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God and do not think about the eternal. John dreams of becoming
a poet, a college president, or a movie star. But the only way to
escape the absurdity of life is to turn to religion, to the church,
which can shelter him from all his troubles.
In parallel with the traditional literature in the 1960–
70s, experimental literature also developed, which became
a reaction to the spiritual crisis of society and the emergence
of a lot of theoretical research in this regard, which in its
extreme manifestations made a shocking impression and did
not contribute to the spread of this kind of literature among
the broad readership. In particular, the so-called “New Left”
gained notoriety, which theoretically did not recognize the novel
as a genre. Writer Ronald Sukenik is considered the creator of
the so-called “Bossa Nova” style, which assumes the absence of
plot, narrative, characters, verisimilitude, chronology. In the
novel “From Outside” (1968), R. Sukernik deliberately destroys
the character, the plot, and creates a fragmentary composition.
The hero of the novel “98.6” (1975) is simply «He». «He» is in
constant search of the unusual, and love becomes for him such
an unusual thing. The novel, consisting of dozens of scenes, is
written in a telegraphic style and has the form of a stream of
consciousness of the main character.
“Black humor”, which is the American equivalent of
absurdism, is widely used in American literature. Such writers
as Terry Southern, William Burroughs, James Patrick Donleavy,
Warren Miller, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth became
representatives of this not very clearly expressed trend.
Representatives of the direction of “Black Humor” perceive
the world as chaos. In their works, the absolute aimlessness
of human existence is stated. It is characteristic of the work of
“black humorists” that they ridicule not only the object – the true
reality, but also the way it is reflected – art. The tools of writers
representing this school are burlesque, parody, grotesque, irony,
farce, satire.
The extreme and earliest phase of “black humor” is the work
of William Burroughs of the 1960s. William Burroughs (1914–
1997) – author of the novels “Naked Breakfast”, “Nova Express”,
“The Softening Machine”, etc. The most scandalous work of
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Burroughs – “Naked Breakfast” (1960) – is written in the form
of notes, sketches, fragments generated by a painful psyche.
In the pages of the novel “Nova Express”, a kind of
interplanetary war of the sexes is in full swing. It involves the
planets Venus, Uranus, and organisms without bodies. Only
somewhere in the finale there is a description of the sun and
“a slight whiff of ozone”. It all ends with a dream that takes
you into the future, as it is seen by the modernist writer: a cave
filled with terrible smells. And in it, people devouring their own
excrement and each other.
The work is not devoid of satirical notes, with the help of
which modern society is depicted. The writer considers the sense
of property as hostile to man and to everything human. Those
who are devoid of this feeling, people who are declassified,
seem to the writer more human than those who exist within the
system. The author is in the midst of his heroes. Even if they are
pathetic and disgusting, they are the only possible ones for him.
This is evidenced by the novels “Nova Express”, “The Ticket That
Exploded”, “Softening Machine”, a collection of fragments of
scripts “The Wild Boys”, “Port of Saints”.
Burroughs sets the task for himself of using a word to
cause a flow of associations, since, from his point of view,
only associations are available to a person. In the last novel,
“Cities of the Red Night” (1981), which critics unanimously
called the best work of Burroughs, there are formal attributes
of the novel: characters, plot, concrete realities. But the
postmodernist specificity of the novel becomes clear in the
finale of the work, where the author offers several versions of
the story.
The plot of the novel “Cities of the Red Night” is built around
the figure of a pirate, Captain Missons, who in the XVIII century
founded the colony of Libertatia in Madagascar. The colony was
governed by republican laws. Slavery, executions, and torture
were abolished, and the equality of all people and freedom of faith
were proclaimed. The natives, incited by the English colonialists,
destroyed the colony, and Captain Missons was killed. But the
author claims that the colonists had a chance to live by the laws
that people set for themselves.
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The author also suggests another scenario. What would have
happened if the captain survived, and the colony-republic had
continued to exist. The novel “Cities of the Red Night” is written
about this “other variant”. This interpretation of the relationship
between man and history brings Burroughs closer to the work of
John Barth in the 1970s.
In 2002, Burroughs’s book “My Education: The Book of
Dreams” (1995), the last work of the American writer, was
translated into Russian. After this book, he was keeping
a confessional diary, which was published in the web. The
characters in the book are beatniks, an Arab artist, and other
friends and acquaintances of Burroughs. The style of the “Book
of Dreams” reproduces the manner of diary cursive writing,
a dreamlike worldview, in which the border between reality and
visions is almost completely blurred.
A notable phenomenon in the 1950-60s years becomes
“postmodern” literature. The term “postmodernism” is
increasingly appearing on the pages of literary journals. Some
researchers consider the authors of this term, born at the turn of
the 1950-60s, the American researcher I. Hassan.
In 1971, I. Hassan states: we are witnessing “the modernist
destruction of form to the point where the very idea of form is
called into question, and this doubt requires a rethinking of all
artistic means”. Postmodernism is interpreted by him as “the
art of silence, emptiness, death, creating its own language of
innuendo, ambiguity, wordplay”, that is, it approaches neoAvangrad.
I. Hassan calls the following properties of postmodernism:
anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism, ego diffusion. At the same
time, he says, irony becomes a radical, self-improving game, an
entropy of values. The works of authors who are more or less
inclined to postmodern reproduction of life are often read as
a comedy of absurd, “black humor”, a crazy parody and a farce.
We are talking about “black humor”, which has become a mass
literary phenomenon, or, in other words, about the merger of
modernism and “mass culture”.
The most remarkable work of the early 1980s in American
literature is the novel by Walter Abish (born 1931) “How
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German is it” (1981), which by many signs can be attributed
to a typically postmodern prose. The hero of the novel,
Ulrich Hargenau, arrives in a German city built on the site
of a former concentration camp. The very name of the city
carries an important semantic load – Brumholdstein. This is
the fictionalized name of a philosopher called Brumhold whose
teaching is in many ways similar to the philosophy of Heidegger,
who claimed to penetrate into the hidden essence of things, to
unravel it.
On many pages of the book, the question sounds as a refrain:
what is Germany and what is its historical and moral heritage.
Answering this question, the author recreates a picture of
a society based on relict sign systems and cultural heritage. But
the true story, as it becomes clear, is under the abundant silt
of modern civilization, the expression of which is television,
apartments, cars – in a word, things. We are faced with a society
whose ideals are based on things. The past is invisibly present
behind the scenes of everyday life, it breaks through the everyday
behavior of people, but the attempts of city residents to get to the
bottom of the history buried in the foundation of the city lead
nowhere.
The narrative is complicated by the fact that the author
uses the technique of “fitting” the language to the sample. In
parallel, there is a motif of combining the plan of the disappeared
concentration camp and the modern city, which is fraught with
many puzzles and riddles. All this leads to a gradual recreation
of the image of Germany as a reality. The danger of such
a “realistic” approach to describing the country is that it smooths
out the cracks and crevices that form “underground” memory
systems, makes you forget the archaeology of fascist barbarism
hidden underground.
Germany in the novel by Walter Abisch begins to be perceived
not only as a chronotope and a socio-cultural reality, but also as
a way of expressing a philosophical idea. Abisch writes about “the
unique German way of recognizing and evaluating an object”.
The reader begins to interpret the city to some extent as the ideal
construction of the philosopher Brumhold, his teachings about
the inner, incomprehensible essence of things.
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Thus, in his novel “How German is It”, Walter Abisch poses
an important philosophical and ethical problem: how we use the
power of mind to develop historical amnesia in our consciousness.
On the other hand, the author captures the important fact
that all our knowledge, especially related to the fascination
with materialism in the modern world, becomes a reflection,
a topographic map of the dark depths of the subconscious.
One of the notable figures of modern American literature
is William Gaddis (1922–1998). Unlike Thomas Pynchon, his
works are intended, at first glance, for a narrower circle of
readers, if not for fans of elite literature. “Carpenter’s Gothic” is
one of five novels Gaddis wrote over four decades. The heroine of
the novel, Liz, hides from the outside world in the enclosed space
of a house on the banks of the Hudson River. The house is built
in the so-called “carpenter’s Gothic” style, typical of American
suburbs, which adopted Gothic forms from aristocratic Europe.
But the creators of this style relied on local building materials.
Such houses, according to the author, carry a dual content:
being authentic from the outside, they can conceal any false
stuffing inside. Such houses, as the author says, conceal their
“deceptions, illusions, forgeries”. Liz struggles to reveal the
imperfect meaning of all these illusions of inner content, which
become a reflection of the imperfection of the external world.
The heroine tries to connect the broken ends of life, looking for
the necessary words in dictionaries, saving images in books and
films. The only solace Liz finds in the resurrection of Gothic
fantasies.
The real world bursts into this closed “Gothic” space in the form
of endless calls, meaningless mail, terrifying newspaper headlines
and TV shows that reflect the corrupt political, commercial and
religious reality of modern America. Lies, drugs, mind-splitting
religious fundamentalism – this is what the author opposes.
Beyond the world of the “Gothic” house lies the America of black
capitalism, mired under a bushel of falsehoods and illusions. Paul,
Liz’s husband, becomes the agent of an evangelical preacher –
Reverend Ude, who is the personification of obscurantism in
relation to science and ideas of progress. In reality, his mission
is a cover for clever operations to extract valuable minerals in
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Africa. As Edgar Poe once pointed out, the Gothic and horror of
American literature will not be associated with the presence of
external evil, but with the eclipse of the soul.
The work of another modern American writer Robert Coover
(born 1932) whimsically combines aesthetic and Gothic obsession
in the style of Poe, erotic motifs of Sade and Genet, surrealism of
Celine with modern forms of pastiche and parody. The characters
in Coover’s novel “Gerald’s Party” gather for a party that
becomes a feast for the intellectually jaded. One of the heroines
in a conversation with a guest utters a key phrase, which later
becomes a clue to many mysteries of the novel. When asked what
a parody is, she replies, “The invasion of form or death into life.”
The heroine thus equates form with death.
The motley, diverse crowd partying at Gerald’s is indeed
highly charged with aestheticism. Intelligence is used as
a bargaining chip, which is paid for everything, including love
and sex. One of the guests, for example, offers Gerald his wife in
exchange for a lesson on the nature of theater. Such a “natural
exchange” becomes quite an acceptable line of behavior for the
characters who inhabit the novel, since the guests themselves
are the products of the author’s complex aesthetic ideas.
Nevertheless, the ideological complexity is combined with
excessive descriptions of real things – food, drinks, chic clothes,
as well as with naturalistic scenes, including the depiction of
natural human functions. The plot begins to look like an eerie
carnival, in the maelstrom of which such huge masses of details
are drawn, the flow of which is suddenly interrupted by the
murder taking place at the party.
“The invasion of the form (read: the death) into life” takes
place quite early: approximately on the twelfth page of the
novel. In the living room, they find the body of a certain Ros –
a model and a porn star. The parody is thus complicated by the
detective element. The investigation is led by Inspector Pardew,
a philosopher by nature who believes in the parallel coexistence
of many time layers. He comes to the conclusion that the murder
occurred… half an hour after his arrival at Gerald’s house. The
action includes police officers, actors, directors who are ready
to give evidence or, rather, according to the author’s plan, to
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fictionalize the incident. Meanwhile, the party continues, despite
the misfortune (in the course of the story, several more victims
appear quite in the spirit of Agatha Christie).
Coover’s novel is essentially a postmodern work, and the most
striking example of this is the form of portraying characters
whose roles are not people, but parts of their bodies, voices. It is
these voices, nameless bodies that are lost, constantly change into
someone else’s clothes and even change their identity, following
the author’s will imposed from above, forcing the characters to
undergo unthinkable metamorphoses.
In the work of Coover there is a clearly expressed philosophical
dimension: the author repeatedly raises the question of the
relationship between form and reality. The novel is replete with
naturalistic depictions of atrocities and tortures, which turns
into a new impetus that has been given to the neo-Gothic spirit in
modern American prose.
In the 1980s, postmodern literature has acquired rather
gloomy features. In American literature, the struggle between
the two groups began. The banner of the first one was “realism”,
of the second – “experiment”. At the same time, there is a term
that represents a compromise – “experimental realism”, which
belonged to the American literary critic Jerome Klinkowitz.
A prominent representative of “experimental realism” is Paul
Oster (born 1947), author of the novel “The New York Trilogy”
(1986). Critics put him on a par with Walter Abish, the most
prominent representatives of American postmodernism.
“The New York Trilogy” consists of three novels – “City of
Glass” (1985), “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room” (both – 1986) –
connected by a single storyline. In its implied sense, the trilogy
proceeds from a deliberate polemic with the popular opinion
about detective literature, according to which no author working
in the detective genre can afford to discover the “fictionality”
of the character and the plot without risking entertainment, as
often happens in realistic literature. Thus, Oster does everything
to discover this fiction, but at the same time he strives to remain
entertaining.
Auster, like Coover in “Gerald’s Party”, takes a detective
story as a basis. The peculiarity of the trilogy is that the
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author, the detective and the reader discover the quality of
interchangeability. The reader, looking at what is happening
through the eyes of a detective, sees the hidden meaning in any
detail, but at the same time he is not able to understand the plot,
until certain conclusions are made. And this is the basis of the
entertainment of the work.
The structure of the narrative corresponds to the
“matryoshka” principle. A certain fiction writer Quinn writes
a detective story, in which the main character is Max Work.
In the course of the narrative and the discovery of detective’s
secrets, Quinn himself becomes a character of another author,
Paul Auster, who in turn becomes a character within the plot.
The mystery Quinn explores is more complicated by himself than
clarified.
The trilogy contains many riddles and misunderstandings
conceived by the author. For example, a character named
Blue isn’t sure if he’s hired to spy on someone or if he’s being
followed. Another rather confusing move is that the narrative is
conducted on behalf of the missing character, whom everyone is
looking for. In the end, the narrator still gives an explanation of
everything that happens in the previous two books, leading the
reader to assume that in a sense, Oster did not write these books,
but was himself created by the imagination of a certain creator
and introduced into the narrative.
Each subsequent novel in the trilogy includes everything that
has already been written in a new narrative frame. At the same
time, the increasing complexity of the plot, its intricacies and
fancifulness, theoretically justified by the author, are revealed.
The literary basis of all parts of the trilogy is quite
transparent, and it reveals the kinship of the work with many
modern American novels, in which each writer, in order to
achieve authenticity, demonstrates at the same time his closeness
to the literary tradition and courage in interpreting literary
canons. In “The City of Glass”, for example, there are allusions
to Edgar Poe, the discoverer of American Gothic and the creator
of detective stories. “Ghosts” is dominated by fictional images
inspired by the works of Melville, Thoreau and Whitman.
Auster’s style, for all its experimental nature, is close to the best
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examples of American classics, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield”, the hero disappears in
order to see himself from the outside and understand his own
life.
An important role in establishing the realities of a new,
multicultural community is played by migrant writers – people
who, for one reason or another, dramatically change their
cultural environment, are forced to experience and pass through
their creative consciousness the symptoms of the process
of acculturation in a new environment, as a result of which
there appeare works with certain specific features that can be
combined under the general name “cross-cultural literature”.
Most of them are writers who come from the former colonies to
the metropolis, to the center to which they adapt here, constantly
remembering their homeland with nostalgia. The fluctuation
between the center and the periphery is a common metaphor in
the work of migrant writers, who, among other things, when
moving to another country, begin to create in a new, non-native
language. Decentralization involves not only an excursion
from the “third world” to the “first” one with the overcoming
of special established concepts of the origin of people, but also
a process of negotiations that are conducted in an environment of
overcoming rigid political, traditional and cultural attitudes that
govern the laws of national identity. The hero of cross-cultural
literature, who has a transitional, dual, hybridized identity that
develops «somewhere between», «above the battle», in a state
of transitivity, reflects the dialectic of the binary opposition of
“community – non-community”, “belonging – non-belonging” to
a particular nation.
The range of migrant writers is unusually wide. They are
gaining leading positions in the literature of almost every
economically developed country. In the United States, serious
literature is represented by people from all continents and
regions of the former colonial space. First of all, these are former
residents of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the
Caribbean.
The origins and patterns of the “symbiotic” nature of
writing skills become the subject of introspection of writers
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who, according to different characteristics, belong to the
described group. Modern American writer Jhumpa Lahiri (born
1967), the daughter of Indian immigrants, born in London and
raised in the United States, who became famous for her first
book “The Interpreter of Maladies” (1999), recognizes their
incomprehensibility, the alienation of artistic language from
readers of both Eastern and Western civilizations. At the same
time, the mechanism of interaction of the “other” consciousness
with the surrounding world is partially revealed: the ability to
see the world differently from others, the expectation that the
reader will make an attempt to look at the world through the eyes
of the author. Then follows the recognition by the author of the
fact that such cognizance is impossible. At the same time, the
author does not abandon his bold creative attempts to tell about
the «other», mysterious and incomprehensible, with the help of
a well-known circle of images –both Western and Eastern. Lahiri
does it in a universal language – English, Lingua Franca of the
XX–XXI centuries.
In the process of self-identification of migrant writers,
a question arises: how a writer with colonial roots applies and
uses the resources of the American literature and the English
language, describing non-European communities. It is important
to note that language and form become the embodiment of
judgments that conflict with the characters being narrated.
Chinese-American Ha Jin (born 1956) has mastered English to
the level of a professional writer in just ten years. He emigrated
from China to the United States after the Tiananmen Square
memorable event, and his English was so bad that he was not
even hired at a restaurant. Already in 1999, he was awarded
the National Book Award for the novel “Waiting”, in which
the author tells about the complexities of family life and love
relationships in modern China. The writer claims that life in
America has allowed him to look at China from the outside,
more critically than the inhabitants of the country can do. The
subsequent Faulkner Prize (2000), the reviews of leading critics
who equate the “Ha Jin phenomenon” with the experience of
Nabokov, Conrad and other bilingual writers, allows us to speak
not only of a “scientific case”, but also of artistic discoveries.
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