Postmodernist Reality: Postmodernist Fiction, Realism, and the Representation of Reality

By Linda Darling

This eloquent introduction to postmodernism explores how post-war British fiction reinvents and re-evaluates the literary conventions of Realism. By exploring how classic literary devices such as the omniscient narrator, narrative closure, coherent narration and characterisation are reworked, the author shows how Realism is extended to portray the multiple realities that characterise our contemporary world.

The novels discussed include Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), and A History of the World in 101⁄2 Chapters (1989). By focusing on the modes these literary texts approach the relations between past and present, the elusiveness of history, and the distortions of memory, this study sets out to show how postmodern British fiction reconceptualises the reader’s conceptions of both historical knowledge and fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Darling
• Release date: Mar 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458142900

Book preview

POSTMODERNIST REALITY

Postmodernist Fiction, Realism,

and the Representation of Reality

__________

Linda Darling

Postmodernist Reality: Postmodernist Fiction, Realism, and the Representation of Reality

Smashwords Edition 

Copyright 2011 Linda Darling

All rights reserved. 

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE.

Realism and Beyond

CHAPTER TWO.

Realism and Realisms

CHAPTER THREE.

The Omniscient Narrator and Other Voices

CHAPTER FOUR.

Endings and Non-Endings

CONCLUSION.

Histories and Stories

REFERENCES

Introduction

Realism has been inextricably linked with the form of the novel since the eighteenth century. The notion that the novel should portray a realistic and edifying situation that connects the work of art to the actual world and provides a window onto reality can be witnessed in the early English literary works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Realism as a literary movement took hold in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and it can be defined by a set of literary conventions which attempted to portray an elaborately constructed world of fiction to represent life in its most heightened and intricate details.

The notion that the novel should represent life in its highest complexity is by no means superseded. Indeed, the conventions of Realism are still prevalent as a point of reference for literary evaluation and criticism. This study attempts to investigate the development of the form of the novel and considers in what ways the literary conventions of Realism have been transcended and extended by Modernism and Postmodernism with a predominant focus on the latter. Postmodern fiction seems to have interesting affinities to the Realist tradition in its exploration of the techniques and assumptions intimately linked to classic realism. The classic realist text broke new ground in the genre and later novels either follow the model or consciously break away from it engaging in a different conception of realism to create multiple realities.

This study does not attempt to classify contemporary fiction, but rather engages in a thorough analysis in the attempt to determine and illustrate how post-war British fiction reworks and reinvents the literary conventions of the classic realist text to portray contemporary human experience.

The first chapter of this study considers in what modes the novel is associated with the representations of truth and reality and how this notion developed through time in the attempt to adapt literary conventions to an ever-changing reality. The second chapter explores the several techniques by which post-war British fiction approached the genre. Novelists either rejected or embraced Realism in the perpetual attempt to transpose reality into art. The same chapter also considers how the notion of realism is extended in the endeavour to portray not authoritative truths but multiple, shifting, and possibly distorted realities.

The novels discussed in this study all have one major aspect in common. Postmodern fiction has often been characterised by an attitude towards a crisis of representation. However, these novels do not particularly foreground this crisis; indeed, these novels may initially appear to be Realist texts. What these novels seem to unanimously assert is not that reality cannot be portrayed but rather that multiple realities and truths can be represented and thus they foreground one of the major postmodernist concerns that this reality is after all a construction.

History is fiction, and fiction is reality. The issues raised are addressed in the three concluding chapters that explore how classic literary conventions are undermined or put into question to foreground the postmodernist disaffection with universal truths, and to highlight the active role of the reader in interpreting the text.

Techniques of narration, characterisation, and narrative closure are discussed in relation to Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984), and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (2000), and Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001). Finally, this study attempts to illustrate how these literary texts painstakingly convey the reality of human emotions and human experience, which in fact according to this approach marks them as real as the ineffability of reality itself.

1. Realism and Beyond

We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is.

John Fowles

The debate on Realism, and the relations between art and life, is one which has prevailed since Plato and Aristotle. According to Plato, literature is a form of lying, because the artist's imitation of reality is but an imitation of an imitation, 'thrice removed from the truth'.[1]

The painter, or the poet, imitate reality without necessarily possessing thorough knowledge of its nature, and consequently hinder the citizen from what is moral or true. In the Republic, Plato is concerned with the notion of an ideal state and its production of the good citizen and its future guardians, rather than with aesthetics. Consequently, the development of the Realistic tradition is more affiliated to Aristotelian mimesis.

Like Plato, Aristotle classifies literature as an imitation. This imitation, however, is freed from its negative connotations in Aristotle's Poetics. For Aristotle, the poet is primarily a creator not an imitator. He does not merely imitate reality, but creates a coherent and plausible world that reflects the real world. The poet, therefore, works 'according to the law of probability or necessity', to construct highly structured plots, which yield an insight into certain events or situations in real life.[2]

According to Aristotle, poetry is more scientific and serious than history, since poetry deals with universals and probabilities, whereas history is restricted to facts that actually happened, and thus fails to consider situations and events that are probable or necessary. Aristotle's thesis raises the notion that a 'probable impossibility' may reflect a higher truth on human nature.[3]

In Poetics, Aristotle counters Plato's contention that art as an imitation of an imitation corrupts the individual because 'it feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up'; instead, he insists that art purges the passions, and thereby instructs the individual.[4]

The concept of mimesis in art thus has deep roots. As M. H. Abrams points out, the 'mimetic orientation – the explanation of art as essentially an imitation of aspects in the universe – was probably the most primitive aesthetic theory'.[5] Indeed, the concern with the relationship between life and art is present to this very day.

The development