What is "postmodernism"?

The concept of post-modernism: generally speaking, it is a cultural trend of thought, which originated in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This is fully reflected in religion, architecture and literature. It is essentially different from modernism.

The emergence of postmodern literature naturally has its historical and cultural background. It is generally believed that the direct cause of the rise of postmodern literature is the Second World War and the turbulent social life in the West after the war. The appalling atrocities of fascism and the atomic bombing in the Second World War gave people a great shock, which made people have fundamental doubts about the social moral standards and values that they have been following in the past. After the war, the internal contradictions in capitalist society further intensified. Take the United States as an example The black people's struggle against violence, the women's liberation movement, the student movement against the Vietnam War, and the assassination of President Kennedy ... The society is becoming more and more turbulent and people's spirit is becoming more and more confused. "We have a rich society, and we also have chaotic values. The United States we are facing is not the early United States." This society is "a relatively comfortable, semi-welfare and semi-barracks society"; "All residents become passive, indifferent and split into atoms"; "Traditional loyalty, ties of mutual relations and communication are all relaxed or even decomposed"; When a person becomes a consumer, he is mass-produced just like the products, entertainment and values he enjoys, ingests and absorbs.

The emergence of such an dehumanized society is inseparable from the rapid development of western social science and technology. The development of science and technology makes the society informationized, stylized and computerized, and the society is more and more like a sophisticated big machine, turning everyone into a pinion and a small screw in a fixed position. In the past, the excessively intensified contradiction between labor and capital has been transformed into a contradiction between technology and management. Since the 20th century, the development of mass media, transportation and communication has made the whole mankind more and more closely linked, the space barrier has been quickly crossed, the world has become smaller and smaller, and human beings live together in the "global village". The great development of modern publishing, news, film and television has increased mutual understanding between people. An unprecedented large-scale international cultural exchange era has begun in human history, which is the so-called "information age". This era is no longer "knowledge is power", but "information is benefit" and "benefit is purpose". With the rapid development of the modern world and modern knowledge, people are more and more aware that the existence of knowledge and things is not determined by the eternal essence, but by their own styles and relationships.

The development of high technology will inevitably bring about large-scale mechanical replication and digital replication. Since then, there has been no truth and original work, and everything has become simulacra and falsehood. Large-scale industrial production eventually makes culture a product of mechanical reproduction, and these products then enter the circulation field as commodities. Videos, recordings, books, CDs, floppy disks and other products are copied endlessly, which makes us lose our personality, style and even private life. Manuscripts and originals no longer exist, everything is like images, and the whole world is floating on the surface, with no sense of reality. Intertextuality and hypertext are everywhere. People suddenly and sadly find themselves living in a false world.

The rise of postmodern literature is also closely related to the prosperity of structuralism, especially post-structuralism. Post-structuralism exposes the prejudice and contradiction of western traditional metaphysics, breaks the established literary standards, and attributes meaning and value to bigger problems such as language, system and relationship. Post-structuralism holds that the text is not a fixed place where the author and the reader meet, but an ideographic relationship. Meaning is uncertain, and all meanings are changing in "extension". Influenced by post-structuralism, cultural thoughts such as feminism, new historicism and western Marxism further extend this spirit of deconstruction center and authority to all aspects of literary creation and literary research.

Obviously, the above post-modern philosophy provides a theoretical basis for post-modern literature. Postmodern literature is the image expression of postmodern spirit. Generally speaking, the basic characteristics of postmodern literature can be summarized into three aspects: the uncertainty of creative principles, the diversity of creative methods, language experiments and discourse games. Let's talk separately:

1. The creative principle of uncertainty

Donald barthelme, an American writer known as "the father of a new generation of postmodern writers", declared: "The song in my song is the principle of uncertainty." The indeterminacy of postmodern literature is reflected in the following four aspects: the indeterminacy of theme, image, plot and language.

(1) The uncertainty of the subject. If we say that in realism, the theme is basically determined, and the author emphasizes highlighting the theme; In modernism, the author opposes the theme of realism. They are not opposed to the theme itself. On the contrary, they often take pains to construct their own themes. In postmodernism, the theme does not exist at all, because it has no meaning, no center and no quality. "Everything is scattered." Everything is on the same plane, without a theme, a subtitle or even a topic. In this way, postmodern writers emphasize the randomness, improvisation and patchwork of creation, and attach importance to readers' participation and creation of literary works.

The uncertainty of this theme is closely related to the crisis and loss of postmodernism's rationality, belief, morality and daily life norms. For example, the "beat generation" is a complete collapse from spirit to body. George Mandel pointed out that at that time, "the people of the whole country temporarily lost consciousness in their own way: in churches, cinemas, televisions, bars and books ... the whole world was trying to find its anesthetic ... philosophers, prostitutes and poets, artists and thieves, lovers, dreamers, dereliction of duty, and all kinds of homeless people in the United States ... whether they climbed up step by step in prayer. The "beat generation" is deeply influenced by existentialism, but they highlight the weakness and despair of existentialism-the absurdity of the material world and the indifference and loneliness between people-and abandon the progressive factors of existentialism that focus on action and choice. In addition, under the influence of psychoanalysis and Zen, they emphasized the irrationality and subconscious activities of human spiritual activities, and used nihilism to counter the crisis of existence. Therefore, the "Beat Generation" shows two characteristics in ideological tendency: one is to look at everything with nihilistic eyes, which leads to a complete "collapse" of outlook on life and indifference to politics, society, ideals, future, people's destiny and human future. Secondly, they grasp the world with sensualism, which leads to the complete "collapse" of the middle class lifestyle. They are keen on the dissolute life of drinking, taking drugs, living in groups and roaming. After the "Beat Generation" was "beat", they frankly expressed their most intimate and profound feelings in their works, without shame and scruples. They call their creation "spontaneous creation", and they want to express themselves at will and improvise. On the Road, the representative writer of the "Beat Generation", is such an autobiographical novel, which is written according to the author's own personal experience. The novel shows the mental state of "beat" molecules "on the road": criss-crossing, erratic. On the one hand, they abandoned the old social morality and value standards, on the other hand, they were at a loss in the face of complicated social thoughts. The author believes that life is a never-ending road. Although people stop and go, they are always on the road. In order to express this idea best, the author put a long roll of white paper into the typewriter, wrote down his wandering life and his partner conversation record without thinking, and scribbled this novel with more than 200,000 words in three weeks.

(2) the uncertainty of image. If in realism, people are people, in modernism, people are personality, then in postmodernism, people are characters and people are images. When postmodernism declares the subject and the author dead, the characters in literature also die naturally. Federman, a contemporary theorist, said: "The characters in the novel are fictional beings, and he (she) is no longer a person with flesh and blood and a fixed ontology. This fixed ontology is a set of stable social and psychological qualities-a name, a situation, a profession, a condition and so on. The creatures in the new novel will become changeable, illusory, nameless, nameless, deceitful and unpredictable, just like the words that make up these creatures. But that doesn't mean they are puppets. On the contrary, their existence will actually be more real, more complicated and more faithful to life, because they are not just superficial; They are what they really are: the existence of words. " Some people summarize this feature of postmodernism as "unreasonable, rootless, egoless, rootless, unpainted and metaphorical", in which "unpainted" means that there is no description code for the characters and no portrait of them; "No metaphor" means no metaphor and metonymy code, because in postmodern literature, there is no "meaning" hidden behind the phenomenon to explore. It is this "six nothingness" that completely dismembers the certainty of the post-modern literary image.

This "image uncertainty" is also reflected in the fact that the protagonist of post-modern literature has changed from "non-hero" to "anti-hero". Donald barthelme, an American contemporary writer, is a typical postmodern writer, and his short story Simberta is a classic postmodern text. There are two protagonists in the novel: one is Simberta, a sailor with rich romantic sailing adventures; The other is the American teacher "I" in the 1980s. I live in poverty and am in rags. I was looked down upon by the students in class during the day, but the poetic language full of romantic passion still touched the students. "Be like Simberta! Against the wind and waves! ..... I tell you, to be integrated with the sea! " The students said there was nothing outside. "I" said, you are completely wrong. There are "waltzes, swords and sticks and dazzling floating seaweed." The waltz here refers to the sailor Simberta mentioned earlier in the novel, who walked to the Woods where the waltz sounded after the eighth shipwreck. Here, it is difficult for people to tell whether the speaker is Sailor Sinbad or the university teacher "I", or whether Sailor Sinbad and "I" were originally the same person. How many heroes are there in the novel, two or one? Maybe Simberta, a former sailor, is now a university teacher "I"? All this is uncertain. This specious, or this or that character image completely frustrated any attempt to capture the accurate meaning, and the rest can only be "anything will do" in postmodernism, which is what you understand.

(3) the uncertainty of the plot. Postmodern writers oppose the logic, coherence and closure of stories. They believe that the coherence of pre-modernism, the logic of characters' actions and the complete unity of plots are a closed structure, which is the wishful imagination of writers and is not based on real life. Therefore, this closed body must be broken and replaced by an open plot structure full of dislocation. In this way, postmodern writers stop the logic and coherence of plots, randomly reverse real time, historical time and future time, randomly replace present, past and future, and constantly cut off the real space, making the plots of literary works present various or infinite possibilities.

The new novel contradicts the certainty of the plot of the traditional novel and carefully constructs a labyrinth plot structure. The new novel opposes the planned arrangement of the fate and experience of the characters, writes the life in a coherent, concentrated and thrilling way, and depicts typical characters. Therefore, most new novels break the traditional concept of time, confuse the past, the future and the present, and interweave reality, illusion and memory, thus forming some chaotic scenes that seem completely different from traditional novels, which are actually carefully arranged by the author. Bouthors once said when talking about his novel, "It is not only a maze of space, but also a maze of time". New novelists regard form as above all else, and think that what is important for writers to construct a novel is not what to write, but how to write it. Therefore, they try their best to arrange the plot structure of their works intricately and creatively. For example, Bouthors' diary novel Timetable is divided into five parts, five months (May-September) in the diary. The diary written by the protagonist in this labyrinthine city is not in normal chronological order, but interweaves the present, past, future, reality, history and fantasy. The chronological order in the book is overlapping and staggered, but there are certain rules, just like a progressive multiplication formula table or a price list on the railway. Five months are written in a straight line order of 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, and then in a diagonal line order from May to February; Secondly, things written every month are increasing, so one month's account is added to the diary every month. In this way, although only five months have been written, the events of 12 months are all included in these five months. This year symbolizes a person's life and the whole era. This criss-crossing time is intertwined with the maze-like space, which makes the structure of the novel more complex and exquisite. If readers read Balzac's novels with their reason, they will be confused and think that the author is "insane"; If readers read new novels in the form of new novels and analyze the structure carefully designed by the author layer by layer, they will have a sense of pleasure and pleasure of getting out of the maze step by step, and they have to admire the author's uniqueness.

(4) Language uncertainty. Language is the most important factor of postmodernism, and it even rises to the position of subject. In a sense, the uncertainty of postmodernism is the uncertainty of language. We will discuss this later.

2. Diversity of creative methods

The uncertain creative principles of postmodern literature will inevitably lead to the diversity of its creative methods. Diversification is another basic feature of post-modern literature. Gibbs, an international scholar of comparative literature, once pointed out at an academic conference that "the opposite of absolutism is relativism. Relativism is based on the existence of diversity of different standards. " Diversity means the interaction of diversity. The main advantage of this concept is that it allows practitioners of different interpretation frameworks to communicate with each other, so that they can participate in different frameworks and avoid isolation from each other. "Since the 1990s, due to the great changes in the world situation, cultural absolutism represented by Eurocentrism and Westernization has become the target of public criticism, and thinkers and scholars all over the world have begun to think about and pay attention to the latest topic of how to establish new international cultural relations. After losing the center and absolute, the global human beings are at the same level, and the world culture presents a diversified development trend. What people attach importance to is cultural exchange and dialogue in the true sense. The meta-suspicion of the diversification of postmodern literary creation is not unrelated to the diversification tendency of this culture. This pluralistic feature of postmodern literature is mainly reflected in the integration of postmodernism and modernism, realism and romanticism.

(1) Postmodernism and Realism. Although the spirit of postmodernism is far from realism, there are many similarities in expression techniques. For example, magical realism is the magical combination of postmodernism and realism. Magic realism is the product of post-modern culture, and its overall spirit and creative method have distinct post-modern characteristics. However, magical realist writers have never been far from realism. "Magic realism is first and foremost an attitude towards reality. Magic realist writers face reality and try to go deep into reality to discover the mysteries of reality, life and human activities. " Most magical realist writers are very concerned about the fate of the country and people, with clear creative purpose, strong sense of responsibility and clear concept of love and hate. Rusa said that being a writer "means shouldering a social responsibility at the same time: while developing your own literary career, you should also become an active participant in solving social, economic, political and cultural problems through writing and its activities." Therefore, magical realist writers are different from typical western postmodern writers. They are not keen on describing individual irrational abnormal psychology, but firmly rooted in objective reality, exposing the ugly faces of contemporary Latin American political oligarchs, manor owners and imperialism, expressing sympathy for the people and thinking about the fate of the nation and the people. Carpentier's appreciation of surreal delirium literature, from the beginning to the later boredom to the final break, is due to his rigorous analysis and rational examination of this kind of literature, because he has a strong desire to express the American continent. Marquez said that he has two beliefs in his heart: "First, an excellent novel should be an artistic representation of reality; Second, the closest goal of mankind is socialism. "His" One Hundred Years of Solitude "describes the historical changes of Macondo, a small town on the Caribbean coast, for more than 100 years through the bizarre twists and turns and legendary bumpy experiences of seven generations of Buendia family, reflecting the vicissitudes of Colombian rural areas from/kloc-0 to the 20th century, and expressing the author's thoughts of longing for peace, hating social unrest, hating war, opposing foreign forces and advocating national independence and unity. The realistic factors in the novel are very prominent.

(2) Postmodernism and Modernism. Among most differences, modernist literature and post-modernist literature seem to be only a conscious difference. They are not so much the same as the same, so it is almost impossible to separate them strictly. Almost all postmodern writers have been influenced by modernist writers, and many modernist writers often show some postmodern colors in their works. Joyce is a classic writer of modernism, but in recent years, he is increasingly regarded as a pioneer of postmodernism. His finnegan wake is often regarded as the beginning of a new era of postmodernism in Britain and America, because this work embodies the transition from "self-centered modernism" to "language-centered postmodernism". In this novel, Joyce pays more attention to language experiments and text structure than reasonable limits. In order to meet the needs of the text, he not only adopted the unique "dream talk" in the history of world languages, but also let any other materials he thought could be used openly enter his works, thus showing readers an independent and closed novel world and a maze that can never come out. What Joyce wants to do now is not to try to reflect something through some strange language and words as he did in his early years, but to create a world different from reality through language. Joyce finally completed the transformation from modernism to postmodernism. There are many writers like Joyce who have crossed the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism, such as Kafka, Faulkner, Beckett, Williams and Albee.

As a post-modern literature, Black Humor is obviously influenced by existentialist philosophy and literature. It is after "black humor" writers think that the world is absurd and unreasonable that they adopt an attitude of laughing it off. These "black humor" writers "are deeply disgusted with the world they describe, even desperate. They use strong exaggeration to absurd humor and ridicule, and even use this shocking pen to make readers doubt the essence. They use seemingly "impossible" things to reveal what may or actually happen, reveal the essence of the real world they live in from the opposite side, and use absurdity as a metaphor for truth. They reversed values such as spirit, morality, truth and civilization. (In fact, the reality has turned all this upside down). They respond to ugly, evil, deformed and irrational embarrassing and embarrassing things with humor, ridicule and even' appreciation' laughter to pin their gloomy mood and abyss-like despair. Heller's Catch-22 is a masterpiece of black humor. Originally, the author wanted to ridicule the military bureaucrats who ruled the society and controlled the people's right to subsistence with human wisdom, but in the end, Catch-22 became the symbol and trap of the ubiquitous and unavoidable absurd situation of human beings, with eternal significance, and even wisdom was not spared from this trap. Therefore, Heller adopted an extreme and unfamiliar mocking and mocking attitude towards life and death, affection and love, idealism and patriotism. Even the solemn question of "to be or not to be" in Shakespeare's works has become a joke in Heller's works: "To be or not to be, that is a question to be considered. "This novel belongs to postmodernism in general spirit, but belongs to modernism in artistic technique.

(3) Postmodernism and Romanticism. Just as there are many close links between modernism and romanticism, postmodernism is often permeated with a strong romantic atmosphere. For example, the post-modernist poetry school-Confessions School, which rose in the United States in 1950s and 1960s, pushed the romanticism "expressing personal feelings" to the extreme. Confessional poets resolutely oppose Eliot's poetic creation principles and new criticism theory. Eliot believes that the great pressure of cultural history is much stronger than the poet's own creative impulse. Therefore, "Poetry is not to indulge feelings, but to escape feelings, not to express individuality, but to escape individuality", which is Eliot's famous "impersonal" creative principle. The new criticism develops the theory of "intention fallacy" on the basis of Eliot's theory. They believe that because people often confuse the author's creative intention with the value judgment of the work, the former replaces the latter, which leads to the "intention fallacy", so critics should exclude the author's creative intention from literary criticism. In view of Eliot's theory of new criticism and the tradition of American academic poetry creation, confessional poets do the opposite. They have no qualms about revealing their personal privacy, such as sexual desire, obsession, humiliation, despair, mental disorder, undergoing surgery, contradiction with employers, and distorted abnormal psychology towards their wives, parents, siblings and children, which made their poetry creation return to romanticism, thus creating the popular "Confessional Poetry" movement in the 1960s.

3. Language experiments and discourse games

It is generally believed that the biggest difference between modernism and post-modernism is that modernism takes "self" as the center, while post-modernism takes "language" as the center. As early as 1932, the French writer Beckett issued a post-modernist cry through the protagonist in his novel The Unspeakable Man. "Everything comes down to a question of one word" and "Everything is a word, that's all". Generally speaking, modernism follows the principle of self-centered creation, with understanding the spiritual world as the main object of expression; Postmodernism, on the other hand, advocates language-centered creative methods and pays attention to language games and experiments. The former usually depicts people's consciousness and subconsciousness as important themes in literary works, deliberately revealing the inner truth and inner truth of characters, and then reflecting the "real face" of society. The latter is keen on developing language symbols and code functions, exploring new language art, and trying to make the work an independent "self-reference" and completely self-sufficient language system through language autonomy. Their intention is not to express the world, nor to express their inner feelings and reveal the secrets of their inner world, but to create a new world with language, thus greatly diluting or even canceling the basic functions of literary works to reflect life and depict reality.

On the basis of this theory, post-modern literature should first expose the falsity of the so-called "reality", that is, "reality" is just the illusion of language fiction. In this regard, postmodern metafiction can be taken as a representative. Metafiction (also known as anti-fiction) takes parody (or irony) as the main paradigm, reflecting, deconstructing and subverting the novel form and narrative itself, leading to the disintegration of traditional novels and narrative methods in form and language, and declaring the ineffectiveness and falsehood of traditional narrative. Postmodern metanovelists believe that reality is created by language, and false language creates false reality. The narrative mode of traditional novels is one of the creators of false reality: it fictionalizes a false story to "reflect" the false reality itself, thus attracting readers to be double false. Therefore, the novelist's main task is to expose this deception, and at the same time show readers the falsehood of reality and fiction, and urge them to think and re-understand reality and language. Metafiction is "a novel about a novel" and "how a novel becomes a novel". It exposes its own fiction and parody, deliberately exposes the traces of the novel's self-operation to readers, and exposes the fiction and forgery of the narrative world. "The truth of the novel is: fact is illusion; Fictional stories are the prototype of the world. " Therefore, in metafiction, the so-called "truth" only exists in the language used to describe it, and "meaning" only exists in the process of novel creation and interpretation.

Bath's short story Leaves was written under this theoretical background. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator "I" was very upset, because most of the novels were still "lack of passion, abstraction, professionalism and incoherence" and "conflict, entanglement and no climax". I think about how the novel ends, but I can't go beyond the story of our life. "I" then decided that since we "people who play with pens for a living" are all like "habitual liars", we should "change common nouns" and "continue to make up". It turns out that the traditional narrative world is fabricated in this way. By extension, many "truth systems" of human beings, such as history, religion, morality, ideology and ethical values, are not all "narrative methods"? It is this narrative method that integrates and organizes those scattered ideograms with a causal logic that can be justified, which constitutes what we used to call "reality".

Similarly, after dispelling the authenticity of "reality", postmodernists believe that language itself is meaning and language no longer needs to be attached to other "realities". For example, in post-modern poetry, language itself is meaning, and it refuses to express that "every word is the size of a stone/fist/I threw it at a dark window". "We use this language as if we had created a language", "This language is the purpose, and this language is the map". Language Poets even bluntly pointed out that the main raw material of poetry is language, which is the experience of language production. As a result, post-modernist poets found their own home in language and played freely in it. For example, Stevens' masterpiece Organ changed the language style of American poetry with pure language games and ecstatic noise. Kenneth Kirk only guides students to write poems by playing games. He asked the whole class to write a poem, and each child wrote a line. Finally, word games, boring words and illogical expressions have all become postmodern poetry. At the same time, there are many experiments in postmodern poetry. "Poets began to cooperate with sound, music and other arts. There have been countless works translated from many languages. " German figurative poetry, which appeared in the middle of the 20th century, is also called "language experimental poetry". For experimental poets, words no longer have definite meaning. They are just symbols, which have nothing to do with their grammatical functions or status. They are the raw materials used by poets to form some graphics, and these graphic texts are their own purposes and meanings. For example, the poet Gondelin wrote: "Words are shadows/shadows become words/words are games/games become words." Just as words are games, so are poems.

Since language can create "reality" and language itself is meaning, postmodernists can get full meaning and fun as long as they indulge in language and play freely. Therefore, postmodern writers parody traditional literature and enjoy themselves in language games: donald barthelme turned Balzac's novels into comedies; Bath rewrote ancient Greek mythology with "modern speculative spirit"; Dai Lun Poe juxtaposed the Book of Songs with the battlefield experience of World War I; Burgess retorted that Shakespeare copied the complete works of Shakespeare; Aymis met his own characters in the novel Reality and was fooled. On the other hand, postmodern writers erase the differences between novels and their objects, and arbitrarily transform fiction and fictional reality into a mess: Beckett's First Love regards love as an unreasonable way of meaning disintegration; Bath's voyage at night reduces man's need for God to the absurd consequences of sex. Petra Kelly's profound religious philosophy about life and death in Talking with Kirin is just a sad joke. Kelly's "Fat Man in History" describes a "counter-revolutionary group" that tries to influence the course of history. As a result, they just become muddled samples for others to do experiments.

The playfulness of this narrative mode of postmodern literature enables readers to get great pleasure from reading the text. Postmodern text is a kind of "language structure" and a kind of network structure. Readers can start reading anywhere or stop reading anywhere. The reader does not need to explore or scrutinize the contents hidden behind the text, he only needs to pay attention to his own experiences and feelings at all times. 1968, British novelist B. S. Johnson published a loose-leaf novel in a box with a movable cover, which developed this game spirit of postmodernism to the extreme. Readers can rearrange the loose 27 chapters in the book at will, start reading from any chapter, or play games by themselves.

From modernism to post-modernism, western literature spanned the whole 20th century. Modernism began in the late19th century, while postmodernism has not stopped its creation and influence until today. In the history of 100 years, modernism and post-modernism boldly explored and innovated in a completely anti-traditional manner, and created a large number of works with different shapes and whimsy. There are epoch-making monumental masterpieces, as well as dead junk; There are both elite culture with elegant taste and commercial operation with low style; There are both "intervention" literature that directly intervenes in society and word games that are far away from reality; There are both questions about literature and articles about literature.