Some Notes on the Poetics of the Postmodernist Novel

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to explore some key poetological categories of the postmodern novel. It discusses the premises that led up to the birth of the postmodern era as well as aesthetic and philosophical peculiarities of the postmodernist paradigm. The paper focuses on such postmodernist narrative strategies as metafictional techniques, double/triple coding, the use of simulacra, intertextuality, deconstruction, eclecticism etc. Iconoclastic and irreverent, the postmodern novel is by definition a radical experiment that emerges when a writer feels the customary tropes of fiction have been exhausted. For the postmodernist, the well-worn genre of the novel is insufficient and no longer capable of conveying the imagination of the writer or the magnitude of historical events. Postmodern fiction is a product of the post-World War II period. It can be viewed as an extension of rather than a decisive break or deviation from modernism, the defining literary movement of the twentieth century. Like the modern novel, the postmodern novel is subversive; that is, it counters traditional notions of plot, narrative, chronology, and character development. Postmodern novels are often described as self-reflexive — that is, they center on the nature of fiction itself and are written as though fiction is independent of society, reality, and any realm outside itself. Postmodernist novelists focused on fiction as a self-sustaining universe of its own. Postmodernist fiction encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Their common denominator is its ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live.