Postmodernism in Literature

Labels: British Fiction, Critical Theory, Literary Interpretation, Postmodernist Fiction

In their sociological study The Social Construction of Reality, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann set out to show that reality is manufactured by social conventions and institutions, which we unquestionably take for facts. These social conventions, according to Berger and Luckmann, are necessary for human beings to function in society without the need to analyze every single action they perform. Such habitual actions performed at the level of the unconscious allow for more creativity and productivity, opening a ‘foreground for deliberation and innovation' Similarly, the realist text applies literary conventions which are shared between author and reader, in such a way that the reader does not question the artifice of fiction. Literary conventions are tacitly agreed upon between author and reader, and enable the reader to momentarily suspend his disbelief to accept the constructed world of fiction as real. Conventions can, however, become naturalized to such an extent that we may regard them as given. When these conventions are exposed we become aware of the construction of reality, and accordingly the very concept of reality is undermined. If ‘fiction is woven into all’, all truth claims are fictions which can be written in alternative way once viewed from a different set of conventions. The notion that reality and truth are a construct, rather than an entity or an essence, is one of the major concerns of postmodernist fiction. Nineteenth-century fiction endorses the notion that reality is a commonly shared experience that can be shared between author and reader. Modernism challenged such a view, and moved from an objective representation of reality to individually perspectives of reality. Postmodernist fiction was to go further, representing a world where ‘reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures’. As Jean-Francois aptly puts it, postmodernist fiction is characterised by an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’.

What is Postmodernist Literature?

Postmodernist fiction rejects the notion of universal truths and plays with the possibilities of interpretations, multiple perspectives, uncertainties, and contradictions. The novel, therefore, does not profess to be a coherent whole, and subverts both the expectations of narrative closure and of the disclosures previously provided by the omniscient narrator. Christopher Norris suggests that:

The main point of post-modernist narratives is to challenge, subvert, or paradoxically exploit the conventions in play when we make sense of texts. This involves a high-degree of self-conscious contrivance and, by implication, a manipulative stance outside and above the story-line flow of events. In this sense […] post-modernism carries along with it a strong ‘meta-narrative’ tendency which precisely undermines the naïve habit of trust in first-order natural narration.

In other words, postmodernist fiction is characterised by a strong metafictional impetus. As Linda Hutcheon remarks, ‘metafiction is today recognised as a manifestation of postmodernism’. Metafiction, as Hutcheon simply puts it, ‘is fiction about fiction’. Metafictional novels engage with the conventions of Realism in a contradictory manner, which ultimately works to overthrow the illusion of reality in their self-conscious narration. Taking realist conventions as their point of departure, they proceed to parodic undermining in such a way that the search for the real and the true, the omniscient narrator, and the idea of closure, are all proved a literary device as any other. What metafiction sets out to do ‘is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction’.