Introduction to Postmodernism in Literature

The aim of this pamphlet is to introduce you to the concept of postmodernism. There is a
certain irony in this claim, however, as postmodernism is not really about facts, and it is
not really a concept. In its simplest form, postmodernism argues that all philosophical
and scientific discourse is not ‘fact’, but ‘fiction’. Philosophy and science are just
narratives that help to explain the world – they are texts that can be read in any manner
that the reader sees fit (now you see why statistics say exactly what people want them to
say – they do not reveal facts, but allow us to make interpretations). Postmodernism
argues that there are no facts, only fictions; that there is no truth, only interpretations that
we choose to believe. Likewise, postmodernism is not a ‘concept’ because this word
implies that postmodernism is one thing. It is not. Postmodernism is a portmanteau word
that means a number of different things to a number of different people, an ‘umbrella’
category that encompasses a number of different disciplines and readings that people just
so happen to call ‘postmodernism’.
As a result of this, you should understand that this pamphlet contains what I think is
significant about postmodernism. As such, it is biased and so although I try to remain
objective, it can only ever be my interpretation of what I think ‘postmodernism’ is. The
difficulty in describing postmodernism therefore even goes as far as what is contained in
this pamphlet. Here is what should be in it:
 The Postmodern Aesthetic
 Postmodernism as ‘late-Capitalism’
 A Brief Summary of Some Narrative Techniques Used By Postmodern Authors
What these inclusions attempt to demonstrate is the variety of what postmodernism may
mean, and allow you to develop some kind of understanding in order to approach your
examination. You will observe that it focuses mainly on literary fiction, which seems
important to me because you are examined on the literature of postmodernism, and why
certain types of narrative can be categorised as postmodern. Although postmodernism
exists in a variety of formulations, I am only offering what I consider to be the most
useful: it is not the only definition. In fact, all of this could be of no use to you
whatsoever, in which case you should just pick up a copy of Tim Woods’ Beginning
Postmodernism, Simon Malpas’ The Postmodern and his Introducing Postmodernism,
Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory, or one of the Routledge Critical Thinkers
series on a particular theorist, such as Baudrillard or Jameson.

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 THE POSTMODERN AESTHETIC, OR, POSTMODERNISM AS A STYLE

Jean-François Lyotard wrote a text called The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge. Its appendix is an important essay called ‘Answering the Question: What is
Postmodernism?’, which attempts to define what the postmodern means. Its title suggests
one of Kant’s essays, because Lyotard uses ideas of the Kantian sublime to justify the
postmodern. Do not worry too much about this phrase (‘Kantian sublime’) because I will
try to explain what Lyotard is talking about without resorting to this. Jean Baudrillard
also wrote an important book on postmodernism, Simulacra and Simulation, which
explored the way in which contemporary culture was more about simulation and
virtuality (think virtual reality here) than about reality. Baudrillard started out as a
Marxist and, although he ‘abandoned’ this line of argument, still intensely disliked the
idea of being called postmodern, although he still got put into that (ironic) canon of
postmodern theory, so he is included here although he probably would not want me to do
so. Hassan, the final critic in this selection, wrote a book called The Postmodern Turn,
which reveals some conflicting aspects of the postmodern ‘era’ or ‘style’. Here are some
important quotations from these texts, followed by an explanation of what they mean:

1. ‘Metanarratives’
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards
metanarratives. (Lyotard, xxiv)

This rather short statement says that metanarratives are bad. A metanarrative, something
which tells us how the world works in no uncertain terms, and which defines how we see
the world, is bad because it does not allow any argument. Lyotard uses Christianity,
science, and Marxism as examples of metanarratives because Christianity defines the
world through God, science defines the world through reason, and Marxism defines the
world through economics and modes of ‘production’. Each of these examples state one
way, and only one way, of seeing the world, and you cannot disagree without being
wrong. Let us use an extremely reductive example here: a critic reads a text, such as Jane
Eyre, and writes that it is about being female in a man’s world. A Marxist could turn
around and say, ‘well, you are ignoring the material aspects of the text’s production here’
because to the Marxist critic, in order to understand a text, you have to understand where
it came from, what class the author was, and what class is being celebrated in the text,
alongside any other number of economic determinants. Any other way of interpreting the
text is wrong. Likewise, science exists in a black-and-white world in which it is logic that
determines how the world works. If an idea is illogical, it must be wrong. Similarly, if an
atheist met a Christian and said ‘I do not believe in God’, the Christian would say that the
atheist is wrong. There is no argument, only certainty; no debate, only the fact of ‘my
way, or the highway’. Lyotard sees these metanarratives as causing all the ills in the
world, and the postmodern as the antidote to these. Lyotard argues that, in order to
encompass those differences that exist globally (for example, gender, race, class, culture),
we must have ‘incredulity towards’, that is, not believe, those ‘metanarratives’ that
reduce the differences that we see in the world.

2. ‘The Sublime Postmodern’

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 The postmodern is […] that which denies itself the solace of good forms
[…]; that which searches for new presentations […]. A postmodern artist
or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the works
he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and
they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying
familiar categories to the text or the work. Those rules and categories are
what the work of art itself is looking for. (Lyotard, 81)

What Lyotard is saying here is that art cannot be judged according to any rules external to
itself. Let us examine this. Lyotard could imagine a modernist writer saying something
along these lines: ‘stream-of-consciousness is good, and what the Victorians called
realism is bad, so any book that uses realism is bad’. These are proscriptive rules on what
is art and what is not; what is good art and what is bad art. This tells us two things: one,
that modernism was a metanarrative (one way of seeing the world, and anything else is
wrong), and that two, modernists believe that one form of art is superior to another. A
postmodern critic, such as Lyotard, would argue that in fact both ‘stream-of-
consciousness’ and ‘social realism’ are acceptable and, in fact, required to exist together
in order for the sense of difference to be preserved. That is why postmodern books are a
pastiche of other forms. By mingling different styles, typefaces, narratorial voices,
settings, themes, and histories within one text, the author is defeating the possibility of
interpreting the text in any one way. This is why, later in this section, Lyotard actually
characterises the ‘postmodern’ as the ‘pre-modern’: although modernism and
postmodernism share many of the same aesthetic values, postmodernism is what happens
before they are declared ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The postmodern is that which ‘denies itself’
(does not allow itself to become) ‘the solace of good forms’ (a modernist aesthetic).
Thus, even though postmodernism is chronologically ‘after’ modernism, it is aesthetically
‘before’ it.
Look at Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood, for example. By using four different
stories (Uncle Stephan’s story, which ‘frames’ the others; Eva’s story of persecution
under the Nazi regime; the historical story of the Portobuffole Jews; and the literary story
of Othello), Phillips is writing a postmodern text. He mixes styles (historical narrative,
stream-of-consciousness narrative, and literary narrative, all within one story). It is also
worth nothing that none of these are superior to the others. Each is equally as valid a way
of telling a story. The Nature of Blood confuses history with literature, and truth with
fiction, suggesting that individually these tell us nothing, but that together they tell us a
lot.
Furthermore, Lyotard suggests that when we read a work of art, we cannot say that
it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, which would be judging the art ‘according to a determining
judgment’, what we think is good or bad. What happens instead is that ‘Those rules and
categories are what the work of art itself is looking for’, which means that the text is not
written according to any pre-defined rules, but makes its own up as it goes along, and the
only way to judge the text is in how well it fits its own rules. This is what Lyotard means
when he says that the postmodern text ‘denies itself the solace of good forms’. By
refusing to fit into any pre-existing category, which would allow the author to follow the
conventions of the genre, the text strives to create its own rules, a more difficult option,

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but one that Lyotard sees as required so that the text does not fall back into the habit of
being a metanarrative.
An example here is to imagine the very first detective story. As a rewrite of
traditional romantic quests, this text involved travel (looking for clues) in the search (the
investigation) for the lost love object (the murderer or the stolen property). It was
original because it tried to escape from the conventions of the quest narrative. The
second detective story, however, accepted this first text as a ‘good form’, and repeated it
– what we understand to be a formulaic detective story. Now postmodernism tries to
rewrite everything it can get its hands on, exponentially exploding the older narratives
forms in a mish-mash of events and styles. Because it does not have ‘good’ and ‘bad’
definitions of art, it can use absolutely anything, from adverting slogans to drawings (for
example, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions), from movies to letters (for example,
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow), from scientific reports to literary criticism (for
example, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves). Postmodern texts use anything to say
anything, providing they never slip into telling the reader how to act: when reading
postmodern texts, always expect the unexpected.

3. ‘Freedom’
Give the public free access to the memory and data banks. (Lyotard, 67)

Rather than governments and businesses controlling who has information on what,
Lyotard is suggesting here that everyone should be allowed free access to information,
not just on themselves, but on anyone and everyone (arguably). This is because of the
adage ‘information is power’, and if someone has information on you that you cannot see,
you are being kept out of the loop of power. Lyotard proposes that rather than a
monolithic authority (equivalent to a ‘metanarrative’) controlling electronic information,
this control should be dissolved and given to absolutely anyone, and that that this would
localise knowledge (‘difference’ or ‘micronarrative’ equivalent) to the extent that
everyone would be happy. There are no prizes this time for guessing the problems: would
this work? No. Is it feasible? No. Would it be individuals, instead of governments, who
would take advantage of this ‘freedom of information’? Yes. Would you like a thief to
know exactly who had taken out the most money from which cash-point and when, and
then be able to access where that person lives? Human morality has not developed to the
extent that such measures are practicable, even if in an ideal world they would be
desirable. Enough said about that.

4. ‘Critical Theory’
From today, the only real cultural practice, that of the masses, ours (there
is no longer a difference), is a manipulative, aleatory practice, a
labyrinthine practice of signs, and one that no longer has any meaning.
(Baudrillard, 65)

Baudrillard is talking here about the fact that academics (indicated as ‘ours’) are
essentially in the practice of popular culture, which is now a mixture of ‘high’ and ‘low’
culture. In fact, critical acts are invalidated because criticism is not distinct from popular
culture, but implicated within it – how can you ‘criticise’ what you are ‘part’ of? There is

4
nothing superior about criticism, and it never in any way accesses the ‘truth’ of things.
What he means by ‘a manipulative, aleatory practice’ is that academic criticism, in fact
‘critical theory’ as a whole (the belief that we can stand outside culture to express what is
going on inside it), is essentially complete bunk. ‘Aleatory’ is connected to chance, the
throw of a dice, and by using this word Baudrillard is suggesting that criticism is random.
It does not refer to anything, and it does not mean anything, it just exists, does what it
does, and has no impact and no point. ‘A labyrinthine practice of signs’ refers to the fact
that criticism does not refer to reality, or the reality of culture in any way, but instead just
refers to itself. It is a maze that however long you explore, you will never reach the end.
The ‘signs’ aspect of this is important (remember your ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’),
because he is suggesting that criticism is all sign and no referent: all talk and no trousers.
This becomes especially clear in relation to the next quotation.

5. ‘The Simulacra’
It is the reflection of a profound reality;
It masks and denatures a profound reality;
It masks the absence of a profound reality;
It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure
simulacrum. (Baudrillard, 6)

This quotation is one of Baudrillard’s most famous statements. He is writing here about
the fact that signification (writing, art, science, etc.) goes through several phases in its
lifespan, until it reaches the last of the four. These are ‘the orders of the image’, which
analyses how a ‘simulacra’ comes about. A ‘simulacra’ is a representation of something
that appears to be identical to the original but is in fact a fake. I will break this down
slowly for you, because this is an important concept that is also incredibly difficult.
The first order of the image is that the image is ‘the reflection of a profound reality’.
What you want to be thinking about here is artistic terms (literature or painting). The
intention of ‘art’ at this stage is to represent reality, so we might consider the works of
Charles Dickens or Elizabeth Gaskell here as an allegory, what I am going to call ‘Will’s
Parable on the Orders of the Image’. Although they use fiction, these authors are trying to
represent the reality of social circumstance. There is industrialisation, so they include
industry in their works; there is a disparity between rich and poor, so they represent this
gap by showing poor people. They are not writing a fantasy or a fairytale, but a social
realist commentary on the state of the world. Thus, they reflect ‘a profound reality’.
The second order of the image is that the image ‘masks and denatures a profound
reality’. This corresponds to the idea that after Dickens and Gaskell were published,
people began talking about them. Note here that people began talking about them, not
about the reality that they were representing. This is significant because, although they
intended to bring the plight of those poor souls to society’s attention, what Dickens and
Gaskell actually succeeded in doing was getting themselves talked about. Thus, rather
than now being a ‘reflection’ of that reality, they actually begin to ‘mask’ it, because it is
hidden behind the veil of literature. Furthermore, because people are so busy reading
Dickens and Gaskell, and talking about what they have read, society is too busy to notice
that there are still people who are poor. Society begins to forget what the books were

5
about and so because of the representation, Dickens and Gaskell actually ‘denature’
reality. It becomes less real as a result of their writing about it.
The third order of the image, in which the representation ‘masks the absence of a
profound reality’ arises from the second stage. By this point, people are raving about
Dickens and Gaskell, wanting to get their autographs and talk about the books with
everyone they meet. The problem with this is the fact that people begin to realise that not
everyone understands what Dickens and Gaskell are talking about in their books, and so
the individual must convince everyone that there is only one way to read the texts, and
that is their way. This starts arguments about what Dickens and Gaskell meant, which are
of course of vital importance, of far more importance than whether those poor people are
still around or not. In fact, they are, but by now they are so busy being represented and
arguing what this means that they have no time for being poor anymore. Although they
are still poor, and although they have been represented as being poor, people are so busy
arguing about what Dickens and Gaskell meant that they forget to look back over their
shoulders and make sure that reality is still there. Reality is not there at all now, of
course, it disappeared long ago on a vacation trip to the Bahamas, but everybody is so
busy talking about the representation that they do not notice. Thus, the reality is now
absent, but with all this criticism and academic debate, nobody realises, and so the
representation actually begins to mask ‘the absence of a profound reality’.
The fourth and final order of the image is by this stage obvious. All that matters is
the academic argument, not whether they were actually ever any poor people or not. By
this stage, the representation ‘has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure
simulacrum’. Baudrillard is arguing here that it is not just that the arguments have lost
touch with reality, but in fact that the reality itself has disappeared, and the only thing left
is its simulated existence. Dickens and Gaskell are by this stage in the parable multi-
millionaires, doing the lecture circuits, and are so busy talking about what they
represented that this is the only reality that remains, and that this representation is not at
all real, but is only a simulacra, a simulation, of the original reality.
The point of this is to illustrate the half-Marxist, half-postmodern aspect of
Baudrillard. He is criticising academia and postmodernism for being unreal, for being a
simulation, for destroying reality so that it could talk about itself, to itself, for itself.
Postmodernism, in this argument, however, is configured as something neither negative
nor positive, because as much as Baudrillard dislikes this feeling of simulation, it also
allows a freedom, a sense of play, a feeling that what you say does not really matter, as
we are all just talking the same bunkum. Rather than reality being the connections
between physical objects, the only reality we now know is virtual, an internet connection
where we are so busy talking to each other, spinning our lines, our sentences, our
arguments about reality, that we do not realise that there is no reality left. We see this in a
phrase such as ‘World Wide Web’, which connects the idea of virtual communication
over a large, global network (‘World Wide’) with the idea of a trap (‘Web’). We are
caught in a virtual matrix, a telephonic reality: this is what Baudrillard means when he

6
says ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’. 1 Aesthetically, this also appears in the works
of Don DeLillo (such as White Noise and Mao II), whose texts read like a simulation at
the same time as criticising postmodernism for being a simulation. Postmodernism is just
a tad confusing, in that way.

6. ‘Double-coding’
Our earth seems caught in the process of planetization,
transhumanization, even as it breaks up into sects, tribes, factions of
every kind. Thus, too, terrorism and totalitarianism, schism and
ecumenicism, summon one another, and authorities decreate themselves
even as societies look for new grounds of authority. (Hassan, 96)

Hassan’s point here is to explain two counter-movements within the postmodern. He sees
the postmodern as both a ‘period’ and a ‘style’ (and is thus a good bridging medium
before the next section), in fact, as a kind of ‘periodised style’. This quotation was
chosen, however, because it shows the two counter-movements within postmodernism.
He is arguing that just as postmodernism implies globalisation (the world-wide web, the
sense of global community, and increased economic contact on a planetary scale), it also
implies the movement towards localisation about which Lyotard talks. Likewise, the
response to postmodernism is seen in the simultaneous rise of fundamentalism
(‘totalitarianism’) and splinter groups (‘terrorism’), of divides (‘schism’) and unifications
(‘ecumenicism’). When you were told in the lecture about ‘double-coding’ (the idea that
postmodern unites opposing ideas such as ‘high’ and ‘low’ art into pastiche, or ‘good’
and ‘bad’ ethics into aesthetics), this is what you were being told. The postmodern exists
as two contradictory moments, each pulling away from the other: as we get an increased
interest in ‘new age’ spirituality, we get an increased increase in conservative religions;
as one side increases environmental awareness that we are destroying the planet, the other
is sucking every last drop of oil and gasp of gas from under the earth to match increased
consumption and demand. The postmodern, then, is this pull in two different directions,
and when the postmodern is ‘over’, if it ever will be, you might not like which side wins.

1
Those among you who have seen The Matrix should be right at home here. When Morpheus says,
‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, he is directly citing Baudrillard. In the film, the virtual world has
become more real than the real world, which is now a nuclear wasteland, a ‘desert’. So ‘the Desert of the
Real’ implies that a) we have deserted reality, b) reality has deserted us, c) that reality is a desert, and d)
that our ‘virtual’ reality is also a desert. Keen-sighted viewers will also have noted that at the start of the
film, before Neo ‘follows the white rabbit’, the disk he gives to his contact is retrieved from a hollowed-out
copy of Simulacra and Simulation, the title of the book that this quotation is from. Now how postmodern is
that?

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 POSTMODERNISM AS ‘LATE-CAPITALISM’, OR, POSTMODERNISM AS A HISTORICAL
EPOCH

The second major aspect of postmodernism disagrees with the idea that postmodernism is
an aesthetic practice, and prefers to believe that it is in some way implicated with late-
Capitalist economic practice (consumerism). This view is primarily held by Marxist
critics (such as Fredric Jameson in The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, or Stuart Sim
in ‘Lyotard and the Politics of Antifoundationalism’) and cultural commentators (such as
David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity), for whom postmodernism is a threat
that must be countered.2 Marxism disagrees that it is a metanarrative, preferring instead to
see postmodernism as in some way an aspect of the enemy that encourages small-C
conservatism and an ignorance of economic realities (there were poor people, there are
poor people, and as long as postmodernism continues, there will always be poor people).
Cultural criticism disagrees with postmodernism for kind of the same reasons, although
cultural criticism’s problem is primarily in the fact that if it cannot make generalised
comments about culture it no longer has a point. If postmodernism is about breaking up
‘homogenous forms’, ‘unified concepts’ and ‘metanarratives’, basically your run-of-the-
mill general ideas on what is culture, what is race, and so on, then you cannot offer
cultural criticism without taking into account every single possible difference that could
arise in a culture. You could not for instance say, ‘British society has developed towards
a much more left-wing stance than was seen at the turn of the previous century’, because
you have to define a) what you mean by ‘British’, b) what you mean by ‘society’ and
who you are including in that word, c) how British society is constructed historically and
geographically, d) what you mean by a ‘left-wing stance’, because it could be connected
with economics or with personal freedom, and e) when exactly ‘the turn of the previous
century’ occurred and according to which calendar (Chinese, Christian, Aztec, by
historical events, or by the strict Western 31 December, 1900). This is obviously quite
arduous, as every single statement needs a further fifteen to get anywhere near to
qualifying it. Other types of critic also disagree with postmodernism, such as
fundamentalist Christian Anthony Harrigan (‘Post-Modern Nihilism in America’), who
sees postmodernism as part of the moral decline of Western culture. 3 According to these
critics, the abandonment of God leads to moral anarchy (do we see a metanarrative in this
then? – ‘my way or the highway’).

1. ‘Spin vs. Substance’

Minimizing the authority of the cultural producer creates the opportunity
for popular participation and democratic determinations of cultural
values, but at the price of a certain incoherence or, more problematic,
vulnerability to mass-market manipulation. (Harvey, 51)

Lyotard’s perception of the postmodern is seen in the importance of the local instead of
global, the movement from the metanarrative to a number of micronarratives, and the
deferral of a centralised power to a number of small local councils. This is what might be
called the ‘localisation of power systems’. Harvey’s response to this is to point out the

2
Stuart Sim’s article is found in Radical Philosophy, 44, 8-13.
3
Anthony Harrigan’s article is found in St. Croix Review, 31:5, 24-32.

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ambiguities of this new system. Harvey is talking about poststructuralism and
postmodernism here, because it is extending Barthes’ ‘the death of the author’ (where the
reader, not the author, has control over a text’s meaning) to a cultural scale: governments
and educational institutions no longer have absolute control over the consumption of the
cultural artefact (text, painting, policy statement etc.). The ‘author’ of policy (the
government) no longer controls the reading (public perception) of the text (the policy).
So, what does this accomplish? Well, according to Harvey, this is good because it allows
for ‘popular participation and democratic determinations of cultural values’, that is,
individuals can decide for themselves what these things mean and the government has to
take into account the public perception of its policy decisions. However, whereas Lyotard
is purely optimistic about this, Harvey is not totally convinced. This is achieved, argues
Harvey, at ‘the price of a certain incoherence’ and a ‘vulnerability to mass-market
manipulation’.
Note the language that has been used in the above paragraph, by both Harvey and
me: ‘consumption’, ‘values’, ‘price’, and ‘mass-market’. This is the language of
economics, where everything is determined by its value, its cost, and how it is consumed.
It is asking, in effect, how do we sell meaning? Thus, the point Harvey is getting at is that
although the ability of the public to decide what it wants to ‘buy into’ seems to be a
freedom of choice, it actually runs the risk of being susceptible to advertising – ‘mass-
market manipulation’. We can see this shift in the ‘New Labour’ government, and all the
media concern of ‘spin over substance’. In a postmodern world, it does not matter what
you say, but how you say it: what Stuart Sim calls ‘the authority of charisma’ (11). If we
believe what we are being told, we buy into it, and so if the government can persuade us
that something is a good thing, then we will believe it. So the individual is not getting any
more free, but is instead persuaded to believe the reading that is offered to them: control
of meaning is not devolving from the ‘author’ to the ‘reader’. This is the ‘manipulation’
of the reader by the author – the ability to predict and persuade the reader to buy into a
way of thinking so that, although it is our decision, it is a decision that we are being
programmed to make. Obviously, this historicises postmodernism inasmuch as it is a
‘product’ (yet another thing to buy into) of economic practice and a product of media
manipulation (which requires a certain technological level of media saturation to achieve
anything culturally powerful).

2. ‘The Historical-Geographical Condition’

The experience of time and space has changed, the confidence in the
association between scientific and moral judgements has collapsed,
aesthetics has triumphed over ethics as a prime focus of social and
intellectual concern, images dominate narratives, ephemerality and
fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics,
and explanations have shifted from the realm of material and political-
economic groundings towards a consideration of autonomous cultural
and politic practices. […]
Postmodernism can be regarded, in short, as a historical-geographical
condition of a certain sort. (Harvey, 328)

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This second observation by Harvey is rooted in what he calls ‘overaccumulation’. This is
the overaccumulation of styles, choices, historical ‘facts’, and economic productivity.
Basically, this concept is based upon the idea that there is too much to deal with in the
postmodern world; too many lights, too many designs, too much sensory ‘white noise’
(and here we see DeLillo’s White Noise cropping up again). Late-capitalism,
demonstrated by the rise of consumerism, has also led to an overabundance of ‘things’,
too much for humanity to deal with. This leads, in Harvey’s view, to a period of ‘time-
space compression’ where everything becomes fragmented. Imagine that each year of
history is a book. These books are placed on top of one another, book after book, until the
entire stack just collapses. Until the collapse, everything seems ordered and makes sense,
with 1900 coming before 1901 and after 1899. Eventually, however, the stack becomes
too high and just one more book will cause the entire stack to fall onto the floor in a
complete mess. So, rather than 1900 following 1899, as it would in a nice orderly stack,
our pile of books on the floor suggest that first comes 2037, then 1402, then 1864, then
1969. Everything becomes muddled, and history and space become just as muddled as
everything else does. This is postmodernism for Harvey – a historical period in which
everything becomes muddled.
If we go to the quotation from Harvey then, this is what he means by ‘the
experience of time and space has changed’. Time and space no longer follow any kind of
order, and so our perception of a linear timeline becomes replaced with a sense of
disorder, a sense that time and space hop around willy-nilly, and make no kind of sense.
His summary of ‘the postmodern condition’, although it may seem tentatively similar to
Lyotard’s, is in fact markedly different. ‘Confidence’ has ‘collapsed’, ‘aesthetics has
triumphed over ethics’, and ‘ephemerality and fragmentation take precedence over
eternal truths and unified politics’. This is not the celebration of the postmodern that we
see in Lyotard, but an ambiguous ‘well, OK’ about what postmodernism is. Here is
another way of writing Harvey’s statement:
In the postmodern age, we have no confidence in either science or morals; we
have no sense of doing right or wrong, but only care about how something
looks; we do not work towards any kind of coherent goal for human
emancipation and knowledge but just a series of temporary solutions which
then have to be changed later on.
This, as you can tell, is a much more cautious, perhaps even completely negative,
perception of ‘the postmodern condition’. Although he states all the same ‘facts’ of
postmodernism as Lyotard, Harvey roots postmodernism in the capitalist sense of
‘overaccumulation’: too much has been produced and now we do not know what to do
with it all. His sense of the postmodern is as an historical period, coming after things as it
does – it is POST the MODERN – and Harvey is also less optimistic about the
postmodern abandonment of ethics, science, morality, and truth, than Lyotard is.

3. ‘The Postmodern Metanarrative’

The narrative with no point, no moral? Open-endedness from which no
value-judgements can be extracted to help guide future action, future
response? This is no less ideologically-bound a programme in its
privileging of pleasure over moral responsibility. […]

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 Tending to your own narrative, agonistically or otherwise, looks very
much like a conservative tactic to keep change to a manageable minimum
within the confines of a comfortable status quo. (Sim, 10)

Sim is a Marxist critic along the lines of Jameson, and his problem with postmodernism
is because it is not politically engaging. Now, we saw earlier that Lyotard’s invocation to
open the databanks was politically naïve at best, but Sim goes further than this, arguing
that postmodernism essentially supports the ‘status quo’. His argument is that
postmodernism is so busy dithering about a pretty way of doing things, like writing books
and painting pictures, that it has no clue about the ‘real world’. Because of its aesthetic
nature, it cannot be politically active. He further argues that this is not political
impotence, because that implies an inability to change things, but political conservatism:
why bother to change things when ‘everything’s alright for me, Jack’. The postmodern
process of ‘tending to your own narrative’, that is, looking after yourself, does not allow
the possibility of changing things on a global scale, which is what Marxism intends. Thus
Sim characterises postmodernism as a ‘not in my back yard’ philosophy – if it does not
affect the individual, why should individuals worry about third-world debt, or the
starving in Africa?
Furthermore, Sim also argues that postmodernism is not an ‘incredulity towards
metanarratives’ but is, in fact, a metanarrative itself. When it tells people to not believe in
metanarratives, it is telling them only to believe in postmodernism (or they are wrong).
This is what Lyotard calls a metanarrative and so postmodernism is, for Sim, also a
metanarrative. This is a thornier issue to resolve, and although there are subtleties of
arguments here on either side, it should suffice to say that Lyotard thinks Sim is wrong
and Sim thinks Lyotard is wrong: another ‘academic’ argument, because while they are
busy arguing over this, neither Lyotard nor Sim are feeding the starving or providing
sanitation to those who need it. Of course, there are entire volumes written about this
issue, but we are getting off the point if we go into them here, so I will just carry on.

4. ‘The Modern’
ideological or aesthetic repudiation of the modern. (Jameson, 1)

This is Jameson’s definition of the postmodern. He is saying, like Lyotard, that

postmodernism rejects those standards that are ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’. Lyotard sees this
repudiation tied to an aesthetic practice, arguing that you can be postmodern in periods
prior to the twentieth century if you follow a certain set of aesthetic practices (this is why
he characterises it as ‘pre-modern’ in some instances). Jameson, however, argues that
postmodernism is firmly rooted in the rejection of modernism and modernist tenets and
therefore is quite obviously tied to a historical period. In order to ‘repudiate’ the modern,
you must come after it. As a Marxist critic of culture, Jameson feels that postmodernism
represents ‘the cultural dominant of the logic of late-capitalism’ (Jameson, 45) because
the dominant economic practice after modernism (which is ‘capitalism’) is late-
capitalism, or consumerism, which must obviously therefore be tied to the postmodern.
Postmodernism is therefore a product of Western civilisation, arguably the product of the
decadence of a Western civilisation that has every luxury it requires, and can so spend

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time consuming the past. Again note the terms: ‘product’, ‘luxury’, ‘spend’, ‘consuming’.
It is all about economics.

5. ‘Collective Nostalgia’
Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto
a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a
missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and
the emergent ideology of a generation. (Jameson, 19)

Jameson is here articulating the sense of postmodernism as the idea of a pastiche of

historical forms and styles. What he means by ‘nostalgia films’ are films that try to set
themselves retrospectively in the past, such as George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which
although made in 1973, attempted to recreate 1950s America. Jameson’s problem with
such films is that they can only ever represent the historical ‘style’ of a period, not how it
was. Postmodernism, by using the past as a series of equally valid narratives, reduces
each period to a ‘look’ rather than a particular expression of cultural values. This is the
‘depthlessness’ that features so highly in Jameson’s definition of the postmodern: there is
no historical depth, only a fashionable veneer. Now, as a Marxist, even one who is
interested in postmodernism, Jameson argues that this is not actually bringing into light a
historical way of thinking but is celebrating a particular look. In this way, we could see
films such as Dangerous Liasons, or screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s works, as just
another set of costume dramas. They do not allow us an understanding of what it was like
to live at that time, but only how the period looked. This is what he means by ‘a missing
past’ being ‘refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology
of a generation’. Rather than allow us to understand what a particular period was like,
such films demonstrate what we understand by that period. That is, films such as
Shakespeare in Love do not tell us anything about the Renaissance, but a lot about how
we perceive the Renaissance and what values we as a culture are espousing – ‘the
collective and social level’ of Jameson’s argument. Therefore, in the case of Shakespeare
in Love we understand the textuality of history (history is just another text, not a truth),
and about gaudy fashions. This has absolutely no bearing on what the Renaissance was
really like. Therefore, postmodern films often reveal what is going on in a culture now,
not what was going on then. This is obviously historical for Jameson as although it tells
us nothing about the past, such a manner of representation is obviously tied to ‘now’, and
‘now’ can always become ‘then’.

6. ‘The Death of God’

The essence of post-modernism is nihilism – the denial of any meaning or
purpose in existence – or, more exactly, the triumph of nihilism in the
societies of the Western world. It is a phenomenon identical with atheism
as it denies the existence of any permanent ethical order. It marks the
turning away from the moral teaching that have come down to us from
Moses and brought to their highest levels in Christianity. (Harrigan, 24)

Anthony Harrigan’s polemic against postmodernism is not well known, but I have
included it for you to give you a sense of a (fundamentalist) Christian response to

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postmodernism. Harrigan’s argument is incredibly tenuous, as it asserts that
postmodernism is evil because it does not believe in God, and for the following
(arguably, completely un-postmodern) reasons: a) people are not polite to anybody any
more, b) people are allowed to do artwork which mocks the Christian faith, c) ‘road-rage’
is on the increase, and, finally, d) ‘America ain’t what it used to be in my day’.
Harrigan’s response is a knee-jerk reaction to what he perceives to be the postmodern
threat: nihilism, the ‘belief in nothing’. Now, I will break down this response for you to
show in what ways he is wrong, and in what ways he is right, although he does not argue
it very well.
Is postmodernism nihilistic? Well, some say yes and some say no, as with all things.
In some ways, postmodernism could be seen as nihilistic because it says that there are no
absolute morals. However, it replaces absolute morals with contingent (temporary) ones,
which are true only for small groups of people for short periods of time. So it depends on
how you see it. Next, postmodernism asserts that there is no ‘purpose in existence’
according to Harrigan. Well, yes and no. It argues that there is no absolute purpose in
existence but that there are contingent purposes of existence, again reliant upon what you
think at any particular time and place. Again, it depends on how you see it. Harrigan’s
problem with postmodernism is, in essence, that it is not Christianity. As Christianity is
‘the highest levels’ of ‘moral teaching’ then postmodernism must be inherently evil. He
compares postmodernism with Nazism because neither one believes in God, and
therefore postmodernism must be ‘wrong’. Harrigan is ‘bringing out Hitler’ to show that
what he might call (but never does) ‘bleeding-hearts liberals’ just do not understand that
what they are doing is wrong and un-Christian. Now, there are a few people, I suspect,
who would disagree with this, including some Christian people who believe in certain
aspects of postmodern philosophy such as ‘thou shalt not kill’ (ring any bells?) and ‘treat
everybody you meet with respect’. These people are not any more evil than Harrigan is;
they have just adopted a Christian (rather than belligerent) attitude towards
postmodernism.
Perhaps the most important thing about this quotation is that Harrigan sees
postmodernism as a historical period that epitomises the decline of the Christian religion.
Although Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ pronouncement was made in the 1880s, it seems as
though there was always a chance that we might return to the fold. However, by the latter
half of the twentieth century – the postmodern era – it is too late, and now we are all
sinners against God. So, for Harrigan, postmodernity is a historical period in which
humanity en masse has abandoned God.

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 A BRIEF SUMMARY OF SOME NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES USED BY POSTMODERN
AUTHORS, OR, SOME VERY DIFFICULT WORDS THAT YOU HAVE TO TRY TO
UNDERSTAND

This list is by no means exhaustive, and each of the techniques mentioned here is in some
way involved in the promotion of ontological instability and epistemological
instability, which means that the reader is unsure where the book ends and reality starts,
and what is true and what is not (‘ontology’ is connected to reality, ‘epistemology’ is
related to knowledge). Note that some of these techniques also appear in modernist
literature, although the distinction is that postmodernism takes these techniques to
extremes. Note also that not all texts that show these things can be considered
‘postmodern’, for various reasons (they could be avant-garde, or surrealist, for example).
If there is a preponderance of these techniques, however, it suggests that the text may be
considered postmodern. Some of these terms are critically accepted, and some of these
are my loose definitions to give you the idea.

Authorial Inclusion: The author of the book places himself in the book itself. Thus, in
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy we meet a character called Paul Auster, and in
Steve Erickson’s Arc d’X we meet Steve Erickson, who actually dies within the
text. This suggests that the author is just another character (in which case, who is
the reader?). It can also appear in the form of a direct break in the narrative by the
narrator, which emphasises the book’s textuality, e.g., when the author-narrator of
Steve Katz’s The Exaggerations of Peter Prince says, ‘I ought to grab hold of
myself and finish this novel without characters’.
Chinese-box Worlds: These are narratives, which, in the manner of those famous
Russian babushka dolls, have worlds within worlds within worlds. Borges’ famous
short story ‘The Circular Ruins’ suggests that we are all just dream-images in
another narrator’s dream, who is in turn being dreamed by another dreamer, and so
on up (and down) the chain. If the ‘highest’ dreamer (the one who is dreaming the
dreamer of the dream of the dreamer of the dream…) is also the ‘lowest’ dreamer
(the one who is being dreamed by the dreamer who is being dreamed by the
dreamer who is being dreamed…) then this demonstrates circularity. And if you
understand that, then you are better than I am. Often indicates metalepsis.
Circularity: When the text closes on the same note on which it started. An example of
this would be Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah,
which opens and closes on the phrase: ‘There was a Master come unto the earth,
born in the holy land of Indiana’. We might also see John Barth’s ‘Frame-Tale’
(‘Once upon a time there was a story that began…’ continuously looping on a
Möbius strip) in this way, because its beginning is its ending (or its end is its
beginning, or it is circular, having no ending and no beginning). Circularity often
involves the use of metalepsis to confuse the reader further, as Barth’s story could
involve the continued deferral of narrative layers to infinity, as could Bach’s. Thus,
circularity is also about open endings, as although a story may seem closed, it may
just be being deferred to another narrative level.
Crossover Forms: Where the form of the narrative emphasises a different form from the
‘traditional’ narrative lay-out. Seen in works such as Italo Calvino’s The Castle of

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 Crossed Destinies, which describes the story through the medium of tarot cards, and
George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which uses a hotel as the form of the novel
and tells the story by moving between its ‘rooms’.
Fictionality: Fictionality occurs when the narrator, in the middle of a narrative, decides
to tell you that he/she is not telling the truth, or implies that what they are saying
might not be entirely accurate. We can see this in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They
Carried, in which he tells the ‘truth’ of the Vietnam war by lying, telling us that
apart from the fact that he is a forty-three year-old writer, ‘almost everything else is
invented’. Also seen in Winterson’s The Passion: ‘I am telling you stories. Trust
me’.
Intertextuality: The appearance of other texts within the text. This is sometimes in the
manner of a citation (for example, when Zadie Smith’s White Teeth quotes from a
Jehovah Witness’ pamphlet) and sometimes in the inclusion of characters from
different stories (the appearance of characters from Greek myths in John Barth’s
fiction, for example). Sometimes intertextuality even entails the appearance of
characters from texts by the same author (the character of Quinn appearing in most
of Paul Auster’s books, and Steve Erickson’s female characters appearing in some
of his other stories).
Magic Realism: A form of postmodern writing that relies upon a strict realist approach to
describe the most unlikely (and impossible) occurrences. Paul Auster’s Mr Vertigo
and Timbuktu are examples of this, dealing with flying boys and talking dogs
respectively. We also see this is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, where we
meet children with special powers. What distinguishes this form of writing from
fantasy is the realist way in which these events are described, making them seem as
though they are aspects of the everyday world.
Metafiction: A form of writing in which the narration is not concerned with what
happens (story) so much as how the story is told (narration). Metafictional novels
do not narrate events, but talk about how you can narrate events. Note that this is
distinct from the modernist tradition of metafiction (found in authors such as
Virginia Woolf) because a postmodern text explicitly states this fact in relation to
its textuality, literally saying ‘I am a text’. To use an example that is not
necessarily postmodern, one might think of Ian McEwan’s Atonement here, because
after the entire story is finished, it is revealed to be a written account. We might
also think of those annoying books which end ‘I woke up and it was all a dream’ as
examples of the metanarrative form.
Metalepsis: The appearance of other narrative ‘layers’ within one story. To give you a
simple example, look at this sentence: ‘I met Jane today, and she said, “I saw Sally
yesterday”.’ In this sentence, the first narrative layer is indicated in the statement ‘I
met Jane today’. The second narrative layer is indicated by ‘I saw Sally yesterday’,
which is Jane’s story, not the narrator’s. It is a narrative within a narrative.
Metalepsis can take the form of stories within a story, such as Calvino’s If on a
winter’s night a traveller, which starts ten different books in alternate chapters to
the primary narrative layer (1-start of book one-2-start of book two-3-start of book
three, and so on), in order to indicate a recurring theme. We also see this in Jeanette
Winterson’s The Passion, where in the chapter ‘The Zero Winter’, Henri meets
Villanelle, who tells her story ‘within’ his, and Jeff Noon’s Vurt, where the story is

15
 ‘framed’ by the taking of a feather, and which includes a ‘Tapewormer’ metavurt
feather. Metalepsis can get very confusing for the reader, as sometimes it becomes
so confused that the story ends on a different level from where it started, which
implies that the primary narrative layer never finishes. Both authorial inclusion
and textual inclusion can be examples of metalepsis.
Open Endings: Just as some postmodern texts demonstrate circularity, others
demonstrate open endings. These are endings in which the text never really finishes.
Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘etc.’ at the close of Breakfast of Champions, suggests openness,
as does Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds and John Fowles’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, which each have three possible endings. Could be called
‘anti-teleological’, because it resists (anti-) any possibility of an ending
(teleological).
Pastiche: A form of writing which incorporates many different styles within the same
text. We have already seen that Phillips’ The Nature of Blood is an example of this,
because he mixes history with literature, but we could also see this in Smith’s White
Teeth, when Samad’s thoughts appear on the page in the form of a placard, or in
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, where each chapter (inasmuch as the text
has ‘chapters’) is separated by old-fashioned movie breaks: ‘□□□□□’. Related to
crossover forms.
Puns & Playing: Postmodern novels love to play with language. Hidden throughout a
number of postmodern novels are little nuggets of humour, such as in Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49, which has a radio station called ‘KCUF’ (if you don’t get it,
try reading it backwards). This ties in with the playfulness seen in Perec’s novel A
Void and novella, ‘Jewels, Secrets, Sex’. A Void is a novel with no occurrence of
the letter ‘e’ anywhere in it. What did Perec do with them? Well, he put them in
‘Jewels, Secrets, Sex’, which has no other vowels other than the letter ‘e’. This is
especially impressive given the fact that these texts were originally published in
French and yet both the original and the translation still hold to this rule. Another
bizarre example of playing is when John Barth writes in ‘A Night-Sea Journey’
about a spermatozoa swimming during intercourse, who (which?) is actually the
narrator of the story (it took me four pages to cotton on to this fact). Postmodern
literature is full of puns, and just tends to enjoy playing with language and ideas
rather than actually having to say anything.
Textual Inclusion: Where the text itself appears in the text. An example of this is in
House of Leaves, where we are told that the narrator is reading the exact book,
‘House of Leaves’, that we are holding. This is obviously logically impossible (how
can they read what has not yet been written?), but that is in many ways precisely the
point.
Textuality: The method of narrating that indicates the book is a book. Instead of
allowing the reader to suspend disbelief and enter the reality of the text, this
technique forces the reader to accept the fact that he/she is reading a book, for
example, when Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru states ‘Something has gone wrong
with the narration owing to textual disturbances’.

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