MODULE: English Literature in the 20th Century IIIA+B

Course instructor: Prof. dr. Sanda Berce

[email protected]_ro2009

Course unit 5: L.10. Modernism vs. Postmodernism (PostMODERNisms)

(Art and Literature)
I. The Avant-garde: from the mobile consciousness to the ontological
parallax
parallax (Jane Glodman, 2006):
It records changes of vision introduced by the shifting position or perspective of
observers;
In literary terms it involves juxtaposing, distancing or cutting between diverse
texts, histories, realities (Jane Glodman, 2006)
palimpsest (a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for
another):
Palimpsest overwrites diverse texts, histories, realities in a form of radical
erasure which also remains implicitly citational (Jane Glodman, 2006)

Premise: From Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Boots(1887) to readymade.

The real- reality:
(1) Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Boots: assimilation- realism/post-Impressionism

(2) Rene Magritte, Le Modele Rouge (1935): contamination- Surrealism.

Surrrealism: to resolve the contradictory conditions of dream and reality (out of
the Dada movement of the beginning of the 20th century);

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 - illogical scenes are juxtaposed with photographic precision;
- creating painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to exhibit itself;
- unexpected juxtapositions.

(3) Rene Magritte, The Treacherous Images: This is not a Pipe(1928-29)

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(4) Andy Warhol, Diamond Dust Shoes(1955): inversion- Pop-Art(representation of
industrial objects).

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(5) Minimalism, Conceptualism
- Carl Andre (1966), author of a rectangular object (a pile of bricks: Equivalent VIII)
exhibited at The Tate Galery in London (1976).

Characteristics:
- not in the canon of Modernist sculpture;
- not formally complex or expressive
- lacking any feature to challenge interest in itself;
- Challenging questions and debate: What is the point of this?/Why is this displayed
in a museum?/Is it really art??
-----It confronts and denies the expressive qualities of modernist art;
-----It is meant TO TEST our intellectual response and tolerance of the works.
Andre: WHAT I try to find are sets of particles and the rules which combine them in the
simplest way;
My art is communistic because the FORM is equally accessible to all men.
WHAT art is this?
MINIMALISM= a term referring to style of visual art and music displaying
design elements; it derives from the reductionist aspects of Modernism; it is a
reaction against Abstract expressionism; it is reduced to the essentials (i.e used to
describe Samuel Backetts plays and the novels); the term was used for the first

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 time in 1913, in Russia (The painter Kazimir Malevich: a black square on a white
ground).
CONCEPTUALISM = a philosophical theory that explains universality of
particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within this thinking mind.

(6) Ready-Made, Event, Happening

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle wheel (1913)- Paris, The Fountain (1917)(an Urinal)-New
York
- The Bicycle wheel, exhibited in Paris, 1913: I put the bicycle wheel on a stool, the
fork down, there was no idea of a readymade or anything else. It was just a
distraction. I didnt have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or
describe it;

- To see the wheel turning was very soothing, very conforting, a sort of opening of
avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a

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 bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the
flames dancing in the fire-place . It was like having a fire - place in my studio, the
movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the place.
- The Fountain, exhibited in New York(1917), a porcelain urinal, the original has been
lost. Marcel Duchamp has three other versions, exhibited in different and in different
place;

- It is considered a major landmark of the 20th century art from an artist who has been
involved in the Dada movement in Zurich;
- the first reproduction and a play of the objects commercial origins (readymade,
signed R.Mutt, meaning R[eady]M[ade]);
- M. Duchamp: The term did not appear until 1915 when I went to the US. It was an
interesting word;
- He rejected the art of many of his fellow artists and friends (like Henri Matisse) as
retinal art, intended to please the eye;
- Instead he put art back in the service of the mind;

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- 1958, about creativity: The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the
Spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and
interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative
art;
- he was interested in the Fourth dimension of art (as early as 1910): and was
fascinated with transition, change, movement(speed) and distance (fascinated with
aviation technology)

(II) POST(Modern)ISMS: Flann OBrien - James Joyce -Samuel Becket -

D.H.Lawrence

(I) D.H.Lawrence, Postmodernist signs: Women in Love (1920)

Women in Love (1916) was published only in 1920.

- It stands for Lawrence of a new mood; it explored the possibility intimated in the last
page of The Rainbow: carrying the glamour of ORGANIC LIFE into the ugliness
of society,i.e. extending the satisfactory sensuous experience into a chaotic world
( And the rainbow stood on the earth.She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-
scaled and separate on the face of the world"s corruption were living still, that the
rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they
would cast off the horny covering of desintegration, that new, clean naked bodies would
issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the
clean rain of heaven. She (Ursula) saw in the rainbow the earth"s new architecture, the
old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living
fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven , The Rainbow, p.496)
Lawrences conviction that our culture is desintegrating was confirmed by the war
and the need of coming to terms with death (the natural and unavoidable death
which haunted him in his early books complicated by the death agonies of an
epoch) appeared as one of his favourite themes.
D.H.Lawrences conviction that one must accommodate oneself not only to the
rhythms of individual life (Sons and Lovers) but also to the rhythms of social

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 growth ( The Rainbow), of community alteration (Women in Love) an
individual caught in a disintegration phase of history might live his/her own life
under the shadow of death.
- Women in Love (1920) successful portrayal (impersonated by the feelings of
individuals) of the death of a whole culture: an asserting sense of the times.

Therefore society and culture is reflected in each individual. The working out of
personal difficulties should provide an interpretation of the external world:
1) he saw his work as a search for a better way of living ;
2) he thought of himself as approaching rather than arriving at an ever elusive
truth ;
3) he conceived the characters of the novel work out their salvations according
to the nature of each: they are divided into persons (a) who refuse to see our
culture as in a degenerating phase ; (b) persons accepting that degeneration
was an end in itself ; (c) persons who regard degeneration as a precondition of a
new development.
- The PoMo characteristic of these characters:
strong individualism;
power is grasped as the only reality in a world of inward contradiction;
the individual is unsubmitted to an exagerated love of social order.

e.g; Skrebensky: you cant live unless you come in line somewhere (The Rainbow)
Gerald: What mattered was the pure instrumenatality of the individual. As a man as of
a knife: does it cut well ? (Women in Love)
( an attitude allowing Gerald to continue functioning in a culture that was not consistent
and in a role that had become unbearable to sensitive Christians like his father: he chose
not to be a Christian; he abandoned the DEMOCRATIC-EQUALITY problem as a
problem of silliness );
what mattered was the great social productive machine for fighting with
matter one must have perfect instruments in perfect organization (Gerald makes
drastic changes in mining techniques);

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- Women in Love writes about submittance to an inhuman system: the first great
phase in chaos is the substitution of the mechanical principle for the ORGANIC .
e.g. The Women Hermione and Ursula their relationship to men grows on a base
of cynicism and fear: the perverse joy of brutality ( they would live conventionally
on the surface).
Hermione represents the cultural arisocracy of the world; her intellectual
liberalism is an effort to built a verbal defence, to steady herself as a vulnerable
person within an insecure class.
Ursula is fluid and subtle; she has gone through a deadening shock and has
emerged with greater integrity ( The lurid glow of death colours life more
vividly than the virtue of the past ).
the symbolic motif: the LOTUS flower ( its roots are in the mud and the flower in
the sun ).

II Lawrences postmodernism
- his text is dynamically contradictory : it is given a wholy new dimension in the
context of post-modernity tensions; inconclusivenss; abrupt change of
perspectives.
- The characters are subjected to IRONY and RIDICULE (Birkin makes contradictory
remarks at different points in the novel);
- The novels radical indeterminacy:

Lawrences novel does not merely deploy a series of paradoxes and contradictions in the
service of a larger unity. It is certainly paradoxical because it is shot through with the
continuous and continually felt tension between the necessity of articulating a vision and its
impossibility and sometimes its undesirability (Gaminia Scalado).

--------The texts radical indeterminacy is a function of its own impossible desire:

(a) to achieve the passionate struggle into conscious being;
(b) to struggle for verbal consciousness which should not be left out in art;
(c) to articulate the impossible: at once the propagation and the negation of its
philosophy of life;

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 (d) polyvocal, heteroglossic discourse.
- the elements of the novel are interrelated: they trace the sensuous flux of of the
novels unified life forms.
And yet, D.H.Lawrence was a dogmatic, metaphisically absolutist, radically dualistic
thinker, fascinated by mechanism and disintegration
- D.H.Lawrences SOCIAL ORGANICISM rejected the atomistic, mechanistic
ideologies of industrial capitalism to which he opposed values of liberal
tradition and a protest against the society of products (i.e.goods).

Conclusion: Women in Love describes the collapse of the liberal humanist heritage
with its idealism, personal values, clearing the way for the dark gods of discipline,
action, hierarchy, individual separateness, mystical impersonality (later to be
associated with late capitalism ).

(II) Flann O Brien and ( post )-modernisms

the question posed by OBriens writing is to what extent the concept of literary
(post)-modernism is a valuable and proper context in which to re-consider
critically the metafiction of his novels.
(1) OBrien is usually associated with Joyce (because of their historical and cultural
proximity), the godfather of high modernism.
(2) The critical implication always assumes that Flann OBrien is a late modernist by
dafault. Similarly, it conveniently ignores that with Finnegans Wake (1936),
postmodernism most likely finds its actual point of origin.
Cf. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (1987) :
Finnegans Wake is a monstruous prophecy of our post-modernity all the
elements of this postmodern novel crowd this "novel" : dreams, parody, play, pun,
fragment, fable, reflexiveness , kitsch the edge of pure silence and pure noise

(I) At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is obsessed with confronting the Joyce of Dubliners, A

Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, but it is best considered as a late-modernist,

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transitory text which criticizes both REALISM and MODERNISM in an openly
deconstructive manner (an exciting new aesthetic):
(a) The metafictional techniques developed within its fabric as well as within the fabric
of The Third Policeman (1940) where OBrien developed a progressive genre,
independent of Joyce.
It marks a decissive split that emerges between Modernism ( with its search for coherence
and form ) and postmodernism.
Metafictional techniques :
the role of the author-god ;
the self-conscious narrator ;
the co-creative reader ;
the frame-breaking topography ;
the creative intertextuality.
OBrien s novel is close to the postmodernist novel type (as described by Ihab Hassan in
1987, The Postmodern Turn)
The central tenets of the postmodernist novel (apud Ihab Hassan) :
(1) it avoids symbolism ; its reality is phenomenological ;
(2) it promotes indeterminacy ; its language slips and slides and resists interpretation (the
break down of syntax is designed to defer and postpone any absolute translation- it is
an open, dialogic and polyphonic field of possibilities) ;
(3) it seeks fragmentation (it is against holism and it is conceived with IRONY rather
than catharsis) ;
(4) it is self-reflexive (i.e. conscious of itself and opposed to realist verisimilitude) ;
(5) it is pluralist. It is a hybrid genre, an unmargined discourse which priviledges
intertextuality ;
(6) it uses topographic variation (the fragment itself is visually and phisically figured
out) ;
(7) it celebrates PARODY, PLAY (PASTICHE); it resists any notion of textuality ;
(8) it questions the unifying voice and is anti-authorship.

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 As an early postmodernist writer (or late modernist ?), OBriens repudiated
AUTHORSHIP as the central signifying presence in the text and rejected realist
premises : Flann OBriens reality is linguistically structured and ultimately defines
it as a work of postmodernism.
NOTE : Modernism (for all its radical innovation) had retained and consolidated the key-
convention of Author-God :
for Joyce (like Flaubert), the Author should remain embedded within the literary
machine : like the God of creation within or behind or beyond or above his
hendiwork, invisible, refined, out of existence . Through his representation of
Stephen Dedalus, Joyce reaches the limits of Modernist aesthetics ( Stephen,
though conscious of the literary symbolism of his name, is never pushed so far
into the metaliterary self-consciousness as to consider that he is the symbolic
AUTHOR" of his own texts) ;
Modernists envisage the World as a chaotic flux, but they still believed that
meaning could be salvaged and inscribed in words; filtered and negociated
through the presence of the author-god, the ultimate arbitrer of meaning;
The Modernist interest in the heteroglossic text and the possibilities of
intertextuality remained rooted on an aesthetic rather than on an ontological plane.

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987 : the distinction (epistemological-

ontological) is a crucial one:
(a) the dominant of Modernist fiction is epistemological ( i.e. a reality that is
subjectively structured )
(b) the dominant of postmodernism is ontological (i.e. a reality that is linguistically
structured).
Flann OBriens linguistically structured reality associates him with Samuel
Beckett
Samuel Beckett : Joyce was tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an
artist. I am working with impotence, ignorance

(a) Flann OBrien is the creator of METAFICTION.

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 Occasionally, certain works which deliberately and playfully question the ideology of
ritual convention make their way in literature. They belong to the shamanistic type.
Within the context of the novel such works are called METAFICTION and, according to
J.Hawthorns definition (A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Terms ) :
Metafiction is Literally fiction about fiction It is generally used to indicate fiction
including any self-referential element Metafiction typically involves games in
which levels of narrative reality ( and the reader"s perceptios of them) are confused, or
in which traditional realist conventions, governing the mimetic and diegetic
elements, are thwarted
Metafictions disrupt the artificiality of traditional narrative mode, by forcing the
distinction between the mimetic ( the illusion that the author is not the speaker) and
the diegetic ( the illusion that the author is the speaker) ;
The degree of consciousness allowed to a metafictional narrator is in a constant state
of flux or narrative flicker ( similar to an existential condition : the idea of being
trapped in someone elses order) ;
It involves a laying bare of the literary process ( the literary convention itself
becomes a thematic issue) ;
It is a method of unveiling(unmasking) because it mocks the accepted narrative
contract between AUTHOR-TEXT-READER and calls into question willing
suspension of disbelief which classical realist fiction is contingent upon.
The dominant textual strategies of metafiction are those which make the reader aware
that a novel is nothing but an artefact made upon words or that telling stories is
telling lies (Samuel Beckett); Lanuguage is only a hermetic circle referring only to
itself ( metafiction sets out to undermine accepted and conventional modes of
discourse bu concentrating on their inherent linguistic instability , Patricia Waugh,
Metafiction, 1984) If art traditionally held a mirror up to society, then
metafiction holds up a mirror up to the mirror .

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Metafiction with OBrien
(1)the stance of the heroic artist is gone ; it is replaced by the ludic ironies and the
playful parodies.
(2) Gone too are the closed ideological systems, the Great stories of legitimation, of
Freudianism, of Marxism and Cartesianism. He produced a text which is happy to exist in
a de-centered world.
(3) OBrien is a post-modern satirist with his dominant desire to undermine all
tendencies towards system-making. PLAY and PARODY are the main weapons of his
arsenal because they possess the ability to confront authority and to assess autthority
at the same time.
(4) His stated ideal ( At-Swim-Two-Birds ) is the dislodgment of the author-god from
his transcendental throne and his emphasis on intertextuality
The Third Policeman (1940, published only in 1967) is his public manifesto of his
art that governs the more sublimated poetics:
The novel in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic a
satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at
will the degree of his credulity The entire corpus of existing literature should be
regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their character as
required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet .
(5) He also believed that a text is an intertext, a site of hermeneutical play and
semiotic rearrangement, deliberately exploited in works (of metafiction).

= The very concept of intertextuality suggests that a text does not exist as a self-
sufficient, hermetic whole, and therefore cannot function as a closed fiction.
INTERTEXTUALITY links the narrative not so much to the real world as to the world of
other stories in which the reader lives. Therefore, intertextual origins can never be
exactly located or reduced to a catalogue of sources.
International criticism locate Flann OBrien within an experimental tradition of
avant-garde (experimental) fiction ; they fail to take account of the uniquely
idiosyncrasies of OBriens linguistic experiments and of the Irish comic tradition (
At-Swim-Two-Birds : unequivocal references to Ireland and Irish literature).

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(II) James Joyce: the postmodern

(1) the strategies of inwardness promoted by Joyce and parallax.

(2) the centripetal strategies of inwardness simultaneously function as centrifugal
strategies of openness to the world outside and beyond consciousness.
INWARDNESS (centripetal movement) and OPENNESS (centrifugal movement)
= complementary functions ;

(2) the varieties of interior discourse ( Direct Interior Monologue integrated in the 3rd
person matrix and autonomous and Free Indirect Discourse) used to suggest a mobile
mind and consciousness

mobility of consciousness is stability of presented world ( interaction between

mobile-mind and stable-world).

These strategies render to seize on objects of external reality and then to

abandon them for others, to project subworlds of their own making.

Joyce used PARALLAX as a new form of perspectivism : A character "s interior

construction of the world diverges from the authorial projection of it, and the angle of
this divergence serves to inform us about the structure of this character consciousness
(as in B.McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987)

the principle of parallax ies to juxtapose two or more characters different

constructions of the same world or of the same part of the world.

Postmodernist elements in Ulysses (1922)

(1) the use of parallax or counterpoint of perspectives (Blooms and Stephens);

(2) a parody of modernity itself (cf.M.Calinescu)
(3) the mobile minde contaminates the world outside consciousness :contincency and
contamination ;
(4) metamorphic reality substitute of a mobile mind ( The Oxen of the Sun, see
B.McHale, 1987) ;
(5) uncertainty as effect of pastiche ( influences : Gothic fiction/Horace Walpole ; Irish
literature/ Joseph Sheridan LeFanu : the tradition of the ghost story) ;

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(6) hybrid world- a doubling/replica of really real world ;
(7) use of discursive parallax ; when discourses cannot be attributed to personified
sources within the fictional world Joyce used an ontological parallax or a parallax of
Worlds
as in B.McHale, 1987: Ontological perspectivism, the parallax of discourses and the
worlds they encode, is not a characteristic structure of modernist poetics but it is a
characteristioc of postmodernism, where it may be traced through a whole sequence of
carnivalesque, collage and cut-up or fold-in texts

III. Samuel Beckett

Literature has very little tolerance for abstraction ; there has to be an embodiment of
some kind, a showing forth by way of illustration or anecdote ; the prose embodiment
has to be a fiction.

**Postmodernist fictions are undercut from within: a fiction is merely a fiction while still
engaged in the very act of creating it. Beckett as well as OBrien did this.

(1) With S.Beckett hatred for the necessity of creating fiction appears through clearly and
detestation of that necessity is expressed with wit.
(2) Deirdre Blair, Becketts biographer (1978) : Blindness was an affliction suffered by
major Irish writers ( Sean O" Casey, Joyce).
(3) As in Joyce, S.Beckett represented the Irish form of exile, a total repudiation of
homeland and a corresponding inquiry into the possibilities of language for artists
who felt that their work began at degree zero :
Ireland provided them with a sense of absence ;
Their predecessors are not chosen by the pressure of tradition;
They had to choose them(their predecessors) by making a cosmopolitan virtue out of
a native defect.
Becketts writing is calculated to arouse indecision in the reader.

e.g. Molloy : the pomeranian dog episode : IT = the dog ; the cigar ; the gentleman

Yes, it was an orange pomeranian dog, the less I think of it the more certain I am .

*** Decisions taken by the reader may be based upon :

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(i) the conventions of grammar ;

(ii) the conventions of plot ;

(iii) other organizing principles.

(4) the forms of narrative are supplanted by the techniques of meditation :

(a) the bodily inertia which is so typical of his figures is a condition of thinking/ though
also disablement ;
(ii) stillness helps thought techinque of the Cartesian method of radical doubt.

S.Becketts method of writing oposes the Cartesian- Cogito ergo sum- by searching for an
essence that does not exist (= full doubt and permanently suspended judgment )

The opening page of The Unnamable ( 1953) provides the diagnosis :

No matter how it happened. It, say it, not knowing what. Perhaps I simply assented at
last to an old thing. But I did nothing. I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about
me. These few general remarks to begin with. What am I to do, what should I do, in my
situation, how proceed ? By aporia, pure and simple ? Or by affirmations and negationds
invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later ? Generally speaking. There must be other
shifts. Otherwise it could be quit hopeless. I should mention before going any further, any
further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means. Can one be ephectic
otherwise than unawares? I don"t know .

the I insists that the essential being is separable from the inessential voice. But
one cannot be separated from the other.

As in Descartes: It is only in God that and essence are one

(meaning to be and to have yourself at the same time). Becketts characters want to
reach that state but they cannot. For in that state they would be silent. Failing to reach it
they talk: to speak or to write is to acknowledge the fearful and inexplicable
separation which the I wishes to deny.

According to Beckett what corrupts experience is the notion of essence.

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The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable= the creation of the character is
followed by the characters collapse or merging with another.

**Malone creates a character called Macman. But soon Macman becomes all too
obviously Malone :

What tedium ! And I call that playing. I wonder if I am not talking yet again about
myself. Shall I be incapable to the end, or lying on any other subject ?

** In The Unnamable there are successive collapses of pretence, monologue within

monologue ; subsistances are explained :

- Molloy crawling through the forest ;

- Malone lying on his bed ;
- Mahood in his jar ;
= all are, we learn, fictional creations of the Unnamable

PRETENCE= creation, the converse of truth and synonimous with boredom, disgust and
collapse. Yet, there is an incomprehensible necessity for creation and pretence ; masks or
personae they are attempts to sustain fictional identities ior surrogates that have ordered
him to create these storytellers and their story.

= a command to give utterance, to be verbal, in other words creative; Creativity

necessarily involves fictions(i.e.lies, or a command to utter something important that will
restore the writer to his principal Self).

THE WRITER: obedience to contradictory commands; everything is a question of

words and of their association (domination of Logos ):

It is difficult to speak, even my own rubbish, and at the same time focus one"s attention
on another point, when one"s true interest lies, as fitfully defined by a feeble murmur
seeming to apologize for not being dead. And what it seemed to me I heard then
concerning what I should do and say, in order to have nothing further to do, nothing
further to say, it seemed to me I only barely herd it, because of the noise I was engaged in
making elsewhere, in obedience to the unintelligible terms of an incomprehensible
damnation .

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