Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos” din GalațiDepartamentul pentru Învăţământ la Distanţă şi cu Frecvenţă Redusă Curs practic de literatură engleză Michaela Praisler Facultatea de Litere Specializarea: Limba și literatura română – Limba și literatura engleză Anul III, Semestrul 2 UDJG Faculty of Letters Postmodernism and the Novel Course tutor: Professor Michala Praisler Galaţi 2011 Contents CONTENTS Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Learning Unit no. 1 Postmodernism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.1. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1.2. Metafiction (Durrell, Fowles, Lodge) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 1.3. Feminist Issues (Lessing, Weldon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 1.4. Postcolonial Voices (Rushdie, Ishiguro) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Learning Unit no. 2 Representative Names and Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1. Lawrence Durrell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 2.2. John Fowles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.3. David Lodge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 2.4. Doris Lessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 2.5. Fay Weldon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 2.6. Salman Rushdie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 2.7. Kazuo Ishiguro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Learning Unit no. 3 Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 3.1. Test One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 3.2. Test Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.3. Test Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 3.4. Test Four . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 3.5. Test Five . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 3.6. Test Six . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 3.7. Test Seven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Glossary of Literary Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Postmodernism and the novel in english 3 Introduction INTRODUCTION The course is designed so as to allow form to support content and invite at interactive approaches to the texts and contexts under focus. Its main objectives are: to help students identify the main background issues pertaining to the postmodern age and the postmodernist movement to develop students’ capacity to analyse the literary phenomenon within the broader multicultural frame of the later decades of the twentieth century to bring to attention individual writers and writings, standing for different trends, narrative practices and techniques to encourage the simultaneous understanding and practice of literary and critical discourse events to facilitate the accessing of illustrative texts via literary theory The volume offers support for the didactic activities addressing third year philology students, during the second semester of the academic year: lectures, euristic conversations, explanations, debates, case studies, problematisation, workshop practice etc. It comprises an informative section (Chapters1-2: “Postmodernism” and “Representative Names and Titles”), an applicative text-oriented part (“Tests”) and a selective tool kit for decoding varied discourse patternings (“References” and “Glossary of Literary Terms”) – all of which eventually envisage mature self improvement through distance learning. Postmodernism and the novel in english 5 Postmodernism Learning Unit no. 1 POSTMODERNISM 1.1. Background The term ‘postmodernism’ has invaded the contemporary cultural stage. It appears in a wide range of texts and contexts, carrying numerous connotations. Its all-encompassing nature partly defines the multitude of changes that our world has recently witnessed, and partly demands an elitist interpreter to penetrate its deepest philosophy. Unless one is tempted into using it as an umbrella term for everything that makes today a unique and challenging mixture of clashing worlds and perspectives (from fashion and advertising to visual arts and literary theory) it has to be looked upon as a term in the making, as expressing a break, a fissure in the flow of tradition in all domains. If anything, postmodernism implies a reaction against modernism. Some of the basic beliefs of modernity are turned upside down and inside out by the ways in which we now choose to describe the world. More importantly, the aesthetics of modernism is discarded as false, pretentious, much too experimental to match our desperate attempts at penetrating beyond surfaces and anchoring our whole existence in something worthwhile. Seismic transformations have taken place and we are confronted with cultural events derived from previously unheard of phenomena: new viruses (including electronic ones) resisting antidote, cloning, widespread genocide, travels into space, portable communication facilitators – to name only a few. Consequently, if we accept to describe our age in terms of postmodernism, we are forced to take into account the multifarious aspects it presupposes and deal with it as complex, involving a multidisciplinary effort. From among them, the most noteworthy (involved in a mutual relationship with the literary stage) seem to be: globalisation identity politics economy of reproduction media capitalism computer hyperreality fragmentation high technology life imitating art Nevertheless, despite its diverse and eclectic nature, postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions: […] that there is no common denominator – in ‘nature’ or ‘truth’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’ – that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought [and] that all human systems operate like language, being self- reflexive rather than referential systems – systems of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value. (Edward Craig [ed], Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998: 587) Literature, as already implied, is the perfect common ground for the marriage of opposites and the interplay of diverse positions. In its obvious enterprise of building worlds (other than, parallel to, but similar to ours), it Postmodernism and the novel in english 7 Postmodernism allows for the freedom of choice, opinion and imagination. Using words to represent worlds, it denies THE referent, THE signified, questioning unity and directing the text/signifier towards a liberating plurality. Literature itself has become yet another manifestation of the world as text, of that which we now accept as the ‘textuality’ of the contingent, whose ‘texting’ (reading, rereading and misreading) is a universal practice, a globalising factor therefore. In literature, the novel especially, postmodernism may be said to be recognisable at the level of that particular text which has any, some or all of the following features inscribed into it: preaches in favour of the return to history (previously having been fought back by the modernist writing – in flight from chronology, from objectively representing that which lies beyond it and which interferes with one’s private, intimate experiences) illustrates the obvious return to narrative (taken apart by earlier twentieth century writers, seemingly interested in mirroring the chaotic state of things in the world outside at the level of the literary work by abolishing clear structure, neat plot) is mainly the result of self-contemplation (rounding itself up as metafictional – exposing its inner workings, deconspiring its purposes and addressing a reader accustomed to working with and reading into literariness) brings forth the fiction/fact paradox (by allowing its ‘consumer’ to understand that the only reality it observes is that of the very textuality of the text, of the materiality of the pages which, once written, become part of the contingent and potentially inspire others) enters the post-symbolist phase (not abandoning the symbol, but using it in its broader acceptance, that of archetype; rather than manipulating private symbols to show the interaction between feeling and thought, public ones are formed by endowing the former with archetypal significance) shapes itself up as parody or oblique criticism (in an attempt at embedding tradition while, at the same time, disclosing the absurd, false anachronism at its core; simultaneously makes the text easily digestible, entertaining and instructs its audiences) incorporates critical perspectives (somehow implying that there is no such thing as a clearly delineated frontier between the literary and the literary critical – a trespassing that points to the melting of fiction into non- fiction and vice versa) presupposes an academic novelist (usually a professor of literary studies, whose teaching expertise is used both as a starting point, therefore autobiographically, and as an end, so as to find a cure for the common illness of anxiety with/due to the ‘difficult-to-define-and-follow’ literature) blurs the history/fiction border (by looking into the subjectivity characterising all texts, historical ones included, and by subtly underlining the idea that history cannot be taken for fact or reality, but only for yet another version of his-story) sends to the textuality of history (nourishing the comforting thought that one can easily intervene in the texts already written, and can rewrite history, if not backwards, at least from a totally different perspective: that of a continuous present) 8 Postmodernism and the novel in english Postmodernism includes highlighted artifice (foregrounding and emphasizing the other, novel, shocking – with a view to awakening readers from a culturally induced complacency with accepting the traditional and postponing the innovative in all walks of life) makes extensive use of irony (structural or verbal, achieved by the handling of multiple/possible viewpoints about its subject matter or, respectively, by understatement, concealment and allusion; turns the text into a complex, fascinating whole) is governed by intertextuality (a thorough reader above everything else, the postmodernist writer – aware of the fact that there is little left unsaid/unwritten, that the world itself is a text –turns to the enormous library that precedes him) reformulates magic realism (mixing and disrupting ordinary, commonplace realism with strange, miraculous episodes and powers; adding a fantastic dimension to the engagement with political and social issues) is forwarded in keeping with the principles of fabulation (self- consciously includes fictions within fiction and catches the reader in the trap of elaborate forms and misleading paths that do not match his/her expectations) constructs a surrogate reader/author (includes a reader or an author as characters within the narrative so as to de-canonise them and to endow them with a voice by means of which artistic credos are formulated and opinions supported) All the enumerated features might help to establish some sort of order, some backbone of the contemporary textual scene – a scene of dissolution, a vertiginous melting-pot where the old canons of ‘literature’ are invaded by textual stuff from psychology, philosophy, law, medicine, geography, and the old generic boundaries are down, and the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ goes, and old minor or marginal texts (authors’ jottings, essays, fragments, versions, foul papers, say) cease to lurk in the supplementary shadows and come busily in from the margin and the cold to receive equal treatment with what were once thought of as the main objects of concern, the poems and novels and plays, the published stuff, the final versions, and so on. (Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol. Postmodernity, Texts and History, 1994: 6) They announce the non-conformism of today’s novel text and guide along the path of counternarratives (see Henry Giroux et al. [eds], Counternarratives. Cultural Studies and Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces, 1996), whose main functions seem to be: disturbing grand narratives which gain legitimacy from foundational myths concerning the origins and development of an unbroken history of the West based on an evolutionary ideal of progress opposing official narratives of everyday life propagated for specific political purposes to manipulate public consciousness by heralding a national set of common cultural ideals. Numerous theorisers on the postmodern condition have affirmed that postmodern counternarratives must, they themselves, be interrogated and brought into productive dialogue with other narratives. It is only through facilitating the clash that the discussion finds the appropriate grounds for development. Described as a method, a philosophy, an attitude, a tonality, a style, a moment, a condition, a movement, a theory, postmodernism may Postmodernism and the novel in english 9 Postmodernism therefore be seen at work in the rewriting of the globally observable cultural crises and in the formulation of trans-disciplinary literatures, most of which are self-reflexive and self conscious, disclosing goals and inner patternings. Its critique of the subject, of historicism and of philosophy (specificities of the poststructuralist phase) has found favour not only with the practitioners of metafiction, but also with feminist and postcolonial writers, seeking to show how representation can no longer be considered a politically neutral and theoretically innocent activity (Linda Hutcheon). Grouped under the umbrella terms of ‘postmodernism of resistance’ or ‘postmodernism of reaction’, these orientations bring to attention the plurality of language games so as to advance an attack on the conceptions of universal reason, the unity of language and the unified subject. Their politics of difference and of the local and particular are not only symptoms of, but also essential strategies for coping with a postmodernist culture that advertises itself as decentred, transnational and pluralistic (Andrew Ross). To conclude, the fashionable and elusive term (and notion) of ‘postmodernism’ has led to vigorous debates and bitter controversies. Nevertheless, what emerges is the certainty that postmodernism is of great interest because it directs our attention to the changes, the major transformations, taking place in society and culture. Usually associated with it are great names like: Warhol in art, Jencks in architecture, Artaud in drama, Barth in fiction, Lynch in film, Sherman in photography, Derrida and Lyotard and Baudrillard in philosophy. Of special interest to literary studies are the works of the latter three, recommended titles being: Jacques Derrida’s The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing, Jean François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death. 1.2. Metafiction (Durrell, Fowles, Lodge) Metafictional novels are the ones to explicitly reveal themselves as fictional and to reflect on their own status and narrative procedures. Within this self-reflective category, one can distinguish between: overt, diegetic metafiction (that takes its status, the rules and underlying conventions of the novel and the process of narration as its theme) covert, linguistic metafiction (that suggests, through language games, intertextual references and parody, the inability of language to function as a means of communication or, more importantly, its ability to create worlds, alternative to and more meaningful than the ‘real’ one underneath). This bewildering type of novel, unlike the traditional realistic one, does not want to maintain the illusion that what it is about is an objective reality, which is truthfully reflected in language. It sooner aims at posing problems, at teasing readers out of their acceptance of pre-established modes of thinking, at inviting to play the literary game. Regarding the area that explores the relationship between fiction and reality, the metafictional novel proposes a number of startling questions: Is there a reality ontologically separate and different from our linguistic consciousness? And if there is, can we know it without altering it by our knowledge? And if we can, can we ‘render’ it in language? And if 10 Postmodernism and the novel in english Postmodernism we can, does this rendering correspond to, give a truthful view of that ontologically different reality that we have assumed to exist? Or are we fooling ourselves in believing that there is such a reality, when in reality we are locked up in the prison-house of language, in the reading gaol? (Guido Kums, Metafictional Explorations into Novel Theory, in Marialuisa Bignami; Caroline Patey (eds), Moving the Borders, 1996: 151) Foregrounding the gap between art and life, metafiction occurs in the form of asides (from prefaces and mottos to direct, authorially intrusive passages) in novels that are primarily focused on traditional means of conveying message, portraying characters and action; such passages are felt as manipulative, employing the conventions of realism as they acknowledge their artificiality; they address a reader that is supposed to know a lot about the intricacies of weaving a text, flattering him by considering him an intellectual equal who is aware of the fact that a work of fiction is a verbal construction rather than a ‘slice of life’. As to metafictional writers, they seem to have a sneaky habit of incorporating potential criticism into their text and thus ‘fictionalize’ it (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 1992: 208). The borders become additionally obscured due to the juxtaposition of a number of possible worlds: the real, the fictitious, the fictionalised fictitious and metafiction itself. The central issue remains that of TRUTH. In literary studies, the distinction between fictional and factual discourse ultimately depends on a correspondence conception of reference and truth (the former with objects and facts), but such a conception is untenable, pragmatist arguments in the philosophy of language supporting the thesis by defining fiction through the inexistence of the objects it is describing and thus including in its discourse false statements, deprived of any truth. The solutions offered envisage either admitting that the objects in fiction have a certain type of existence, that can sometimes perfectly match the existence of objects in the real world, or considering that the only objects that exist are those of the real world, denying any existence to the objects in fiction. Therefore, there is no ultimate ground for the distinction between fictional and factual discourse: Fiction is whatever is man-made (conceptually or linguistically). Truth is man-made (conceptually or linguistically). Therefore, truth is just a species of fiction. (Peter Lamarque, Narrative and Invention, in Narrative in Culture, ed. by Christopher Nash, 1994: 137). If, linguistically speaking, the fictional discourse is a descriptive one, it differs nonetheless from a referential type of discourse since its sequences do not imply ‘real’ referents. But this is only a purely negative determination of fiction – that simply shows what it does not do, without considering the explanation of its positive function, one that replaces the act of reference with ‘real-ised’ objects. From the logical point of view, fictional discourse is defined in terms of the zero denotation: the linguistic constituents that, in factual discourse, have a denotative function (proper names, deictics, demonstratives...) lack any denotation proper. The fictional statement has a meaning, but no referent. This definition of fiction as discourse with zero denotation has been accepted by almost all logicians, but N. Goodman (1968) has brought to it an extra dimension by insisting on the idea that it only sums Postmodernism and the novel in english 11 Postmodernism up a necessary condition (otherwise all types of false statements, lies included, would be ranked among the fictional). With metafiction therefore, non-denoted (but real-ised) is fiction itself. The process of reaching that slippery referent is made difficult by the elitist and self-parodic game of mirrors presupposed by the metafictional text, a particular manifestation of intertext, allusive of other, similar texts, and illustrative for literay text-forwarding. Considering itself and its artificiality, the metatext may also be looked upon as intratext, whose depth is not simply structural (usually numerous diegetic levels being juxtaposed), but message-ridden also (the discussions on its own construction being turned into the very content thus foregrounded). Self-reflexive, self-aware and self-ironic, modern and contemporary metafiction is anchored in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and reaches far out to texts yet unwritten, but whose existence will surely depend on precedents. 1.3. Feminist Issues (Lessing, Weldon) In its various manifestations, literary feminism is a cultural politics which aims at freeing itself from naturalised patriarchal notions. The tremendous dynamism at work within feminist orientations has lead to the formulation of numerous critiques and counter-critiques regarding both other ideologies and its own positions, all of which start, however, from similar and constantly innovative, challenging and subverting theories. One speaks today of: British feminism, French feminism, Irish feminism, American feminism, African feminism, Asian feminism, black feminism, lesbian feminism, linguistic feminism, myth feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, deconstructive feminism, gynesis, gynocritics etc. – components of the same scene and usually at war with one another. Historically speaking, the first feminist pronouncements in literary studies were made in connection with the literary text as accentuating the idea of androgyny (Virginia Woolf, Orlando). Later on, the emphasis was laid on woman as ‘other’ and on the sex/gender opposition (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex). The newer feminisms point out the differences between the sexes in terms of biology, experience, discourse, the unconscious, politics, social and economic realities. Works like Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Dale Spender’s Man Made Language, Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own, Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language, Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa, Luce Irigaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One are just a few of the many written during the last thirty years or so on the issue of the female / feminine / feminist. One interesting theory for the purpose of this course is formulated by Elaine Showalter who, in an article published in 1979, Towards a Feminist Poetics, distinguishes between two main types of feminist criticism: feminist critique – which is concerned with woman-as-reader, with the ‘other’ consumer of male-produced literature, with the new light shed on the text from her perspective 12 Postmodernism and the novel in english Postmodernism gynocritics – which is concerned with woman-as-writer, with the history, themes, genre and structure of literature by women, with female language and its referentiality Both seek to foreground the newly visible world of female culture and to find ways into the new language and new way of reading the transparent medium of the text, integrating women’s intelligence, experience, reason and suffering, scepticism and vision (see Elaine Showalter in Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, 2002) The women novelists of the later half of the twentieth century, aware of the contemporary preoccupation with feminist issues, address them either directly (in an outspoken, politicised fashion) or obliquely (through parody and language games). Their works are mostly about women, whose problems can only be truly grasped by other women. They feature universes which are built inside and against man’s world, and give a central voice to the formerly silent fringes. The most frequent aspects such novels bring to attention are: representations of womanhood in texts written by men and women the replacing of (his)story with her story masculinity versus femininity with both sexes the role of the social in the construction of man and woman as different opposing woman-as-other by glimpses into man-as-other fighting back patterns of authority, power, control, manipulation as embodiments of patriarchy rejecting the patriarchy of language and attempting to find a freer feminine discourse to replace it announcing the emancipation of man soon to take place and to allow for a reconsideration of the ‘battle between the sexes’ Women writers, novelists and critics, have to be pluralists, given the feminist insistence on the dominant and all-pervasive nature of patriarchal power so far in history: there is no pure feminist or female space from which we can speak (Toril Moi, Feminist Literary Criticism, in Ann Jefferson and David Robey, Modern Literary Theory, 1988: 205). They need to find appropriate means of showing just how much all ideas, including feminist ones, have been contaminated by patriarchal ideology, without necessarily criticising the inertia that has allowed the phenomenon to take place or the impetus in its growing strong roots. Women are shown engaging in routine activities, in living lives and dreaming dreams. If caught in ridiculous or tragic hypostases, they seem to deserve what is happening to them and their positions are made to raise questions in the reader. The individual characters, despite individual features, remain part of a broader pattern, which is not so much due to biology as it is the result of women historically having been subjected to the same kinds of oppression. Under patriarchy, women have formed a separate subculture, and the thus socially produced female essence is what feminist writing is mostly concerned with. The textual strategies by means of which anger is expressed are, from the literary point of view, those which give feminist writing its savour. Inspired from the literature of the past, but shaped to address a different kind of readership, they speak about the many, but usually to the educated few who might read stylistics into the politics of the text. From the Postmodernism and the novel in english 13 Postmodernism immasculation of discourse, to experimental narrative practices, the dissolution of obsolete modes of analysing the self in fiction and fiction itself, the rearranging of chronology and the metafictional commentary, texts by, about and for women undermine the stable foundation of the canon, whose centrality has enforced a marginal spot for women. 1.4. Postcolonial Voices (Rushdie, Ishiguro) One of the dominant, obsessively recurrent issues of the late twentieth century fiction – the problem of the subject, of constructing identity – has probably been due to the tremendous influence that psychoanalytic writings have had upon the contemporary mind and stage. Postmodern, hyperrealist, magic realist and other experimental types of writing have primarily concerned themselves with this problem reflected in fictional characterisation, authorship and intentionality, readership, narrative technique, style, genre and thematics. Following psychoanalysis, the subject was portrayed in literature as less stable and essentialist, and more in process, determined by the ‘other’. As a result, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class and race were split accordingly, being shown as constructed out of difference, out of the dialogic, out of discourse. Heterogeneity, not homogeneity or unitariness, impurity and mélange, not originary purity, were shown to govern these aspects of identity. The decentring and de-essentialising of the subject have brought about the cultural story, the idea that meaning is provisional and social, and knowledge always perspectival and contextual. Art, literature included, is no longer considered as basically representational; it is sooner looked upon as politicised and empowered, as participating (from the cultural point of view) in the creation of the real. In it, signs replace objects of the material world. Its power is symbolical. Questioning representation remains, however, a subversive political strategy, whose resistance to established practices and beliefs has managed to place the emphasis on the margins rather than on the outmoded centre. In terms of the imperialism of representation, fetishist images of the ‘margin’ are produced from within ‘civilising’ centres to satisfy the western need for political and psychological focal points and to silence any attempt at autorepresentation with the former. In other words, if the margins have become the centre, they have been denaturalised, forced to accept their very condition of a margin – now fashionably at the core of universality. Bringing the two together and alternating their role and significance, postcolonial writing covers a wide range of ambivalent cultural modes and formations, specific to the colonial aftermath – a period of transition and translation in redefining old identities or discovering newly-acquired oppositional ones. Charged with the rhetoric of independence and the creative euphoria of self-invention, postcolonial writing, in its earlier stages, has sought therapeutic aid in the revisiting of the colonial past, offering itself to being interpreted as committed to this complex project of historical and psychological recovery. In its present day form, postcolonialism in literature is oriented towards the following problematics: 14 Postmodernism and the novel in english Postmodernism the economic, political and, more importantly, cultural heritage of the colonial system the classical debate on the equality of races, peoples, religions the world and the book as authoritarian, ‘colonising’ structures woman as ‘other’/colony/colonised national politics versus nationalistic politics the mutual transformations of globalisation, uniformisation and hybridity, diaspora textual politics and (post)colonial literatures the metanarrative of the colonies, of colonialisation and of the end of colonialism Central remains the idea of history, synonymous in Western philosophy with that of (European) civilisation, which has imposed itself as ideal, supreme, dominant – a phenomenon obvious especially in the international languages bringing along an intellectual, cultural, artistic, literary colonialisation. Postmodernism and the novel in english 15 Postmodernism 16 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles Learning Unit no. 2 REPRESENTATIVE NAMES AND TITLES 2.1. Lawrence Durrell born in India, in 1912 educated in Britain, lived mostly in France novel sequences: The Alexandria Quartet [Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960)], The Revolt of Aphrodite [Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970)], The Avignon Quincunx [Monsieur; or, The Prince of Darkness (1974), Livia; or, Buried Alive (1978), Constance; or, Solitary Practices (1982), Sebastian; or, Ruling Passions (1983) and Quinx; or, The Ripper’s Tale (1985)] volumes of travel writing: Prospero’s Cell (1945), Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), Bitter Lemons (1957), The Greek Islands (1978) collections of short stories: Sauve Qui Peut (1966), The Best of Antrobus (1974), Antrobus Complete (1985) plays: Sappho (1959), Acto (1961), An Irish Faustus (1963) volumes of poetry: Collected Poems (1960 and 1968), Collected Poems 1931-74 (1980) died in 1990 Interested less in social or psychological aspects, Lawrence Durrell prefers dwelling on the image of reality and the individual’s ability/possibility to grasp its inner meaning. An adept of Einstein’s theory of relativity and interdeterminancy, he associates the observing of nature with the latter’s being disturbed by the interference. As a result, he places the emphasis on the role of imagination, by means of which one reflects on things untouched by the presence of the observer. With him, knowledge is thus reached through subjective perspective rather than through objective analysis. Applying these beliefs in the practice of writing fiction, Durrell formulates a critique of the impositions at work within Western society and gives liberating alternatives under the form of Eastern patterns of thought and behaviour. Combining mythical elements with philosophical speculations, he focuses on the global cultural phenomenon and the human beings caught in its web.As an experimental novelist, Lawrence Durrell’s principal aim seems to be that of building a totally detached and impartial fictional text, one that does away with author and authority, inviting personal interpretations on the part of the reader. The latter is empowered with the interpretational task, is given letters, journals, quotations from characters within the story or from famous names in the English literature outside the text as such. Fiction expands therefore and contaminates the real, just as the latter is already known to invade (to have invaded once and for all) the novel. The universe(s) he rounds up resemble unsolved puzzles, endless combinations of their disparate parts being possible as one reader is exchanged with another or one and the same person goes through the reading task more than once and, as experiences vary, moods shift, expectations are transformed, awareness of fictionality differs. Multiplying perspectives to infinity, Durrell’s writings may suggest, (besides the obviously intended diversity of the world and interplay of Postmodernism and the novel in english 17 Representative names and titles subjective positions regarding it) hesitancy or even carelessness, but the unitary, palpable, real settings that hold the pieces together imply the idea that the ultimate purpose of he texts is that of pinpointing the only actual similarity there is between the fictional and the real: their constitution out of fragments and the necessary understanding of its being ordered by the- less-than-apparent thread of life – chaotic, yet pulsating with inner energy. Depth of analysis and complexity of indirect comment on the state of the (literary) world are achieved by means of: the relativity of truth the trespassing of textual boundaries symbolic modes of writing the comic of language and situation mythic suggestiveness inter-human relationships governed by love and/or passion Sudden interferences of an authorial and authoritative kind are present in his text to awaken readers from comfortably plunging into the fiction of fiction and, therefore, to undercut expectations of separation from the real world (of novels and novel writing). The reality Durrell constantly sends to is one of unity in diversity, singularity in multiplicity, harmony in polyphony. His richly populated fictional universe, his numerous narrators and standpoints define the way of the world, governed as it is by the story- telling process going on around us and taking us across the frontiers of our own stories into everybody else’s. A huge novel, our lives are inscribed in the collective memory, whose traces remain discernible for future inscriptions to start from or move around. The Alexandria Quartet The four novels that are part of the ‘quartet’ are: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, all named after characters involved in the plurifaceted story of the sequence. Its central character, however, remains Alexandria, the setting whose spirit Durrell means to bring to attention. Prefacing Justine is the following disclaimer: The characters in this novel, the first of a series, are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real. (1982) It serves a double purpose: that of warning against the sin of taking fiction for reality, and that of emphasizing the feeling of place, exotic and different, under whose spell all the characters are to discover unexpected angles of themselves. The plot and the characters remain essentially the same throughout the four novels, narrative technique being the only variable. As narrators change and different viewpoints are presented, the reader is taken on an open ended journey along the fictional(ising) path. Expanding the story beyond the limits of one book, Durrell suggests that the result of the extension might still be part of a continuum. The addressee of this message is the reader – invited to play the narrating game and tell his/her own version of the ones already caught on paper. Justine is narrated from Darley’s point of view. He, a novelist in love with Justine, offers to tell her story and, no matter how hard he might try to keep it objective, he remains unreliable because of his very awareness of the possibility of being influenced by his love for this narrated woman. Like 18 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles Pygmalion, he grows obsessed with his creation and tends to construct his whole narrative around her. A rich, young and beautiful Egyptian Jewess now at her second marriage (to Nessim Hosnani), Justine attracts the attention of men, who gravitate around her in trajectories mirrored at the level of the text’s inner structure. Part of a world of the drifters, the uprooted, the ‘lost’, Justine’s main preoccupation is with herself, her well-being. Selfish and narcissistic, she is the perfect choice for a metafictional text whose norms are scrutinised, exposed and turned into the focal point of reference. Balthazar adds information meant to correct/contradict Darley’s assumptions in Justine. Balthazar is a physician; his narrative is automatically considered to be nearer to objectivity and reliability. Nevertheless, he remains partly unreliable due to his being involved in the story that he tells. Balthazar discloses the fact that Justine had only used Darley as a screen for her true love for Pursewarden, the latter’s close friend. He also alludes to Justine’s infidelity to her lover(s) in her alliance with Nessim in setting up an anti-British plot to smuggle weapons to Palestine, a partnership stronger than any kind of love. Mountolive, narrated by the homonymous character – British ambassador to Egypt – brings an omniscient, therefore objective and reliable narration, whose ‘politics’ is to shed light on that which people commonly choose to keep silent about: from political plots to private lives and skeletons in dark closets. Clea is the novel which centers round a breakthrough from the bondage of time and space. It presents Darley’s escape from Alexandria’s contaminating influence and his freedom to enjoy true love with Clea, the artist/painter. The link between the four narratives is provided by the progression envisaged, one that alludes to the constant metamorphoses of the self in and of fiction. A state of permanent suspense is thus maintained, the reader being supposed to expect and accept any sudden mutation in the interpretation of relationships and personal motives on the one hand, and of narrative practices and techniques on the other. Initially intended to investigate modern love, perpetually changing in a kaleidoscopic fashion, The Alexandria Quartet is sooner about the violation of current tastes and the norms of social realism. Taboos are tackled directly, to shock and prevent from complacently accepting impositions. Absolute truth is questioned and replaced with personal truths, stories and experiences, stories of experiences. Its circularity (in time, plot, setting, characters) confers it the quality of a whole, a series of cycles similar to that of life itself. 2.2. John Fowles born in Essex, in 1926 educated at Oxford University novels: The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965 and 1977), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), A Maggot (1985) short stories: The Ebony Tower (1974) nonfiction: Islands (1978), The Tree (1979), The Enigma of Stonehenge (1980), Land (1985) Postmodernism and the novel in english 19 Representative names and titles Writing under the influence of existentialism and the practices of the nouveau roman, John Fowles experiments with fiction and focuses on its very nature. Considering how fiction interacts with reality and history, and the boundary separating them, he covertly discusses issues like: the power of repressive convention, the negative force of social (and literary) conformity, the enigmatic nature of sexual relations, individual freedom and the desire to manipulate and control. In the preface added to the second edition of The Magus, and as a result of the numerous criticisms his book had received, Fowles explains his intentions, points to his indebtedness to literary tradition and personal life and defines his text as an exploration into the antipathy between God and freedom. If there was some central scheme beneath the […] stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it lies perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: ‘The Godgame’. I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific; that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. […] I do not defend Conchis’s decision at the execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are antipathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. (1983: 10) This metafictional aside may be read as two things at once (in keeping with the kind of reader one is); on the one hand, it might be taken for a neutral ground where the freedom of choice is still very much possible, since it lies in the future; on the other hand, it might imply that, despite its preaching in favour of total freedom, it remains an intrusive exercise which, by telling the reader what not to expect from the text, is actually telling him/her what to read into it. In other words, the preface is illustrative of Fowles’s fiction, one which demolishes pretensions of divine powers, both on the part of the writer (as author) and on the part of the reader. Targeted by his bitter irony and obvious parody are the omniscient authors of the English literary past and the passive, submissive readers of the present, too narrow minded or too blind to see the text as constantly in the making. The non-diegetic historical information Fowles makes use of serves to authenticate the fiction it encloses; to both offer a pleasing surface for the reader who is eager to establish links between the real and the fictional, and give the text the depth expected by the active, inquisitive reader who seeks to reach the ‘true’ message underneath the dialogism of the text. Added is either a fantastic dimension or a fictionally-real one. The former is suggestive of the movement away from the object reality, the latter gives access to the reality of fiction, inside the metafiction thus constructed. Or, from a different perspective: committed to democratic socialism in their urging emancipation from oppressive social structures and sympathising with a whole tradition of religious dissent, the novels of John Fowles are also utopian texts firmly opposed to reaction. The Magus A strikingly new kind of novel which, although intends to establish an absolute level of reality, paradoxically relativizes reality (Brian McHale, 20 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles Postmodernist Fiction, 1987: 114), The Magus foregrounds a godgame whose central protagonist is Nicholas Urfe, the puppet whose strings are held by Conchis – God/the puppeteer. Arriving on the Greek island of Phraxos, the young Nicholas Urfe (supposed to teach English in a local boys’ boarding school) meets and befriends Conchis, an elderly Greek millionaire residing at Bourani. Nicholas accepts to be experimented on by Conchis, who stages a succession of theatrical situations, for his younger friend to experiment with confrontations with the ‘real’. What actually happens is that Nicholas is made to accept responsibility for his ‘true’ self by plunging at the heart of fiction(s) and returning, each time, to reconsider reality in terms of the fictional underlying it (as illustrated by his bringing along vivid memories of worlds which only seem real but are obviously artificially created). All of Nicholas’s journeys into the possible are paralleled by a journey inwards, to his own consciousness, which may be inferred by considering Conchis’s name, symbolically pronounced to suggest ‘the conscious one’ (Nicholas’s rational alter ego, but also the embodiment of narrative omniscience): ‘How do you know who I am, Mr Conchis?’ ‘Anglicize my name. I prefer the “ch” soft.’ He sipped his tea. ‘If you question Hermes, Zeus will know.’ (The Magus, 1983: 80) Indeed, apparently it is Nicholas Urfe who functions as narrator, but it is really Conchis who manipulates him into telling his stories the way authority imposes it on him. They are both, in turns, authors and narrators, narrators and narrated, sharing the statute of magus, imposing perspectives and trapping the reader into the labyrinth of their story-telling. Pathologically driven towards the games Conchis keeps making him a pawn of, Nicholas loses contact with reality. His own personal life is backgrounded in favour of the enticing experiences he is the subject of. His teaching career, his love for Alison, the death of his parents no longer count, no longer manage to interfere with his new reality or unreality. In its constant building and breaking of frames and settings, the novel is resonant of metatheatre and metafiction: Nicholas’s role-playing in Conchis’s theatre is similar to the reader’s experience with this novel which offers multiple illusions of reality as food for thought. It seems that this was the perfect choice for Fowles to pinpoint the features of the new, liberated literature of the later half of the twentieth century, one of illusory textual representation and of interactive activities meant to both educate the reader and allow him/her a personal interpretation. The last pages of the book, presenting Nicholas reunited with Alison back in London, once again formulate the central ideas of The Magus: The final truth came to me, as we stood there, trembling, searching, between our past and all our future; at a moment when the difference between fission and fusion lay in a nothing, a tiniest movement, betrayal, further misunderstanding. There were no watching eyes. The windows were as blank as they looked. The theatre was empty. It was not a theatre. […] I looked away from Alison and at those distant windows, the façade, the pompous white pedimental figures that crowned it. It was logical, the perfect climax to the godgame. They had absconded, we were alone. I was sure, and yet … after so much, how could I be perfectly sure? How could they be so cold, Postmodernism and the novel in english 21 Representative names and titles so inhuman – so incurious? So load the dice and yet leave the game? (654-655) Nicholas Urfe’s incursions at the heart of fictionality and his analyses of the way in which it is constructed and perceived make the novel a document of postmodernism, with its obvious questioning of realist conventions and simultaneous parodic acknowledging that, unfortunately, realism still has control over the way in which literature is read, taught and evaluated. A novel about worlds in collision, The Magus is as near fabulation as it is realism. The two are blended in a way that makes its reading at once challenging and rewarding. The French Lieutenant’s Woman Unlike The Magus, too theoretical for the common reader, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a deliberately readable piece of fiction which clearly brings out the artistic preoccupations of two generations of novelists and which offers keys for its author’s intellectualising inclination in novel writing. It adopts an old fashioned Victorian narrative pattern, which it both praises and parodies. Its setting is Victorian, its plot is Victorian, its characters are Victorian too. Nevertheless, besides the Victorian narrated time, there is the twentieth century narrating one that the author – a character in his own story – belongs to. The latter addresses a contemporary reader, in a way which facilitates the discussions on the absurdities related to the previous century’s mentality, behaviour, habit, narrative practices. In his Notes on an Unfinished Novel, Fowles wrote: I write memoranda to myself about the book I’m on. On this one: You are not trying to write something one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write; but perhaps something one of them failed to write. And: Remember the etymology of the word. A novel is something new. It must have relevance to the writer’s now – so don’t ever pretend you live in 1867; or make sure the reader knows it' (in Malcolm Bradbury, The Novel Today. Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, 1977: 138) The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in the Lyme Regis and the London of the late 1860s. It tells the story of Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson. The latter comes to Lyme on the occasion of his engagement to Ernestina, but falls prey to Sarah’s manipulative story-telling. She, by now known as ‘the French lieutenant’s whore’ due to her own fabrication of a story of unrequited love and sexual misfortune, seems aware of the fact that a Victorian man like Charles will sooner be attracted by a past such as her invented one than by an impression of propriety and innocence. She plays her role to perfection, turning into the character she had imagined. Lured by the mystery surrounding her, Charles indulges in a relationship with her, only to discover the total lie underneath Sarah’s tale. What follows is a temporary separation and numerous special and temporal journeys back and forth, as Charles begins looking for the woman he had abandoned, and as their paths fail to cross. This is also the point at which the authorial voice (making the savour of Chapter Thirteen) turns into an authorial presence and the smooth flow of the Victorian narrative is interrupted by the intervention. 22 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles The parallel plots of Sam and Mary, of Mrs. Poultney and of Dr. Grogan add to the complexity of the novel’s construction and formulate judgements on strict social hierarchies, narrow-minded mentalities and progressive scientific research respectively, as embodied by the above mentioned characters. In point of structure, the novel’s chapters are all preceded by asides under the form of famous Victorian texts; excerpts from Thackeray, Hardy, Dickens, Browning, Darwin, Marx, Arnold, Ruskin and others, together with quotes from late nineteenth century journals, magazines, legal and political writings are all used to provide each fictional section with an appropriate introduction, further developed to later connote in the exact opposite direction. The ending is open in its double-natured form, therefore overtly anti- Victorian as the whole novel. It once again returns to the formula of existentialist philosophy in its forwarding more than one choice for the reader to experience freedom of interpretation (a necessary condition of the human condition) and to the theory of the nouveau roman that Fowles owes to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Michel Butor and that he abides by, favouring the movement of the writing, the novel’s own language and technique. All in all, it is now accepted (see Neil McEwan, The Survival of the Novel. British Fiction in the Later Twentieth Century, 1981) that The French Lieutenant’s Woman serves as a revealing introduction to the work of other modern novelists, who are as conscious as Fowles is (although less explicitly) of the need to be wary about the nature of fiction. It is a brilliant, but also a conscientious work which explores the incongruities of fiction today. 2.3. David Lodge born in London, in 1935 educated at London University Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham (since 1976) novels: The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), Out of the Shelter (1970), Changing Places (1975), How Far Can You Go? (1980), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988), Paradise News, Therapy (1995), Home Truths (1999), Thinks (2001), Author, Author: A Novel (2004) works of criticism: Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), Working with Structuralism (1981), Consciousness and the Novel (2002) An attempt at sugaring the metalanguage pill has been that of transforming literary theory and criticism into theoretical fiction or narratology as narrative. Nevertheless, the abrupt shift asks for an educated, highly cultivated and, why not, patient reader, for a reading elite who might consent to abandoning hope of ever deriving any pleasure out of experiencing literature and to plunging into a thorough study of fiction while apparently reading fiction. And, some would say, as if it weren’t bad enough for critics to write fiction and novelists to concentrate on theory, the university professor is added at times as a special ingredient meant to Postmodernism and the novel in english 23 Representative names and titles hold everything else together in a puzzling puzzle, with a view to instructing (!?) an already overburdened readership. Some thirty years ago, the relationship between fiction and criticism was comparatively unproblematical. Criticism was conceived of as a second-order discourse dependent on the first-order discourse of fiction. Novelists wrote novels and critics criticised them. (David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads, 1984: 11) Nowadays, the literary phenomenon has offered itself to being moulded and controlled by academics who, on the one hand, have operated selections and exclusions within the canon (simply because literature cannot be taught or learnt without there being a common body of texts to refer to and compare) and, on the other hand, have attempted to write texts about the canon, themselves becoming canon-ised, within a relatively short period of time. Additionally, mention must be made of the fact that inside and outside the educational system there is a growing variety of conflicting views on the subject of literary value and on the difference between literary and non-literary texts (Ann Jefferson and David Robey [eds], Modern Literary Theory, 1988:10), which has led to relative hierarchies being drawn up. A case in point is the simultaneous manipulation of the critical, theoretical novel and of the fictionalised critique (whose skilful handling of the terminological instrumentarium perhaps performs investigation enterprises on the literary corpse if not surgical interventions to resuscitate it back on track) with David Lodge. The following excerpts from his (non)fiction will hopefully support the thesis: 1. To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every decoding is another encoding. (Small World, 1984: 25) 2. Any text inevitably undermines its own claims to have a determinate meaning, and licences the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic freeplay. (Modern Criticism and Theory, 1988: 108) 3. Aporia. In classical rhetoric it means real or pretended uncertainty about the subject under discussion. Deconstructionists today use it to refer to more radical kinds of contradiction or subversion of logic or defeat of a reader’s expectation in a text. (Nice Work, 1988: 338) 4. The ‘meaning’ of a literary text is objectively knowable, and distinguishable from the ‘significance’ attributed to that meaning by particular readers. (Modern Criticism and Theory, 1988: 253) 5. The paradigms of fiction are essentially the same whatever the medium. Words or images, it makes no difference at the structural level. (Changing Places, 1978: 251) In Lodge’s academic trilogy, the professor-character is carefully manipulated so as to forward ideas, principles, concepts and to have literature-about-literature and language-about-language embedded within the text. The reading process is rendered difficult and, most often than not, meanings are either overlooked, added, misinterpreted, or misattributed. In other words, signifiers send to signifieds that are multiple or simply different with each reader/reading. The comedy embedded is, nevertheless, the ingredient which allows parody and self-parody, avenging the reader’s difficulties in digesting the hard core of the texts. 24 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles Changing Places. A Tale of Two Campuses This novel is structured around the idea of an academic exchange scheme, further developed in Small World and Nice Work. In Changing Places, the American professor Morris Zapp, from Euphoria State University exchanges places for a year with the English professor Philip Swallow, from Rummidge University. As the two men are confronted with different universes, the cultural clash is brought to the fore; the American finds the English educational system rural, quite absurd and out-of-date, while the Englishman is shocked to discover an emancipated, highly progressive urban environment. They are both misfits trying hard to survive and to cope with everything: from accommodation facilities to teaching activity and social life. A study of the cross-Atlantic, invisible but powerful cultural battle, the book ridicules the inertia both sides manifest in accepting the other. Although it analyses all this on the small scale of the university situation, it is allusive of similar practices in other domains as well. The academic campus is nothing but the world in a nutshell and the academic an embodiment of Man at his most ridiculous, despite the novel’s disclaimer: Although some of the locations and public events portrayed in this novel bear a certain resemblance to actual locations and events, the characters, considered either as individuals or as members of institutions, are entirely imaginary. Rummidge and Euphoria are places on the map of a comic world which resembles the one we are standing on without corresponding to it, and which is peopled by figments of the imagination.(Changing Places, 1978) David Lodge manages to create a feeling of verisimilitude by recurrent references to the state of affairs in the wide world outside the university and in the claustrophobic academic one, and to types of discourse that distinguish one from the other. Furthermore, the use of numerous letters in the epistolary section of the novel (exchanged between Philip and Morris and their wives, Hilary and Désirée), the British English and the American English alive in their texts, together with the numerous and humorous incursions into the frontier reality/fiction (e.g. Morris is a specialist in Jane Austen, and his twin children are called Elizabeth and Darcy) mirror a mock-refined cultural situation one can easily recognise. The ending takes one back to the novel’s opening paragraphs, with the two professors (this time each accompanied by the other’s wife) on planes moving in opposite directions than they were when their story began, and which are about to collide – avoided accident that has the four reunited and planning on future exchanges, all suggestively illustrated by the scene’s being presented as a script whose stage directions both manipulate the actors-characters and introduce an authorial presence who ultimately proves to be inefficient, so the play-novel remains open. Small World. An Academic Romance This second novel in the series is set against an international academic background. The numerous academics populating the novel’s universe are presented as migrating from one place to another, to take part in conferences (but also to seek the company of others like them, who might understand their worries, appreciate their efforts and plug in to their Postmodernism and the novel in english 25 Representative names and titles creative energy). The conferences are nothing but alibis, the real reason for their being constantly on the move being the socialising involved: But, on the whole, academic subject groups are self-defining, exclusive entities. Each has its own jargon, pecking order, newsletter, professional association. The members probably meet only once a year – at a conference. Then what a lot of hallos, howareyous and whatareyouworkingons over the drinks, over the meals, between lectures. (1984: 233) The romance mode, the mythical pattern and the metafictional design of Small World are brought together by Lodge’s skill with constructing memorable stories which speak of/to the contemporary mind. The main character, Persse McGarrigle, a young university lecturer is, like Percival, in search of a Grail: Angelica Pabst, a fellow academic. Naïve and romantic, Persse keeps answering calls for papers and putting his name down for all possible future conferences in the hope of meeting Angelica once again. His (mis)adventures seem never-ending, like the metafictional discussions on texts and textuality, literature and literary theory – that most of the characters spend their lives delivering. Among those who forward the metafictional debate in the novel is Morris Zapp – the deconstructionist. Philip Swallow is also present but, unlike his peers, he has adopted no critical orientation and seems to be the only one still enjoying literature for what it is rather than massacring it for the sake of theory. Criticising criticism and the critic is the dominant goal of the metatext, infested by regurgitations of critical discourse from people who seem to have lost their human features and replaced them with labels and concepts: Fulvia Morgana – a Marxist, Sigfried von Turpitz – a Teutonic Response Theory expert, Michel Tardieu – a narratologist and, last but not least, Arthur Kingfisher – their mentor and superior, embodiment of both the King Arthur and the Fisher King figures. The academic romance announced in the title is followed through to the very end, when Persse discovers true love outside the suffocating world of sterile words the academia is (in the person of Cheryl Summerbee, a non-academic, working for British Airways). His quest continues, however, as he is incapable of tracing her down. Open ended, therefore also open to interpretation and reinterpretation, Small World, plays with expectations and amuses while uncovering the darkest of corners in the life outside and inside the text. Nice Work The last novel of the trilogy returns to the exchange scheme in Changing Places. This time it involves an academic and a businessman, a woman and a man, other oppositions being considered, without the university milieu’s being left out. Robyn Penrose, a lecturer specialising in the nineteenth century novel and women’s studies, is asked by her faculty board (that Philip Swallow is a part of) to spend some time becoming acquainted with the industrial world and to accept that an engineer, Vic Wilcox, managing director of a steelworks, attend her classes in return, everything being part of a project initiated by the government on Industry Year. Totally displeased at the thought of the drab involved in all this, she shows up in 26 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles Vic’s office, only to discover that he is just as angry about the scheme as she. The difficulties they initially encounter in understanding the world of each other (and which are comically rendered by Lodge) gradually become easier to accept, as the two get to know each other better. Lodge’s craft of rendering the atmosphere of the two universes that are part of the broader one but that do not cross paths too often is related to his portrayal of their discourses and the essential misunderstandings they cause as a result of the war of mentalities thus formulated. ‘My field is […] women’s studies.’ ‘Women Studies?’ Wilcox echoed with a frown. ‘What are they?’ ‘Oh, women’s writing. The representation of women in literature. Feminist critical theory.’ Wilcox sniffed. ‘You give degrees for that?’ […] ‘Still, I suppose it’s all right for the girls.’ ‘Boys take it too,’ said Robyn. ‘and the reading load is very heavy, as a matter of fact.’ […] ‘Why aren’t they studying something useful, then?’ ‘Like mechanical engineering?’ ‘You said it.’ (1989: 114) The language Vic speaks is that of a middle-aged married man with a wife he no longer loves and children whom he cannot get to grips with; the language of an engineer who, after having graduated, does nothing to broaden his cultural horizon; the language of the well-off, who pay for their pleasures without giving real quality a second thought, driven as they are by the dictates of fashion and by the need to impress neighbours and friends. Robyn’s language is that of a young and beautiful woman who is still single because of the time and effort she puts into her long-term education; the language of the open-minded academic who freely discusses all subjects, including those which are disturbing for most people; the language of the literate, the scholar, the researcher. Communication between them is obviously impossible at first. Only as human beings can they finally find common ground, and even then not wholly: when Vic develops a crush for her, Robyn is bewildered by the old fashioned, syrupy approach he adopts (candle light, roses, romantic declarations and adolescent love-making); she seems more accustomed to frank statements and safe sex. The last paragraphs of the novel bring an image that sums up the whole content and message: looking out of her office window that gives on to the campus lawn, Robyn can see a gardener pushing his motor mower up and down. The students make way for him to pass, without uttering a word, without communicating in any way, although he is roughly of the same age as they. No arrogance is obvious on the students’ part, no resentment on the gardener’s, just an avoidance of contact. Physically contiguous, they inhabit separate worlds. (384) Food for thought on the reader’s table. Postmodernism and the novel in english 27 Representative names and titles 2.4. Doris Lessing born in Persia (Iran), in 1919 and brought up in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) educated in Salisbury, at a Roman Catholic convent, but left school at the age of fourteen settled in London in 1949 novel series: Children of Violence [Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), The Four Gated City (1969)] and Canopus in Argus: Archives [Shikasta (1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), The Sentimental Agents (1983)] novels: The Grass Is Singing (1950), The Golden Notebook (1962), Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Summer Before Dark (1972), Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984), The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988), The Old Age of El Magnificato (2000), The Sweetest Dream (2001), The Grandmothers (2003) and others collections of stories: This Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951), Five: Short Novels (1953), The Habit of Loving (1957), A Man and Two Women (1963), African Stories (1964), Winter in July (1966), The Black Madonna (1966), The Story of a non-Marrying Man (1972) and many more other: Going Home (1957), In Pursuit of the English (1960), A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (1974) Doris Lessing’s literary works are closely associated with feminism, social criticism and autobiography, their central themes being in connection with the world’s being shaken into new patterns by the current cataclysms and with individuals in search of wholeness, both illustrated at the level of content and form (the latter being used to support the former). Her writing covers a wide range of genres, settings and narrative techniques, but are held together by a number of main concerns. Worth mentioning are the following: the analysis of the contemporary cultural scene; the awareness of the perpetual social change; the association of the catastrophic nature of twentieth century history with personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness; the emphasis on higher states of consciousness as a possible retreat in the face of alienation; intense anger at social injustice; interest in radical revisions of the self; concentration on the nature of inter-human relationships. A novelist at odds with old-fashioned ways of shaping novel discourse, Lessing remains nonetheless indebted to traditional modes of writing which she uses to express the manners, aspirations, anxieties and particular problems of the times she lives in. Authorial omniscience is not abandoned wholly, the moralising tone is partly preserved, the anchoring in historical, social, political and cultural realities is still obvious, despite the numerous, more experimentalist, narrative practices and techniques adopted. The tradition she works in stems from the great European realists of the nineteenth century, with their special preoccupation with liberation movements and profound judgement of the quality of a whole way of life in terms of the qualities of people. (see Lorna Sage, Women in the House 28 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles of Fiction, 1992). What she resents is the world’s inability to allow women to stand for universality, and she builds her texts so as to highlight the recognition of difference and the authority of otherness. Whether her novels are autobiographical, science fiction or metafictional, they adopt realism as a backdrop, but do not round up imaginative worlds one can live inside. Uncomfortable, threatening, terrifying, her universes demand fighting for survival. The reader’s task seems to be that of finding his/her way through the entanglement of plots celebrating heterogeneity and of ‘listening’ to the silence undermining rhetoric. In the Preface to The Golden Notebook (in Malcolm Bradbury, The Novel Today. Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, 1977), Lessing formulates a complete literary credo, by exposing the inner workings of her fiction: mild feminism, the unsilencing of women: This novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. (171) the theme of the breakdown: Sometimes when people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions. (170) other thoughts and themes: - the impossibility of finding a novel to describe the intellectual and moral climate of a hundred years ago, in the middle of the last century, in Britain, in the way Tolstoy did it for Russia, Stendhal for France (173) - the main character – an artist with a ‘block’, so as to tolerate no longer this monstrously isolated, monstrously narcissistic, pedestalled paragon(174) - a different kind of subjectivity: The way to deal with the problem of ‘subjectivity’ is to see [the individual] as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does (176) - allowing the book to make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped (176) - criticising the critic/reader: the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood (185) Like Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing orients her texts towards transcending difference and exploring a shared crisis of consciousness. She expands the discussion so that it might also cover the area of novel writing, but, most often than not, she prefers to look into real women, with real worries in real-life situations. Starting from individual cases and then broadening the scope to catch womanhood between parallel mirrors, she manages to disturb and please at the same time, opening doors behind which unspoken selves have long been hidden. The attempted dialogue with the rest of the world is more valuable in its preliminary, anticipative stage than in its actual manifestation. The feeling of entrapment and the loud noise of silence remain overwhelming and contaminate the reading process also, leaving behind painful traces of sudden realisations. Postmodernism and the novel in english 29 Representative names and titles The Diaries of Jane Somers The book appeared initially as two separate volumes, entitled The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could. In its present day form, these are the two parts of the novel. Central is Janna, an intelligent, attractive magazine editor from whose perspective the story is told. Before her illumination on the true value of existence, her life had meant money, comfort, success and glamour. With the death of her husband, and that of her mother, Janna begins to understand her inadequacy and to question the way of the world. The shiny cover of her life, like that of a women’s magazine, hides the real bitterness, the dim corners underneath. Her emotional sterility, her vulnerability and her inefficiency in really communicating with others drives her to writing a diary and to becoming committed to the old and the deprived, in an attempt at analysing her true nature and making up for the lost time. Accidentally meeting Maudie Fowler (old, wicked, poor), Janna becomes obsessed with the woman and joins ‘The Good Neighbour’ social aid programme, volunteering to help look after the needy. Leaving behind her wonderful career, expensive clothes, educated friends, travels abroad, she embarks on a journey of self-knowledge that is painful in that it discloses aspects she had previously been blind to, living, as she had done, among the priviledged. Her downfall (in the eyes of her acquaintances) runs parallel with incursions into her soul, which she turns upside down and inside out, especially in the pages of the diary she keeps. Maudie is the secondary character who, in Part I, supports the introspection by providing the necessary ‘other’ against which Janna may define herself. In Part II, the role is played by Richard Curtis, the man with whom Janna falls in love. Richard is a married man, which adds to the responsibilities both are weighed down with. Their relationship is clearly an impossible one, and Janna can decide to bring it to an end only when she eventually acknowledges the fact that, in wanting him around she is desperately trying to deny Freddie’s death. She pretends to be in love with Richard, but all she does is relive her past with Freddie, her then empty marriage, now fictionalised and improved due to her having become older, more mature, therefore more alert to the small things in life which make it worth living. All this richness and intensity of feeling and thought is shared with the reader in a way that reminds of everyone’s personal unhappiness wrapped up in the self-satisfaction on display with most. Following Janna’a text, pretext and context, the reader discovers aspects of the self previously buried and is lead to looking with fresh eyes at the impositions of society, at the norms it seems to force people to accept and thus remain caught on the surface of things, behind the artificial mask of convention. The Diaries of Jane Somers is a novel which involves the self- conscious and deliberate textualisation of one’s self. It posits fiction alongside truth, blurring the boundary between them and suggesting that the fictionalising of fact is closer to truth than reality/history. Aware of the unreliability and unpredictability of memory, Lessing demolishes the myth of the past as real and as contained in the present. In so doing, she gives her writing a feminine and feminist touch: the fertility of 30 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles imagination is not devoid of messages about women and womanhood, especially since the mother-daughter and the woman-lover relationships are focused upon and amplified until distorted, made to go beyond the commonly accepted prejudices. Trapped inside the identity of someone she barely recognises, Janna decides it is time for her to become involved in establishing connections, no matter how extra-ordinary they may be. It is not surprising maybe that she holds on to her friendship with Maudie and gives up the one with Richard. The symbiosis of the former is far more valuable than the attraction of opposites with the latter. Man-the-centre becomes man-the- outsider, gravitating around the main character’s presence, yet incapable or forbidden to trespass its inner circle. Like Doris Lessing, Jane Somers goes through the therapy of writing and of living anew, accessing the truths of a younger and fictive self from the different perspectives of her split older ones. 2.5. Fay Weldon born in Worcestershire, England, in 1931 educated at University of St. Andrews, Scotland (studied economics and philosophy) lives in Dorset, England novels: The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967), Down Among the Women (1971), Female Friends (1975), Remember Me (1976), Words of Advice (1977), Praxis (1978), Little Sisters (1978), Puffball (1980), The President’s Child (1982), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), The Shrapnel Academy (1986), The Rules of Life (1987), The Heart of the Country (1987), Leader of the Band (1988), The Cloning of Joanna May (1990), Darcy’s Utopia (1991), Growing Rich (1992), Life Force (1992), Affliction (1993), Splitting (1995), Worst Fears (1996), Big Women (1997), Nobody Likes Me (1997), The Bulgari Connection (2001), Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide (2002), Mantrapped (2004) children’s books: Wolf the Mechanical Dog, Party Puddle collections of short stories: Watching Me, Watching You (1981), Polaris (1985), Moon Over Minneapolis (1991), Wicked Women (1997), A Hard Time to Be a Father (1998) and others non-fiction: Letters to Alice, Rebecca West, Sacred Cows etc. The feminism of Fay Weldon’s writing is concentrated on the idea of women exploited by men in domestic circumstances. She shifts the emphasis from the broader social context to the narrower one of the home where, behind doors and shutters, the real unhappiness unfolds. Aware of the fact that women allow themselves to be subjected by men and by their natures alike, she uses satire to formulate judgements on a world that seems to have been arranged so that it suits men. The novelist bridges the gap between the popular and the serious, presenting the simple, small things in life as we know it in a way which invites at the thorough consideration of the complicated pattern underneath. She finds the best wording for everything that has remained unsaid, avenging all the silent splinters of a woman’s life. Her readers are pleased to discover only too familiar representations which, through exaggeration and caricature, are rendered ridiculous and preposterous, yet remain sufficiently connected Postmodernism and the novel in english 31 Representative names and titles with what goes on in the real world to result in an analysis of actual problems. Adopting a direct, straightforward attitude and point of view, Fay Weldon expresses a sense of paradoxical sisterhood and exposes the various aspects of patriarchal ideology. She seems to point to the fact that any stereotype is self-destructive, easily transformed into its own unstable contradiction and thereby demonstrates that such stereotypes only exist as verbal constructs in the service of that ruling ideology or to that, as Germaine Greer argues (see The Female Eunuch, 1993) whatever the kind of feminine stereotype to which women are supposed to conform to, it is necessarily a construction of patriarchal capitalism: The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. […] She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity. (in Keith Green and Jill LeBihan [eds], Critical Theory and Practice, 1996: 234) The woman as mother, lover, wife, housewife, friend, career woman etc are roles her characters play, usually in separation one from the other, to gratify preconceived ideas that are further developed, pushed out of shape, until they become monstrously deformed, defamiliarised so as to contain the criticism intended. Ordinary and middle-class, her characters are mostly described in terms of the relationships they establish with others. The men and women around them are just as bad, just as disappointing, and it is Weldon’s frequently expressed intention of exposing weaknesses with women, of not discriminating against men, of unfavourably treating both, that gets forwarded. Her politics appears to be related to the notion that women themselves are to blame for the status they have been imposed and have accepted. The victims are more numerous than the warriors, and their inertia is contagious, passed on from generation to generation. Furthermore, when not silenced altogether, most women play their roles conscientiously, under the yoke of male power and control, although capable of seeing through the consensus. Narrating with a view to disclosing multiple perspectives, Weldon’s women adopt dialogism to juxtapose the surface level of things with the subtle pondering on its depths. They wear the mask, but rebel behind it; in observing their situation, they pronounce aphoristic truths that give flavour to the writing: Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men (Down Among the Women, 1971: 187); Men do get very odd when their wives are pregnant (Affliction, 1993: 96); If the wife leaves an empty bed, a husband’s first impulse is to fill it (Worst Fears, 1996: 57) Embodying abstract notions of womanhood, characters switch from the third person to the first person, both imitating male voices and guiding the responses to the inner femininity/feminism of the text. Thus two types of audiences are addressed efficiently and the message carried through. The plots are also selected to illustrate the argument about women today and always. From childhood to maturity and old age, women are portrayed as suffering from gender inequalities directly related to economic, monetary conditions. The additional subplots foreground hypostases of institutions like marriage, career, love affairs, education, the succession of which (never presupposing the same order) creates the impression of life, of a dynamism to be associated with change or progress rather than with prosaic circularity or cyclicity leading nowhere in the end. 32 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles Down Among the Women The novel’s theme is stated by its very title: women’s oppression and the low status they have always been associated with. Used as a refrain, to start most chapters, it emphasizes a dangerous streak in the collective unconscious, and ridicules the current drive to subdue the already subdued. It depicts the complexity of women’s experience and glimpses into the unreasonable expectations society enacts upon them. The characters and the plot serve to transmit the idea that patriarchy must be fought back and freedom of action and thought allowed to dictate the evolution of women in society. Built around six characters, whose lives are interwoven to compare and contrast, to oppose and analyse, the novel also presupposes two levels – one on which the diachronic debate is developed and one on which the synchronic aspect is considered: on the one hand, three generations of women are presented, each embodied by a particular character: Wanda – the grandmother, Scarlet – the mother, Byzantia – the daughter on the other hand, a group of friends (not really all that friendly towards one another) is discussed: Scarlet, Jocelyn, Audrey, Helen, Sylvia and Susan The link remains Scarlet, a partly autobiographical character, an independent single mother, a woman with a will and a way, the most intelligent and emancipated of all. Through Scarlet, whose name adds a critical and intertextual component, Weldon empowers women with the force to appreciate their value and refuse submission to absurd requirements. Jocelyn turns from a bright, open-minded intellectual into a bored and boring housewife. She stands for the ‘happily married’ woman, trapped in an impossible situation, with a husband who cheats on her and with no other satisfaction to ever look forward to. Eventually, she breaks free, as she leaves Philip for Ben, with whom she begins a new life. Audrey is the one who moves in the opposite direction: from a quiet, submissive wife and mother to a woman of the world, as she manages to shake off the ties imposed on her, abandons husband and children and lives with a married man. She awakens from the woman’s nightmare and lives life to the full, with no remorse or sense of guilt whatsoever. Helen is the prototype of the victim; she is beautiful, sensitive and loving, therefore a misfit. After numerous disappointing relationships, she understands that men only feel comfortable with women who are their inferiors, but continues to make compromises and lower herself in degradation. Her suicide, and her decision to take her daughter’s life also, is symbolical for Weldon’s feminist message of anger at such philosophies of life. Sylvia is another victim. Unlike Audrey, who has gone through all the stages of social womanhood and come out a fresher, better person, she sees all her attempts at happiness destroyed, all her hopes shattered in the unfortunate relationships she establishes. Punished for having punished in her turn, Sylvia has to accept her fate and simply carry on with her life. Susan, who becomes Scarlet’s stepmother, is the ‘nicest’ from a patriarchal point of view. She transforms her status of wife and mother into a religion, dedicating all her time and effort to making her marriage to an Postmodernism and the novel in english 33 Representative names and titles elderly man work, despite being aware of the bitterness underneath the polished surface of her life. Wanda, the only feminist proper, opens the novel, and Byzantia, her follower, ends it. The former introduces the discussion on the necessity of educating women to think independently and fight for the right of making personal choices, while the latter detaches herself and her generation from ‘the last of the women’ (as patriarchy has constructed and as focused upon in the book), announcing the emergence of a new, emancipated woman with the strength to operate major changes and to provide all women with an improved, culturally and socially determined, status. The narration is achieved by the handling of both a third-person, omniscient narrator and a first-person subjective one, underlining the shift from the historical perspective to the individual, particular viewpoint. Jocelyn’s narratorial task is interrupted every now and then by authorial, intrusive passages (very patriarchal in essence) within which generalisations are made and a twenty-year span is covered, all in relation with the evolution (or involution) in feminist positions. Immortalised in fiction, the female, feminine and feminist voices inside Weldon’s novel leave deep traces in the reader and therefore attain their goals. 2.6. Salman Rushdie Indian novelist, born in Bombay, in June 1947 educated at Cambridge University has recently moved from London to New York novels: Grimus (1975), Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001) short stories: East, West (1994) a book of reportage: The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987) critical essays: Imaginary Homelands (1991) film criticism: ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1992) non-fiction: Step Across This Line (2003) Defined as a postcolonial, experimentalist, metafictional, magic realist writer, Salman Rushdie’s fame rests upon the uniqueness of the imaginative space he foregrounds, where representations of alterity meet and fill the void of denied realities. Rushdie is an enthusiastic proponent of new forms, able to match the new sensibilities, the twentieth century location of culture: film, radio, television, video – all present as narrative material, structural device and metaphor in his fiction. (see Damian Grant, Salman Rushdie, 1999) The emphasis on the media helps him open a whole discussion on the fundamentally new relationship between public and private life, language and silence, the centre and its fringes. Inside today’s global culture, Rushdie’s intention, as formulated in Imaginary Homelands, is that of writing books that draw better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world. Drawing on a vast range of Hindu, Islamic and Western, classical and modern, academic and popular traditions, he produces a highly original collage which speaks equally to the East and to the West, about the past and about the present, in elaborate or in simplistic ways. A self 34 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles conscious and versatile writer, Rushdie discusses diversity and uses multiplicity as forms of resistance to the unitary nature of imperialist ideology, of political and religious control, of canonical artistic impositions. The magic realism of his fiction allows the combination of the realistic portrayal of poverty and suffering with magic, fantasy, farce, symbolism and allegory. In other words, the objective meets the subjective, the masculine the feminine, tradition innovation, authority the subdued. Assuming migrancy (and therefore discontinuity) at the personal, national and artistic levels, Rushdie seems to find a liberating mode of defining the self taken up by fiction, using in his defence the very weapons that have been directed against him by fate. A ‘translated’ man, he now translates his translation, distancing himself from the original, while creating a better one to replace it. An easterner whose western definition is found unsatisfactory, he adopts the opposite position to do justice to his own. Placed within the British tradition (of Forster’s A Passage to India), and benefiting from a deeper knowledge of ‘the other’ to which he has always belonged, but is now distant from (therefore less biased about), Rushdie sets out to juxtapose layers of cultural patterns that run parallel to successive strata of story-telling – all shown to be on the fiction - reality borderline. Narratologic and historiographic self-consciousness is subtly incorporated by his symbolical, obliquely theoretical fiction preoccupied with the subjectivity of historical narrative, which places its endings and beginnings at the centre to avoid any obtrusive moral conclusion. Social boundaries are crossed, cultural frontiers trespassed and distinctions blurred in this insane game of having the misplaced other intrude upon worlds he/she does not belong to. Resulting is an impression of reality melting into a fiction that implies an overpowering authority gaining in altitude and becoming increasingly frightening, especially when identified with the realist’s urge to have complex reality represented, encapsulated by strict formulations within or without the fictional text. Salman Rushdie’s rewriting of the past has helped define not only time, but history also, as relative. Much of the knowledge about the past, he believes, is of a narrated nature since all past events are potential historical facts, actual facts remaining those which have been chosen to be narrated. He therefore separates personal history from the collective, acknowledged version of history and, by doing so, rediscovers himself, man and artist. The autobiographical vein remains a unifying feature of Rushdie’s writing, despite his transgression of genre categories and its challenges upon the reader. From the mention of one’s arrival on a strange island (in Grimus), to one’s birth into a new world (in Midnight’s Children), nationality versus religious (dis)orientation (in Shame and The Satanic Verses), to language and culture in conflict (in Fury), his texts cover painful ground, engage in ideological discourses, experiment with the limits of imagination, test the coherence of life, explore the nature of Man and Art –obvious metaphors of Rushdie’s own life experiences. Inside his texts, autobiographical characters, like everyone else, live history forward and ‘write’ it in retrospect (see The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, 1987), feeling free to commit mistakes, knowing that the draft of their lives will be corrected in the future narrative about it. Postmodernism and the novel in english 35 Representative names and titles Midnight’s Children The Three Books that make up the novel cover sixty-odd years (from 1915 to 1977) and four generations. However, there are numerous incursions into the distant, mythical past of India and the world. As to the future, it is only suggested, or left untouched for the moment when, years from now, it will already have become someone else’s past. Saleem Sinai, the main character, is writing an autobiographical novel, but starts the story of his life much earlier than usual (as in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy), by the presentation of his grandparents’ meeting and falling in love. Their story is symbolical for the metatext of Midnight’s Children. Saleem’s grandmother pretends to be ill, just to have the new doctor in town consult her. Custom had it, in those days of India’s past, for young, virgin women not to expose their bodies to anyone, not even a doctor; she is therefore consulted from behind a sheet, perforated to allow the doctor’s hand to touch her belly. What follows is love and marriage, years spent together in getting to know each other. As time passes, the perforated sheet acquires new holes, it becomes more and more transparent. And so does the narrative: if initially obscure, allowing brief glimpses into the narrated universe, it then opens new doors, as new perspectives are added and the mysteries begin to clear. Saleem-the-narrator discusses Saleem-the-character with Padma- the-narratee. The former adopts the stance and voice of the author, while the latter stands for an inquisitive, constantly dissatisfied reader, who keeps complaining about the meaninglessness of the narrative that is presented to her every time she comes in the room where Saleem sits at his writing desk. It is Padma who avenges the problems the reader has with the exotic and sophisticated mixture of autobiography, history, magic realism and metafiction in Midnight’s Children. Saleem writes of his birth, simultaneous with that of one thousand more children across the country, and with that of the new, liberated India (at midnight, on 15th August 1947) – hence the title of the novel. The births bring about a generation of witnesses/artists, with their own, intruded- upon, stories/tales, as 1001 Sheherezades under the threat of telling what they are told, or as obedient practitioners of religion, whose personal interventions in THE text are looked upon as a deadly sin (with One Thousand and One Nights and The Quran as obvious intertexts). He then goes through pains to rebuild the past out of disparate fragments with the aid of memory and ends up disintegrating, he himself, as Padma has foreseen: You better get a move on or you’ll die before you get yourself born (in fiction) (1982: 38). The ending he provides marks an abrupt shift from the metonymical ‘I’ standing for the group, to the ‘I’ becoming the group and, incapable of holding it together, splitting into a multitude of virtual ‘I’s about to rewrite their own versions of a story that has engulfed them and their wor(l)d . Although silenced in the end, his individuality pulverized (the clock having made time become a bomb), HISstory fights back time and disrupts accepted patterns: I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks (38). His view on history/the past is that of a succession of jars containing pickles to be swallowed as one swallows words which contain worlds, although one’s perceptions get to be distorted and hideously altered by/in time. 36 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles The future, however, is much more difficult to encapsulate; on the other hand, it will, for sure, presuppose yet another possible interpretation of things past and digested by a former present having become a recent past by then; in other words, what lies ahead is only for others to actually experience and deposit under the form of dried-out memories. One last empty jar seems to await a Proustian reader who, by tasting the past (historical and literary), might begin to write the future. The principles at work in the novel are those of decentring, plurality and double-selves, all related to India’s cultural, religious, linguistic heterogeneity, her ‘double parentage’ – native and colonial – and her ‘double emergence’ – birth and death/rebirth. (Benjamin Graves, Born Again – Double Parentage in Midnight’s Children, 1998, The Internet) Throughout the intricate scaffolding of the plot, the irony of the mistaken identity is built on double-faceted cultural archetypes (Shiva, in the divine division of labour, is sometimes the destroyer, sometimes the creator) and apparent truths: Saleem should be Shiva and Shiva – Saleem; Ahmed is really Shiva’s father (not Saleem’s) and Wee Willie Winkie – Saleem’s (not Shiva’s); the son Saleem finally adopts when marrying Parvati the Witch is really Shiva’s etc. The multiplicity beyond appearances rooted in unilateral misjudgement painfully becomes the object of satire, even towards the end, where three options are presented and none chosen: to provide the book with a happy ending, to raise unanswerable questions or to give dreams the concluding statement. Instead, the complex film of future plural lives/narratives is projected on the paper screen. 2.7. Kazuo Ishiguro Japanese novelist, born in Nagasaki, in 1954 came to Britain in 1960 educated at the University of Kent, Canterbury and the University of East Anglia now lives in London novels: A Pale View of the Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000) screenplays – A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (1984), The Gourmet (1986) Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are mainly historical ones. They are developed on moments, events and ideologies that have shaped the contemporary situation. The global and individual histories his writings present resemble Rushdie’s, in the sense that they constantly haunt characters, to the extent to which they become incapable of distinguishing between what really is/has been, what is/has been fictionally constructed. With Ishiguro, however, the emphasis is on the twentieth century rather than on ancient, mythical times, and the magic is replaced by the illusory, although the allusive and symbolical is preserved. With the two World Wars in the background, Ishiguro’s novels acquire a dangerous, threatening nuance, employed to the full in the portrayal of life on the edge of reason and meaning. Violence seems to be the key-word in defining the human condition, in the essence of existence. Postmodernism and the novel in english 37 Representative names and titles People are violently manipulated and respond with violence, irrespective of the level on which this ‘battle’ takes place (global, national or individual). Most often than not, the public and the private selves are described as at war with each other, their struggle resembling the conflict between nations, the combat between armies. If nations have history, individuals have memory, and it is this double slippery ground that Ishiguro’s writings cover. Like Rushdie, Ishiguro invites at considering both as fluid or in-the- making, and therefore rewriteable. He consequently inscribes both with traces that give substance to the commentary on the way we are. Re-membering, putting together the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present (see Leela Ghandi, Postcolonial Theory, 1998), Ishiguro carries out a therapeutic project, postcolonial in essence, bridging the gap that keeps worlds apart. Historically-accurate descriptions accompany the otherwise extremely subjective, character-based narration, which leads to the mixed chronology of the plot and the double-layered narrative structure. Usually involved in the thorough consideration of their own movements forward in space and backwards in time, Ishiguro’s character-narrators subvert accepted notions of truth and deconstruct patterns of authority in and outside fiction. Stereotypes are judged as forming the buffer zone between cultures, advertised by greedy vendors who offer them as tax-free merchandise, without the awareness of the disastrous impact their actions might have on a wider scale in the foreseeable future. Behind them, cultures flourish independently, few managing to preserve their genuineness from the onslaught of the invading ‘other’, while most facilitate the conquest and accept the yoke. Besides the historical contexts, the settings chosen also disclose their author’s philosophical perspectives: Ishiguro's first two novels are set in Japan, the third in England, the fourth somewhere in an unidentified European country, and the most recent in London and Shanghai. The two worlds they stand for are considered from the opposite direction without the break being too obvious since the only alienating factor at work here is hybridity, as embodied by the writer himself. Populating his novels are characters which filter the world from different standpoints: that of a woman (in A Pale View of the Hills), of a painter (in An Artist of the Floating World), of a butler (in The Remains of the Day), of a pianist (in The Unconsoled), of an orphan (in When We Were Orphans). All the roles are assumed by Ishiguro, as all are margins, now central to the discussion on the cultural politics of otherness. The quiet surface of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction hides deep water underneath. Submerged are the subjugating forces of the literary craft, human psyche, logocentric discourse. Working his way around Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Freud (among others), the novelist speaks to and from the canon about what has been de-canonised but matches the canonical. Plunging into the depths of consciousness, reaching the unconscious and experimenting with language and technique so as to illustrate their inner workings (already associated with the great twentieth century Western masters) are mirrored by, or simply versions of the analysis of the exiled, misfit, outcast, exotic, different (now coming from Japan and flooding the Western stage). 38 Postmodernism and the novel in english Representative names and titles Challenging boundaries of all sorts, Ishiguro addresses readers world-wide, developing themes and strategies of universal appeal in an international language that allows the voicing of local concerns, the sharing of personal preoccupations. The Remains of the Day The novel focuses on the absolutely desolate life of an English butler with no family (besides a butler-father – now dead), no name (he seems to have been christened Stevens, as he even thinks of himself in terms of his surname), no home (he has always found accommodation with his employers), no past (his life has only presupposed butlering), no future (his friends are inexistent; as to love, it has generally been out of the question). Mr. Stevens is the last of a long line of butlers. With him, tradition ends and nothing replaces it. His Englishness (as constructed from the outside, as seen through foreign eyes) is old fashioned and sterile, doomed to disappear. Its absurd inappropriateness in a changing world is exacerbated by the seriousness with which Stevens reflects on issues like friendship, affection, happiness, which people set as ultimate goals for themselves, but which are incomprehensible to him. Spontaneity, humour, enthusiasm, open-heartedness are as alien to him as reserve, dignity, sobriety, propriety are natural, inbuilt. Reluctant to change, he does not accept difference, diversity, simply because he does not know they exist. In his enclosure, isolated from the rest of the world and caught in time, Stevens lives to serve and serves to live, in a mechanical and surveyable way. The book however breathes freedom from constraint and escapes the bonds of time, moving backwards and forwards, from the present to the past and back, involving circularity and repetition. In 1956, after a very long and for the first time, Mr. Stevens takes a break from the routine of his daily life and is made to go on holiday by the present owner of Darlington Hall – the American Mr. Farraday, who finds it absurd to expect someone to dedicate his whole time to one’s career and, anyway, is incapable of seeing what to do with the inherited butler. Leaving the residence (which had been his foster home for countless years while in the service of Lord Darlington) is a difficult experience for Stevens. He has nowhere to go, no one to visit. Eventually, he remembers Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn) – former housekeeper, workmate and secret love, the woman who had brought the freshness of living intensely, of actually being alive to Darlington Hall and in Mr. Stevens’ path. He pretends (to himself) to be going on a ‘business’ trip to provide Darlington Hall with a suitable housekeeper, when what he really wants is to see her again. His six day motoring trip through the south of England takes him down memory lane and he revisits his life/butlership. The focal point is March 1923, when two crucial events took place, without his then being aware of their significance: the death of his father and the conference organised at Darlington Hall. Seeing to the Lord’s French, German and American guests (gathered to discuss politics and to aid Germany after the war), Mr. Stevens cannot be with his father on his death bed; his place is taken by Miss Kenton and a special bond develops between the two. Postmodernism and the novel in english 39 Representative names and titles Blinded by this ray of light in the blandness of his life, he is incapable of grasping the importance of the history written in his presence, one that will bring about the downfall of his master and the end of the old ways. The two events remain the link in Mr. Stevens’ digressive meandering through his past, which now seems so distant, so unreal, so belittled by the current sensation of being alive and part of a greater scheme. The cinematic enchaining of scene after scene, reflected on the automobile windows, builds the film of Stevens’ life in retrospect. Gone wrong, it now comes in the way of perceiving the normal evolution of things. In its portrayal of the emblematic figure of the butler stubbornly and ridiculously opposing the challenges of the Times, at odds with History and picking up the remains of a Day, dreams of comfortable inertia and of predictability are shattered and rebuilt by Ishiguro in this book about the contamination of Englishness by the long-dreaded other, Americanness in particular being hinted at: I do not mean to imply anything derogatory about Mr. Farraday; he is, after all, an American gentleman and his ways are often very different (The Remains of the Day, 1990: 15) The novel’s depersonalised style, its artificial morality and its sense of superior detachment in capturing the still-life posture of Englishness speak of Ishiguro’s knowledge of the people and the culture he embodies only to offer new insight to from the heritage of his Japanese sensitivity to detail and nuance. 40 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests Learning Unit no. 3 TESTS Use the glossary of literary terms to decode the texts and find appropriate solutions to the tasks formulated. 3.1. TEST ONE But what stamps the carnival 1. Comment on Alexandria as setting and with its spirit of pure mischief is the character. velvet domino – conferring upon its wearers the disguise which each man in his secret heart desires above all. To become anonymous in an anonymous crowd revealing neither sex nor relationship nor even facial expression – for the mark of this demented friar’s habit leaves only two eyes, glowing like the eyes of a Moslem woman or a bear. Nothing 2. Isolate the principal tropes embedded in the else to distinguish one by; the thick fragment and develop on their usage. folds of the blackness conceal even the contours of the body. Everyone becomes hipless, breastless, faceless. And concealed beneath the carnival habit (like a criminal desire in the heart, a temptation impossible to resist, an impulse which seems preordained) lie the terms of something: of a freedom which man 3. How much emphasis is placed on the has seldom dared to imagine for question of the truthfulness of love and to what himself. One feels free in this disguise purpose? to do whatever one likes without prohibition. All the best murders in the city, all the most tragic cases of mistaken identity, are the fruit of the early carnival, while most love affairs begin or end during these three days and nights during which we are delivered from the thrall of personality, from the bondage of ourselves. Once inside that velvet cape and hood, and 4. Consider the carnival situation and the wife loses husband, husband wife, carnivalesque discourse. lover the beloved. The air becomes crisp with the saltpetre of feuds and follies. The fury of battles, of agonizing night-long searches, of despairs. You cannot tell whether you are dancing with a man or a woman. The dark tides of Eros, which demand full secrecy if they are to overflow the human soul, burst out during carnival like something long dammed up and Postmodernism and the novel in english 41 Tests raise the forms of strange primeval 5. Look into the shifts in narrative practice and creatures – the perversions which are, technique. I suppose, the psyche’s aliment […] Yes, who can help but love carnival when in it all debts are paid, all crimes expiated or committed, all illicit desires stated – without guilt or premeditation, without the penalties which conscience or society enact? But I am wrong about one thing 6. Discuss the excerpt in terms of the relativity – for there is one distinguishing mark of truth. by which your friend or enemy may still identify you: hands. Your lover’s hands, if you have ever noticed them at all, will lead you to her in the thickest press of maskers. Or by arrangement she may wear, as Justine does, a familiar ring – the ivory intaglio taken from the tomb of a 7. Dwell on the mythic suggestiveness of the dead Byzantine youth – worn upon text above. the forefinger of the right hand. But this is all, and it is only just enough. (Pray that you are not as unlucky as Amaril who found the perfect woman during carnival but could not persuade her to raise her hood and stand identified. They talked all night lying in the grass by the fountain, making love 8. Find the existentialist ideas rendered by the together with their velvet faces text and relate them to the reading pattern touching, their eyes caressing each suggested by the whole novel sequence. other. For a whole year now, he has gone about the city trying to find a pair of human hands, like a madman. But hands are so alike! She swore, this woman of his, that she would come back next year to the same place, wearing the same ring with its small yellow stone. And so tonight he will 9. Identify the metafictional stance and point to wait trembling for a pair of hands by its functioning as a disclaimer in itself. the lily-pond – hands which will perhaps never appear again in his life. Perhaps she was after all an afreet or a vampire – who knows? Yet years later, in another book, in another context, he will happen upon her again, almost by accident, but not 10. How much does the text anticipate the here, not in these pages too tangled already by the record of ill-starred further development of the story pattern? loves…) (adapted from Justine, 1982: 98) 42 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests 3.2. TEST TWO I do not know. This story I am 1. How is the postmodernist debate telling is all imagination. These illustrated? characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a 2. What purpose does the mentioning of convention universally accepted at the Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes serve? time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. […] You may think novelists always 3. Develop on the discussion on have fixed plans to which they work, authors/authority as embedded in the excerpt. so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture- 4. What is stated with regard to makers enjoy making furniture, as readers/readings? drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other 5. Focus on the reality/fiction borderline than the world that is. Or was. This is foregrounded. why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that 6. How does the text break with tradition at they begin to live. […] the level of structure and content? In other words, to be free myself, I must give [Charles], and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs Poulteney, their freedoms as well. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other Postmodernism and the novel in english 43 Tests freedoms to exist. And I must conform 7. Refer to the time and tense of the fictional to that definition. discourse. The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and 8. Concentrate on the existentialist decreeing; but in the new theological principles formulated. image, with freedom our first principle, not authority. I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real that the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new 9. Identify the rhetorical devices employed reality (or unreality) more valid; and I throughout the fragment. would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any more than you control – however hard you try, however much of a latter-day Mrs Poulteney you may be, your children, colleagues, friends or even yourself. (adapted from The French 10. Delineate the fictional worlds that words Lieutenant’s Woman, 1983: 85-87) build. 3.3. TEST THREE Philip to Hilary 1. How much ‘reality’ may be observed at the level of this epistolary section of the novel? Darling, I was stricken with guilt as soon as I saw your second air-letter this morning. Mea culpa, but it has been a rather hectic week, with the term, or quarter as they call it, beginning. […] I confess I had something of the raw-recruit feeling when I went to meet my classes for the first time this week. The system is so different, and the students are so much more heterogeneous than they are at home. They’ve read the most outlandish 44 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests things and not read the most obvious 2. Note the cultural clash obvious in the ones. I had a student in my room the letters and draw an outline of each. other day, obviously very bright, who appeared to have read only two authors, Gurdjieff (is that how you spell him?) and somebody called Asimov, and had never even heard of E. M. Forster. I’m teaching two courses, which 3. Identify the characteristics of the two means I meet two groups of students educational systems which help support three times a week for ninety minutes, Lodge’s commentary on the way literature or would do if it weren’t for the Third is/should be taught. World Students’ strike. There’s a student called Wily (sic) Smith, who claims he’s black, though in fact he looks scarcely darker than me, and he pestered me from the day I arrived to let him enroll in my creative writing course. Well, I finally agreed, and then on the first occasion the class met, 4. Analyse the symbolism of names with the what d’you think happened? Wily characters above. Smith harangued his fellow students and persuaded them that they must support the strike by boycotting my class. There’s nothing personal in it, of course, as he was kind enough to explain, but it did seem rather a nerve. Well, darling, I hope the length of 5. Develop on the academic as the source of his letter will make up for my the comic. remissness of late. Please assure Matthew that my house is not about to slide into the sea. As to Robin Dempsey, I think it’s unlikely that he’ll get a senior lectureship this year, promotion prospects being what they are at Rummidge, but not through any 6. Comment on the retreat of the authorial competition with me, I’m afraid. He presence. has published quite a lot of articles. All my love, Philip Morris to Desiree […] Desiree, your letter did nothing to lighten a heavy week. It isn’t true after all that there are no students at British universities: this 7. Extract the parodic and self-parodic week they returned from their instances in the text. prolonged Christmas vacation. Too bad, I was just beginning to get the hang of things. Now the teaching has thrown me back to square one. I swear the system here will be the death of me. Did I say system? A slip of the tongue. There is no system. Postmodernism and the novel in english 45 Tests They have something called tutorials, 8. Consider literature as an act of instead. Three students and me, for communication and analyse the roles played an hour at a time. We’re supposed to by the addressers and addressees. discuss some text I’ve assigned. This, apparently, can be anything that comes into my head, except that the campus bookshop doesn’t have anything that comes into my head. But supposing we manage to agree, me and the students, on some book of which four copies can be scratched together, one of them writes a paper and reads it out to the rest of us. After about three minutes the eyes of the 9. Discuss the main tropes in the text and other two glaze over and they begin to their cultural implications. sag in their chairs. It’s clear they have stopped listening. I’m listening like hell but can’t understand a word because of the guy’s limey accent. All too soon, he stops. “Thank you,” I say, flashing him an appreciative smile. He looks at me reproachfully as he blows his nose, then carries on from where he paused, in mid-sentence. The other two students wake up briefly, exchange glances and snigger. That’s 10. Find the autobiographical component of the most animation they ever show. the excerpt above. When the guy reading the paper finally winds it up, I ask for comments. Silence. They avoid my eye. I volunteer a comment myself. Silence falls again. It’s so quiet you can hear the guy’s beard growing. Desperately I ask one of them a direct question. “And what did you think of the text, Miss Archer?” Miss Archer falls off her chair in a swoon. Well, to be fair, it only happened once, and it had something to do with the kid’s period that she fainted, but somehow it seemed symbolic. Believe it or not, I’m feeling quite homesick for Euphoric State politics. What this place needs is a few bomb outrages. They could begin by blowing up the Chairman. (adapted from Changing Places, 1978: 122-125) 46 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests 4.4. TEST FOUR We ate in the kitchen, for which he 1. Identify the general feminist issues said he was grateful, making a joke of addressed in the excerpt. it. […] When we went back to the living room we were restless, did not sit down for a time, then did; but got up, and went strolling about, he to examine my – I nearly said our, since Freddie bought it – Picasso lithograph, and set of flower prints. Very nice, they are; but then, so is my living room, this whole flat. I offered him a 2. Discover their particular instantiations and drink. We both had another Scotch, comment on them. and then it was eleven o’clock and both of us knew it was all impossible. We were stricken, shocked, shaken, but it would not have been possible for us to go into our bedroom, take our clothes off and make love. I was thinking wildly, If all the lights were switched off, what then? A thought which utterly amazed me, so 3. Find the female stereotypes alluded to and foreign was it to me. discuss their reception. And he said, just as I thought it, ‘If the lights were off, Janna –but who would we be making love with, I wonder?’ And he was looking at me from an unfriendly distance, and even laughing, a most masculine laugh I judged it, full of irony – and finality. Yet I felt my spirits lift as I heard it, for 4. Develop on sexuality and there was a sanity there which had (meta)symbolism. been missing. Then he said, ‘I’m going. I shouldn’t have come.’ ‘Yes, you must,’ and I couldn’t wait for him to leave. […] As for me, his going was a load off me; literally, I felt myself expand and breathe again and want to move about and do things. So I did – tidied, 5. What are the barriers inferred and to what cleared up, put on the radio and extent are they overcome inside the text and danced a little by myself, which I do outside it? very often, coming back from Richard. But last evening, it was sheer relief. Yet of course I could have wept, too. Not so much for ‘the night of love’ which had been presenting itself to us so unpleasantly, like something on an agenda, provided for by circumstances and by careful planning – was that the rub? – but because we Postmodernism and the novel in english 47 Tests had both been in such disarray that 6. Concentrate on the man-woman we were foregoing the treat of a whole relationship and underline the deviations from day together, today, which we were to accepted/acceptable patterns. have spent free of all other ties. It goes without saying that I dreamed of Freddie, my lost love. Who was never my love. Or I don’t think he was. It is strange what a bad memory I have for the things that matter. I can remember exactly what I wore and what he wore, where we were: we were married in Kensington 7. Discuss the narrative technique employed Registry Office and Freddie’s parents to forward the text. and my parents gave a reception at the Savoy. My parents could not have afforded it by themselves. Joyce was my matron of honour. We never saw Freddie’s best man, or I don’t think we did, after the wedding. We were all jolly. I looked, I had no doubt, very pretty; after all, I was very pretty. But what was I feeling? I have no idea at 8. How much does the diary form contribute all. The honeymoon, motoring in the to facilitating introspection? Dordogne, is a mystery to me. I remember lovely scenery, wonderful food. I am sure we had wonderful sex, because we did. What did I feel? As for what he felt, I am sure I didn’t give that a thought. Did I ever ask myself what Freddie felt about anything, until after he was dead? And yet, what a 9. Observe the deliberate textualisation of credit I was all round! I do remember the self and discuss it in relation with the strolling back into the office, after the contemporary situation. honeymoon, and the satisfaction of it, as after a job properly done! I’ve done that, done it well, everything is as it should be! (adapted from The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1978: 122-125) 10. Point to the juxtaposition of temporal levels and the demarcation between the real and the fictional(ised). 48 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests 3.5. TEST FIVE Down among the women. What a 1. Discuss the impact that the title as refrain place to be! Yet here we all are by has upon the reader. accident of birth, sprouted breasts and bellies, as cyclical of nature as our timekeeper the moon – and down here among the women we have no option but to stay. So says Scarlet’s mother Wanda, aged sixty-four, gritting her teeth. On good afternoons I take the children to the park. I sit on a wooden bench while they play on the swings, or roll over and over down the hill, or 2. Mention the ideas overtly expressed and mob their yet more infant victims – the ones barely suggested. disporting in dog mess and inhaling the swirling vapours that compose our city air. The children look healthy enough, says Scarlet, Wanda’s brutal daughter, my friend, when I complain. The park is a woman’s place, that’s Scarlet’s complaint. Only when the weather gets better do the men come out. They lie semi-nude in the grass, and add the flavour of unknown 3. Refer to the oblique criticism addressed to possibilities to the blandness of our patriarchal society. lives. Then sometimes Scarlet joins me on my bench. Today the vapours are swirling pretty chill. It’s just us women today. I have nothing to read. I fold the edges of my cloak around my body and consider my friends. One can’t take a step without treading on an ant, says Audrey, who abandoned her children on moral grounds, and now lives with a married 4. Read the text again with a view to man in more comfort and happiness understanding the role of the immasculation of than she has ever known before. She, discourse. once imprisoned on a poultry farm, now runs a women’s magazine, bullies her lover and teases her chauffeur. How’s that for the wages of sin? With her children, his children, her husband, his wife, that makes eight. Eight down and two to play, as Audrey boasts. With the chauffeur’s wife creeping up on the outside to make nine. Sylvia, of course, got into the habit Postmodernism and the novel in english 49 Tests of being the ant; she kept running into 5. Which are the female stereotypes brought pathways and waiting for the boot to to attention and how is each perceived? fall. Sylvia too ran off with a married man. The day his divorce came through he left with her friend, and her typewriter, leaving Sylvia pregnant, penniless and stone deaf because he’d clouted her. How’s that for a best friend? You’ve got to be careful, down here among the women. So says Jocelyn, respectable Jocelyn, who not so long ago pitched her middle-class voice to its maternal coo and lowered her baby into a bath of scalding water. Seven years later the scars still show; not that Jocelyn seems to notice. In any 6. Are men associated with money? If so, case, the boy’s away at prep school why? most of the time. ‘Better not to be here at all’, says Helen to me from the grave, poor wandering wicked Helen, rootless and uprooted, who decided in the end that death was a more natural state than life; that anything was better than ending up like the rest of us, down here among the women. It is true that others of my women friends live quiet and happy married lives, or would claim to do so. I watch them curl up and wither gently, and without drama, like cabbages in early March which have managed to survive 7. What is the importance of time in the the rigours of winter only to succumb presentation of womanhood? to the passage of time. ‘We are perfectly happy,’ they say. Then why do they look so sad? Is it a temporary depression scurrying in from the North Sea, a passing desolation drifting over from Russia? No, I think not. There is no escape even for them. There is nothing more glorious than to be a young girl, and there is nothing worse than to have been one. Down here among the women: it’s what we all come to. […] Wanda’s flat, at the present time, is two rooms and a kitchen in Belsize Park. It won’t be for long. Wanda has moved twenty-five times in the last forty years. She is sixty-four now. Rents go up and up. Not for Wanda 50 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests the cheap security of a long-standing 8. How is the text narrated and by whom? tenancy. Wanda turns her naked soul to the face of every chilly blast that’s going: competes in the accommodation market with every long-haired arse-licking mother- fucking (quoting Wanda) lout that ever wanted a cheap pad. Wanda’s flat then, twenty years ago, when we begin Byzantia’s story, was two rooms and a kitchen in another part of Belsize Park. Some women have music wherever they go, Wanda has green and yellow lino. 9. What purpose do the breaks in the text Scarlet, who at this time is twenty, has serve? been sleepwalking on this lino since she was five and last felt the tickle of wall-to-wall Axminster between her toes. That was before Wanda left her husband Kim in search of a nobler truth than comfort. The lino used to be lifted, rolled, strung, tucked under some male arm and heaved into the removal van. Presently it cracked and folded instead of curling itself gracefully, and the male arms became impatient and scarcer, so Wanda hacked it into square tiles with a kitchen knife, and 10. Why do you think the urban setting was now when it’s moved it goes piled, and chosen? Wanda carries it herself. Amazing how good things last. The lino belonged in the first place to Wanda’s lover’s wife. This lady, whose name was Millie, bravely threw it out along with the past when she discovered about Wanda and her husband Peter – Peter for short, Peterkin for affection – but depression returned, sneaking under the shiny doors (three coats best gloss, think of that, in wartime!). (adapted from Down Among the Women, 1973: 5-7) Postmodernism and the novel in english 51 Tests 3.6. TEST SIX ‘An Anglo?’ Padma exclaims in 1. What central postcolonial issues are horror. ‘What are you telling me? You addressed in the text above? are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?’ ‘I am Saleem Sinai,’ I told her, ‘Snotnose, Stainface, Sniffer, Baldy, Piece-of-the-Moon. Whatever do you mean – not my own?’ ‘All the time,’ Padma wails angrily, ‘you tricked me. Your mother, you called her; your father, your grandfather, your aunts. What thing are you that you don’t even care to tell 2. Develop on hybridity: manifestations and the truth about who your parents perceptions. were? You don’t care that your mother died giving you life? That your father is maybe still alive somewhere, penniless, poor? You are a monster or what?’ No: I’m no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues… but there’s something more important than that. It’s this: when we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made 3. Discuss the central paradox of the no difference! I was still their son; they excerpt: being fathered by history and rewritten remained my parents. In a kind of by fiction. collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think out way out of our pasts… If you had asked my father (even him, despite all that happened!) who his son was, nothing on earth would have induced him to point in the direction of the accordionist’s knock-kneed, unwashed boy. Even though he would grow up, this Shiva, to be something of a hero. So: there were knees and a nose, a 4. Consider the metafictional aspect: the nose and knees. In fact, all over the dialogue between the narrator/author and the new India, the dream we all shared, narratee/reader. children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents – the children of the time; fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. ‘Enough,’ Padma sulks. ‘I don’t want to listen.’ Expecting one type of two-headed child, she is peeved at being offered another. Nevertheless, whether she is listening or not, I have 52 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests things to record. 5. How many diegetic levels may be Three days after my birth, Mary observed? Pereira was consumed by remorse. […] She gave up her job at the Nursing Home and approached Amina Sinai with, ‘Madam, I saw your baby just one time and fell in love. Are you needing an ayah?’ And Amina, her eyes shining with motherhood, ‘Yes.’ Mary Pereira (‘You might as well call her your mother,’ Padma interjects, proving she is still interested, ‘She made you, you know’), from that moment on, devoted her life to 6. How does structure contribute to bringing me up, thus binding the rest forwarding content? of her days to the memory of her crime. On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road clinic, and little Sonny followed me into the world – but he was reluctant to emerge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Dr. Bose, in the heat of the moment, pressed a little too hard, and Sonny arrived with little dents beside each of his temples, shallow forceps-hollows 7. Analyse the magic realism of the which would make him as irresistibly fragment. attractive as the hairpiece of William Methwold had made the Englishman. Girls (Evie, the Brass Monkey, others) reached out to stroke his little valleys … it would lead to difficulties between us. But I’ve saved the most interesting snippet for the last. So let me reveal now that, on the day after I was born, my mother and I were visited in a saffron and green bedroom by two persons from the Time of India 8. Focus on the role of the media in catching (Bombay edition). I lay in a green crib, the moment. swaddled in saffron, and looked up at them. There was a reporter, who spent his time interviewing my mother; and a tall, aquiline photographer who devoted his attentions to me. The next day, words as well as pictures appeared in newsprint… Quite recently, I visited a cactus- garden where once, many years back, I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape; and extracted from its Postmodernism and the novel in english 53 Tests insides the things I had placed there 9. Which personal and national histories are all those years ago. Holding them in developed upon and to what purpose? my left hand now, as I write, I can still see – despite yellowing and mildew – that one is a letter, a personal letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a newspaper cutting. It was a headline: MIDNIGHT’S CHILD. And a text: ‘A charming pose of Baby Saleem Sinai, who was born last night at the exact moment of our 10. Observe the multitude of ‘I’s and eyes Nation’s independence – the happy holding the text together and reread it from this Child of the glorious Hour!’ perspective. And a large photograph: an A-I top- quality front-page jumbo-sized baby- snap, in which it is still possible to make out a child with birthmarks staining his cheeks and a runny and glistening nose. (The picture is captioned: Photo by Kalidas Gupta.) Despite headline, text and photograph, I must accuse our visitors of the crime of trivialization; mere journalists, looking no further than the next day’s paper, they had no idea of the importance of the event they were covering. To them, it was no more than a human-interest drama. (adapted from Midnight’s Children, 1982: 118-119) 3.7. TEST SEVEN I hope you will agree that in these 1. What is Englishness defined in terms of two instances I have cited from his and why? career – both of which I have had corroborated and believe to be accurate – my father not only manifests, but comes close to being the personification itself, of what the Hayes Society terms ‘dignity in keeping with his position’. If one 2. Concentrate on the ‘(re)writing’ of the considers the difference between my national and personal self as obvious in the father at such moments and a figure excerpt. such as Mr. Jack Neighbours even with the best of his technical flourishes, I believe one may begin to distinguish what it is that separates a ‘great’ butler from a merely competent one. We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the 54 Postmodernism and the novel in english Tests story of the butler who failed to panic 3. Discuss the quality of the discourse in on discovering a tiger under the dining relation with the problematics envisaged. table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is. And let me now posit this: ‘dignity’ has to do crucially with a butler’s ability not to abandon the 4. Point to the subversive practices and professional being he inhabits. Lesser techniques employed. butlers will abandon their professional being for the private one at the least provocation. For such persons, being a butler is like playing some pantomime role; a small push, a slight stumble, and the façade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath. The great 5. What tropes are predominant and what butlers are great by virtue of their roles do they play? ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent 6. Disambiguate the I, the you and the we in gentleman will wear his suit: he will the text. not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity’. It is sometimes said that butlers 7. How may the existentialist references be only truly exist in England. Other interpreted? countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race is 8. Discuss the ratio seriousness/irony in the capable of. Continentals – and by and text. large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree – are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations. If I may return to my earlier 9. To what extent does the historical debate metaphor – you will excuse my putting support the argument formulated? it so coarsely – they are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming. In a word, ‘dignity’ is beyond such persons. We English have an important advantage over Postmodernism and the novel in english 55 Tests foreigners in this respect and it is for 10. Which might be the worlds colliding in this reason that when you think of a Mr. Stevens’ presentation and how is otherness great butler, he is bound, almost by perceived? definition, to be an Englishman. (adapted from The Remains of the Day, 1990: 67) 56 Postmodernism and the novel in english Glossary of Literary Terms GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS allegory form of narrative containing meanings different from or additional to those made explicit on the literal surface allusion reference made in a literary work to something that lies outside it analepsis flashback in narrative; reference to its past archetype theme, image, pattern, character, interest, situations, plot and personality recurrent in literature; myth aside also known as ‘disclamer’; text which is added to the fictional one proper and which comments on the latter’s form/content atmosphere the mood of a written work; it may be moral, sensational, emotional or intellectual bildungsroman ‘formation novel’; one which describes the protagonist’s development from early childhood to maturity and old age carnivalesque co-existence of multiple points of view available to plural interpretations; works which subvert the literary culture of the ruling classes and undermine their claim to moral monopoly characterisation the way in which characters are created and described within a narrative, with a view to producing different reactions in the reader(s); there are as many methods of characterisation as there are ways of narrating characters invented, imaginary people populating the universe of fiction; access to them is enabled by means of dialogue, action, description collage the technique of gluing together otherwise disparate elements; jumping from one topic to another by means of fragmentary images comic means of provoking sympathetic or derisive laughter counternarrative narrative which disturbs grand narratives with a political or manipulative function; innovative, anti-canonical cubism 20th century style of art, in which objects and people are represented by geometric shapes decadence the state of having low moral standards and being more concerned with pleasure than with serious matters decentring in deconstruction, a term used to denote the opposition to the centre (ideological, political, cultural, linguistic) defamiliarisation making strange; making the familiar seem totally new, as if it were seen for the very first time dénouement the final unfolding of a plot, satisfying or denying the reader’s expectations from a narrative description the creation or representation in words of objects, people, patterns of behaviour or scenes dialogism the expression of a variety of viewpoints, leaving the reader with open questions diction the choice of words in a literary text; the kind of vocabulary used diegesis narrative, telling; the elemental story level of a narrative; derived are: the homodiegetic level (of the story told in the first person by a character-narrator); the heterodiegetic level (of the story told in the third person by an authorial narrator); the intradiegetic level (of Postmodernism and the novel in english 57 Glossary of Literary Terms events that are part of the same story as the narrator’s); the extradiegetic level (of events that are part of a different story than the narrator’s) digression a straying away from the main subject/idea; free association disclaimer also known as ‘aside’; explanatory text running counter reader expectation discourse the ‘how’ of a narrative (as opposed to the ‘what’, or story pattern); also ‘voice’ ellipsis omission of essential words; as a figure of speech: the condensation of maximum meaning into the shortest form of words éloignement spatial or temporal distancing (usually with a view to looking back at once familiar details from a different standpoint) epiphany sudden meaning or insight carrying artistic potential epistolary means of telling a story through letters of participants or observers existentialism philosophical trend which stresses the importance of existence; takes the view that the universe is an inexplicable, meaningless and dangerous theatre where the responsibility of making choices determines the nature of this existence and allows a freedom which results in a state of anxiety (due to endless possibilities) expressionism European artistic movement meaning to show reality as distorted by an emotional or abnormal state of mind fable short moralising tale in which animals act like human beings fantastic unreal happening demanding supernatural and psychological explanation; creates a state of suspended understanding in the reader fantasy the most playful kind of imagining, separated from any kind of contact with the real world; in literature: a world which is parallel to the real one fauvism a 20th century style of painting which uses pure bright colours focalisation perspective or viewpoint adopted as the lens through which particular events, descriptions or characters are seen and reported framing story the story that embeds other, successive stories by means of mise- en-abîme free indirect style a narrative technique which uses the third person to refer back to a first person and juxtaposes direct and reported speech futurism early 20th century style of painting, music and literature that expresses the violent, active qualities of modern life grand narratives logical, chronological narratives covering whole lives, with metonymical characters and a moralising tendency; based on the Western evolutionary ideal of progress grotesque deliberate distortion and ugliness intended to shock, satirise or amuse gynesis feminist critical orientation concerned with constructions of women and womanhood gynocritics feminist critical orientation concerned with the characteristics of texts written by women historiography the literary re-writing of history, where the past may be ‘set right’ or made to move in different directions hybridity mixture, usually in a cultural acceptance idiolect the individual language system of a certain person (his/her pronunciation, choice of vocabulary, usage, grammatical forms) 58 Postmodernism and the novel in english Glossary of Literary Terms image word picture, description of some visible scene or object; more generally, reference to objects and qualities which appeal to the senses and feelings imagery commonly, the figurative language in a literary work; words referring to things that appeal to the senses imagism modernistic movement in art and literature aiming at a musical presentation without adornment imitation concept which underlies theories of realism; literature is seen as a mirror held up to life immasculation becoming masculine, authoritative, imposing; in feminist terms: violent, manipulative implied reader imagined, intended reader; also known as ‘encoded reader’ impressionism 19th century style of painting which uses colour instead of details of form to produce effects of light or feeling interior monologue means of narrating so as to convey in words the process of consciousness intertextuality the many and various kinds of relationships that exist between texts; from this perspective, literature is seen as a self-referential system or structure intratext text presupposed by a self-referential text irony saying one thing and meaning another; usually involving understatement, concealment or allusion juxtaposition deliberate multi-layering of narrative to produce special effects kűnstlerroman novel which focuses on the spiritual or artistic maturation of its protagonist leitmotif a recurrent motif (type of character, theme, image) logocentrism the centrality (authority) of the word/ language magic realism fiction which mixes and disrupts ordinary, everyday realism with strange, impossible and miraculous episodes and powers metafiction fiction about fiction; elitist, narcissistic, circular or repetitive; associated with ‘the literature of exhaustion’ mimesis imitation, reflection, mirroring of life/reality mirrors reflectors; functional characters used to reflect on the protagonist montage art form in which a piece of writing is made from parts belonging to different pieces Movement (the) a school of poetry associated with the fifties, whose representatives reasserted traditional values favouring a so-called ‘no-nonsense’ tone myth stories usually concerning gods or superhumans; a system of myths voicing the religious or metaphysical beliefs of a society; nowadays, that which culturally defines humanity as a whole narrated character/event that the narrative centres around narratee implied, imagined figure in the text to whom a narrative is told narrative story in which a selection of incidents is made so as to suggest some relationship between them; their sequencing is also significant for the point intended narrative technique method, skill of narrating (telling); manipulation of narrators and points of view narratology ‘science’ which studies the ‘grammar’ of narratives; analysis, categorisation and theory of narratives narrator he/she who tells the story; a narrator may be of an author type or of a character type (usually associated with a third or a first person Postmodernism and the novel in english 59 Glossary of Literary Terms narrative respectively); first person narrators may be: unreliable (a character whose opinions cannot be taken for granted since they are subjective) or autobiographical (supposedly objective); third person narrators may be: intrusive (commenting upon their stories) or impersonal (somehow detaching themselves from the stories they tell); omniscient (playing the God-game and pretending to know everything about everybody) or limited (presupposing a restricted, ‘human’ point of view) naturalism an extension of realism; it claims scientific accuracy nouveau roman French avant-garde, the experimental anti-novel of the 50s and 60s novel long fiction which concentrates on character and incident and usually contains a plot; it covers a wide range of styles and manners, subject matter and technique omniscience God-like knowledge of characters, actions, situations, thoughts paradox statement which is apparently self-contradictory; one that seems in conflict with reason and common sense parody imitation of a particular work intended to ridicule its specific features petits histoires subjective stories about individual experiences glimpsed at and allowed to connote plot the pattern of relationships existing between events; the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of a narrative; ‘discourse’ in narratology point of view the way in which the material and the audiences are approached by a narrator polyphony the co-existence of different voices (types of discourse) and points of view in a literary work prolepsis rhetorical term which refers to the anticipation of future events in a narrative; flashforward psychological style of writing in which the inner lives of the characters, their realism ideas, feelings, mental and spiritual development are realistically mirrored pun ‘play upon words’; one and the same word may lead to opposing meanings realism the literary trend associated with the increasing relevance of scientific investigation during the later half of the nineteenth century; seeking to show up the false hopes and fanciful aspirations of characters; mimetic, usually in opposition with fiction which describes life as full of thrilling adventure and fulfilled aspirations repetition recurrent use intended to emphasize an idea or to create a sense of pattern romantic new interest in nature, corresponding with the investigation of the self; exploring the complicated relationships between things, feelings and ideas setting the temporally-marked place against which characters are presented and which determines them to a certain extent short story small prose fiction concentrating on few characters, having a simple plot and numerous descriptions; it provides a swift dénouement (ending) stereotype standard, fixed idea or mental impression; a cliché, an ordinary perception made dull by constant repetition 60 Postmodernism and the novel in english Glossary of Literary Terms story the logical and chronological sequencing of events told; the ‘what’ of a narrative stream of the flow of human thought, usually rendered by means of free consciousness indirect style and interior monologue style the characteristic manner in which writers express themselves or the particular manner of an individual work; specific subject matter, vocabulary, imagery, diction etc. suggestion ideas and meanings of language that are beyond the bare literal significance surrealism 20th century artistic trend which connects unrelated images and objects in a strange way syllepsis a simultaneous presentation of events that pertain to the past, present and future of a narrative; a figure of speech, also known as zeugma, in which words or phrases with very different meanings are yoked together symbol something which represents something else (usually an idea or abstraction) by means of analogy or association theme abstract subject of a work; central idea (explicit or implicit) time in literature, it may be objective and/or subjective, the time of the clocks and/or the time of the mind tone manner or mood; attitude adopted by the ‘speaker’ in a literary work trope figurative language; words or phrases not used in their literal sense; sometimes distinguished from figures of speech, whose departure from ordinary speech is a matter of order or rhetorical effect, rather than of meaning Victorian having been produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1832- 1901); usually realistic voice authorial persona; speech vorticism modernist movement in art and literature redefining the image in more dynamic terms; a continuation of imagism witness character who does not participate in the events told; secret sharer Postmodernism and the novel in english 61 Glossary of Literary Terms 62 Postmodernism and the novel in english References REFERENCES FICTION DURRELL, LAWRENCE (1982) Justine, Oxford: Picador FOWLES, JOHN (1983) The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Great Britain: Triad/Granada FOWLES, JOHN (1983) The Magus, Great Britain: Triad/Granada ISHIGURO, KAZUO (1990) An Artist of the Floating World, London: Faber and Faber ISHIGURO, KAZUO (1990) The Remains of the Day, Great Britain: Triad/Granada LESSING, DORIS (1978) The Diaries of Jane Somers, London: Penguin Books LODGE, DAVID (1978) Changing Places, London: Penguin Books LODGE, DAVID (1984) Small World, London: Penguin Books LODGE, DAVID (1989) Nice Work, London: Penguin Books RUSHDIE, SALMAN (1982) Midnight’s Children, Great Britain: Picador RUSHDIE, SALMAN (1995) Shame, London: Vintage WELDON, FAY (1973) Down Among the Women, London: Penguin Books WELDON, FAY (1993) Affliction, London: Harper Collins WELDON, FAY (1996) Worst Fears, London: Harper Collins LITERARY HISTORY, THEORY AND CRITICISM CUNNINGHAM, VALENTINE (1994) In the Reading Gaol. Postmodernity, Texts and History, Oxford: Blackwell CURRIE, MARK (1998) Postmodern Narrative Theory, New York: St. Martin’s Press GASIOREK, ANDRZEJ (1995) Postwar British Fiction. Realism and After, London: Edward Arnold GHANDI, LEELA (1998) Postcolonial Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press GIROUX, HENRY et al. (eds) (1996) Counternarratives. Cultural Studies and Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces, London: Routledge GREEN KEITH; JILL LEBIHAN (eds) (1996) Critical Theory and Practice, London: Routlege HUTCHEON, LINDA (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism, England: Routledge LODGE, DAVID (1984) The Novelist at the Crossroads, London: Routledge LODGE, DAVID (1988) Modern Criticism and Theory, London: Longman LODGE, DAVID (1990) Language of Fiction, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. LODGE, DAVID (1992) The Art of Fiction, London: Penguin Books McEWAN, NEIL (1981) The Survival of the Novel. British Fiction in the Later Twentieth Century, London: Routledge McHALE, BRIAN (1987) Postmodernist Fiction, London & New York: Routledge Postmodernism and the novel in english 63 References MENGHAM, ROD (1999) An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction, Cambridge: Polity Press MOI, TORIL (2002) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London & New York: Routledge NASH, CHRISTOPHER (ed) (1994) Narrative in Culture, England: Routledge SAGE, LORNA (1992) Women in the House of Fiction, London: Macmillan Press 64 Postmodernism and the novel in english
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