The image of the writer in postmodern literature. Postmodernism in modern literature

In Russian literature, the emergence of postmodernism dates back to the early 1970s. Only at the end of the 1980s did it become possible to talk about postmodernism as an irrevocable literary and cultural reality, and to beginning of XXI century, we have to acknowledge the end of the “postmodern era”. Postmodernism cannot be characterized as an exclusively literary phenomenon. It is directly related to the very principles of worldview, which manifest themselves not only in artistic culture, in science, but also in different areas social life. It would be more accurate to define postmodernism as a complex of ideological attitudes and aesthetic principles, moreover, in opposition to the traditional, classic painting the world and the ways of its representation in works of art.

In the development of postmodernism in Russian literature, three periods can be roughly distinguished:

1. Late 60s - 70s. (A. Terts, A. Bitov, V. Erofeev, Vs. Nekrasov, L. Rubinstein, etc.)

2. 70_s - 80_s. approval as a literary movement, the basis of whose aesthetics is the post-structural thesis “the world (consciousness) as a text”, and the basis artistic practice which is a demonstration of cultural intertext (E. Popov, Vik. Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, V. Sorokin, etc.)

3. Late 80s - 90s. period of legalization (T. Kibirov, L. Petrushevskaya, D. Galkovsky, V. Pelevin, etc.).

Contemporary postmodernism its roots go back to the art of the avant-garde of the beginning of the century, to the poetics and aesthetics of expressionism, literature of the absurd, the world of V. Rozanov, Zoshchenko’s story, the work of V. Nabokov. The picture of postmodern prose is very colorful, multifaceted, there are many transitional phenomena. Formed persistent stereotypes postmodern works, a certain set artistic techniques, which have become a kind of cliché, designed to express the crisis state of the world at the end of the century and the millennium: “the world as chaos”, “the world as text”, “crisis of authorities”, narrative essayism, eclecticism, play, total irony, “exposure of technique”, “power letters", its shocking and grotesque character, etc.

Postmodernism is an attempt to overcome realism with its absolute values. The irony of postmodernism lies, first of all, in the impossibility of its existence, both without modernism and without realism, which give this phenomenon a certain depth and significance.

Russian postmodern literature went through a certain process of “crystallization” before taking shape in accordance with the new canons. At first it was Wen’s “different,” “new,” “hard,” “alternative” prose. Erofeev, A. Bitov, L. Petrushevskaya, S. Kaledin, V. Pelevin, V. Makanin, V. Pietsukha, etc. This prose was polemical, oppositional to tradition, it was sometimes even a “slap in the face of public taste” with its dystopian nature, nihilistic consciousness and hero, harsh, negative, anti-aesthetic style, comprehensive irony, quotation, excessive associativity, intertextuality. Gradually, it was postmodernist literature with its own postmodernist sensitivity and absolutization of wordplay that emerged from the general flow of alternative prose.

Russian postmodernism carried the main features of postmodern aesthetics, such as:

1. rejection of truth, rejection of hierarchy, evaluations, any comparison with the past, lack of restrictions;

2. attraction to uncertainty, refusal of thinking based on binary oppositions;

4. focus on deconstruction, i.e. the restructuring and destruction of the previous structure of intellectual practice and culture in general; the phenomenon of double presence, the “virtuality” of the world of postmodernism;

5. the text allows for an infinite number of interpretations, the loss of a semantic center that creates a space for dialogue between the author and the reader and vice versa. It becomes important how information is expressed, with primary attention to context; the text is a multidimensional space composed of quotes that refer to many cultural sources;

Totalitarian system and national characteristics cultures determined the striking differences between Russian postmodernism and Western ones, namely:

1. Russian postmodernism differs from Western one in the more distinct presence of the author through the feeling of the idea he is pursuing;

2. it is paralogical (from the Greek paralogy, answers out of place) in its essence and contains semantic oppositions of categories, between which there can be no compromise;

3. Russian postmodernism combines avant-garde utopianism and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism;

4. Russian postmodernism is born from the inconsistency of the consciousness of the split of the cultural whole, not into the metaphysical, but into the literal “death of the author” and consists of attempts within one text to restore cultural organics through a dialogue of heterogeneous cultural languages;

Regarding postmodernism in Russia, Mikhail Epstein said in his interview for Russian Journal: “In fact, postmodernism has penetrated much deeper into Russian culture than it might seem at first glance. Russian culture was late for the celebration of the New Age. Therefore, it has already been born in the forms of new modernity, postmodernity, starting from St. Petersburg<…>. St. Petersburg is brilliant with quotes, collected from the best examples. Russian culture, distinguished by the intertextual and quotational phenomenon of Pushkin, in which Peter’s reforms responded. He was the first example of great postmodernism in Russian literature. And in general, Russian culture was built on the model of a simulacrum (a simulacrum is a “copy” that has no original in reality).

Signifiers here have always prevailed over signifieds. But there were no signified people here as such. Sign systems were built from themselves. What was assumed by modernity - the paradigm of the New Time (that there is a certain self-significant reality, there is a subject who knows it objectively, there are the values ​​of rationalism) - was never valued in Russia and was very cheap. Therefore, Russia had its own predisposition to postmodernism.”

In postmodern aesthetics, the integrity of the subject, the human “I,” traditional even for modernism, is destroyed: mobility, uncertainty of the boundaries of the “I” leads almost to the loss of face, to its replacement by many masks, the “erasure” of individuality hidden behind other people’s quotes. The motto of postmodernism could be the saying “I am not I”: in the absence of absolute values, neither the author, nor the narrator, nor the hero are responsible for everything said; the text is made reversible - parody and irony become “intonation norms” that make it possible to give exactly the opposite meaning to what was stated a line ago.

Conclusion: Russian postmodernism, isolated from the West, a complex of ideological attitudes and aesthetic principles different from traditional painting peace. Postmodernism in Russian literature is paralogical; there can be no compromise between its oppositions. Representatives of this trend, within the framework of one text, conduct a dialogue “in heterogeneous cultural languages.”

Postmodernism - (eng. postmodernism) - common name related to the latest trends V contemporary art. It was introduced into widespread use in 1969 by the American literary critic L. Friedler. In the specialized literature there is no consensus on the meaning of the term “postmodernism”. As a rule, postmodernism is attributed to post-war European and American culture, but there are also attempts to extend this concept to more early period or, conversely, attribute it to the art of the future, after or outside of modernity. Despite the vagueness of the term, there are certain realities of modern art behind it.

The concept of “postmodernism” can be interpreted in a broad and narrow sense. IN broad meaning, postmodernism is a state of culture as a whole, a set of ideas, concepts, a special view of the world. In a narrow sense, Postmodernism is a phenomenon of aesthetics, literary direction, in which the ideas of postmodernism in a broad sense are embodied.

Postmodernism emerged in the second half of the 20th century. Special role R. Barthes, J. Kristeva, J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, U. Eco played a role in the formation of the ideas of postmodernism. In practice, these ideas were implemented by A. Murdoch, J. Fowles, J. Barnes, M. Pavic, I. Calvino and many others. etc.

The main elements of postmodern consciousness:

Total relativism- the relativity of everything and everyone, the absence absolute truths and precise landmarks. There are many points of view, and each of them is true in its own way, so the concept of truth becomes meaningless. The world of postmodernism is extremely relative, everything in it is unsteady and there is nothing absolute. All traditional guidelines have been revised and refuted. Concepts of good, evil, love, justice and many more. others have lost their meaning.

A consequence of total relativism is the concept end of history, which means the denial of the objective linear nature historical process. There is no single history of humanity; there are metanarratives fixed in the mind, i.e. large-scale explanatory systems that those in power create for their own purposes. Metanarratives are, for example, Christianity, Marxism. Postmodernism is characterized by a distrust of metanarratives.

Epistemological uncertainty- a feature of the worldview in which the world is perceived as absurd, chaotic, inexplicable. Episteme is a set of ideas that in a given era defines the boundaries of the true (close to the concept of a scientific paradigm). Epistemological uncertainty arises during the period of episteme change, when the old episteme no longer meets the needs of society, and the new one has not yet been formed.

Simulacrum is an object that arises as a result of the simulation process, not associated with reality, but perceived as real, the so-called. "connotation without denotation." The central concept of postmodernism, this concept existed before, but it was in the context of postmodern aesthetics that it was developed by J. Beaurillard. “A simulacrum is a pseudo-thing that replaces the “agonizing reality” with a post-reality through a simulation that passes off absence as presence, erasing the differences between the real and the imaginary. It occupies in non-classical and postmodern aesthetics the place that belonged to the artistic image in traditional aesthetic systems.”

Simulation– the generation of the hyperreal using models of the real that do not have their own sources in reality. The process of generating simulacra.

The main elements of postmodern aesthetics:

Synthesis- This is one of the fundamental principles of postmodern aesthetics. Anything can connect to anything: different types arts, language styles, genres, seemingly incompatible ethical and aesthetic principles, high and low, mass and elite, beautiful and ugly, etc. R. Barth, in his works of the 50-60s, proposed to abolish literature as such, and in its place formulate a universal form creative activity, which could combine theoretical developments and aesthetic practices. Many classics of postmodernism are both theoretical researchers and practical writers (W. Eco, A. Murdoch, J. Kristeva).

Intertextuality– special dialogical relations of texts, built as a mosaic of quotations, which are the result of absorption and modification of other texts, orientation to the context. The concept was introduced by Y. Kristeva. “Every text is located at the intersection of many texts, rereading, emphasizing, condensing, moving and deepening of which it is” (F. Sollers). Intertextuality is not a synthesis, life-giving essence which is the “fusion of artistic energies”, the connection of thesis with antithesis, tradition with innovation. Intertextuality contrasts “merger” with “competitiveness of a specializing group,” called modernism, then postmodernism.

Nonlinear reading. Connected with the theory of J. Deleuze and F. Guattari about two types of culture: “wood” culture and “rhizome culture”. The first type is associated with the principle of imitation of nature, the transformation of world chaos into an aesthetic cosmos through creative effort; here the book is a “tracing paper”, a “photograph” of the world. The embodiment of the second type of culture is postmodern art. “If the world is chaos, then the book will become not a cosmos, but a chaosmos, not a tree, but a rhizome. The rhizome book implements fundamentally new type aesthetic connections. All its points will be connected to each other, but these connections are structureless, multiple, confused, they are suddenly broken off every now and then.” Here the book is no longer a “tracing paper”, but a “map” of the world. “What is coming is not the death of the book, but the birth of a new type of reading: the main thing for the reader will not be to understand the content of the book, but to use it as a mechanism, to experiment with it. “Rhizome Culture” will become a kind of “buffet” for the reader: everyone will take whatever they want from the book-plate.”

Double coding- the principle of text organization, according to which the work is addressed simultaneously to differently prepared readers who can read different layers of the work. An adventurous plot and a deep story can coexist in one text. philosophical issues. An example of a work with double coding is W. Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose,” which can be read both as an exciting detective story and as a “semiological” novel.

The world as a text. The theory of postmodernism was created on the basis of the concept of one of the most influential modern philosophers (as well as cultural scientist, literary critic, semiotician, linguist) Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, “the world is a text,” “the text is the only possible model of reality.” The second most important theorist of poststructuralism is considered to be the philosopher and cultural scientist Michel Foucault. His position is often seen as a continuation of the Nietzschean line of thought. Thus, history for Foucault is the largest manifestation of human madness, the total chaos of the unconscious.

Other followers of Derrida (they are also like-minded people, opponents, and independent theorists): in France - Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes. In the USA - Yale School (Yale University).

According to the theorists of postmodernism, language functions according to its own laws. In short, the world is comprehended by man only in the form of one or another story, a story about it. Or, in other words, in the form of “literary” discourse (from the Latin discurs - “logical construction”).

Doubt about authenticity scientific knowledge led postmodernists to the conviction that the most adequate comprehension of reality is accessible only to intuitive – “poetic thinking”. The specific vision of the world as chaos, appearing to consciousness only in the form of disordered fragments, was defined as “postmodern sensitivity.”

Since the second half of the 20th century, philosophy began to invite humanity to come to terms with the fact that there are no absolute principles in our existence, but this was not perceived as powerlessness human mind, but as a certain wealth of our nature, since the absence of a primary ideal stimulates the diversity of vision of life. No only the right approach– they are all correct and adequate. This is how the situation of postmodernism is formed.

From the point of view of postmodernism, modernism is characterized by the desire to know the beginning of beginnings. And postmodernism comes to the idea of ​​abandoning these aspirations, because... our world is a world of diversity, movements of meanings, and none of them is the most true. Humanity must accept this diversity and not pretend to comprehend the truth. The burden of tragedy and chaos is lifted from a person, but he realizes that his choice is one of many possible.

Postmodernism absolutely consciously revises everything literary heritage. It becomes today the existing cultural context - a huge cultural unwritten encyclopedia, where all texts relate to each other as parts of the intertext.

Any text turns out to be a quote from another text. We know something, therefore we can express it in words. How do we know them? We heard, we read, we learned. Everything that we do not know is also described in words.

Our culture consists of cultural context. Literature is part of the cultural context in which we live. We can use these works; they are part of that reality, the picture of which we create for ourselves.

All our knowledge is information that we have learned. It comes to us in the form of words that someone frames. But this someone is not the bearer of absolute knowledge - this information is simply an interpretation. Everyone must understand that they are not absolute carriers of knowledge, but at the same time, our interpretations can be more or less complete, depending on the amount of information processed, and they cannot be correct or incorrect.

The distinctive feature of postmodernism is conceptuality.

The work consolidates the writer’s vision of the world, and does not simply describe the world. We get the picture as it appears in the author’s mind.

1. Features of Russian postmodernism. Its representatives

In a broad sense postmodernism- this is the current general in European culture, which has its own philosophical basis; This is a unique worldview, a special perception of reality. In a narrow sense, postmodernism is a movement in literature and art, expressed in the creation of specific works.

Postmodernism entered the literary scene as a ready-made trend, as a monolithic formation, although Russian postmodernism is the sum of several trends and currents: conceptualism and neo-baroque.

Postmodernism emerged as a radical, revolutionary movement. It is based on deconstruction (the term was introduced by Jacques Derrida in the early 60s) and decentration. Deconstruction is a complete rejection of the old, the creation of a new one at the expense of the old, and decentration is the dispersion of the solid meanings of any phenomenon. The center of any system is a fiction, the authority of power is eliminated, the center depends on various factors.

Thus, in the aesthetics of postmodernism, reality disappears under a stream of simulacra (simulacrum - (from lat. Simulacrum, Idola, Phantasma) -conceptphilosophical discourse introduced in ancient timesthoughts to characterize, along with images-copies of things, such images that are far from similar to things and express the spiritual state, phantasms, chimeras, phantoms, apparitions, hallucinations, dream representations,fears, delirium)(Gilles Deleuze). The world is turning into a chaos of simultaneously coexisting and overlapping texts, cultural languages, and myths. A person lives in a world of simulacra created by himself or other people.

In this regard, the concept of intertextuality should also be mentioned, when the created text becomes a fabric of quotes taken from previously written texts, a kind of palimpsest. As a result, an infinite number of associations arise, and the meaning expands indefinitely.

Some works of postmodernism are characterized by a rhizomatic structure (rhizoma is one of the key concepts of the philosophy of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The rhizome must resist the unchanging linear structures (of both being and thinking), which, in their opinion, are typical of classical European culture.), where there are no oppositions , beginning and end.

The basic concepts of postmodernism also include remake and narrative. Remake is a new version already written work (cf. Pelevin’s texts). A narrative is a system of ideas about history. History is not a succession of events in their chronological order, but a myth created by the consciousness of people.

So, a postmodern text is an interaction of game languages; it does not imitate life, like a traditional one. In postmodernism, the function of the author also changes: not to create by creating something new, but to recycle the old.

Mark Naumovich Lipovetsky, relying on the basic postmodernist principle of paralogicality and the concept of “paralogy,” highlights some features of Russian postmodernism in comparison with Western ones. Paralogy is “a contradictory destruction designed to shift the structures of rationality as such.” Paralogy creates a situation that is the opposite of the situation of binary, that is, one in which there is a rigid opposition with the priority of one principle, and the possibility of the existence of something opposing it is recognized. The paralogy lies in the fact that both of these principles exist simultaneously and interact, but at the same time the existence of a compromise between them is completely excluded. From this point of view, Russian postmodernism differs from Western:

* focusing precisely on the search for compromises and dialogical connections between the poles of oppositions, on the formation of a “meeting place” between what is fundamentally incompatible in classical, modernist, as well as dialectical consciousness, between philosophical and aesthetic categories.

* at the same time, these compromises are fundamentally “paralogical”, they retain an explosive nature, are unstable and problematic, they do not remove contradictions, but give rise to a contradictory integrity.

The category of simulacra is also somewhat different. Simulacra control people’s behavior, their perception, and ultimately their consciousness, which ultimately leads to the “death of subjectivity”: the human “I” is also made up of a set of simulacra.

The set of simulacra in postmodernism is not opposed to reality, but to its absence, that is, emptiness. At the same time, paradoxically, simulacra become the source of the generation of reality only under the condition of awareness of their simulative nature, i.e. imaginary, fictitious, illusory nature, only under the condition of initial disbelief in their reality. The existence of the category of simulacra forces its interaction with reality. Thus, a certain mechanism of aesthetic perception appears, characteristic of Russian postmodernism.

In addition to the opposition Simulacrum - Reality, other oppositions are also recorded in postmodernism, such as Fragmentation - Integrity, Personal - Impersonal, Memory - Oblivion, Power - Freedom, etc. Opposition Fragmentation – Integrity The category of Emptiness also takes on a different direction in Russian postmodernism. For V. Pelevin, emptiness “reflects nothing, and therefore nothing can be destined for it, a certain surface, absolutely inert, so much so that no weapon that enters into confrontation can shake its serene presence.” Thanks to this, Pelevin’s emptiness has ontological supremacy over everything else and is an independent value. Emptiness will always remain Emptiness.

Opposition Personal – Impersonal is realized in practice as a person in the form of a changeable fluid integrity.

Memory - Oblivion- directly from A. Bitov is implemented in the statement on culture: “... in order to preserve, it is necessary to forget.”

Based on these oppositions, M. Lipovetsky brings out another, broader opposition Chaos – Space. “Chaos is a system whose activity is opposite to the indifferent disorder that reigns in a state of equilibrium; no stability any longer ensures the correctness of the macroscopic description, all possibilities are actualized, coexist and interact with each other, and the system turns out to be at the same time everything that it can be.” To designate this state, Lipovetsky introduces the concept of “Chaosmosis”, which takes the place of harmony.

In Russian postmodernism, there is also a lack of purity of direction - for example, avant-garde utopianism coexists with postmodern skepticism (in the surreal utopia of freedom from Sokolov’s “School for Fools”) and echoes of the aesthetic ideal of classical realism, be it the “dialectics of the soul” in A. Bitov or “mercy for the fallen” by V. Erofeev and T. Tolstoy.

A feature of Russian postmodernism is the problem of the hero - author - narrator, who in most cases exist independently of each other, but their constant affiliation is the archetype of the holy fool. More precisely, the archetype of the holy fool in the text is the center, the point where the main lines converge. Moreover, it can perform two functions (at least):

1. The classic version of a borderline subject, floating between diametrical cultural codes.

2. At the same time, this archetype is a version of the context, a line of communication with a powerful branch of cultural archaism

It is believed that postmodernism in literature first appeared in the United States, and then gradually spread to many other countries. European countries. People became more interested

• literary studies
• post-Freudian,
• intellectual concepts.

Moreover, for many reasons for the perception of such the latest trends It was the American “soil” that turned out to be the most favorable. The fact is that in the 50s many unknown and completely new trends in literature and art appeared. All these growing trends needed to be comprehended. As a result, it turned out that in the 70s a change in the cultural paradigm gradually began to occur, where postmodernism in literature took the place of modernism.

The first examples of postmodernism in literature

Already in 1969, an article entitled “Cross Borders, Fill Ditches” was published, which in this regard turned out to be significant. The author of this sensational article was Leslie Fiedler, a famous literary critic. In this article one could clearly see the whole pathos of combining languages mass literature with the language of modernism. Both completely different poles were combined and brought closer to each other in order to make it possible to erase the boundaries between fiction, which was despised by aesthetes, and elitist and modernist literature.

The ideas of poststructuralists from France, who migrated to the United States at that time, not only made it possible to much better understand all the processes emerging in American art, but also added new impetus to discussions regarding postmodernism.

Development of postmodernism

The new concept of postmodernism (which originated in the USA) over time influenced not only art and literature, but also many sciences:

• political,
• business,
• right,
• psychoanalysis,
• management,
• sociology,
• psychology,
• criminology.

Moreover, when rethinking American culture, art and literature served as a methodological basis in postmodernism as theoretical basis poststructuralism. All of this contributed to changing racial and ethnic attitudes among Americans. Postmodernism in literature has also become fertile ground for the emergence of a feminist approach.

And in the 90s, postmodernism gradually penetrated the spiritual culture of society.

Main features of postmodernism in literature

Most researchers believe that with postmodernism, an artificial destruction of traditional views and ideas about the completeness, harmony, and integrity of all aesthetic systems arose. The first attempts to identify the main features of postmodernism also appeared:

1. predilection for quotation compound incompatible;
2. blurring of binary and too rigid oppositions;
3. hybridization of different genres, which gives rise to mutant new forms;
4. ironic revaluation of many values, decanonization of most conventions and canons;
5. erasure of identity;
6. playing with texts, metalinguistic games, theatricalization of texts;
7. rethinking history human culture and intertextuality;
8. mastering Chaos in a playful manner;
9. pluralism of styles, models and cultural languages;
10. organization of texts in a two- or multi-level version, adapted simultaneously for mass and elite readers;
11. the phenomenon of “death of the author” and the author’s mask;
12. multiplicity of points of view and meanings;
13. incompleteness, openness to designs, fundamental unsystematicity;
14. "double coding" technique.

Texts from capital letters became the most basic object of postmodernism. In addition, cultural mediation, ridicule and general confusion began to appear in this direction.

“Hidden Gold of the 20th Century” is a publishing project by Maxim Nemtsov and Shasha Martynova. Within a year, they are going to translate and publish six books by major English-language authors (including Brautigan, O'Brien and Barthelme) - this will close the next gaps in the publication of modern foreign literature. Funds for the project are raised through crowdfunding. For Gorky, Shashi Martynova prepared a short introduction to literary postmodernism based on the material of the authors under her supervision.

The twentieth century, a time of planetary delight and the darkest disappointments, gave literature postmodernism. From the very beginning, the reader had a different attitude towards postmodern “unbridledness”: it is not at all marshmallows in chocolate and not Christmas tree to please everyone. The literature of postmodernism in general is texts of freedom, a rejection of the norms, canons, attitudes and laws of the past, a goth/punk/hippie child (continue the list yourself) in a respectable - “square”, as the beatniks said - family of classics literary texts. However, pretty soon literary postmodernism will be about a hundred years old, and during this time, in general, we have become accustomed to it. It has grown a considerable audience of fans and followers, translators are tirelessly honing their professional skills on it, and we decided to summarize some key features postmodern texts.
Naturally, this article does not pretend to exhaustively cover the topic - hundreds of dissertations have already been written about postmodernism in literature; however, an inventory of the toolbox of a postmodernist writer is a useful thing in the household of any modern reader.

Postmodern literature is not a “movement”, not a “school” and not “ creative association" It is rather a group of texts united by a rejection of the dogmas of the Enlightenment and modernist approaches to literature. The earliest examples of postmodern literature in general can be considered Don Quixote (1605–1615) by Cervantes and Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) by Laurence Sterne.
The first thing that comes to mind when we hear about postmodern literature is the pervasive irony, sometimes understood as “dark humor.” For postmodernists, there are few things in the world (if any) that cannot be desecrated. That is why postmodernist texts are so generous with mimicry, parodic antics and similar fun. Here's an example - a quote from the novel Willard and His Bowling Prizes (1975) by Richard Brautigan:

“More beautiful,” said Bob. - This is all that remains of the poem.
“By running away,” said Bob. - That's all that's left of the other one.
“He’s cheating on you,” Bob said. - “Breaking.” “With you, I forgot all my troubles.” Here are three more.
“But these two are simply marvelous,” said Bob. - “My sorrow is immeasurable, for my friends are good for nothing.” "Takes a bite out of the cucumbers."
- What do you say? Do you like it? - asked Bob. He forgot that she couldn't answer him. She nodded: yes, she likes it.
- Do you still want to listen? - asked Bob.
He forgot that she had a gag in her mouth. (Translated by A. Guzman)

Postmodern literature is not a “movement”, not a “school” and not a “creative association”

The entire novel is billed as a parody of sadomasochistic literature (you can hardly find more seriousness anywhere) and at the same time a detective story. As a result, both sadomasochism and detective fiction in Brautigan turn into a piercing watercolor of loneliness and the inability of people to understand and be understood. Another excellent example is the cult novel by Miles on Gapalin (Flann O'Brien) The Singing of Lazarus (1941, translated into Russian 2003), a vicious parody of the Irish national-cultural renaissance of the turn of the century, written by a man who spoke excellent Irish , who knew and loved Irish culture, but had a deep disgust for the way the revival of culture was embodied by cliques and mediocrities. Irreverence as a natural consequence of irony is the trademark of postmodernists.

Descartes spent too much time in bed, subject to the obsessive hallucination that he was thinking. You are ill with a similar illness. (“Dolka Archive”, Flann O’Brien, trans. Sh. Martynova)

The second is intertextuality and the associated techniques of collage, pastiche, etc. A postmodern text is a prefabricated constructor from what was in the culture before, and new meanings are generated from what has already been mastered and appropriated. This technique is used all the time by postmodernists, no matter who you look at. Masters Joyce and Beckett, modernists, however, also used these tools. The texts of Flann O'Brien, Joyce's reluctant heir (it's complicated, as they say), are a bridge between modernity and postmodernity: A Hard Life (1961) is a modernist novel, and Two Little Birds Floated (1939, in the Russian edition - “About Waterfowl”) is some kind of postmodern. Here is one of thousands of possible examples - from “ Dead Father» Donald Barthelemy:

Children, he said. Without children I would not have become a Father. Without childhood there is no Fatherhood. I never wanted it myself, it was forced on me. A tribute of sorts, which I could do without, the generation and then the upbringing of each of the thousands, thousands and tens of thousands, the swelling of a small bundle into a large bundle, over a period of years, and then making sure that the large bundles, if of the male sex, wear their caps with bells, and if not him, then they observe the principle of jus primae noctis, the shame of sending away those who are unwanted to me, the pain of sending those who are desired into the lifestream big city, so that they never warm my cold ottoman, and the leadership of the hussars, maintaining public order, maintaining postal codes, preventing crap in the drainage, I would prefer not to leave my office, comparing Klinger's editions, first print, second print, third print and so on, Didn't it fall apart on the fold? […] But no, I had to devour them, hundreds, thousands, fifaifof, sometimes along with shoes, you bite a child’s foot well, and right there, between your teeth, is a poisoned sports sneaker. And hair, millions of pounds of hair have scarred their guts over the years, why couldn’t they just throw children down wells, throw them on mountain slopes, randomly shock toy railways? And the worst of all were them blue jeans, in my meals, dish after dish of poorly washed blue jeans, T-shirts, saris, Tom Macans. I probably could have hired someone to peel them for me first. (Translated by M. Nemtsov)

Another good example « old fairy tale on new way" - Donald Barthelme's novel "The King" published in Russian (published posthumously, 1990), in which a creative rethinking of the legends of the Arthurian cycle takes place - in the scenery of the Second World War.

The mosaic nature of many postmodern texts was bequeathed to us by William Burrows, and Kerouac, Barthelme, Sorrentino, Dunleavy, Eggers and many others (we are listing only those who were translated into Russian in one way or another) used this technique in a lively and varied way - and still use it.

Third: metafiction, in essence, is a letter about the process of writing itself and the associated deconstruction of meanings. The already mentioned novel “Two Little Birds Floated” by O'Brien is a textbook example of this technique: in the novel we are told about an author who writes a novel based on Irish mythology (please: double postmodernism!), and the characters in this embedded novel plot against the author intrigues and conspiracies. The novel “Irish Stew” by postmodernist Gilbert Sorrentino is based on the same principle (not published in Russian), and in the novel English writer Christine Brooke-Rose's "Textermination" (1992) only characters act at all classical works literature, gathered in San Francisco for the Annual Congress of Prayer for Being.

The fourth thing that comes to mind is a non-linear plot and other games with time. And baroque temporary architecture in general. "V." (1963) by Thomas Pynchon is a perfect example. Pynchon is generally a great fan and skillful at twisting pretzels out of time - remember the third chapter of the novel “V.”, from reading which the brains of more than one generation of readers are twisted into a DNA spiral.

Magic realism - the merging and mixing of life-like and non-life-like literatures - to one degree or another can be considered postmodern, and in this regard, Marquez and Borges (and even more so Cortazar) can also be considered postmodernists. Another excellent example of such interweaving is Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel with the title “Crystal Vision” (1981), rich in translation options, where the entire work can be read as an interpreter for a deck of tarot cards and at the same time as everyday chronicles of one Brooklyn neighborhood. Sorrentino characterizes numerous implicitly archetypal characters in this novel only through direct speech, their own and addressed to them - this is also, by the way, a postmodernist technique. Literature does not have to be reliable - this is what the postmodernists decided, and it is not very clear how and why to argue with them here.

The mosaic nature of many postmodern texts was bequeathed to us by William Burroughs

Separately (fifthly), it is necessary to say about the tendency towards technoculture and hyperreality as a desire to go beyond the framework of reality given to us in sensations. Internet and a virtual reality- to a certain extent, products of postmodernity. In this sense, perhaps best example could be Thomas Pynchon’s recently published novel “The Edge Bang Bang” (2013).
The result of everything that happened in the twentieth century is paranoia as a desire to discover order behind chaos. Postmodern writers, following Kafka and Orwell, are making an attempt to re-systematize reality, and the suffocating spaces of Magnus Mills (Cattle Drive, Full Employment Scheme and the upcoming Russian All Quiet on the Orient Express), The Third Policeman "(1939/1940) by O'Brien and, of course, all of Pynchon are about this, although we have only a couple of examples from many.

Postmodernism in literature is generally a territory of complete freedom. The toolkit of postmodernists, compared to what their predecessors used, is much broader - everything is allowed: an unreliable narrator, surreal metaphors, abundant lists and catalogs, and word creation, word game and other lexical exhibitionism, and the emancipation of language in general, breaking or distortion of syntax, and dialogue as the engine of storytelling.

Some of the novels mentioned in the article are being prepared for publication in Russian by Dodo Press, and you can have time to personally participate in this: the project “Hidden Gold of the 20th Century” is a substantive continuation of the conversation about literary postmodernism of the 20th century (and not only).