“The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself…”—Lyotard [The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)]
What this epigraph does, apart from setting the tone for what Lyotard will go on to call the ‘paradox of the future anterior’ in the postmodern, is to posit the post-modern as an offshoot of the modern; what was marginal in the modern becomes central in the post-modern as liminality becomes its prevalent register. Is the post-modern then a carnivalised form of the modern where the hierarchies have simply been upturned? As many thinkers, as many post-moderns; as many literary authors, as many post-moderns: that is how it is. Whether it is the removal of the hyphen that separates ‘post’ and ‘modern’ (what has been called the castration of the postmodern) or the perilous addition of the theoretical suffix ‘ism’ to make it ‘postmodernism’, everything associated with the term has been shrouded in profound vagueness and uncertainty. Philosophers like Baudrillard and Habermas have strongly reacted to them, being straightjacketed by postmodernism. Authors like John Barth have expressed their wonder, if not disgruntlement at the label. Postmodernism’s obsessive insistence on all forms of closures on the one hand (end of history, end of philosophy, end of the author, end of criticism, end of performance etc), and a post-structuralist notion of endless proliferation of meaning through the perpetually differing and deferring signifier-gang on the other, has placed it in a no-man’s land. But the fascinating thing about postmodernism is its ability to turn all its critiques into its properties. You call it a no-man’s land and it will say that that is the precise point. As Frederic Jameson says, the postmodern is marked by a schizophrenic displacement of the spatio-temporal; add to it the Lyotardian ‘future anterior’ and you have the timeless, spaceless and, of course, authorless no-man’s land! You call it confusion, it will call itself a ‘simulacrum’; you call it contradictory and Derrida will say “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique”; you call it ideologically non-committal and it will retort by saying that parodies have become blank pastiches now; you call it all messed up and it will then resort to ‘micro-narratives’; you say it is playing into the hands of globalization and it will respond that it is a historical inevitable—some ‘cultural logic’ of some late capitalism; you use the word ‘Enlightenment’, it will be angrily silent and if you ask why this silence, it will say that it has been able to invert the hierarchy of speech and silence! Postmodernism has indeed mastered the art of theorizing its other, if not anything else!
It was Jean-François Lyotard who used the word ‘postmodern’ for the first time in his commissioned work The Postmodern Condition in late1970s. His insight into the comodification of knowledge where it ‘ceases to be an end’ in itself and becomes part of an acquisitional process which radically exteriorizes the knowledge from the knower, brings out the changing matrix of knowledge in the post-industrial society. Lyotard presents the new face of knowledge in terms of specific ‘language games’ which are effected by ruptures within what he calls ‘metanarratives’ or grand narratives. In a strongly anti-essentialist manner, he explores the historical destabilization of these narratives e.g. the Enlightenment project of socio-political progress and the Hegelian rationalism in terms of the revelation of scientific knowledge and comes to identify this ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ as the definitive postmodern stance. Gianni Vattimo in his book, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (1988), critiques the Lyotardian argument for being located into a historical discourse, which it so desperately tries to decimate.
Jean Baudrillard is another philosopher whose work has been seen as a shaping influence on postmodernist thought. His famous paradigmatic shift from the subject to the ‘object-system’ is a post-Derridean deconstruction of subjectivity. Derrida in his trend-setting essay, “Structure, Sign And Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), exploded the structurality of structure by denouncing the immobility of the centre, characterizing it as an ‘interdicted’ zone, located both inside and outside the structure and thus operative through a continual metonymic surge. Baudrillard, in his radical foregrounding of what he terms ‘the silence of pure objectality’ in Cool Memories, extends the post-structuralist break, constituted by Derrida, to an extreme—“the main interest has always been on the conditions in which the subject discovers the object, but those in which the object discovers the subject have not been explored at all…what if it were the object which discovered us in all this?” (Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime) The Baudrillian theory of ‘simulation’ sets forth one of the fundamental modes in which postmodern literature has been characterized and that is an anti-realist approach. Postmodernism has questioned representation of reality on the grounds of the always already represented character of the real as well as the insufficiency of language as a semiotic register in reflecting the real. One of the basic methods of countering representation in postmodernism has been a tendency to refer back to language. The Lacanian Symbolic is constitutive of reality only through an exclusion of the Real, which remains somewhat resistant to complete symbolification. As William Burroughs says, ‘language is a virus from outer space’ and the only way to deal with it is to tell stories which would not move outward and depend upon the external reality but circulate back to itself and be self-contained. Linguistic meaning apropos of Derrida is only a ‘differance’ and what texts like Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch (1959) and Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983) do is to backtrack into language ad infinitum, becoming immune to reality in an absolutely auto-referential way. This self-reflexivity of narratives builds up what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘historiographical metafiction’ in postmodern literature. Much like Umberto Eco who sees the ‘hyper-real’ in the entertainment parks of America, Baudrillard too, presents to us a complete destruction of the real through its optimization beyond the limit. He theorizes four ‘successive phases of the image’; first in which ‘it is the reflection of a basic reality’; second where ‘it masks and perverts a basic reality’; the third is the order where ‘it masks the absence of a basic reality’ and the fourth and the most chaotic order of the simulacra is where ‘it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (Baudrillard, Simulations). The world of the simulacra is, therefore, a world of pure appearances where language, in a Derridean contestation of metaphysics, proclaims instead of hiding the void underneath. A perfect example of this will be the closing lines of Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951)—“Then I went back into the house & wrote, it is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” It is only language that moves one level higher than that of the narrative to deconstruct its realistic referentiality, here.
Another significant break between modernism and postmodernism lies in the different ways in which they see the high-culture-low-culture split in the society. While modernists like Joyce, Kafka, Proust in different ways endorse the charlatanism, embedded in this split, postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and especially someone like Haruki Murakami celebrate what they consider to be a democratic, non-elitist and equalitarian conglomeration of high art forms with ‘kitsch’ or popular low-art genres. Murakami’s works [e.g. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle (1997)] make a largely subversive use of the thriller format. Other important post-war fiction- writers like Jorge Luis Borges or Alain Robbe Grillet also delve into what Michael Holquist calls in his essay, “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction” (1971), ‘the metaphysical whodunit’ where these authors, in their own different ways, subvert the retrospective logic of the detective story with all sorts of bizarre figurations. They choose the genre for its insistent dependence on logic and then slaughter the logic through reversal of set patterns. In Grillet’s Novel, The Voyeur (1955), it is the very event of the crime, which gradually evaporates rather than a disclosure of the mysterious agency behind it. Grillet’s novels show yet another postmodern symptom by focusing more on the objectness of the objects than whatever they might signify. Not only Robbe Grillet, the entire ‘New Novel’ movement in France provides us with a critique of the psychological realism of the Modernist novel as the spotlight shifts from depth to surface in their works. This rejection of depth psychology and a fascination with surfaces relate to the deconstructive and self-reflexive tendencies within postmodernism. Postmodernism moves away from the kind of high cultural shock, a novel like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939) creates in the common reader, and tries to concentrate on a concreteness that is real and yet a little too real for realism. Someone like Beckett might look equipped with all the venom of postmodernism in terms of its post-structuralist and post-realist orientations, but the extreme formal experimentalism, a tendency towards pervasive abstraction and a sweeping metaphysics of the ontological (all speaking of high art) alienate him from the mainstream of postmodernism, relocating him into a predominantly modernist framework. The case of Beckett is not just an instance but a valid indicator of the mutually enmeshed character of modernism and postmodernism. John Barth rightly points out in his essay, “The Literature of Replenishment” (1980), that the ideal postmodern author will ‘somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism’ by combining the ‘pre-modern’ with the ‘modern’. His instances of the postmodern novel include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973).
Now, I would like to examine one of Borges’s stories, Circular Ruins [from The Garden of Forking Paths (1944)], somewhat closely to draw some conclusions (if there are any) about the subject. This particular story of Borges, in many different ways, deals with and responds to the dialectics and paradoxes of postmodernism, I have been discussing. The story is about a mysterious sorcerer who is all set to construct a human being through his dreams in the circular ruins of a mystical temple. It is about the tribulations of this dream-creation and its imposition upon reality and, once the sorcerer’s project is completed, the produced son is sent to another circular ruin according to a divine dream-instruction to get his making perfected. Towards the end of the story, a man comes to the sorcerer and tells him the story of a magical man unaffected by fire in the other ruin downstream. In the final moment, there is a fire in the forest, which destroys the circular ruins in a historical u-turn much like the earlier holocaust, which had turned the temple into a ruin. In the blaze of that devastating fire, the sorcerer finds himself unaffected. The fire soothingly embraces him and he is made to realize ironically that for all this time, when he had been dreaming and creating a human being, he himself was being dreamt and created by another dreaming and creating human being.
I think this Borges-story, written at a time when much of postmodernist theory was still to appear, anticipates some of its directions. To begin with, the story uses the fairy-tale (a popular art form) model to delve deep into a world of simulations, identity politics, lacking closure. The Borgesian ‘magic real’ is a technique of undoing the real through the hyper-real. Unlike Beckett, Borges does not abandon the realistic frame and tries to unmake it from within. The line with which the tale opens is almost a peerless representational fabric (“no one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud…”) and it is only the adjective ‘unanimous’ placed before ‘night’ that makes an abstraction of the night, de-spatializing and de-realizing the image in the process. The entire story poses a challenge to realistic representation as the world of dreams is given an autonomous parallel existence, from which figures can smoothly enter reality, depending upon an intent of transference.
The last chapter of Baudrillard’s book, The Perfect Crime, is called ‘The Revenge of the Mirror People’ where he imagines a future revolt of the mirror images demanding a real existence alongside human beings. In the ‘future anterior’, representation is seen to fail fully in producing the ‘other’ and there shall have been two equally sovereign peoples. Baudrillard theorizes this phenomenon by using another Borges-story, The Book of Imaginary Beings (1974), where the mirror world comes alive and moves out of the mirror to challenge the human authority. In Circular Ruins too, it is the dream world that seems to have completely eaten up the real, by the time we reach the end of the story. And once again it is a radical break from the discourse of humanism that seems to ground the ‘circular ruins’ of representation. In the first phase, the sorcerer uses the pedagogic field of the classroom in his dreams and seeks to find from his ageless students someone who can be imposed upon reality. He does find one after some frustration but shortly thereafter there is a rupture in his project in the form of insomnia and dreamlessness. This rupture can be seen in terms of a postmodern conception of the epistemic and pedagogic lack in all human discourses. The technique that he then uses is a fragmentary technique of imagining parts of the body bit by bit and this blasts the illusion of the unity of the body, something that the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ is yet to impress on him. The process also underpins cloning, another technological facet of the postmodern. But initially the imagined youth remains asleep (dreaming?) like his dreaming creator. This sleep within sleep initiates the topography of the Borgesian labyrinth where once one reaches the centre, the centre reveals itself as yet another labyrinth. The constructedness and unreality of the constructor opens up the post-structuralist domain where telos suffers from a fallacy of infinite regress. It is this realization of the sorcerer that he is implicated by an-other dream of an-other dreamer, which destabilizes his existential power centre, and the perpetually shifty nature of power is disclosed. It is this subversiveness that deconstructs the genre as the centre of the mythical content is dislodged. The whole story pastiches the Frankensteinian motif and a host of other literary motifs alike. Towards the end, Borges provides us with a parenthesis where he comments upon the passage of time—“which some tellers of the story choose to compute in ten years, others in decades”. Not only is this a postmodern metafictional bent but a critique of linear and objective time as well. But the parenthesis also adds to the mythical ambience.
Whether it is the dream dimension, which is in line with surrealism or Borges’s intensely allusive texture (an epigraph from ‘Through the Looking-Glass, VI’, references to the cosmogonies of the Gnostics etc) or even the ways in which he simultaneously operates in a mythifying and de-mythifying register, I think Circular Ruins presents to us an accurate spectacle of the mutuality of contraction and expansion in between modernism and postmodernism. While Borges keeps stressing the infinite deferral of ‘metanarrative’ and gives some form of independence to all the micro-narratives, which are initiated by the story, this disconnective nuance is located completely within the Joycean structure of epiphany, which renders it paradoxical. The revelation of the sorcerer’s identity at the end of the story is not projected as a postmodernist fetish- meaning with surfaces only, but rather as a deep structure in terms of linguistic and epistemological imports. It is the text, which is trapped in this eternal tug of war as it tries to hold on to ‘the still point of the turning world’ but ‘things fall apart’ and ‘the centre cannot hold’. And it is only then that literature dreams a dream of evading both circularity and ruins. The contestational labels of modernism and postmodernism may wait for an eternity.
Works Consulted: -
a) Barth John, The Literature of Exhaustion and The Literature of Replenishment, Lord John Press, 1982.
b) Baudrillard Jean, The Perfect Crime, Verso Publishers, 1996.
c) Baudrillard Jean, Simulations and Simulacra From Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Poster Mark (ed). Stanford University Press. 1998.
d) Baudrillard Jean, Cool Memories, Verso Publishers, 1990.
e) Beckett Samuel, The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume II: Novels, Grove press. 2006.
f) Borges Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, Penguin Books, 1998.
g) Connor Steven (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, Cambridge University press, 2004.
h) Derrida Jaques, Writing and Difference, Routledge. 2001.
i) Lucy Niall, Postmodern Literary Theory, Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
j) Lyotard Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984.
