of fidelity to the "truth of life" in classical art and now, when the practice of imposing a wrong view of the world on people has taken root in modern mass culture through literature, newspapers and television. He draws attention to the obvious differences between the picturesque scene depicted on the painting by Géricault "The Raft of the Medusa" and the real terrible facts of the maritime disaster of this ship. Freeing his audience from the contemplation of wounds, abrasions and scenes of cannibalism, Géricault created outstanding work art that carries a charge of energy that liberates the inner world of the audience through the contemplation of the powerful figures of suffering and hopeful characters. In the modern post-industrial era, in the state of postmodernity, literature is put 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 a modern concept of life turn out to be associated with the development of humanistic problems, which was one of the main assets of classical literature. Therefore, in the novel by J. Fowles "The Worm", the episodes of the emergence in England of the 18th century. one of the unorthodox religious movements is interpreted as a story about how "how the sprout of personality painfully breaks through the hard stone soil of an irrational society bound by traditions." Thus, in recent decades 20th century postmodernism reveals a clear tendency to return to the field of art and creativity of a person as an intrinsically valuable person, 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 criticism of the twentieth century. Crisis of methodology. Nizhny Novgorod: 1999.

Zatonsky DV Modernism and postmodernism. Kharkov: 2000.

Foreign literature. 1994. №1.

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

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

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"Hidden Gold of the 20th Century" is a publishing project by Maxim Nemtsov and Shasha Martynova. During the year they are going to translate and publish six books by major English-speaking authors (including Brautigan, O'Brien and Bartelmy) - this will close the next gaps in the publication of modern foreign literature. Funds for the project are raised through crowdfunding. For "Gorky" Shashi Martynova prepared a short introduction to literary postmodernism based on the material of the authors under her charge.

The 20th century, the time of planetary delights and blackest disappointments, gave postmodernism to literature. From the very beginning, the reader treated postmodern “unbridledness” in different ways: this is not at all marshmallows in chocolate and not a Christmas tree to please everyone. The literature of postmodernism in general is the texts of freedom, the rejection of the norms, canons, attitudes and laws of the past, the child goth / punk / hippie (continue the list yourself) in a respectable - "square", as the beatniks used to say - a family of classical literary texts. However, pretty soon the literary postmodern will be about a hundred years old, and during this time, in general, people have got used to it. He has grown a considerable audience of fans and followers, translators tirelessly hone on him professional excellence, and we have decided to summarize some of the key features of postmodern texts.
Naturally, this article does not pretend to exhaustive coverage of the topic - hundreds of dissertations have already been written on postmodernism in literature; however, an inventory of a postmodernist writer's toolbox is a useful thing in the household of any modern reader.

Postmodern literature is not a "movement", not a "school" and not a "creative association". It is rather a group of texts, united by the rejection of the dogma of the Enlightenment and modernist approaches to literature. by the most early examples Postmodern literature in general can be considered "Don Quixote" (1605-1615) by Cervantes and "Tristram Shandy" (1759-1767) by Lawrence Sterne.
The first thing that comes to mind when we hear about postmodern literature, - all-pervading irony, sometimes understood as "black humor". For postmodernists, there are few things in the world (if any) that cannot be denounced. That is why postmodernist texts are so generous with mockery, parodic antics, and similar amusements. Here is an example for you - a quote from the novel "Willard and his bowling prizes" (1975) by Richard Brautigan:

“Better,” said Bob. - That's all that's left of the poem.
“Escaped,” said Bob. - That's all that's left of the other one.
"He's cheating on you," Bob said. - "Breaking". "With you, I forgot all the hardships." Here are three more.
“These two are amazing,” said Bob. “My grief is immeasurable, for my friends are good for nothing.” "Bite off cucumbers."
- What do you say? Do you like it? Bob asked. He forgot that she couldn't answer him. She nodded, yes, she likes it.
- Do you still want to listen? Bob asked.
He forgot that she had a gag in her mouth. (Translated by A. Guzman)

Postmodern literature is not a "movement", not a "school" and not a "creative association"

The whole novel is declared as a parody of sadomasochistic literature (you will find nowhere more serious) and at the same time a detective story. As a result, both sadomasochism and Brautigan's detective turn into a piercing watercolor of loneliness and the inability of people to understand and be understood. Another great example is Miles' Gapalin (Flann O'Brien) cult novel The Lazarus Singers (1941, translated into Russian 2003), a vicious parody of turn-of-the-century Irish national-cultural renaissance by a man who spoke excellent Irish who knew and loved Irish culture, but had a deep disgust at the way the revival of culture was embodied by hysterics and mediocrity. Irreverence, as a natural consequence of irony, is a trademark of postmodernists.

Descartes spent too much time in bed, subject to a haunting hallucination that he was thinking. You are unhealthy with a similar affliction. ("The Dolkey Archive", Flann O'Brien, trans. Sh. Martynova)

The second is intertextuality and the techniques of collage, pastiche, etc. associated with it. A postmodern text is a prefabricated constructor from what was in culture before, and new meanings are generated from what has already been mastered and appropriated. This technique is very common among postmodernists, whoever you take. Masters Joyce and Beckett, modernists, however, also used this toolkit. The texts of Flann O'Brien, the reluctant heir of Joyce (it's complicated, as they say), are a link between modernity and postmodernity: "A Hard Life" (1961) is a modernist novel, and "Two Birds Sailed" (1939, in a Russian-language edition - “About Waterfowl”) is still some kind of postmodern. Here is one of the thousands of possible examples - from "The Dead Father" by Donald Barthelme:

Children, he said. Without children, I would not have become a Father. Without childhood, no Fatherhood. I myself never wanted it, they forced it on me. A kind of tribute, which I could do without, the generation and then education of each of the thousands, thousands and tens of thousands, the inflation of a small package to a large package, over a period of years, and then a certificate that large packages, if the male sex, wear their hats with bells, and if not him, then they observe the principle of jus primae noctis, the shame of sending away those who are undesirable to me, the pain of sending those who are desired to the lifestream big city to never warm my cold ottoman, and leading the hussars, maintaining public order, observing postal codes, keeping rubbish out of the drain, would prefer not to leave my office, comparing Klinger's editions, first print, second print, third print, and so on, didn't it fall apart at the fold? […] But no, I had to devour them, hundreds, thousands, fififofam, sometimes together with shoes, you bite a child’s leg well, and right there, between your teeth, you have a poisoned sports slipper. Yes, and hair, millions of pounds of hair scarred the intestines over the years, why couldn’t you just throw children into wells, leave them on mountain slopes, accidentally shock toys railways? And worst of all were their blue jeans, in my meals dish after dish of badly washed blue jeans, T-shirts, saris, “tom-macans”. Probably, it would be possible to hire someone to peel them for me first. (Translated by M. Nemtsov)

Another good example « old fairy tale in a new way” - published in Russian by Donald Bartelmy's novel “The King” (published posthumously, 1990), in which a creative rethinking of the legends of the Arthurian cycle takes place - in the scenery of the Second World War.

The mosaic nature of many postmodernist texts was bequeathed to us by William Burrows, and Kerouac, Bartelmy, Sorrentino, Dunleavy, Eggers and many others (we list only those who were translated into Russian in one way or another) used this technique vividly and in various ways - and use it.

Third: metafiction, in fact - writing about the very process of writing and the deconstruction of meanings associated with it. O'Brien's already mentioned novel Two Birds Sailed is a textbook example of this technique: in the novel we are told about the author who composes a novel based on Irish mythology (please: double postmodernism!), and the characters of this nested novel weave against the author intrigues and conspiracies. The novel “Irish Stew” by the postmodernist Gilbert Sorrentino (not published in Russian) is arranged according to the same principle, and in the novel by the English writer Christine Brooke-Rose “Textermination” (1992), only the characters of classical works of literature, gathered in San Francisco at the Annual Congress of Supplication for Genesis.

The fourth thing that comes to mind is a non-linear plot and other games with time. And baroque temporal architecture in general. V. (1963) by Thomas Pynchon is a perfect example. In general, Pynchon is a great lover and craftsman of turning pretzels out of time - remember the third chapter of the novel "V.", from reading which the brain of more than one generation of readers is twisted into a DNA helix.

Magic realism - the merging and mixing of life-like and non-lifelike literature - can be considered postmodern to one degree or another, and in this respect, Marquez and Borges (and even more so Cortazar) can also be considered postmodernists. Another excellent example of such interweaving is the novel by Gilbert Sorrentino with a rich title of translation options "Crystal Vision" (1981), where the whole work can be read as an interpreter for a deck of tarot cards and at the same time as everyday chronicles of one Brooklyn block. Numerous implicitly archetypal characters in this novel are characterized by Sorrentino only through direct speech, their own and addressed to them - this, by the way, is also a postmodernist device. Literature does not have to be authentic - this is what the postmodernists decided, and it is not very clear how and why to argue with them here.

The mosaic nature of many postmodern texts was bequeathed to us by William Burroughs

Separately (fifthly), it is necessary to say about the inclination towards technoculture and hyperreality as about the desire to go beyond the reality given to us in sensations. The Internet and virtual reality are, to a certain extent, products of postmodernity. In this sense, perhaps the best example is Thomas Pynchon's recently published Russian novel The Edge of the Blow (2013).
The result of all that has happened in the 20th century is paranoia as a desire to discover order behind chaos. Postmodern writers, following Kafka and Orwell, are attempting to re-systematize reality and the suffocating spaces of Magnus Mills (Cattle Drive, Full Employment Scheme and the forthcoming release in Russian All Quiet on the Orient Express), The Third Policeman (1939/1940) O'Brien and, of course, the whole Pynchon - about this, although we have just a couple of examples from many.

Postmodernism in literature in general is a territory of complete freedom. The toolkit of postmodernists, compared to what their predecessors managed, is much wider - everything is allowed: an unreliable narrator, and surreal metaphor, and abundant lists and catalogs, and word creation, word game and other lexical exhibitionism, and the emancipation of language in general, breaking or distorting syntax, and dialogue as a narrative engine.

Some of the novels mentioned in the article are being prepared for publication in Russian by Dodo Press, and you can personally take part in this: the Hidden Gold of the 20th Century project is a substantive continuation of the conversation about literary postmodernism 20th century (and beyond).

Perhaps none of literary terms not subjected to such a fierce discussion, which goes around the term "postmodernism". Unfortunately, widespread use has deprived him of specific meaning; However, it seems possible to distinguish three main meanings in which this term used in modern criticism:

1. works of literature and art created after World War II, not related to realism and made using non-traditional image techniques;

2. works of literature and art, made in the spirit of modernism, "brought to the extreme";

3. in an expanded sense - the state of man in the world of "developed capitalism" in the period from the end of the 50s. XX century to the present day, a time called by the theoretician of postmodernism J. - F. Lyotard "the era of the great meta-narratives of Western culture."

Myths that have been the basis of human knowledge since time immemorial and legitimized by common use - Christianity (and in a broader sense - faith in God in general), science, democracy, communism (as faith in the common good), progress, etc. - suddenly lost their indisputable authority, and with it humanity lost faith in their power, in the expediency of everything that was undertaken in the name of these principles. Such disappointment, the feeling of "lostness" led to a sharp decentralization of the cultural sphere of Western society. Thus, postmodernism is not only a lack of faith in Truth, which led to a misunderstanding and rejection of any existing truth or meaning, but also a set of efforts aimed at discovering the mechanisms of "historical construction of truths", as well as ways to hide them from the eyes of society. . The task of postmodernism in the broadest sense is to expose the impartial nature of the emergence and "naturalization" of truths, i.e. ways of their penetration into the public consciousness.

If modernists considered it their main task to support the skeleton of the collapsing culture of Western society at all costs, then postmodernists, on the contrary, often gladly accept the “death of culture” and take away its “remains” to use as material for their Game. So, Andy Warhol's numerous images of M. Monroe, or Cathy Acker's rewritten "Don Quixote" are an illustration of the postmodernist trend bricolage, which uses particles of old artifacts in the process of creating new, albeit not "original" (since nothing new can be, by definition, the author's task is reduced to a kind of game) - the resulting work blurs the lines both between the old and the new artifact, and between "high" and "low" art.

Summing up the discussion about the origins of postmodernism, German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch writes: "What was developed by modernity in higher esoteric forms, postmodernity carries out on a wide front of everyday reality. This gives the right to call postmodernity an exoteric form of esoteric modernity"

The key concepts used by the theorists of postmodernism in literature are "world as chaos", "world as text", "intertextualism", "double code", "author's mask", "parodic mode of narration", "failure of communication", "fragmentation". narration", "metaraskazka", etc. Postmodernists claim a "new vision of the world", a new understanding and image of it. Theoretical basis poststructuralism is, in particular, a structuralist-deconstructivist complex of ideas and attitudes. Among the techniques used by postmodernists, the following should be mentioned: refusal to imitate reality in images (generally accepted is associated with the usual, and is a great delusion of mankind) in favor of the Game with form, conventions and symbols from the arsenal of "high art"; cessation of the pursuit of originality: in the age of mass production, any originality instantly loses its freshness and meaning; refusal to use the plot and character of the character in order to convey the meaning of the work; and, finally, the rejection of meaning as such - since all meanings are illusory and deceptive. Modernism, having created a historical background for the current under discussion, later began to degenerate into absurdism, one of the manifestations of which is considered "black humor". Since the postmodernist's approach to the perception of reality is synthetic, postmodernists used the achievements of a variety of artistic methods for their own purposes. Thus, an ironic attitude to everything, without exception, saves postmodernists, as once romantics, from fixing on something unchanging, solid. They, like the existentialists, put the individual above the universal, and the individual above the system. As John Barth, one of the theorists and practitioners of postmodernism, wrote, "the main feature of postmodernism is the global assertion of human rights, which are more important than any interests of the state." Postmodernists protest against totalitarianism, narrow ideologies, globalization, logocentrism, and dogmatism. They are principled pluralists, who are characterized by doubt in everything, the absence of firm decisions, since they associate many variants of the latter.

Based on this, postmodernists do not consider their theories as final. Unlike modernists, they never rejected the old, classical literature, but actively included its methods, themes, images in their works. True, often, although not always, with irony.

One of the main methods of postmodernism is intertextuality. On the basis of other texts, quotes from them, borrowed images, a postmodernist text is created. Related to this is the so-called "postmodern sensibility" - one of the foundations of the aesthetics of postmodernism. Sensitivity not so much to life phenomena as to other texts. The postmodern method of "double code" is associated with texts - mixing, comparing two or more textual worlds, while texts can be used in a parodic way. One of the forms of parody among postmodernists is pbstish (from the Italian Pasticcio) - a mixture of texts or excerpts from them, potpourri. The original meaning of the word is an opera from fragments of other operas. The positive aspect of this is that postmodernists are reviving obsolete artistic methods - baroque, gothic, but their irony, their boundless doubt prevails over everything.

Postmodernists claim not only to develop new methods of artistic creativity, but also to create a new philosophy. Postmodernists talk about the existence of a "special postmodern sensibility" and a specific postmodern mentality. At present, in the West, postmodernism is understood as an expression of the spirit of the era in all areas of human activity - art, literature, philosophy, science, politics. Postmodernist criticism is subjected to traditional logocentrism and normativity. The use of concepts from various fields of human activity, the mixing of literary themes and images - character traits post-structuralism. Postmodernist writers and poets often act as literary theorists, and literary theorists sharply criticize theories as such, opposing them to "poetic thinking."

The artistic practice of postmodernism is characterized by such style features, as a conscious focus on eclecticism, mosaicism, irony, play style, parodic rethinking of traditions, rejection of the division of art into elite and mass, overcoming the border between art and everyday life. If the modernists did not claim to create a new philosophy, and even more so - a new worldview, then postmodernism is incomparably more ambitious. Postmodernists are not limited to experiments in the field of artistic creativity. Postmodernism is a complex, multifaceted, dynamically developing complex of philosophical, scientific-theoretical and emotional-aesthetic ideas about literature and life. Its most illustrative areas of application are artistic creation and literary criticism, the latter often included integral part into the fabric of a work of art, i.e. a postmodernist writer often analyzes both the works of other authors and his own, and often this is done with self-irony. In general, irony and self-irony are one of the favorite techniques of postmodernism, because for them there is nothing solid, deserving the respect and self-respect that was inherent in people of previous centuries. In the irony of postmodernists, some features of the self-irony of romantics and the modern understanding of the personality of a person by existentialists, who believe that human life is absurd, manifest themselves. In the postmodern novels of J. Fowles, J. Bart, A. Rob-Trieux, Ent. Burgess and others, we meet not only a description of events and characters, but also lengthy discussions about the very process of writing this work, theoretical reasoning and self-mockery (as, for example, in novels " Clockwork orange"Anthony Burgess, Paper Men" by William Golding).

Introducing theoretical passages into the fabric of a work, postmodern writers often directly appeal to the authority of structuralists, semiotics, and deconstructivists, in particular, mentioning Rolland Barthes or Jacques Derride. It is a mixture of literary theorizing and fiction is also explained by the fact that writers are trying to "educate" the reader, declaring that under the new conditions it is no longer possible and stupid to write in the old way. The "new conditions" presuppose the breaking of the old positivist causal ideas about the world in general and about literature in particular. Through the efforts of postmodernists, literature acquires an essayistic character.

Many postmodernists, in particular the writer John Fowles and the theorist Rolland Barthes, tend to pose political and social problems, and sharp criticism bourgeois civilization with its rationalism and logocentrism (R. Barth's book "Mythologies", in which modern bourgeois "myths", i.e. ideology, are deconstructed). Rejecting the logocentrism of the bourgeoisie, as well as all bourgeois civilization and politics, postmodernists oppose to it the "politics of language games" and "linguistic" or "textual" consciousness, free from all external frameworks.

In a broader worldview, postmodernists talk not only about the dangers of any kind of restrictions, in particular, about logocentrism that "narrows" the world, but also about the fact that a person is not the center of the cosmos, as, for example, the Enlighteners believed. Postmodernists oppose and prefer chaos to space, and this preference is expressed, in particular, in the fundamentally chaotic construction of the work. The only specific given for them is the text, which allows you to enter any arbitrary values. It is in this connection that they speak of the "authority of writing", preferring it to the authority of logic and normativity. For postmodernist theorists, in essence, an anti-realistic tendency is characteristic, while postmodernist writers widely use realistic methods of depiction along with postmodernist ones.

Especially important in the aesthetics and practice of postmodernists are the problems of the author and the reader. The postmodernist author invites the reader to be an interlocutor. They may even parse the text along with the intended reader. The author-narrator strives to make the reader feel like his interlocutor. At the same time, some postmodernists tend to use tape recordings for this, and not just text. Thus, John Bart's novel "The One Who Lost in the Fun Room" is preceded by the subtitle: "Prose for Print, Tape Recorder and Live Voice". In the afterword, J. Barth talks about the desirability of using additional channels of communication (except for printed text) for an adequate and deeper understanding of the work. That is, he seeks to connect oral and written speech.

A postmodernist writer is prone to experimentation in written speech, to revealing its hidden communicative possibilities. The written word, which is only a "trace" of the signified, is inherent in polysemy and semantic elusiveness, therefore it contains in itself the potential opportunity to enter into the most diverse semantic chains and go beyond the traditional linear text. Hence the desire to use a non-linear organization of the text. Postmodernism uses the polyvariance of plot situations, the interchangeability of episodes, using associative rather than linear logical-temporal connections. He can also use the graphic potential of the text, combining texts of different style and semantic load, printed in different fonts, within the same discourse.

Writers - postmodernists have developed a whole complex artistic means Images. These techniques are based on the desire to depict the real world as little as possible, to replace it with a text world. At the same time, they rely on the teachings of J. Lacon and J. Derrida, who pointed out that the signifier can only be a "trace" of a real object or even an indication of its absence. In this regard, they said that between reading a word and imagining what it means, there is a certain time gap, i.e. we first perceive the word itself as such, and only after some, although short time- what the word means. This cult of the signifier, of the word, is deliberately directed by the postmodernists against the aesthetics and literature of the realists. And even against the modernists, who did not renounce reality, but spoke only about new ways of modeling it. Even the surrealists considered themselves the builders of a new world, not to mention the brave futurists, who aspired to be "sumps" and "water carriers" of this new world. For postmodernists, however, literature and the text are an end in itself. They have a cult of the text itself, or, one might say, of "signifiers" who are torn away from their signifieds.

One of the most important methods of postmodern writing is defined by theorists as "non-selection", i.e. arbitrariness and fragmentation in the selection and use of material. With this technique, postmodernists seek to create an artistic effect of unintended narrative chaos, corresponding to the chaos of the external world. The latter is perceived by postmodernists as meaningless, alienated, torn and disordered. This technique is reminiscent of surrealist methods of writing. However, as already noted, the surrealists still had faith, albeit illusory, in the possibility of changing the world. Artistic techniques Postmodernists aim to dismantle the traditional narrative connections within the work. They deny the usual principles of its organization inherent in realists.

The style and grammar of the postmodern text are characterized by the following features, called "forms of fragmentary discourse":

1. Violation of grammatical norms - the sentence, in particular, may not be fully completed (ellipse, aposiopesis);

2. Semantic incompatibility of elements of the text, combining incompatible details into a common one (merging tragedy and farce, posing important problems and all-encompassing irony);

3. unusual typographic design of the proposal;

However, despite the fundamental fragmentation, postmodern texts still have a "content center", which, as a rule, is the image of the author, more precisely, the "mask of the author". The task of such an author is to set up and direct the reactions of the "implicit" reader in the right perspective. The whole communicative situation of postmodern works rests on this. Without this center, there would be no communication. It would be a complete communication failure. In essence, the "mask" of the author is the only living, real hero in a postmodernist work. The fact is that other characters are usually just puppets of the author's ideas, devoid of flesh and blood. The desire of the author to enter into a direct dialogue with the reader, up to the use of audio equipment, can be regarded as a fear that the reader will not understand the work. And writers - postmodernists take the trouble to interpret their work to readers. Thus, they act in two roles at once - the artist of the word and the critic.

From what has been said above, it is obvious that postmodernism is not only a purely literary, but also a sociological phenomenon. It developed as a result of a complex of reasons, including technical progress in the field of means of communication, undoubtedly influencing the formation of mass consciousness. Postmodernists take part in this formation.

It is also obvious that postmodernists wittingly or unwittingly seek to blur the line between high and mass culture. At the same time, their works are still focused on the high reader. artistic culture, because one of the main techniques of postmodernism is the technique of literary allusion, association, paradox, various kinds of collages. Postmodernists also use the technique of "shock therapy", aimed at destroying the habitual norms of the reader's perception, which was formed by cultural tradition: the fusion of tragedy and farce, posing important problems and all-encompassing irony.

Conclusions to Chapter 1

The salient features of postmodernism are literary movement are the following features:

· citation. everything has already been said, so nothing new can be by definition. The author's task is reduced to a play of images, forms and meanings.

· context and intertextuality. " The ideal reader" should be well erudite. He should be familiar with the context and capture all the connotations embedded in the text by the author.

· text layering. The text consists of several layers of meanings. Depending on their own erudition, the reader may be able to read information from one or more layers of meaning. From this follows the focus on the widest possible range of readers - everyone in the text will be able to find something for themselves.

· rejection of logocentricity; virtuality. There is no truth, what is taken for it by human consciousness is only truth, which is always relative. The same characterizes reality: the absence of objective reality in the presence of many subjective worldviews. (It is worth recalling the fact that postmodernism flourished in the era of virtual realities).

· irony. Since truth has been abandoned, everything must be treated with humor, for nothing is perfect.

· text-centric: everything is perceived as a text, as a kind of coded message that can be read. From this it follows that the object of attention of postmodernism can be any sphere of life.

Thus, Friedrich Schlegel ("On the Study of Greek Poetry") states that "the absolute maximum of negation, or absolute nothingness, can be given in any representation to the same small extent as the absolute maximum of affirmation; even at the highest level of the ugly, there is something else beautiful."

The true world of postmodernism is a labyrinth and twilight, a mirror and obscurity, simplicity that makes no sense. The law that determines the relationship of a person to the world should be the law of the hierarchy of the permissible, the essence of which is the instantaneous explanation of the truth based on intuition, which is elevated to the rank of the basic principle of ethics. Postmodernism has not yet said its final word.