Some Ghostly Tales From South America
A Lackadaisical Overview of Magic Realists' Short Story Art
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Joao Guimaraes Rosa (1908-1967) was a Brazilian diplomat & physician whose short stories of rural Brazil are sophisticated, elegant & macabre. The term Magic Realism is frequently used to distinguish South American from North American fantasy. But Rosa's influences included Poe for weirdness & Hawthorne for descriptiveness, so that any distinction between the weird tales of the two continents is mostly artificial.
Primeiras Estorias (Rio de Janeira: Livraria Jose Olympio Editora, 1962) was translated by Barbara Shelby as The Third Bank of the River & Other Stories (NY: Knopf, 1968). It is a superior collection for anyone who loves a ghostly tale. The title story has been anthologized a couple of times so has a degree of fame among English language readers. Like the majority of Rosa's stories, "Third Bank" is set in the backlands of the state of Minas Gerais, somewhat comparable to a North American setting in, say, Appalachia. "Third Bank" is an excellent choice for a title story because it captures the double meanings & mysticism for which Rosa is duly famed to Portuguese language readers. In a general sense, a third bank is a place unachievable by the living. On a literal level, the story regards a young man's father who sets out in a canoe only to discover he cannot reach the second bank, nor return to the first bank. He remains a ghostly presence in his canoe on the river year after year, unchanging, near but unreachable. By the end, the narrator is reduced to stark terror when his father finally acknowledges him, this being an omen of his own impending death.
The eerie ambiguities of the title story is typical of many in the collection. "The Mirror" sets out to explain "the transcendent nature" embodied by the mystery of one's own reflection. It poses simple conundrums, like why do we always seem to see ourselves as the same in a mirror, whereas a roll of film shot all in one hour will reveal us to look very different one frame to the next. The intimation is that what we see in a mirror is a disguise that protects us from viewing our true & terrifying selves.
A more sentimental approach to the weird tale is provided by "The Girl from Beyond." It regards a strange village child whom nothing perturbs, whose capacity for working miracles increases during her short life, until she foresees even her own death with the same imperturbability. Another miraculous figure is "A Young Man, Gleaming, White" who is either a madman who survived an inexplicable cataclysm in the 1870s, or an angel who fell from another world (or out of heaven) instigating the cataclysm when he struck the earth.
An earlier collection, Sagarana (Rio de Janeira: Livraria Jose Olympio Editora, 1946) was translated as Sagarana: A Cycle of Stories (NY: Knopf, 1966). It seems not to be the equal of Third Bank, but this may be the fault of Harriet de Onas, whose translations of sundry authors from Spanish & Portuguese invariably read imperfectly. The tale "Woodland Witchery" regards a feud with a sorcerer. The supernatural element is strong, but the real strength of the story, as with the others, is in describing Brazilian village life & mores. The mysticism is weaker & there are fewer interesting ambiguities than in Third Bank. None of the Sagarana stories have the degree of emotion, whether of terror or sentiment, & seem really to be about people trying to get along with one another despite villagers' foibles & infighting.
Happily the better of the two collections is a little easier to find, though both can be fairly expensive whenever they pop up among booksellers.
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil's first great short story writer. Between 1858-1906 he penned over 200 short stories, of which around thirty are available in English. The stories he penned from the 1880s until the end of his life are considered matchless in the Brazilian language. His translators unfortunately have not been as keen on that percentage of his work that is fantastic, & someone ought to provide us a selection of his satiric fantasies. In the meantime, a representative selection of nineteen stories from his mature period is available as The Devil's Church & Other Stories (Austin & Ln: University of Texas Press, 1977). There was an earlier collection The Psychiatrist & Other Stories (1963) but I read it so long ago that I remember nothing about it. The Devil's Church, however, is memorable & charming, & the American first edition is a very handsomely designed hardcover with old wood engravings heading each story (it has also a trade paper edition). The lovely engravings were unfortunately dropped from the later UK first.
The authors Machado most resembles are Swift & Twain at their most bitingly satiric. Machado's criticisms of church & state have a universality that transcends any specifically Brazilian situation he may have had in mind. Particularly Swiftian is "The Bonzo's Secret." The title (alluding to a bonze or Buddhist monk) provided a pun in Portuguese meaning both "solemn" & "hypocrite." The doctrine of the sect is to instill in others beliefs the priests themselves do not hold. They amputate noses which are replaced with "metaphysical noses." The followers accept these metaphysical noses as unquestionably real.
More to the side of Twain is the collection's title story. The Devil finds it easy to win converts to his new Church by pandering to the most furtive, secret, & petty sins of otherwise pious people. But after he has won them to the overt sinfulness required by his doctrine, he is frustrated in his desire to completely corrupt humanity by their tendency to commit furtive good deeds.
Irony is Machado's truck & trade, as in the tale of reincarnation, "A Second Life," narrated by a man who died young, or the outright comedy, "A Canary's Ideas," a charming fable of a caged bird's misguided impressions of himself as master of the world. Perhaps the cruelest of the stories is "An Alexandrian Tale" which might be regarded as heroic fantasy, if a reader immerses herself in the incidents as literal rather than as satiric reflections on idealism used by modern governments to justify totalitarian evil. It recounts the career of a Ptolemaic surgeon, whose scientific theory for a perfected world requires the most grotesque experimentation upon living humans.
Horacio Quiroga (1879-1937) was born in Uruguay & died in Argentina of suicide by poison after he learned of his cancer. His life was enriched with adventure & marred with violence & tragedy, so that the abrupt hazards & cruelties of so many of his tales reflect actual experience. He was not without tenderness, however, & his children's fantasies, Cuentos de la selva (1918), available in English as Jungle Tales, make pleasing adult reading.
Quiroga revered Poe. A great number of his more than 200 stories are weird tales. They are available in Spanish in the Biblioteca Rodo Series under the collective title Cuentos (1937-1945). If someone with a love of the macabre & a good ear for translation mined this set, we would be given a truly great collection of supernatural horror. These haven't been what his translators have preferred up to now, but we do have a serviceable collection that shows Quiroga's full range in The Decapitated Chicken & Other Stories (Austin & Ln: University of Texas Press, 1976), which in its first hardcover edition is handsomely designed & illustrated. There is also a trade paperback.
In this representative set of tales, Quiroga comes across most often as a Spanish language d'Isle Adam possessed by the contes cruel, as in "The Decapitated Chicken" or "Drifting." His main theme is always death, even in the one story that ends well, "The Son." Some of the tales are pure adventure. "A Slap in the Face" reminded me of Owen Wister, an emotive author of westerns. "In the Middle of the Night" is a breathtaking tale of surviving a flood along the Upper Parana River, with a man & woman "spurred on by madness & disillusion" & doing in the Tropics what Jack London did for the sub-Arctic.
This collection is masterful despite under-representation of the supernatural stories Quiroga personally thought so important. There are, however, just enough weird tales in the mix to make the book sought-after by readers of same. "The Feather Pillow" has become famous among the current horde of vampire fans, as I've seen The Decapitated Chicken on many vampire readers' wantlists. The pillow itself is the vampire. "Sunstroke" is an elegant ghost story wherein a man's dogs observe the descent of Death upon their master.
A truly superior jungle tale is "Juan Darien" which one-ups Kipling at every stroke. This story could easily slip into an anthology about were-beasts. Juan Darien is a tiger who has taken the outer appearance of a human being to undergo human education. He soon learns of the faithless cruelty of men & how his own race is infinitely to be preferred. Another jungle tale, "Anaconda," is a powerful adventure told with unutterable sincerity from the anaconda's point of view.
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In 1962, three earlier collections & a bestiary by Mexican author Juan Jose Arreola (b. 1918) were collected together with new stories as Confabulario Total 1941-1961, then done into a large English language hardcover with four divisions, & titled Confabulario & Other Inventions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), with negligible illustrations by Kelly Fearing. The volume begins with "Bestiary," of vignettes often a half-page each in length. Some have the tone of poems-in-prose, others of whimsical character studies commenting on the human state while disguised as natural history. The second section, "Prosody," consists of prose miniatures of varied subjects, some of them close to Baudelaire in attitude. Sixty-one pages into the collection, we reach the short stories & short-shorts, mixed into sections called "Confabulario" & "Various Inventions."
"A Pact with the Devil" takes its cliche subject & places it in an unusual environment. Satan in a cinema house attempts to bargain for the soul of a man who is watching a film about a deal with the devil. He fortunately refuses to finalize the bargain until he sees how the film ends! A handful of the stories resemble early Tom Disch. The fantastical "Announcement" satirizes the very advertising techniques Disch lampooned in "Fun With Your New Head." The excellent "Parable of the Exchange" tells of used-car-style misleading sales techniques for inducing husbands to exchange their old wives for robotic ones, from the point of view of a husband who is so out of step with things that he would rather keep his old wife. Other of the tales are highly mystical. "Paul" is a cashier in a bank who unexpectedly rises out of the banality of his everyday life & sets outward & inward on journeys that reveal to him the whole of the cosmos; there is something of the Kabbalah in this story, & is a clear precursor to Borges's justifiably famous "The Aleph." "God's Silence" is told in two letters, one left open on a table so that God will read it, the other God's reply. These mystical fancies are very beautiful & convey the author's interest in Gnosticism.
"I'm Telling You the Truth" is literary science fiction about a device for teleporting camels through the eye of a needle. A particularly eerie story is "The Bird Spider" about a man deathly afraid of spiders who nevertheless purchases a gigantic deadly poisonous variety to turn loose in his house. In "Small Town Affair," the attorney Don Fulgencio awakens one morning to discover splendid bulls' horns have sprouted from his head. The vignette "Autrui" swiftly outlines the paranoia of a corpse. "The Prodigious Milligram" is a long fable of an ant who in the course of diligently pursuing her duties steps slightly out of the line. To her surprise she must undergo trial & punishment in the Kafkaesque anthill. Unlike Kafka's maltreated heroes, however, our ant's martyrdom transforms the entirety of the hill. "The Fraud" is a strange, vague ghost story about a stove manufacturing mogul whose stoves cease to function after his death. In all, this is an inventive collection with a wide ranging approach to storytelling art.
To attempt to review Jorge Luis Borges (hard "g") is too daunting, so I will only mention a couple of my favorites among his many books. It is the rare writer who becomes a household name outside his original language, & rarer still that so great a genius is widely recognized, as opposed to some potpoiler novelist or television actor who becomes universally admired. From the point of view of a fantasy, horror, or ghost story reader, it is wonderful to think that a writer so gleefully influenced by American pulp magazines should indeed be recognized as a giant of letters. Few of the many academicians who have published their numerous monographs on Borges like to admit the great man read pulp magazines from the USA & even submitted stories to them: he accumulated rejection slips from science fiction pulps, but Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine was more rewarding for him. If any ghost story fan has avoided Borges out of the sentiment that anybody the academics delight in must therefore be stultifying – overcome your prejudice at once!
The Book of Sand (NY: Dutton, 1977) is predominantly supernatural. "There Are More Things" is Borges' homage to H. P. Lovecraft. "The Other" is his homage to the Poe of "William Wilson." Other stories have the avowed mark of H. G. Wells or Kafka to them. Most of the tales represent the author's last "period" of creativity, when he was somewhat apologetic about repeating themes already well-handled throughout his career. More representative of every period of his creative life is The Aleph & Other Stories 1933-1969 (NY: Dutton, 1970), a fat collection most of which is fantasy. Typical is my favorite, the title story, about an ordinary man who glimpses all of creation in a single letter of the alphabet.
A couple of my other favorites among Borges' titles are a bit less storyish: Dreamtigers (Austin/Ln: University of Texas, 1964) is a handsome slender book half poems & half poems-in-prose, the second category very winning; then there's an anthology of poems-in-prose co-edited with A. Bioy Casares, Extraordinary Tales (Ln: Souvenir Press, 1973; with a 1971 US edition I've not seen). Borges also edited, together with fantasists Silvina Ocampo & her husband A. Bioy Casares, The Book of Fantasy (NY: Viking, 1988), a thoroughly international & grand anthology first published (in Spanish) in 1940 & expanded in 1965. The US edition has an Ursula LeGuin introduction added.
I've often thought I'd one day write a good long essay about feminist supernatural writers of Latin America, but doubt I'll ever get around to it. As an introduction to women's weird tales I most strongly recommend Alberto Manguel's anthology Other Fires: Short Stories by Latin American Women (NY: Potter, 1986). Though not packaged as fantasy, almost all the stories are fantastic, in all senses of the word. A bit harder to find, but quite as good, is Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic & the Real (Houston: Arte Publico, 1990) edited by Celia Correas de Zapata, a big anthology that does not overlap Alberto's selection at all.
Three single-author collections stand out for me. Silvina Ocampo's Leopoldina's Dream (NY: Penguin, 1988) is a large choice of fantasy, including many ghost stories, such as the "House of Sugar" about a woman who quite rightly knew she should never have lived in a house that had previous occupants. Maria Luisa Bombal's New Islands & Other Stories (NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982) is a small collection of weird tales all written before 1940, my favorite being "The Unknown," about a sunken ship whose crew does not realize they are dead. Lygia Fagundes Telles, a Brazillian, has published many collections in Portugese, a selection of which appeared in English only in small paperback format as Tigrela & Other Stories (NY: Avon Bard, 1986). The title story regards a woman possessed by a she-tiger's spirit & acts accordingly. The lead story, "Ants," tells of a box containing the bones of a dwarf. Night by night the box is visited by an army of ants who by stages put the skeleton together. This is a tremendously good collection & I dare say it would not have been relegated to paperback original except that a woman had written it.
I guess I'm getting pooped rereading stories a bit too hastily to refresh my memory, & am wearing down on the subject besides, so I'll end with a few rapid-fire recommendations. If the following books are getting short shrift, it's only because I ran out of steam, not because they are secondary; for the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marqez is very likely the best of the lot, and I've practically skipped him entirely. I often regret selling my set of US first editions (in an hour of need) so that I have the majority of his tales only in the big omnibus Collected Stories, plus a follow-up volume of novellas, this set containing many of my truly favorite tales in the whole world. His later collection is Strange Pilgrims (NY: Knopf, 1993), contains a dozen first-rate weird tales.
Carlos Fuentes' Burnt Water (NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980) includes Mexican ghost stories. My favorite tale is "Chac-Mool," about a householder who obtains a statue of the Rain-god which comes to life, drives the householder to suicide, & takes over the doomed man's house in order to live a typical (if rather damp) suburban life. Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa's The Beggar's Knife (San Francisco: City Lights, 1985) was translated by the great Paul Bowles. The small book consists of a great many short-short tales, many about ghosts, witchcraft, &c. Of slightly lesser interest (because it is closer to science fiction than supernatural) is his The Pelcari Projeact (Ln: Peter Owen, 1991), a single short story reading like a cynical, sadistic version of Kafka's The Trial.
Brazilian Jorge Amado's The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell (NY: Knopf, 1965) is a slim book consisting of the one short story. Though it never with great certainty leaps into outright supernaturalism, it is nevertheless a splendidly bizarre & funny tale of friends who invade Quincas's wake, steal his body, & take him on a last tour of adventure in the slums he'd loved so much more than his middle-class family life. Quincas's story is one of greatest tales ever to come out of Latin America. Another Brazilian, Murilo Rubiao, is inferior to most of these others, but The Ex-Magician & Other Stories (NY: Harper & Row, 1979) is chiefly weirds & contes cruel. One tale, "Teleco, the Rabbit," is memorably strange & sad, making up for the misogynist fables that mar parts of the book.
Julio Cortazar has a plethora of collections available in English, all with at least a bit of fantasy in them. A collection top-heavy with weirdness is A Change of Light & Other Stories (NY: Knopf, 1980). My own favorite of his books is very odd in style & emotion, quite different from the greater body of his story collections, one that rests halfway between short stories & poems-in-prose (which I love). That book is Cronopios and Famas (NY: Pantheon, 1969) which not long ago, I noticed, had a reissue in paperback, so it should be easy to find, though the original hardcover is almost unfindable, & my own copy is rather shoddy (unlike the bulk of these books I've named, which I have as Fine Firsts). A typical story is about a decapitated man who continues living because there is a gravediggers' strike. My favorite & most fully storyish is "Simulacra" about a family that decides to build an elaborate gallows in their front yard, an occupation that brings everyone even closer together, "Addams' Family" style, while causing the entire neighborhood to go through various stages of curiosity, alarm, annoyance & expectation leading up to the wonderful day of the gallows' completion.
This connected series of commentaries is a dynamic work & I will expand it as I have time to read or re-read select volumes of short stories by magic realists.
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post-World War II literature (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.
Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard's concept of the "meta-narrative" and "little narrative," Jacques Derrida's concept of "play," and Jean Baudrillard's "simulacra." For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest.
This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author and his own self-awareness; thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author's "univocation" (the existence of narrative primacy within a text, the presence of a single all-powerful storytelling authority). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. A list of postmodern authors often varies; the following are some names of authors often so classified, most of them belonging to the generation born in the interwar period: William Gaddis (1922-1998), William Burroughs (1914-1997), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), John Barth (b. 1930), Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931), Robert Coover (1932), Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) Don DeLillo (b. 1936), Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), Ishmael Reed (1938), Kathy Acker (1947-1997), Paul Auster (b. 1947)[1], Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952).
Background
Notable influences
Postmodernist writers often point to early novels and story collections as inspiration for their experiments with narrative and structure: Don Quixote, 1001 Arabian Nights, The Decameron, and Candide, among many others. In the English language, Laurence Sterne's 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, with its heavy emphasis on parody and narrative experimentation, is often cited as an early influence on postmodernism. There were many 19th century examples of attacks on Enlightenment concepts, parody, and playfulness in literature, including Lord Byron's satire, especially Don Juan; Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; Alfred Jarry's ribald Ubu parodies and his invention of 'Pataphysics; Lewis Carrol's playful experiments with signification; the work of Isidore Ducasse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde. Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work would serve as an influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and attacked the central role of the artist. Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magical realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period.[2]
Comparisons with modernist literature
Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the stream of consciousness styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf's Orlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely.[2]
Shift to postmodernism
As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start.
The prefix "post," however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention, through the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal computer (Cyberpunk fiction and Hypertext fiction).[3][4][5]
Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first performance of Waiting for Godot in 1953, the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology.[6]
Post-war developments and transition figures
Though postmodernist literature does not refer to everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, and Magical Realism) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures (Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic.
The work of Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus's concept of the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Samuel Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says, "Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres.[...] Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work [...] He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters."[7]
"The Beat Generation" is a name coined by Jack Kerouac for the disaffected youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Kerouac developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. "Beat Generation" is often used more broadly to refer to several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen). Though this is now a less common usage of "postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this group (John Ashbery, Richard Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with the Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs. Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin, for the creation of the "cut-up" technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded.
Magical Realism is a technique popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was a center piece of the Latin American "boom", a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magical Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early twentieth-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America.
Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern, see Brian McHale.[8]
Scope
Postmodernism in literature is not an organized movement with leaders or central figures; therefore, it is more difficult to say if it has ended or when it will end (compared to, say, declaring the end of modernism with the death of Joyce or Woolf). Arguably postmodernism peaked in the 60s and 70s with the publication of Catch-22 in 1961, Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Slaughterhouse Five in 1969, Gravity's Rainbow in 1973, and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the 80's with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism.[9] With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in 1985 or The Satanic Verses in 1988 to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.
A new generation of writers -- such as David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem -- and publications such as McSweeney's, The Believer, and the fiction pages of The New Yorker, herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or something else entirely -- post-postmodernism. [2][10] Amazon.com described the Mark Z. Danielewski 2000 novel House of Leaves as "post-postmodern."
Common themes and techniques
All of these themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor is this an exclusive list of features.
Irony, playfulness, black humor
Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, etc. It's common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon address the events of World War II. A good example of postmodern irony and black humor is found in the stories of Donald Barthelme; "The School", for example, is about the ironic death of plants, animals, and people connected to the children in one class, but the inexplicable repetition of death is treated only as a joke and the narrator remains emotionally distant throughout. The central concept of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic "catch-22", and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within a serious context. The Crying of Lot 49, for example, contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure.[11][2][12]
Intertextuality
Since postmodernism represents a decentered concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Critics point to this as an indication of postmodernism’s lack of originality and reliance on clichés. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales – as in works by Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme, and many other – or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism is John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke’s poem of the same name. Often intertextuality is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice, for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Also, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Borges[13][14][15].
Pastiche
Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, Derek Pell relies on collage and noir detective, erotica, travel guides, and how-to manuals, and so on. Though pastiche commonly refers to the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). For example, Thomas Pynchon includes in his novels elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction; songs; pop culture references; well-known, obscure, and fictional history mixed together; real contemporary and historical figures (Mickey Rooney and Wernher Von Braun for example); a wide variety of well-known, obscure and fictional cultures and concepts. In Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can also refer to compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson's 1969 novel The Unfortunates; it was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose.[2][16][17]
Metafiction
Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willful suspension of disbelief". It is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique: the first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien's 1990 novel/story collection The Things They Carried, about one platoon's experiences during the Vietnam War, features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents through out the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable and heroic, moral war stories don't capture the truth.
Fabulation
Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magical Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature -- the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example -- and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction. By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators. A good example of fabulation is Salman Rushdie´s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.[18]
Poioumena
Poioumenon (plural, "poioumena") is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. A common example of this is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy which is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children parallels the creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, John Fowles's Mantissa, and William Golding's Paper Men, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew.[19][20][21]
Historiographic metafiction
Linda Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction" to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung), and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to the Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian Period in The French Lieutenant's Woman. In regards to critical theory, this technique can be related to The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes.[2]
Temporal distortion
This is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and non-linear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut's non-linear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants, the author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously -- in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on -- yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version.[2]
Magic realism
Literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian who in 1935 published his Historia universal de la infamia, regarded by many as the first work of magic realism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction – especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier is another described as a "magic realist". Postmodernists such as Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, and Gunter Grass commonly use Magical Realism in their work.[2][22] A fusion of fabulism with magical realism is apparent in such early 21st century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier's "The Ceiling," Dan Chaon's "Big Me," Jacob M. Appel's "Exposure," and Elizabeth Graver's "The Mourning Door".[23]
Technoculture and hyperreality
Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the "cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism" implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, Don DeLillo's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with a "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment.[24][25][26] Steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction popularized in novels and comics by such writers as Alan Moore and James Blaylock, demonstrates postmodern pastiche, temporal distortion, and a focus on technoculture with its mix of futuristic technology and Victorian culture.
Paranoia
Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and the work of Thomas Pynchon, the sense of paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon has many possible interpretations. If one reads the book with a particular bias, then they are going to be frustrated.[27] This often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human.[2]
Maximalism
Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer, which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work.
Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto, attack the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, James Chapman's Stet, and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment.[28][29]
Minimalism
Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader’s imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Samuel Beckett.[30]
Different perspectives
John Barth, the postmodernist novelist who talks often about the label "postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called "Literature of Exhaustion" and in 1979 wrote "Literature of Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In "Literature of Replenishment" Barth says,
My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century Modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett's Texts for Nothing... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and 'contentism,' pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction...[31]
Many of the well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II, one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war:
The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the Fifties. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle. I don't think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Pynchon and in Cat's Cradle.[32]
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.[33]
Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram" makes the connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature:
It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists, the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by "postmodern." The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of a culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR, the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor, and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 ... Here's Robert Coover's 1966 A Public Burning, in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president.[34]
Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature:
Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially Durell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while "post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative.[35]
