Only Connect.

A Passage from Modernism to Postmodernism

Colecția eseu/teorie:
 Felix
FelixNicolau
Nicolau

I am a writer interested in simplifying and re-launching poetry as a

mixture of experimental enterprise with life slices recognizable and
digestible to both elitist and non-elitist public. I am the author of five
volumes of poetry (Kamceatka – time IS honey, 2014), two novels and

Only Connect.
eight books of literary and communication theory: Take the Floor.
Professional Communication Theoretically Contextualized (2014),
Cultural Communication: Approaches to Modernity and Postmodernity
(2014), Comunicare şi creativitate. Interpretarea textului contemporan
(Communication and Creativity. The Interpretation of Contemporary
Text, 2014), Homo Imprudens (2006), Anticanonice (Anticanonicals,
2009), Codul lui Eminescu (Eminescu’s Code, 2010), and Estetica A Passage
passage from
inumană: de la Postmodernism la Facebook (The Inhuman Aesthetics:
from Postmodernism to Facebook, 2013). My expertise resides in roller- Modernism to Postmodernism
skating, scooter-commuting and skateboard-mental-writing.

București, 2016 Editura frACTalia

Redactare și corectură: Iulia Gajea Table of contents
Tehnoredactare: Jora Grecea
Coperta: Alecs Cândea

Tipărit la tipografia Editurii frACTalia Introduction: culture is bound to improve

communication............................................................................. 11
Felix Nicolau The context of postmodernity................................................. 16
Only Connect. A Passage from Modernism to Postmodernism Paradigms of postmodernity:.................................................. 18
History and simulacra
© frACTalia, 2016 (Peter Ackroyd and Julian Barnes).......................................... 21
pentru prezenta ediție a. The great expectations of memory ........................... 21
b. The uncontrollable impulse to win............................ 22
c. Faking identity – structure begotten by chaos ..... 24
Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României d. The grandeur and misery of the imaginary............. 27
NICOLAU, FELIX e. Twisted decodings........................................................... 30
    Only connect : a passage from modernism to f. Amnesia or hyper-memory?......................................... 31
postmodernism / Felix Nicolau. - Bucureşti : frACTalia, 2016 Language as a set of games..................................................... 34
    Conţine bibliografie Poststructuralism.......................................................................... 36
    ISBN 978-606-94005-5-5 The straying steps of postmodernism.................................. 36
Problems of moral psychology: Iris Murdoch.................... 41
82.09 Tel Quel............................................................................................ 43
American counter-culture (The Beat Generation)............ 45
a. Dolly culture, crazy counterculture............................ 46
b. A tumultuous ivory tower.............................................. 47
c. The Beats - hardly a generation................................... 48
d. The imperative of paradox............................................ 51
Editura frACTalia The fractioned universe and the polycentric culture...... 53
Str. Saidac nr. 6, bl. 34, sc. A, etaj 3, ap.15, sector 6 The absurd theatre and the parallax.
București, România Dyads versus triads (Harold Pinter)........................................ 56
www.fractalia.ro a. The mark of dominance: the parallax........................ 57
b. Categories of silence and despondency.................. 59
Comenzi prin email: comenzi@fractalia.ro c. Blindness as self-delusion.............................................. 61

5
 d. The language of objects................................................. 62
e. The intellectuals and the arch-object........................ 65
f. The blurred memory of the recent history.............. 66
The avatars of the canon........................................................... 71
New developments in the
Anglo-American contemporary fiction................................ 72
Imagination and opera aperta (Ian McEwan)..................... 75
a. Memory as mediator....................................................... 76
b. Irony – the second mediator......................................... 77
c. The scientific imagination.............................................. 79
d. The risks of islandization................................................ 81
e. The problem of truth – more geometrico.................. 82
f. The architecture of the subjectivized reality.......... 84
g. Artistic symbols of conformist representations..... 86
Democracy versus market economy..................................... 90
Realism and the new canon..................................................... 91
Modernity....................................................................................... 92
The paradoxical doctrine
of counter-modern modernity.......................................... 93
How is the Individual (Self ) modified
in modern societies?................................................................... 94
From Modernism to Postmodernism.................................... 96
Modernism – a community world.................................... 96
Postmodernism: the collective society................................. 97
Modernity assumes an aesthetic stance.............................. 98
The aesthetic and scientific sides of modernism............ 100
Modernism in English Literature.......................................... 101
Modernism and science..................................................... 102
What does modernism retain from myth,
history, and tradition?............................................................... 103
a. The modernist critique of idealism............................ 103
6 7
The elitist postmodernism:
mimicking modernism (David Lodge)................................ 106
a. The seductive profession. Acting capacities......... 107
b. Stimulants for vitality
and hypocritical reactions .......................................... 109
c. The poststructuralist kitsch........................................... 111
d. Academic weaponry....................................................... 113
e. The variegated perks....................................................... 115
Samuel Beckett steers modernism
to postmodernism .................................................................... 118
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (1981/1990)
reconsider modernism............................................................. 120
Modernist architecture in postmodernist
academy (Malcolm Bradbury)................................................ 123
a. The dominant code........................................................ 124
b. Globalized translation. Fashion................................. 126
c. Architectures of message:
inner and outer perspectives...................................... 128
d. Dictatorship or plurivocity
in decoding messages?................................................ 130
e. Transparent translations against
personalized ones........................................................... 132
f. Deterritorialization as abstraction
and geometry................................................................... 134
Postmodernist theorists........................................................... 137
The “New Art” generates a new canon............................... 139
What exactly is Postmodernism?.......................................... 142
The secret bridge between
modernism and postmodernism......................................... 153
a. Space and time................................................................ 154
 b. Expansion and hybridization
(Rosalind Kraus, 1979)................................................... 155
Residence and complicity....................................................... 157
a. The development of the novel.................................... 157
The hyperreal: Simulacra and Simulations........................ 159
Pastiche and Schizophrenia................................................... 162
The Modernist “Discours” versus
the Postmodernist One” .......................................................... 163
Architecture and the visual arts in relation
to postmodernism in the interval 1950-1970.................. 165
The postmodern architecture and visual arts.................. 167
The anti-Establishment attitude:
parables (Ken Kesey)................................................................. 169
a. Gender or political problematic?.............................. 171
b. Staying awake not to lose the disaster................... 172
c. Obsessions turned into manias................................. 174
The postmodern deconstruction
and the politics of culture....................................................... 178
Macropolitics exhaustion creates
a problem of legitimation....................................................... 180
Freedom can be positive or negative................................. 182
Jürgen Habermas and the post-rationalist modernity.185
Modernism................................................................................... 189
The new realist project of modernism:
Henry James and Joseph Conrad......................................... 190
Henry James (1843 – 1916)
and the focalizing characters................................................. 191
The invisible “reality” of Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1925).195
D.H. Lawrence and the dangers of modernism............... 199
a. Time and the “new timing”.......................................... 202
8 9
b. Subordination of style and narrative technique
to the idea of time and the “new timing”............... 204
c. Lawrence’s symbols (images) preserve an
ontological status........................................................... 205
d. Characteristics of communication
in D. H. Lawrence’s novels:........................................... 206
e. D.H. Lawrence’s attitude to language...................... 207
f. Postmodernist traits of Lawrence’s works ............. 209
Virginia Woolf and the Negotiation with Form................ 212
a. The tense relationship between Experiment
and Tradition..................................................................... 220
b. The relevance of G. E. Moore epistemology
for V. Woolf’s fiction........................................................ 224
c. Moore’s realism and V. Woolf’s critical theory....... 225
d. Femininity as protagonist............................................ 229
e. The functions of artistic communication............... 232
f. To the Lighthouse as a novel of knowledge
and memory..................................................................... 233
The binary oppositions between
modernism and postmodernism......................................... 238
The central tenets of the Modernist novel........................ 240
The central tenets of the postmodernist novel............... 241
Flann O’Brien between modernism
and postmodernism.................................................................. 242
The postmodern James Joyce............................................... 245
Conclusions.................................................................................. 246
Selective bibliography of modernism:............................... 247
Selective bibliography of postmodernism:...................... 250
 Introduction:
culture is bound to improve communication

More recent theoretical developments tend to decrease

the importance of difference between modernism and
postmodernism. Right at the end of postmodernism we
should temporalize our quick judgements. It would be
exactly what Jacques Derrida understood by difference: a
postponing of verdict, a slowing down of sticking hazardous
labels on individuals and phenomena.
The post-postmodern communication might be more
mature, but not necessarily “politically correct”, as this only
generates frustrations because of compulsory repression.
Jennifer Ashton is one of those who reconsidered the tense
relationship between modernism and postmodernism.
She remarked that: “Where, for example, the modernism
of Eliot has been identified with the autonomy of the text
(or what postmodernism calls the ‘closed’ text) and the
determinacy of its meaning, the postmo­dern text is ‘open’
and its meaning is indeterminate”1. So, the main difference
comes in terms of precise meaning. Of course, the purpose
of professional communication is to reduce ambiguity as
much as possible. But even in this restrictive and formal
field one needs ambiguity as a way of acting politely.
Allowing some openness to our messages implies that
we do not desire to instill a vein of dominance in the act

Jennifer Ashton (2005). From Modernism to Postmodernism.

1

American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge, UK, p. 1.

11
of communication. It is Michel Foucault who extensively
wrote about the underlying power tension of every human
action. That is why Jürgen Habermas considered modernism
to be a sequel of the Enlightenment project, namely the
urge to impose rationality on everything and to fanatically
believe in progress.
Contemporary theorists admit that progress has been
evolving along a sinous line. If modernism is an ever-green
psychological determinant, then it surely is multifaceted,
as Adam Sharman noticed: “there were many European
concepts and lived versions of modernity”2. This is another
softening approach to understanding crucial cultural
movements. There are no solid, impenetrable frontiers
between stylistic and cultural phenomena. Panta rhei,
everything flows – Heraclitus redivivus! The process of
flowing into one another describes the ideal situation of
communication. Even Zygmunt Bauman contested the
cultural dams built by some modernists: “In a sense, so­lids
cancel time; for liquids, on the contrary, it is mostly time that
matters. Was not modernity a process of ‘li­quefaction’ from
the start?”3 This means that modernity is not exactly what
we used to accept, that is, an elitist and obsessively original
enterprise. It is perfectly true that it contested tradition, but
it only fluidized clogged tributa­ries, never departing from
the mainstream, from the river bed. Modernists assumed
risks only with the purpose of reconstructing the dialogue
2
Adam Sharman (2006). Tradition and Modernity in Spanish Amer­
ican Literature: from Darío to Carpentier. Palgrave Macmillan™, New
York, p. XI.
Zygmunt Bauman (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity Press and Black-
3
well Publishing Ltd., USA, p. 2.
12
with the past: “‘Melting the solids’ meant first and foremost
shedding the ‘irrelevant’ obligations standing in the way
of rational calculation of effects”4.
Liquefying structures may help the process of commu­
nication as much as it may pulverize it into countless
exchange of insignificant content. Even most emotional
communication concentrates essential message. Bauman
warns about the decomposing blabbering of culture in­dus­
try, strictly relying on entertainment and consumerism: “It
means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything and
the mindboggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing
and in the name of what one should pursue it. This is a state
of mind marked above all by its all-deriding, all-eroding,
all-dissolving destructiveness”5. As the condition of value is
thrown into the abyss of relativism, solid communication is
more and more exposed to irony: “Demolition is the only job
the postmodern mind seems to be good at. Destruction is
the only construction it recognizes”6. In Bauman’s opinion,
postmodernism is reduced to makeshift communication,
as it does not replace the demolished values and structures
with a different axiology. This could be the future task of
post-postmodernism.
Judith Butler, on the other hand, is a fierce defender of
the right to be different, of the Other and Otherness. The
necessity of recognition in a free world implies, nonetheless,
a common code and open roads to communication. The
4
Ibidem, p. 4.
5
Zygmunt Bauman (1992). Intimations of Postmodernity. Routledge,
London, pp. VII-VIII.
6
Ibidem, p. IX.
13
Other could not be completely different, otherwise we
become reciprocally alienated: “Recognition implies that
we see the Other as separate, but as structured psychically
in ways that are shared”7. Recognition is lucrative as long
as there is a mutual endeavor to approach differences
in terms of possible points of convergence. Spiritually
advanced individuals accept different points of view
as a regenerating parallax. It depends a lot wherefrom
one watches phenomena. But this acceptance does not
eliminate understanding.
Friedrich Nietzsche considered that modernism was
the last stage of a nihilist society. Stuart Sims dwells upon
the skepticism of the following movement, namely the
postmodernism: “One of the best Ways of describing
postmodernism as a philosophical movement would
be as a form of scepticism – scepticism about authority,
received wisdom, cultural and political norms, etc. – and
that puts it into a long-running tradition in Western thought
that stretches back to classical Greek philosophy. […]The
technical term to describe such a style of philosophy is
‘antifoundational’”8. Skepticism assumes, however, a
different epistemological stance than nihilism. It means
that postmodernism returns to the Sextus Empiricus’s
suspension of judgment, favoring, thus, an empirical
approach. This may slow down communication, but in
the same time counters discriminating approximations.
7
Judith Butler (2000). Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Roundtable
on the Work of Jessica Benjamin, “Longing for Recognition”. l(3): 271-
290, p. 272.
8
Stuart Sim (ed.) (2001). The Routledge Companion to Postmo­
dernism. London, p. 3.
14
Derrida’s deconstruction advised prolonged processes
of weighing down issues: “Deconstruction was directed
against the system-building side of structuralism, and took
issue with the idea that all phenomena were reducible to
the operations of systems, with its implication that we could
come to have total control over our environment. What
Derrida was concerned to demonstrate was the insta­bility
of language, and indeed systems in general”9.
Now, the new approaches in communication underlined the
importance not of the message, because its transmission can
prove imperialistic, but of negotiation without the stubborn
desire to reach consensus. At the end of postmodernism we
should be able to accept uncer­tainty and difference. The
modernist experience it is only too helpful when we need
to enlarge the scope of our understanding without skidding
to relativism. The lack of meaning can be as dangerous as
imposed meanin­gs. We have this “endlessly creative capacity
to generate new and unexpected meanings”. But “meaning
is therefore a fleeting phenomenon, that evaporates almost
as soon as it occurs in spoken or written language (or keeps
transforming itself into new meanings), rather than something
fixed that holds over time for a series of different audiences”10.
In conclusion, if culture does not improve communication,
then it does contradict its main goals and fundamentals.
Ibidem, p. 5.
9
10
Ibidem, p. 6.
15
 The context of postmodernity l New Journalism: massification of culture, information
versus culture, entertainment.
l The weak structures: J. F. Lyotard and the dissolution
of the Grand Narratives, Gianni Vatimo and The Weak
Man (L’Uomo debole).
l The sexual revolution: twisted sexuality, political
correctness.
l The main narratological transformations of the
period are:
Mikhail Bakhtin: the carnivalesque and the dialogic.
Roland Barthes: “The Death of the Author”.
Linda Hutcheon: metafiction and parody.
The main ideological-cultural currents of the period are: Pastiche, cultural recombination.
l New Criticism.
The exploitation of kitsch.
l New Historicism.
Plagiarism, the relish for copies and repetitions.
l The “angry young men”.
Mixture of levels, forms, styles.
l Structuralism (Tel Quel group in Paris); Roland Barthes
Bricolage fashion.
(“The Death of the Author”). Intertextuality.
l Poststructuralism (Jacques Derrida’s déconstruction).
Demythization.
l Semiotics (Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco).
The subject is fragmented.
l Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories: the
A crosshatch of discourses.
conceptual dissolution of unified and stable identity. The magical realism.
l Jean Baudrillard: the theory of “simulacra”,
l The new canon: Harold Bloom discusses the Western
“Hyperreality”, “Vital Illusion”. canon in three stages: the Aristocratic Age,
l Multiculturalism.
the Democratic Age and the Chaotic Age. Some short
l Globalization.
references are made to the Theocratic Age, which
l Post-colonialism.
comes before the Aristocratic one.
l Post-industrial society (McLuhan’s global village).
l Digital literature.
l Anarchism.
l New-liberalism.
l Feminism and genderization.
l Minimalism.

16 17
 Paradigms of postmodernity:
Brian McHale (Constructing Postmodernism, 1992)
Modernism-------------------------------Postmodernism
Hierarchy----------------------------------Anarchy
Presence-----------------------------------Absence
Genital-------------------------------------Polymorphous
Narrative----------------------------------Anti-narrative
Metaphysics------------------------------Irony
Determinacy-----------------------------Indeterminacy
Ihab Hassan and The Postmodern Turn
18
Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism------------------------- Symbolism
Pataphysics--------------------------- Dadaism
Form (conjunctive, closed)------- Antiform (disjunctive,
open)
Purpose-------------------------------- Play
Design--------------------------------- Chance
Hierarchy------------------------------ Anarchy
Mastery-------------------------------- Logos
Exhaustion---------------------------- Silence
Art-------------------------------------- Object
Finished Work------------------------ Process
Performance------------------------- Happening
Distance------------------------------- Participation
Creation------------------------------- Totalization
Decreation---------------------------- Deconstruction
Synthesis------------------------------ Antithesis
Presence------------------------------- Absence
Centring------------------------------- Dispersal
Genre---------------------------------- Boundary
Text------------------------------------- Intertext
Semantics----------------------------- Rhetoric
Paradigm------------------------------ Syntagm
Hypotaxis----------------------------- Parataxis
Metaphor----------------------------- Metonymy
Selection------------------------------ Combination
Root------------------------------------ Depth
Rhizome------------------------------- Surface
Interpretation------------------------ Reading against
Interpretation/
Misreading
19
 Signified------------------------------- Signifier History and simulacra
Lisible (Readerly)-------------------- Scriptable (Writerly) (Peter Ackroyd and Julian Barnes)
Narrative/Grande Histoire-------- Anti-Narrative/Petite
Histoire
Symptom----------------------------- Desire
Type------------------------------------ Mutant a. The great expectations of memory
Genital/Phallic----------------------- Polymorphous/
Androgynous It was Jean Baudrillard who endorsed the rumour of
Paranoia------------------------------- Schizophrenia
Walt Disney’s body waiting to be de-criogenised in a more
Origin/Cause------------------------- Difference-Differance/
technically-developed world. As we know, Disney’s health
God the Father---------------------- The Holy Ghost
decayed severely soon before his death, the doctors having
Metaphysics-------------------------- Irony
even to remove one of his lungs. Baudrillard needed this
Determinacy------------------------- Indeterminacy
invented memory as he wanted to demonstrate that even
Transcendence---------------------- Immanence
death had been absorbed into the range of simulacra. The
fake news was supported by the fact that Disney’s tomb
isn’t known to the large public. Such a stratagem is not
uncommon when it comes to the graves of those celebrities
who don’t want their resting place to be vandalised. Of
course, we would like the idea of ha­ving Disney back and
saving our kids from the catastrophic cartoons of the 3rd
millennium...
Memory could offer great expectations when infused
with imagination. Such an “ideology of the return” (Foucault in
Simon During 1999: 138) engenders illusions or disillusions.
On the one hand, who studies history is protected from
historicism (ibidem), as history is seldom a nuptial feast,
on the other hand, who superficially or fallaciously selects
deeds from the past, or distorts them, is tempted to herald
the miracle.
In other words, it is very important the way in which we
decode historical messages. Signs can acquire unexpected

20 21
ideological meanings, getting in this way articulated with
biased openings. As Stuart Hall remarks, it is at the level
of association that connotation intervenes and favours
“situational ideologies” (Hall in Simon During 1999: 512).
As we know very well, ideologies emerge from polysemy,
but they cannot stand pluralism. They institutionalise “the
dominant or preferred meanings” (ibidem: 513) with the
purpose of imposing a hierarchical vision. The human
species has the obsession of structure. Now, an obsession
nurtures compulsory drives: it matters to win, irrespective
of the fact that it is not an honest victory. Encoding and
decoding meanings are incongruent acti­vities (ibidem:
515). Wherefrom then comes the pleasure of fake victories?
b. The uncontrollable impulse to win
This is the question to which Peter Ackroyd tries to answer
in the novel The Fall of Troy. The autodidact Heinrich Obermann
(impersonating the renowned Heinrich Schliemann), dedicates
the second part of his life – the first one having been invested
in making a fortune for himself – to the identifying and
revealing of the site of legen­dary Troy. He already boasts
the discovery of Odysseus and Penelope’s palace on the
island of Ithaca. His enthusiasm derives from the tales
told by his father when Heinrich was a child. Tales about
trolls, fairies, ghosts, demons, and hidden treasures. His
father also extensively lectured him in Homer’s works,
read in original. If the realm of fairies and that of the trolls
are not necessarily pure fantasy, the mind of the young
Lutheran kept fantasizing all his life. He indulges, too, in a
22
process of de-Christianisation which coincides with the
worshipping of shrewdness and victory obtained at no
matter what price. We know that for the Old Greeks fame
was everything. Achilles finally preferred to die in the battle
than to reach the age of wisdom. Even Nestor’s fame of
a wise old man originated in his ability to compromise
antagonistic forces and not in his desire to contribute to a
happier world for everybody. The pagan wisdom was and
is specific to old age, because only at this stage in life can
be arranged “the complicity between regimes of memory
and dominant power relations” (Hodgkin and Radstone
2003: 18). Obermann is in his 50s and is fully aware of how
to practise the “politics of memory discourses” (ibidem: 2).
Preserving childhood memories and fantasies doesn’t
annihilate the matter-of-fact thinking. Exalted and fond
of culture as Obermann may seem, he is ready to resort
to unorthodox archaeological methods in order to create
chaos. The samples shouldn’t be accurately dated so that
nobody could hold him accountable for the discoveries
he made. In this way, the jewelleries and precious objects
are stolen away with the help of an ingenious network.
Heinrich motivates his stratagem in front of his much
younger Greek wife by saying that what he robs from Turkey
he gives to Greece. Of course, personal interest prevails. In
this way, the imaginary is bound to support mercantilism.
For instance, because on the site could be found neither
swords nor shields – strange enough for an ancient would-
be battlefield – Obermann shamelessly produces some
swords out of the blue. Additionally, he advertises his magic
gift of discovering famous lost historical places in the press
worldwide. His belief that people lived “in an iron age”
23
and that “they needed history” (Ackroyd 2007: 12) proves
to be very profitable in terms of present day currency.
His gift of “sniffing” potentially significant archaeological
locations is indisputable. But he is not a vulgar tomb-pilferer
because he deludes himself together with the rest of the
world. He really believes that he gets closer and closer to
the mysterium tremendum of Troy and repudiates cultural
selfishness: “Troy is not for Turkey. Troy is for the world”
(ibidem: 35). By postulating the primate of imagination
over science: “That is archaeology. Instinct! [...] It is not a
science [...] It is an art [...] My imagination is correct” (ibidem:
41), he is able to attribute himself supernatural powers. A
genius deserves more than the common lot. Because only
he can make visible the invisible, he infers that he has the
right to repeat the game the other way round.
c. Faking identity – structure begotten by chaos
Later in the novel we learn that Obermann’s past is full of
onerous businesses. Capitalism gets on well with enthusiasm
and culture is his suitcase. When Consul Cyrus Redding
assesses him as a genius but not as a great man (ibidem:
66), the problem is reset in ethical coordinates. As Jeremy
Gibson and Julian Wolfreys put: “playing with identity is the
most serious game in the world for Ackroyd” (Gibson and
Wolfreys 2000: 18). In the process of constructing a new
identity, even if a fake one, memory is ascribed a leading
role. The best way to discourage inquiries into the past is
to mythologize that past. We are used to the cliché that
postmodernism demythologizes the past. But the reverse
24
way functions smoothly as long as it relies on a biased
mythology. The myth can have the paradoxical effect of
freezing the past. Memory and oblivion are inextricably
intertwined. We forget things in order to memorize other
things. Actually, our minds shift sets of memories and our
past becomes a battlefield of reminiscences (Hodgkin and
Radstone 2003: 241).
Paradoxically, although Obermann is a fake, the fact that
he sacralises his own past in connection with the grandeur
of the Homeric legends sanctifies almost everything around
him. It seems that if behind a simulacrum there is a saintly
kern, the imitation assumes the holiness of the lost original.
When Turkish peasants discover an ancient skeleton, they
don’t agree to its museumification. In order to accelerate
the burial proceedings, Obermann is forced to baptize the
foundling. The same when the sceptical professor William
Brand, from Harvard, unexpectedly dies after visiting a
cursed cave, the cave of Selene. Obermann will perform the
rites of exorcism in a blasphemous way, reciting Latin verses
from Vergil while making signs with a cross. His excuse is
a cultural one: “was he not called the divine Virgil by the
early Church fathers?” (Ackroyd 2007: 95). More than this,
in order to get rid of any evidence, he burns the corpse
with the help of a Homeric pyre.
Ackroyd does not condemn his hero. The message is
another one: the manipulator cannot escape unaffected
by his manipulative stratagems. Who wants to pre-arrange
the victory is seized by a continuous fear. And who is fearful
misses the spectacle of the game, which is the real beauty
of life. Obermann is too intelligent to confine his life to a
series of dull victories. This is the second conclusion of the
25
novel: mischievous deeds in the realm of beauty and glory
get contaminated by that beauty and glory. Obermann is
halloed by grandeur in spite of his materialistic drives: “I
am here to recreate Troy, not to reduce it to a pile of dust
and bones” (ibidem: 84). Imagination abuses science, but
the result is amazing. Without supposition and genius,
hidden treasures would never come to light. Accuracy
and objectivity should come after imagination released
the revelation. The lack of necessary correspondence
between encoding and decoding (Hall in During 1999:
515) could make logical decodings sterile enterprises.
From such a stance, the imaginary offers the chance of
a preview which shouldn’t be despised as it is fuelled by
strenuous former documentation. The imaginary is really
useful when science exhausted its means. In many cases,
what once belonged to the imaginary has been scientifically
certified in the meantime. The history of science is full of
examples of realisable imagination. When the road from
premises to conclusion was not a smooth one, scientists
preferred perverted syllogisms more often than not. It is
exactly what Obermann tries to do, with the excuse that his
schemes improve the spiritual condition of humanity. The
recovered Troy is a symbol of courage and love conjoined
with treachery and recklessness. The exemplary city lays
bare good and bad examples together. It is a parable of
humanity. The purpose of such a discovery is education,
not profitability.
From such a perspective, there is a benign imaginary and
a toxic one. “We must fight for the criminal imperfection
of the world. Against this artificial paradise of technicity
and virtuality, against the attempt to build a world of
26
completely positive, rational and true, we must save the
traces of the illusory world’s definitive opacity and mystery”
(Baudrillard 2000: 74). Actually, the real opposition is not
between science and imaginary, but between science and
technical applications that encourage anti-metaphysical
approaches and short-sighted utilitarianism. Obermann is
not guilty of inventing historical artefacts, but of disfiguring
the beauty of Troy through stealing. Misery and grandeur
rotate in a vicious circle: on the one hand, he makes visible
what belongs to the invisible; on the other hand he makes
disappear the jewelleries that came out from imaginary
into reality.
d. The grandeur and misery of the imaginary
The small, and, anyway, varying distance between rea­
lity and imaginary is reflected in Julian Barnes’s novels A
History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and Flaubert’s Parrot.
If “fable and fabulation are cathartic as they attenuate
the horror, brutality and arbitrariness of the history of
the world” (Guignery 2006: 67), then part of his novels’
substance correspond to such a compensatory function
of the imaginary. But the imaginary, as I have already
mentioned, contributes to reconsidering the doctrinal
truth through conjecture or hypothesis. As a matter of fact,
the doctrinal truth is not something repulsive. It is only an
ideologised truth whose interpretation stalled in order to
be convenient to a certain epoch. The stalled interpretation
becomes anachronistic in time, consequently not totally
understood, so it will be approached with awestricken
27
respect. Even the ironies poked at the indisputable truths
are manifestations of hesitance and incomprehensibility.
What we do not understand anymore gets reintegrated
into the realm of imaginary.
But there is the reverse way: the cynical and demythisizing
approach realised with postmodernist techniques. The
literary historian comes with the minimalist perspective
and this suggests familiarity with immemorial times. If
the discourse respects the principles of verisimilitude,
literature wins over history. It is quite plausible that the Deluge
was sailed over by a flotilla, not by a single Ark, as Barnes
“enlightens” us in the chapter-story The Stowaway from A
History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. The reconsideration,
then, becomes violent towards the consecrated tradition.
Noah is “a hysterical rogue with a drink problem” (Barnes
2010: 8). The dismantling of the Holy Scripture is justified
by the fate of animals accompanying humans on the flotilla.
The narrator being a tiny woodworm camouflaged into
the horn of a ram – but the narrative source is disclosed
only at the end of the chapter –, the perspective belongs
not to the maximized winner, but to the minimized
refugee. The woodworms are not allowed on the Ark as
they are considered irrelevant to the chart of species,
but even extremely dangerous to the safety of the ships.
Gnawing at wood is the same with gnawing at mentalities
and prejudices. Why should humans feed on the other
animals: “we were just floating cafeteria” (ibidem: 14)? Why
should humans apply oversimplified structures to reality
by destroying the cross-breeds: the behemoth, the fire-
living salamander, the basilisk, the griffon, the sphinx, and
the unicorn? Those primitive desires of domination and
28
simplification would be, thus, specific to a “very unevolved
species compared to the animals” (ibidem: 28). Barnes here
implicitly accuses the protagonists of human history of lack
of imagination. And where we have a deficit of imagination,
the respect for others’ rights will suffer or regress to the level
of toleration. We may have either a “permission concept
of toleration” or a “respect conception” (Forst 2007: 305).
The latter implies “equal rights for identities” (ibidem: 307),
irrespective of the differences between them. The accent
in the genuine multiculturalism is put on identities, not on
minorities or majorities. What matters is the quality, not the
quantity. Toleration, with its three components: objection,
acceptance and rejection (ibidem: 292), is acceptable and
not insulting when the parties involved tolerate each other.
Toleration being “a normatively dependent concept”, which
needs “other, independent normative resources in order to
gain a certain content and substance” (ibidem: 293) can
swiftly evolve to perverse implementations if it is based
on the permission conception. The one-sided toleration is
reflected in Barnes’s novel with the help of aberrant juridical
context. When it is advantageous, the maximal becomes
democratic, overestimating the minimal. A strategy of
this sort is effective when somebody wants to transfer
responsibilities to an innocent, uninitiated category. The
process of overestimation is mirrored in the third chapter
of the novel: The wars of religion. The woodworm is accused
of having devoured on purpose the leg of the throne in
the church of Saint Michel. The incident provoked the fall
of a bishop who hit his head on the pavement. The fall is
mythologized: he fell “like the mighty Daedalus, from the
heavens of light into the darkness of imbecility” (Barnes
29
2010: 64). Besides the ironical rhetoric, the inaccuracy of
taking Daedalus for his son, Icarus, induces mistrust towards
the sophisticated scholasticism of the religious court of
law. The bestioles (ibidem: 75) should be anathemized and
excommunicated. From now on, the theological conflict
enters the domain of multiculturalism. Can the woodworm
be placed under the dominion of man’s jurisdiction if it was
not upon Noah’s Ark? Can the vermin be acquitted if it didn’t
turn up at the tribunal after repeated summoning? This is
the utopian, or the hypocritical side of multiculturalism
– imagining that the borders between different cultures
will not be trespassed. Trespassing involves violence
exerted by one of the parties. Reciprocal opening of some
intervals of borderlines creates the opportunity to the
transcultural communication, whose success we shall
never be able to anticipate. The permission conception is
the pre-condition of advancing multiculturalism towards
transculturalism. This is realisable in a context of complete
amnesia or of comprehensive mutual understanding. As
much memory or as much amnesia as possible! I have to
admit to approximation as “historiography and memory
are not the same” (Schwarz 2007: 141).
e. Twisted decodings
Maybe Obermann stretches his imagination in order
to obtain imaginings. He forces out historical evidence,
and this is not what we could name historical truth.
Imagination is useful to his business, but also to the local
people’s businesses. Somebody could argue that truth in
30
such conditions is irrelevant, not to say useless. We could
agree with this line of interpretation if producing such fake
truths didn’t disturb others’ life and beliefs. Obermann tricks
Sophia’s – his young Greek wife – high expectations. She
had sincerely believed in her future husband’s enthusiasm
and genius. Then, there is a tacit fight between the greedy
improvised archaeologist and the Turkish peasants
working for him: the fight for gold and precious stones
found on the site. Lastly, the whole world is fooled about
the veracity of the tremendous discovery. The figment
of Obermann’s imagination is sheer mercantilism. He is
able to mimic rituals and the antique heroes’ behaviour.
His enlightened conceptions hide subterranean mean
purposes. Wherefrom the title of the novel: The Fall of Troy.
When the inventor of the falsified Troy is crushed under the
hoofs of a scared horse, the whole invention breaks into
pieces. Troy’s legendary name is dragged through the mire.
Obermann’s magnificent imaginary, which is the result of
his imagination, is compromised because he “detotalises
the message in the preferred code in order to retotalise the
message within some alternative framework of reference”.
In cold, scientific formulation, this is a “struggle in discourse”
(Hall in During 1999: 517).
f. Amnesia or hyper-memory?
But imagination can be dangerous in more subtle ways.
In Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes “stages” the irony played
at the expense of Flaubert’s principle that between writers
and their work there should be no transfer of personal
31
information. Writers shouldn’t imbue their works with
autobiographical substance and the literary productions
will live an independent life from their authors’. The irony
is that in France there are plenty of Flaubert’s statues.
Right at the beginning of the novel, Barnes provides three
biographies of the French writer: an official one and two
intimate others. The first one of the second type records
successes and happy events, the second failures and
sorrows. Exactly what Flaubert feared: that his life could
influence the reception of his books, degrading in this
way their intrinsic aesthetic quality. In the novel we have a
character who burns Flaubert’s personal correspondence
in order to respect his cultural will. But this only enhances
the danger: we have insufficient information regarding
Flaubert’s existence, but we do have something, though.
Out of this incompleteness does the insatiable imagination
emerge. So, imaginary is the result of a force that can never
be as sober as a judge. Homer’s and Shakespeare’s lives
cannot be exploited in terms of plastic-surgery-imagination.
The imaginary shaped around their physical presence is
sheer fiction. This is the pure condition of imaginary. Semi-
fictitious or semi-historical imaginings are double-edged:
they can commercially and shamelessly speculate about
the scarce evidence left, or they can advance visionary
hypotheses, contributing to authentic revelations. Cast
in such an equation, imagination is the communication
channel between memory and future. As Luisa Passerini
put it: “Memory is the past tense of desire, anticipation its
future tense, and both are obstacles to the present-oriented
attitude which is the only one which allows the unknown to
emerge in any session” (in Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 251)
32
References:
Ackroyd, Peter, The Fall of Troy, Vintage, London, 2007.
Barnes, Julian, a). The History of the World in 10 ½
Chapters, Vintage, London, 2010.
b) Flaubert’s Parrot, Vintage, London, 2011.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Vital Illusion, Columbia University
Press, U.S.A., 2000.
Forst, Rainer, “A Critical Theory of Multicultural Toleration”,
pp. 292-310, in Laden, Simon Anthony and David Owen,
(ed.), Multiculturalism and Political Theory, Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Foucault, Michel, “Space, Power and Knowledge”, pp.
134-144, in During, Simon, (ed.), The Cultural Studies
Reader, 2nd edition, Routledge, London, 1999.
Gibson, Jeremy and Julian Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd –
The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text, MacMillan Press Lts,
London, 2000.
Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes, Palgrave,
MacMillan, New York, 2006.
Hall, Stuart, “Encoding, Decoding”, pp. 507-517 in During,
Simon, (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edition,
Routledge, London, 1999.
Luisa Passerini, “Memory between silence and oblivion”,
pp. 238-251, Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone,
(ed.), Contested Pasts. The Politics of Memory, Routledge,
London, 2003
Schwarz, Bill, “Memory and historical time”, pp. 135-151,
Radstone, Susannah and Katharine Hodgkin, (ed.), Regimes
of Memory, Routledge, London, 2003.
33
 Language as a set of games
In spite of the elitist attitude professed by modernism,
the thirties were fascinated with politics, proving that
the artsy mentality was not all-encompassing. If Martin
Dodsworth notices that the early modernism was still
talkative as a young person, Ihab Hassan in The Postmodern
Turn. Essays in Postmodern Theory, 1987, Ohio State
University Press, USA, identifies the literature of silence at
the beginning of postmodernism. This is something very
close to antiliterature, as it included elements of happening
and abstraction, much in the same way Jackson Pollock
practised and understood action painting. One can do
almost anything with language, but the complete chaos
is not possible. Ludwig Wittgenstein described language
is a set of games, related to the arithmetic of primitive
tribes (The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford, 1958, 8 lf ). In
this way, language is reduced “to pure ratio”. Following
these early observations, Ihab Hassan remarked that “the
conceptions of literature as game and as action merge in
another form of metaphoric silence: literary obscenity”. Now
we understand that the literature of silence is a literature of
revolt in which violence and obscenity muffle the language
and favour image.
Now in poetry we shall have the concrete poetry, which
makes pictures with the alphabet, while the novel gives up
to the old-fashioned principles of causality, psychological
analysis, and symbolic relations (see Sartre, Beckett, and
Alain Robbe-Grillet). The silence can be attained either by
34
transforming the novelist into a literalist who only names
things or offers pure images, or through radical irony (Kafka,
Mann).
Furthering the tradition of silence Maurice Blanchot
in Le Livre à Venir identified J. J. Rousseau as the first
representative, “acharné à écrire contre l’écriture”. He
anticipated that literature approached «l’ère sans parole”
in which, as in some works of Beckett and Miller, language
can be perceived only as humming sound (Paris, 1953).
Thus, literature advances towards its essence, which would
be disappearance. A similar problem is signalled by Roland
Barthes: «La modernité commence avec la recherche d’une
littérature impossible» (Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, Paris,
1953). The Orphic dream would be: «un écrivain sans
Littérature». Claude Mauriac, in his turn, considers that the
art of words becomes onomatopoeic and incomprehensibly
musical: “After the silence of Rimbaud, the blank page of
Mallarmé, the inarticulate cry of Artaud, literature finally
dissolves in alliteration with Joyce...For Beckett...words
all say the same thing” (The New Literature, New York,
1959). Philip Tew, in The Contemporary British Novel,
homologated, in his turn, the “blurring of genres”, which
have “all bled into one another” (p.3).
We should not forget that the Maenads tore Orpheus
at the request of Dionysus because he was an Apollonian.
The head of the poet must be severed in order that he
may go on with his singing. Great steps are taken towards
antiliterature. New and disruptive aesthetic forms re-emer­
ge: neopicaresque, black burlesque, grotesque, gothic,
science fiction.
35
 Poststructuralism
The straying steps of postmodernism
Jean François Lyotard assumes that “the postmodern
condition” coincides with the end of authoritative meta­
narra­tives. History becomes a personal issue – no more
of victors’ perspective. Relativity imbues science with
quantum physics, theories of chaos and of the fractal. James
Gleick advances the theory of chaoplexity (disorder and
unpredictability/the “butterfly effect”= it flutters its wings
in the west and causes a monsoon in the east). The era of
gadgets (cell phones, fax machines, portable physiotherapy
units, grafts, personal stereos) generate a posthuman body
which is half machine and half a media-projected invention
(D. Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, The Athlone
Press 2000).
Fashionable now is the “participant novel” or the
“interactive fiction” wherein the reader chooses the narrative
trajectories and endings in virtual space (Andrew Gibson,
Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Edinburgh
University Press, 1966).
36
Derrida lectures on “Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences”, 1966, Of Grammatology,
1967. He accentuates that meaning no longer depends
on its relationship to some signifier, but on the signifier’s
slippage under other signifiers. Deconstruction disjoins
the signifier from the signified. So the syntagmatic axis,
representing reality, replaces the pre-eminence of the
paradigmatic axis which stood for a virtual, artificial system.
This is the moment when the author, as it happened to
God some decades before, is declared inexistent. Roland
Barthes, in The Death of the Author, affirms that the text
is a tissue of quotations from the world’s innumerable
centres of culture. The universal intertextuality degrades the
formerly agentive and autonomous author to the position
of a bricoleur (Derrida, Lévi-Strauss) or a scriptor (Barthes).
He is now born with the text and almost everybody can
become an author.
From the narrative point of view, the boundary between
chronodiegesis (the level of the plot, supposed to refer to
the world) and metanarratives (self-referential language
acts) is blurred into distinct layers of fictionality (Linda
Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional
Paradox, Methuen, 1984). The reading for pleasure is
discarded as lay-reading.
For Roland Barthes, in Untying the Text: A Post­struc­
turalist Reader, Routledge, 1981, the “processes of meaning”
affect the text, which “explodes and disperses” becoming
a “production in progress, plugged in other texts, other
codes”. The text in this acception gets articulated with
society and history in ways which are not determinist but
“citational”. There is no such thing as textual independence.
37
 But not only texts! Deconstructionists argue that there
is no language-free standpoint. Language, in its turn,
expresses more than the speaker’s or writer’s intentional
meaning. Writers can no longer control their medium.
Instead, they are used by this medium. Following Carlyle’s
footsteps, postmodernists complete the deconstruction of
history (abolition of subject, agentive action, causal links,
and evolution, the possibility of new action, monumental
acts, and documented reconstruction). In his essay On
History, Carlyle defined the subject as “alphabetic letters
in need of interpretation”.
The chaos under the order dreamt of by so many
centuries was signalled also by Nietzsche in Untimely
Meditations. Here he revised history as a succession
of chance events, lacking order, meaning and purpose.
Moral values (The Genealogy of Morals) are not factual,
humanity is surrounded by a system of signs to which a
contingent significance is ascribed. Morality and values,
in general, depend on interpretation. The new relativism
justifies aggression, wars and dissolution of family values.
Religion itself was at bay.
The postmodernist individual leads a posthistorical life,
because, as Francis Fukuyama considered, the historical
process ended with the advent of democracy. The preten­
sions of truthfulness expostulated beforehand by the
discourse of history is gradually replaced by historicist
negotiations of personal and communal, present and
past narratives that invent rather than discover the past as
history books conserved it. Hayden White, in Metahistory,
describes the new way of recording historical facts in the
form of narrative and rhetorical emplotment). Thus, history
38
gets closer to literature than to science. This is visible in
books pervaded by magic realism written by authors like
Salman Rushdie and Jim Crace.
The historical perspectivism splits Identity into a set of
“positions” in language, as Benveniste and Derrida theorized.
The dissolution of identity was influenced by the post-
colonial spaces of migration and cultural transitivity. In this
new context, identity became hybrid and nomadic, as Rosi
Braidotti explained in Nomadic Subjects. A more positive
side is highlighted by Gerard Delanty who sees the moral
advancement of society in the priority of the Other over the
Self in postmodernity. Modernism had been incomparably
more narcissistic. Postmodernists were able to internalize
the Other as a counterbalance for the limitations of the Self.
The culture of entertainment used mass-media to
stimulate the formation of class-less decontextualized
culture. The incisive American writer Donald Barthelme
baptized that a forest of images, mass-produced and
endlessly, alluringly empty. Individuality disappears,
whereas otherness becomes a mirror of the shrunk self.
The postmodernist subjects are given no chance: they
are self-destructive, demonic, nihilist, the Beelzebub, coyote
figures, the tricksters of the Disney cartoons, endlessly
killed and coming back alive. As they have no substance,
they cannot be annihilated. Consequently, the postmodern
discourse is built on pastiche, cultural recombination,
blankness, a sense of exhaustion, relish for copies and
repetitions, rejection of history, mixture of levels, forms,
styles, and bricolage fashion. There is no escape: as we
are a linguistic social construct, we end up as fragmented,
unstable crosshatches of discourses.
39
 In this respect, Floyd Merrell explained: “the bricoleur’s Problems of moral psychology: Iris Murdoch
job is the junk yard, where he sorts and classifies. [...]
The engineer mathematizes the world, the bricoleur
taxonomizes it. […] He just picks a provisional centre,
knowing that it is not full presence, the origin, nor absolute
and deconstructs the system in order to demonstrate that
there is no centre”.

Iris Murdoch’s novels are deemed “fictionalised philo­

sophy”, as they would substitute philosophers for characters
while they dispute in a platonic symposium. With her,
history is not a record of actual events any longer, but a
palimpsest of discourses about them, each making up its
own version.
In a 1986 study, Peter J. Conradi used the concept of
“magical realism” in connection with Iris Murdoch (born
1919). Here he mentioned that Murdoch’s fantasy was not
the South American parabolic type, but a sort of surrealist
mixture of fantasy and “meticulous naturalistic rendering of
detail” (Conradi 6). Her progression was from existentialism
to religion, from the artist to the saint. She sympathised
with Sartre’s existentialism in the measure in which it took
a stand in problems of value and morality, considering
them not abstractions, but the personal responsibility of

40 41
a solipsistic, exalted individual. In combating positivism
and behaviourism of the age, she wrote the essay Against
Dryness in support of the return to subjectivity. But she
disliked the existentialist annihilation of the cultural past,
the “tabula rasa” and the artificial re-start from the scratch.
Murdoch used the language of phenomenology even in the
title of her fictional debut, Under the Net (1954) that refers
us to a passage (6.341) in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus.
Simone Weil, in Degrees of Freedom, contested the
freedom offered by the writer, saying that all she afforded
was the dialectic of binary structuring, of dyadic pairs whose
inner struggles provided the structure of her fiction. In spite
of this, Murdoch’s characters are not static: they assume
the well-known existentialist change of roles, willing to
confront suffering and death.
42
Tel Quel
Tel Quel includes the poststructuralism and the post­
modernism and takes distance from the structuralist claims
of immanent analysis of the texts (explication de texte). The
structuralists pretended they were capable to decipher
all codes and exhaustively distil a text’s meaning. Jacques
Derrida discoursed about difference and dissemination,
while Julia Kristeva invoked the recovery of the Russian
Formalists’ critique of univocal meaning and monologic
discourse. Structuralism starts losing ground and, all of a
sudden, texts were set free and overflowed their margins.
They formed an intersection of textual surfaces or intertexts.
Postmodernists’ free approach towards culture was
anticipated by Tel Quel group in Paris. Nowadays we
disfigure and parody the works of our ancestors or our
contemporaries. Even the notion of plagiarism is not what it
used to be, at least in Europe. Patchwork, for instance, is not
considered intentional plagiarism. The Russian Formalists’
critique of univocal meaning and monologic discourse
was recovered by Julia Kristeva and there came to the
forefront of interpretation strategies the works on difference
and dissemination. The credit granted to semiotics was
transferred to a revised version, called pragmatism, wherein
the stress was laid on the way language produces meaning
in a context of usage. The deconstructionist approach
spread to the States, at Yale University, respectively, where
important theorists (Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and
Harold Bloom) carried on the activity of their European foils.
43
 The notion of “postmodernism” came rather late into
theoretical use in Wolfgang Welsch’s book from 1987 –
Unsere Postmoderne Moderne, issued in Weinheim. Before
this date, Charles Jencks published the article “The rise of
Post-Modern architecture” in 1975, whose content was to be
developed to form the book The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture. J. F. Lyotard transferred the concept to the
realm of cultural studies and described the “postmodern
condition” as the death of authoritative metanarratives.
What mattered from then on were especially the small
narratives related to victims and defeated. The previous
stability and continuity of the world got to be shattered by
quantum physics, theories of chaos or of the fractal. James
Gleick invoked the “butterfly effect” (it flutters its wings in
the west and causes a monsoon in the east) in support of
the theory of chaoplexity. Disorder and unpredictability are
the key words of the interval. The poles are covered and
somehow balanced as Benoit Mandelbrot, who studied
the fractal, remarked that chaos is apparent: behind it
persist some relational forces able to organize complex
systems. D. Cavallaro, in Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, The
Athlone Press, 2000, described the posthuman body, half
machine and half a media-projected hologram, as being
made of cell phones, fax machines, portable physiotherapy
units, grafts and personal stereos. In an artificialized world,
imbued with computer-generated movies and wherein
readers can choose their narrative trajectories and endings
in virtual space, writing and reading are not the same. The
previous symmetrical space, reflected in the psychological
and artistic dimensions, was split or even pulverised into
many sub-centres.
44
American counter-culture
(The Beat Generation)
“When I read it, I don’t wince,
which is all I ever ask for
a book I write.”- Norman Mailer
Isn’t it clear that the golden days of counterculture have
been swallowed by the conformist and dry mainstream?
The scourging days of 1964, when Timothy Leary urged:
“you have to Go Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head”
(in Whitmer and VanWyngarden 1987: 15). Those years
when the experiments with psychedelic drugs took place
at Harvard and on writers! The counterculture focused
on aesthetic experiments combined with a sharp social
involvement. The same Leary professing open hate to the
establishment: “To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in
the defense of life is a sacred act” (ibidem: 42). And keep in
mind – this was the second stage of counterculture, after
its pinnacle!
The authenticity of counterculture is indisputable as
writers’ biographies extensively rivalled their fiction. In
1960 Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. Okay then, he was
mentally disturbed. If it had been only for that! But his
private life got redeemed by overflowing into the public
realm. In 1969 he ran for mayor of New York. The writer’s
status was so important that he could charge 50 bucks
admission to his 50th birthday party. What if he had covered
Adam’s lifespan?
45
 a. Dolly culture, crazy counterculture
Within the same interval, Hunter S. Thompson was going
for “big bang psychotherapy” (ibidem: 87), firing rifles out
of his window. No wonder he was described as “a literary
bull in the china shop of western civilization” (ibidem: 88).
Now we can clearly hear the “hum of the block machinery”
(Kesey 2002: 7), that is the Combine repressing everything
that wanted to be different. What if culture, especially the
academic one, has become a Procrustean device supporting
a hypocrite and dull political correctness? What if this
new type of culture, cemented with piles of red tape –
rules, regulations, diplomas and certificates – has got the
appearance of Miss Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s
Nest? “Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made,
like an expensive baby doll, blend of white and cream and
baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils”(ibidem: 10).
A dolly culture imbued with cute and cosy considerations,
the function of which is more and more didactic, but less
and less challenging and critical.
Now, what is the good of a civilized culture wherein one
writes keeping the score: number of articles, scholarships,
memberships, committees and so forth and so on? If
McMurphy popped in one day and asked us: “Who’s the
bull goose loony here” (ibidem: 25), how many of us would
have the guts to face him? He was battling hammer and
tongs against that Big Nurse who wanted everybody and
everything “adjusted”. One way or another, even we, the
intelligentsia, have become the employees of a cultural
factory. But this giving in isn’t sufficient. We have to let
ourselves be reformed into “a bunch of chickens at a peckin’
46
party” (ibidem: 72), telling on those still resisting, those who
don’t want to surrender to the snugly rhinoceros condition.
Try and not be polite, try and not be ecumenical and the
globalists will ridicule you as a retrograde factor. Again, we
are living in an Age of Enlightenment relying not that much
on Reason, but on conformity to corporate thinking. As
Harding, the philosopher of the loonies put it allegorically:
“All of us in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees,
hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world” (ibidem: 81).
b. A tumultuous ivory tower
The paradox of this Newer World Order is that all the
previously banished abnormalities and perversities are now
accepted as long as they back up the conjugated efforts
of diminishing liberties. You can be whatever you like if
only in small quantities and slumbering intensity. Like in
John Fowles’s The Collector, the thinkers are a Miranda
imprisoned by a Caliban incapable of understanding her
larger-than-world aspirations. I think Orwell overestimated
the fears of the dominant class. Why would it be necessary
to make people blindly believe the official lie and fanatically
die for it? Religion, not to say philosophy and art, is a strong
enemy of manipulation. Better and easier is to replace these
abstract attractions with superstitions and consumerism.
As for the creators and thinkers, they can brood over
whatever they want as long as they draw the conclusions
only in their minds. The mind stays free, but the expression of
it no. Disentangling from all sorts of manipulations becomes
harder and harder. In order to attain this capability, one needs
47
(counter)culture, not official and tamed edu­cation. But
(counter)culture doesn’t pay anymore. The contemporary
free-thinker has become a famished figure.
What we shouldn’t forget is that the Beats didn’t molly-
coddle in literature. Their movement was a reaction against
“the stifling conformity of the Eisenhower presidency of the
1950’s” (Gair 2008: 25). This political involvement highlights
the seriousness underlying all their revelries and escapades.
Then, it was the position taken against the Korean War,
immediately after which many representatives of the (quasi)
generation abruptly ended their public life.
c. The Beats - hardly a generation
Although the Beat writers dwelled mainly upon their
personal experiences, heavily relying on the first person
narrative, they never enjoyed escapism. In their case, the
ivory tower was a travelling device, either spatially or in the
guise of a drug trip. If their ideals converged to a certain
degree, this aspect doesn’t entitle us to crowd them under
the flag of a generation. Already in the 60’s the genuine
spirit of the group had made room for the “media-hyped
‘beatnik’ industry” (ibidem: 5), an appalling conclusion for
the real Beats. We mustn’t forget that the term “beatnik”
was an ironic coinage. In criticizing the dullness of the new
post-war material comfort, the Beats turned to patriarchal
values. They are the true heirs of those Transcendentalists
who had withdrawn to hamlets and cultivated their own
back-garden food. Ralph Waldo Emerson warned about
the dangers of the economic spirit swallowing the spiritual
48
values. If we gather together the critiques brought to the
American Dream, we shall notice the common key struck
in turns by the Transcendentalists, the Beats and the more
comprehensive Flower-Power movement. On the one hand,
we have the primitive and Zen attitude, on the other hand
the Fordist enthusiasm for technological progress and social
welfare. Ginsberg’s mantra “first thought, best thought” isn’t
that far away from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden preaching
spontaneity, simplicity, and pure-heartedness. Now the
culture should imply individualism and, at least, cleavage
from, if not protest against, the utilitarian-gregarious
vision of the world. And here lies the main difference from
subsequent literary currents inferring themselves from the
Beat “canon”. The Beats didn’t pay homage to literature
as to a fetish - as it will be the case with their pretended
successors. Writing was mainly a lifestyle, the capture of
psychedelic and social experiments. This fact is reflected
in the Beat counterculture’s protagonists becoming in time
(well-sold) idols of the popular culture.
Again, the Beat attitude wasn’t strictly a scriptural one.
All the arts shook hands over sabotaging the ponderous
mainstream. There came the Bebop, Marlon Brandon’s
Method Acting and Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism.
Their involvement was so fierce that many of them destro­yed
their lives or others’. Lucien Carr killed David Kammerer,
Jackson Pollock suffered a fatal car accident as a result of
his chronic alcoholism, Jack Kerouac had a vicious and
premature death, not to say about William Burroughs who
shot Joan Vollmer and shockingly admitted afterwards: “I
am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would not have
become a writer but for Joan’s death. The death of Joan
49
brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit,
and manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle in which I had
no choice except to write my way out” (ibidem:11). “Writing
their way out” meant writing on the brink of craziness; which
is somehow paradoxical if we keep in mind the structural
conservatism of the Beats. Their writing techniques may be
avanguardist (see Burroughs’s cut-up method), but their
message and their cultural background stay conservative
and romantic.
So, Bebop relaxes the geometry of Swing in jazz, Marlon
Brandon’s impersonating Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee
William’s A Street Car Named Desire epitomized the im­
portance of gesture and of overwhelming, animal passion,
disregarding the clear and self-contained diction, while
Abstract Expressionism reacted against the figurative social
realism prevalent in the painting around 1930. Beat culture
meant especially context. Context is always a kind of shelter,
too. One feels protected, one could slip into improvising. As
the new musicians did, Kerouac used to practise his pen in
sketching whatsoever passed by his window. The fragment
became momentous. Of course, the power of fragment
lies in its expressivity, not in the complex structure or in
imposing ideational concatenations. Original techniques
emerged in every art, all of them desirous to disrupt
continuity, logics, figurativeness, and bourgeois decency.
Maybe the quintessential approach was that of Jackson
Pollock, surnamed “Jack the Dripper” by Time magazine,
on account of his peripatetic and dripping way of painting.
50
d. The imperative of paradox
All these instances lead to the conclusion that the Beats
lived an insurmountable paradox. They modernized fiction
writing – at the level of phraseology and narrative strategies
–, but admitted to the formative influence of tradition.
Alienated or self-exiled, they envisaged constituting an élite,
despising commercial success. Simultaneously, their themes
focused on the lives of cultivated or tormented outcasts.
Their inspirational reality was placed at the outskirts of
society. This savage and apparently incongruous élite was
long despised and neglected by the representatives of
mainstream culture. To be sure, the Beats were extremely
sensitive, psychotic, and delirious. Weird enough, Allen
Ginsberg, the most physically flawed between them,
persisted most and was assimilated to a countercultural
icon. Even he, the weak one, embraced a combative,
masculine, and energetic stand. Often physically strong,
but emotionally fragile, the Beats ignored Walt Whitman’s
hymning and visionary artistry. Secluded and anti-social,
they didn’t nurture paramount plans for their country.
Actually, they never found the balance between art and
life; in their case, the one consumed the other. That’s why
the temptation to compare the American counterculture
between the 40’s and the 60’s with other countercultures
all over the globe is only a strenuous, not to say illusory,
battle. Only the United States of that period created
the atmosphere for such a complex, contradictory, and
courageous phenomenon. Let’s not stretch our illusions
behind the point where they may break! The Beats in the
skies won’t credit us - not a snap!
51
 References:
Gair, Christopher. The Beat Generation: a Beginner’s
Guide. 2008, Oneworld Publications. ISBN: 1851685421.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 2002.
Clays Ltd, London. ISBN-13 978 – 141-02487-5.
Whitmer, O. Peter and Bruce VanWyngarden. Aquarius
revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture
that Changed America: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg,
Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer. 1987. MacMillan.
New York. ASIN: B0029WTT5O.
52
The fractioned universe and
the polycentric culture
The new saeculum is characterized by the “participant
novel” or “interactive fiction”. The distinction between writer
and reader is blurred. This is congruent with the breaking
of the geometric dimensions into fractionary dimensions,
as Andrew Gibson indicated in Towards a Postmodern
Theory of Narrative, Edinburgh University Press, 1966.
In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human
Sciences”, 1966, and Of Grammatology, 1967, Jacques
Derrida declared the independence of meaning from any
dependence on signifier. In its turn, the signifier slipped under
other signifiers along the syntagmatic axis. In the end, this is
the purpose of deconstruction: signifiers are projected into a
free play and texts overflow into other texts. Roland Barthes
already, in The Death of the Author, specified that the text is
a tissue of quotations from the world’s innumerable centres of
culture. What happens to the authors, then? They are degraded
to the level of a bricoleur (Derrida, Lévi-Strauss) or scriptor
(Barthes), much in the same way a DJ mixes nowadays. The
agency and autonomy of the authors vanishes and they are
born with the text. The boundary between chronodiegesis
(the level of the plot, supposed to refer to the world) and
metanarratives (self-referential language acts) is melted into
distinct layers of fictionality (Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic
Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox, Methuen, 1984).
Paul de Man, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minnesota, 1983)
53
insists on the status of texts as illusion and allegory of monumental acts, and documented reconstruction). In this
their unreadability on account of the difficulty of selecting respect, they were anticipated by Th. Carlyle who defined
a do­minant meaning from the competitive meaning the subject, in his essay “On history”, as “alphabetic letters in
structures. In his early structuralist phase Roland Barthes, need of interpretation”. Nietzsche too reinterpreted history
in “Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives” as a succession of chance events, lacking order, meaning
(Image-Music-Text, Fontana, 1977), attempted a “structural and purpose in Untimely Meditations. In the same unstable
analysis” of the “levels of meaning” within a text. Once he and contingent situation were placed the moral values
switched to poststructuralism, in “Textual analysis: Poe’s (The Genealogy of Morals). Every metaphysical subject
Valdemar”, included in Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist was subjected to a gravitational process of relativization.
Reader (Routledge, 1981), he promoted the “process of
meaning”, which “explodes and disperses”, on the text not as
“a closed product”, but as a “production in progress”, plugged
into other texts, other codes (this is the intertextual level
of meaning). Sociological and historical implications are
articulated within, not deterministically, but “citationally”.
In many writers’ works of the period we notice a pheno­
menon of cannibalism translated in pastiche, quotation and
parody(Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; William Golding,
Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors; Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton,
David Dabydeen, The Intended, Jeanette Winterson,
Boating for Beginners; Angela Carter, American Ghosts
and Old World Wonders; Emma Tenant, Two Women of
London; The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde; Sue
Roe, Estella, Her Expectations; Brian Aldiss, Frankenstein
Unbound). This postmodern hunger of the text is explicated
by deconstructionists through the inexistence of a language-
free standpoint. Language supersedes the speaker’s/writer’s
intentional meaning. With the help of this voracious and
independent language, postmodernists complete the
deconstruction of history (abolition of subject, agentive
action, causal links, evolution, the possibility of new action,

54 55
 The absurd theatre and the parallax.
Dyads versus triads (Harold Pinter)
There are two ways of staging Harold Pinter’s plays: either
a humorous, paradoxical one, or a gloomy, speechless and
menacing one. Before becoming a playwright, Pinter had
acted in many plays. Thus, although he despised theory,
he understood the suggestive power of body lan­guage,
moments of silence and objects on stage. The epithet
‘Pinteresque’, already included in The New Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary, surprises exactly these qualities.
Probably his new approach to the dramatic action, besides
the important influence of Samuel Beckett’s literature, was
generated by the dramatist’s multicultural origins.
56
The Pinters had roots between the polish Jews, then
in Odessa, and, in this way, they grouped easier with
Ashkenazic rather than Sephardic Jews. Owing to this,
some of the recurrent themes in his plays are evacuation,
loneliness, separation and violence. He even admits to a
guiding line borrowed from William Golding’s Lord of the
Flies, where civilization yields in front of instinctual impulse.
Michael Billington, Pinter’s biographer, noticed the will to
power which pervades his plays: “Pinter’s vision of human
relationships as a quest for dominance and control in which
the power balance is capable of reversal” (56). Most often
than not, a woman will arbitrate the relation between two
men. Gender power, which is above sexual power, originates
in the predominance of the verb “to have” over the verb “to
be”. What matters is not love or, at least, physical attraction,
but the acquisition of a new supporter in the strife to obtain
a space and break a will.
a. The mark of dominance: the parallax
This double opening of Pinter’s plays results from his
peculiar understanding of the absurd. Unlike Samuel
Beckett, he doesn’t dehumanize his characters by trans­
forming them into some automata. The characters in the
absurdist theatre are constantly waiting for a saviour, for a
meaning-producer. With Beckett, for instance, the unfulfilled
expectation creates, in turn, a desperate or a prostrated
state of mind. While waiting for Godot: “Nothing happens,
nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful” (Beckett 41). In
the absence of a spiritual guide, people become robots
57
emptied of human reason. Abolishing rationality and
imagination, Molloy sucks pebbles which are transferred
from one pocket into another. Time is felt like an oppressor,
life is nothing else than an exhausted loitering. Waiting is a
persistent activity in Pinter’s plays. To fill the temporal gap,
the characters focus on objects, even fight over them. In The
Homecoming the dialogue is assembled from prolonged
monologues due to the fact that the brothers living under
the same roof are fed up with each other. Maybe the most
important phenomenon in many of his plays is the parallax
an “apparent change in an object’s position due to a change
in the observer’s position” (Collins English Dictionary). For
instance, In The Caretaker, Aston, who had been checked
into a mental hospital and given electric shock therapy,
before leaving in the search of his persecutor wants to
finish a shed in the garden. The shed would repair his
pride and bring back his strength. A glass of water in The
Homecoming is a perfect pretext for sexual invitation.
Sometimes objects are used as signifiers without a signified.
They only act as bumpers which are to absorb the implicit
clashes between protagonists. That is why the apparently
inoffensive, even dull dialogues, are tense:
Max: There’s an advertisement in the paper about flannel
vests cut price. Navy surplus. I could do with a few of them.
Pause
I think I’ll have a fag. Give me a fag.
Pause
I just asked you to give me a cigarette.
Pause
Look what I’m lumbered with. (Pinter 16)
58
b. Categories of silence and despondency
Although a Beckettian way of dealing with words is
conspicuous, the British dramatist relies on the suspense
obtained with the help of silent moments. In the Postmodern
Turn Ihab Hassan described the literature emerging in the
1950s as a literature of silence (6). There are different types
of silence. In Beckett’s plays there is a lot of talk, most of
which is gibberish. It is like a hurly-burly coming from a
hurdy-gurdy. Some of his plays, taken as a whole, leave the
impression of a talkative silence. The chatty mood and the
exasperated waiting for something or somebody have the
paradoxical effect of suggesting a chronic crisis.
The impending crisis is not Pinter’s hallmark. Pinter is
not fond of realism and finds repugnant whatever kind
of orthodoxy. He praises ambiguity without favouring
metaphysical drives. It is true what Ronald Knowles
remarked about this kind of choral theatre – “we are drawn
into the endless permutations of possibility” (in Raby 79);
but these permutations never suppose the reification of
man. The same author considers that “in The Homecoming
all cultural values are deconstructed by the visceral, atavistic
animality revealed by the reaction to Ruth” (Ibidem). What
he misses is the fact that if in the beginning femininity is
degraded by approaching it as an object that must be
possessed, tamed, in the end Ruth has all the machos in the
family kneeled at her feet. The context indeed is aggressive
and filthy, but Max, the father, scolds one of his sons in the
first act with a prophetic replica: “Go and find yourself a
mother” (Pinter 24). This line will prove to be illuminating
for the whole apparently despicable action. A son returns
59
home after many years. In the meantime, he has become
a doctor in philosophy. His father and brothers belong to
the blue-collar classes, with all the incumbent mentalities
and behaviours. For example, the father explains about
his sons and stepsons: “Look what I’m lumbered with. One
cast-iron bunch of crap after another. One flow of stinking
pus after another.” (Pinter 27). The confrontation between
the new-comers and the owners of the house will not be
an open one from the start. Only later on the blue-collars
will try to defile the woman by treating her as a prostitute.
A prostitute, in the end, is a lendable object destined to
provoke physical pleasure. Besides, in this family, woman
beating is a boasting opportunity. To make things more
bizarre, Ruth, who admits having been “a photographic
model for the body” (Pinter 65), stirs the sexual impulses
of her husband’s brothers. She leaves the impression
of surrendering to their instincts but, eventually, turns
the table on them and from the status of a sexual object
suddenly she evolves to the rank of a mother-queen. An
implacable queen, because at the end of the play the in-laws
are reduced to the role of her toys and subjects. This is not a
really deus ex machina ending. A possible explanation is that
she only simulated submission and objectification. Lenny,
one of the seduced brothers, complains to her weirdly
complacent husband: “What do you think of that, Ted? Your
wife turns out to be a tease” (Pinter 74). Ruth knows that, in
order to manipulate people, one has to foster their illusions.
The ridiculous team of men envisage a profitable future
for them as a result of sexually exploiting their temptress.
They even decide for the husband to be his own wife’s
pimp and attract professors from The United States back
60
to his family’s brothel. This “diseased imagination” (Pinter
86), as Max unconsciously calls it, is broken when they
get subjugated by Ruth’s authority: “She’ll use us, she’ll
make use of us, I can tell you! I can smell it!” (Pinter 89). As
a matter of fact, the characters in Pinter’s plays don’t wait
for a saviour, but for a victim who, finally, proves to be an
executioner. The one waited for gets to be waited upon! As
Michael Billington put it with a biographical hint, “Pinter’s
own secret planet turned out to be a cratered paradise
destroyed by the serpent of sexuality and the desire for
domination.” (26).
c. Blindness as self-delusion
In a certain way, with Pinter happens as with Mircea
Nedelciu, who disputed the natural, not to say basic
functionality of the objects in his novel The Field Raspberry
(Zmeura de câmpie): “the unmatched beauty acquired by
an object originally deprived of whatever aesthetic qualities,
but that knows now to stay within its functional frontiers
whatever may intervene around it”11 (translation mine)
(13). In Tea Party, for instance, the walls of the setting are
papered with Japanese silk. The interior, thus, creates a cosy
and exotic atmosphere. Several lines below, we understand
that the lavishly decorated walls belong to an office suite.
All of a sudden their beauty becomes sheer queerness. The
office looks more like an alcove where the boss can indulge
„inegalabila frumuseţe pe care o capătă un obiect lipsit, la origine, de
11
orice calităţi estetice, dar care ştie să rămână în limitele lui funcţionale
orice s-ar întâmpla în juru-i” (Zmeura de câmpie)
61
in complementing his newly-employed secretary. Pinter’s
irony, highlighted by the objects placed on the stage, is
explosive. Disson, the courting boss, is described, on the
occasion of his marriage, like living in conformity with
“austere standards of integrity” (Pinter 100). This fame helps
the manager to take himself for a strong, efficient man. He
pretends to be free of the need to be loved. Like with the
teacher in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, he relies only on
facts. But his utilitarianism is a fake. Everything around him
must reassure his manly attributes. The above-mentioned
austerity is compensated for by the carefully dusting of a
tiny yacht placed on a mantelpiece. Disson craves for power,
money and pleasure. When his second wife – who brings
up his two boys from a previous marriage – discovers him
kneeled on the floor of his office with a scarf tied over his
eyes and waiting for his secretary to give him a massage,
he cuts short any explanation: “How dare you speak to me
like that? I’ll knock your teeth out!” (Pinter 119). Next time
when they resume the office-game, he will find out that
the chiffon stinks. This could be said about all his life. The
chiffon blinds him objectively. In time, blindness becomes
voluntary. Although Disson doesn’t recognize, his fits of
blindness protect him from the dissipated milieu of his
family. He is not sure anymore whether his brother-in-law is
the real brother of his wife, he cannot rely on his secretary’s
faithfulness to him.
d. The language of objects
A key-object in the play is the beautifully wrought mirror
Disson installs in his house. He takes the object inside only
62
when he has symptoms of transitory blindness. Thus, the
mirroring effect is annihilated. Disson manages to see only
what he wants; and he wants to admit only happiness and
success in his life. Even the function of the mirror is twisted.
Disson belies the lies in his life of a would-be model-father
and irreproachable husband and employer. Pinter read
Eugene Ionesco’s The New Tenant at the beginning of his
playwright career. The Romanian-French dramatist used
objects to form sepulchral clusters. Basically, the new tenant
hires two porters to carry an infinite range of objects. The
result is a suffocation of the traffic in the whole country.
If Ionesco favours hyperbole and metamorphosis, Pinter
prefers the litotes and the personification of his characters’
obsessions. Leo Schneiderman noticed: “His characters
engage in repetition and incantation, always with the
same spare vocabulary, until the audience begins to see
beyond the stage and to literally visualize the character’s
obsessions, which are localized in rooms, buses and other
places experienced in the past” (187). The objects are only
an interface for a repressed communication. But every
character knows how to look through this interface.
But, as Mircea Nedelciu cleverly noticed, we live in “this
country in which objects look different, have been changing
their roles, their voice and function”12 (translation mine) (47).
In Tea Party the objects are sometimes only heard. In their
turn, they send to a humanity who prefers to communicate
through the language of inanimate existences. In addition,
the language of objects works like a refrain, being resumed
periodically. For instance, the sentence „soft clicks of the
“acest secol în care obiectele arată altfel, sunt în schimbare de rol,
12
voce și funcție” (Nedelciu 47)
63
door opening and closing, muffled steps, an odd cough,
slight rattle of teacups, whispers” (Pinter 134) intervenes
repeatedly in the otherwise dull dialogue. The sounds
mingle with human voices and the result, paradoxically,
is a vibrating silence. Actually, objects transmit more
information than words. Beckett too resorted to this
strategy from time to time; with him such a device enhanced
desolation: „Beckett leaves us with a world so depleted
of life that nothing short of a cataclysm can renew it; we
are close to the absence of the outrage” (Hassan 6). For
Ihab Hassan the outrage was the symbol of apocalypse. If
Beckett and Pinter herald a lurching apocalypse, Eugène
Ionesco simply triggers it, although his fictional world is,
or seems to be, more relaxed. He does this sometimes
in spite of his characters’ obstinacy not to recognize the
catastrophe. In Rhinoceros, Bérenger, the Logician, and
Botard reject the sheer evidence; they refuse to accept
what they have just seen or simply try to belittle the weird
apparition of an African or Asian animal on the streets
of the city. Silence, with Pinter, functions as a respite for
reorganizing and reviving communication. The result is
disappointing, as the antiheroes don’t admit to any mistake
in the past informing their present. In these conditions,
silence is only a simulacrum, pretending to shelter some
important meanings. In the end, it works as a deluding
calibration: „literature strives for silence by accepting chance
and improvisation; its principle becomes indeterminacy.”
(Hassan 10).
64
e. The intellectuals and the arch-object
Apart from Beckett’s characters, Pinter’s ones are very
often failed intellectuals. The cultural background doesn’t
shield them from the basic necessities. In The Basement,
Stott and Law evoke the glorious mental feats of the past:
Stott: Remember those nights reading Proust? Remember
them?
Law (to Jane): In the original.
Stott: The bouts with Laforgue? What bouts.
(Pinter 154)
But this is not culture – it is only information. In the
end, the three friends sharing a cosy home undermine
each other by forming unstable and aggressive dyads.
The one not summoned in the dyad will play the role of
the scapegoat. The fight for supremacy consists in moving
objects in the house or simply removing them. Thus, the
taste is an excuse for bullying the other two protagonists.
Pinter’s “settings belong to the minimalist tradition, but
their effect is to evoke compelling images of loneliness,
conflict, and insecurity. The basic element in Pinter’s
stage settings is a room that invariably suggests ominous
possibilities of desolation and trauma” (Schneiderman 186).
Thus, the room is the arch-object in his plays. The secluded
space offers the protection of a mother’s womb but, in the
same time, when there is more than one individual inside
it, it aggravates dire instincts and aggressive paranoia.
In The Birthday Party, Stanley, the gloomy ex-pianist is
so jealous of his small room in a shabby boarding house that
he doesn’t tolerate any intruder. Aggression and politeness
65
are signs of fragility in this world. Assailants like Goldberg
and Stott instinctively feel the tragic flaw and snip at it.
Better is to keep silent and study your adversary: „silence
develops as the metaphor of a new attitude that literature
has chosen to adopt towards itself. This attitude puts to
question the peculiar power, the ancient excellence of
literary discourse – and challenges the assumptions of our
civilisation” (Hassan 11). Of course, the enemies of silence
and cosy seclusion could be identified with the characters’
subconscious fears and hopes. Especially that most of them
are fragile or perverted. But these mini-dramas are imbued
with “the yearning for some lost Eden as a refuge from
the uncertain, miasmic present” (Billington 82). It results
that Pinter’s dramaturgy turns round two typologies: the
strong and perverted on the one hand, the weak and
suspicious on the other hand. The representatives of both
categories are sensitive to a past golden age. This is their
only similitude, but as their happy memories don’t belong
together, communication is impossible.
f. The blurred memory of the recent history
Pinter’s plays are an analysis of the need to communicate
no matter what. This irrepressible drive constituted the core
of Beckett’s Happy Days, where a woman buried up to her
neck in the desert talks incessantly. The absurdist vein is
conspicuous at Pinter when he assembles dialogues that
function like monologues. In Landscape people accomplish
a certain recitative without paying attention to others’
words:
66
Duff:
I should have had some bread with me. I could have
fed the birds.
Beth:
Sand on his arms.
Duff:
They were hopping about. Making a racket.
Beth:
I lay down by him, not touching.
(Pinter 169)
Famous for his musical silences and repetitions, Pinter
hardly ever writes symphonic plays. The quiet intervals
recharge energetically the exhausting conversations but,
simultaneously, enhance the imprecise threat. Even when
they keep quiet, the protagonists attack each other or get
ready to strike back if necessary. Mutual understanding
and confidence are illusions. Because of the high-pitched
tension, nobody pays real attention to the external
present-day events. The ensuing effect is an all-embracing
alienation. In Landscape beings are taken for objects and
then degraded:
Beth: I’ve watched other people. I’ve seen them.
Pause
All the cars zooming by. Men with girls at their sides.
Bouncing up and down. They’re dolls. They squeak.
Pause
67
 Al the people were squeaking in the hotel bar. The girls
had long hair. They were smiling.
(Pinter 182)
Because of this abstract-mindedness, nobody is able to
master their fresh memories. It is only the remote, happy
times that are embedded in their high-definition memory.
In Silence Ellen admits that: “often it is only half things
I remember, half things, beginnings of things.” (Pinter
204). Having no common remembrances, the characters
communicate in instalments. In between these instalments
there is silence or daydreaming. The former is toxic most
often than not, as Michael Billington perceives it: “Silence
as a weapon of control” (57). Silence, staged in 1969, is
a series of crossed monologues delivered by the three-
person cast: Ellen, Rumsey and Bates. Such talkative
“silences” are made possible with the help of “repetition
and incantation” (Schneiderman 187). The dialogue is
a failure because the characters expect nothing more
from the present; they “evoke the past by recalling visual
images of idealized harmony and security for regressive
or compensatory reasons” (Schneiderman 188). This
defeatist attitude is characterized by Leo Schneiderman
as a “pattern of oedipal-defeat-without-a-battle” (193).
The same researcher considers that Pinter belongs “to the
fraternity of Beckett and Ionesco, whose male protagonists
are beyond the reach of maternal love, romantic passion,
or even human charity. These antiheroes are defeated from
the start” (194). Such an utterance should be taken cum
grano salis. At first sight, the differences between Beckett
and Pinter are less conspicuous than the resemblances.
68
However, one thing is sure: Pinter’s characters are punished
for whatever slippage into sentimentality. The victim can
become torturer if offered the chance. Happiness is localised
into an intangible past. If Beckett staged the “failure of the
language to mirror ‘reality’ ”, as Marjorie Perloff considers (in
Bloom 18), Pinter staged the failure of confronting reality
and the twisted functionality of objects. Stanley in The
Birthday Party is offered a drum, although he pretends to
have been a pianist. The drum is a military, harsh instrument.
It commands discipline, strictness and aggression. Objects
in Harold Pinter’s theatre are an opportunity to transmit
ideas, desires or threats. The victim is the one who fails to
correctly interpret the language of objects and of details.
References:
Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Woks.
Croydon, U. K.: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Billington, Michael. Harold Pinter, revised edition.
London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2007.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Critical Views: Contemporary
Poetics –New Editions. New York: Infobase Publishing,
2010.
Collins English Dictionary, Glasgow: HarperCollins
Publishers, 2005.
Harold Pinter: Play 3. Chatham Kent, U. K.: Faber and
Faber Limited, 1997.
Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Essays in
Postmodern Theory and Culture. Ohio State University
Press, 1987.
Knowles, Ronald. “Pinter and twentieth-century drama”.
Raby Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Harold
69
Pinter. Ed. Raby Peter. U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
2009. 74-86.
Nedelciu, Mircea. Zmeura de câmpie. Bucureşti: Editura
Gramar, 1999.
Schneiderman, Leo. The Literary Mind, Portraits in Pain
and Creativity. New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc., 1988.
70
The avatars of the canon
David Lodge in Consciousness and the Novel (2002)
made the following considerations: “Imagining what it
is to be like someone other than yourself is at the core
of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the
beginning of morality”. So telling stories still has great
chances of survival in postmodernism: “the single human
voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic
way of rendering consciousness”.
Of a different opinion was Francis Fukuyama, who wrote
the book Our Posthuman Future. Consequences of the
Biotechnology Revolution, 2002. His demonstration relied
a lot on George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World (1932), wherefrom I extract a quotation: “the
hatching of people not in wombs but in vitro; the drug
soma which gave people instant happiness; the Feelies in
which sensation was simulated by implanted electrodes;
and the modification of behaviour through constant
subliminal repetition and, when that didn’t work, through
the administration of various artificial hormones”.
These two simultaneous stances put pressure on the
canon and on the exclusivist aesthetical pretentions in
making it up.
71
 New developments in the
Anglo-American contemporary fiction
The new “historical novel” ambitions to re-write “History”
so that this becomes a plurality of “his-stories”. Space is
opposed to time and history is understood as a set of
apocryphal stories, or pastiches, as in John Fowles’s A
Maggot. 1985.
The opposition postmodernism - modernism was
understood in terms of architectural approach between
1910 and 1945. The hegemony of the Euclidian geometry
as an axiomatic system that produced theorems related
to a two-dimensional and three-dimensional space was
eliminated. Claude Levi-Strauss theorized bricolage or a
multiple use of elements taken from earlier styles or periods
(classical or modern): “Post” of postmodernism indicates a
succession (a diachronic sequence of periods), a conversion
(a new direction from the previous one).
The new Zeitgeist, challenged by the techno-scientific
development and by the consumer society viewed as a process
of continuous accumulation as well as a postindustrial
society, generates a new type of avant-garde. The older
frontier, specific to the high-modernism, between high-
culture and mass-culture is effaced. Jean François Lyotard
mentions the derision of avant-gardes regarded as the
expression of an outdated modernity.
Matei Călinescu describes a new face of Modernity.
Thus, there would be two conflicting and interdependent
“modernities”:
72
(1) socially progressive, rationalistic, competitive,
technological;
(2) cultural critical, self-critical, demystifying basic values
of radical modernity:
The main characteristics of the period are: innovation,
rejection of the authority of tradition, and experimentalism.
The postmodernism as anti-modern dismisses the dogma
of progress and criticises excessive rationality. It senses that
modern civilization has lost the great integrative paradigms
(“grand narratives”), and that what was once a great unity
(for example, the modernist Ego) became fragmented.
In the 1960’s revolutionary spirit was linked with
counterculture and engendered optimistic-apocalyptic
interpretation. In the 1970’s and 1980’s postmodernism
imbibed the literary and art criticism, but especially
architecture. Other infused disciplines were: epistemology,
social sciences, established interpretation, and philoso­
phical-historical debate. The closer we get to the last
two decades of 2000, the more fashionable became
philosophical debate, epistemology, history of science
and hermeneutics. They all predict a possible exhaustion
of avant-garde and modernism.
Graham Swift, in Waterland, 1983, insists on historiographic
metafiction, a species extensively analysed by Linda
Hutcheon. Rose Tremain, in Restoration, 1989, experiments
with docudrama, in an effort to increase the authenticity
of her prose. Martin Amis, in Time’s Arrow, 1991, and
Graham Swift, in Last Orders, 1996, bet on fragmentation
and alternative narratives wherein space and time are
compressed:
Finally, the “author returns” in the (auto)biography and
73
the novel, for instance in Julian Barnes’s The History of Imagination and opera aperta (Ian McEwan)
the World in 10 and ½ Chapters, or in Flaubert’s Parrot.
Consequences:
l The point-of-view vanishes, or tries to do this.
l All discourses suffer a materialistic integration (cf. Fredric
Jameson: “recycling of discourses”: discourses are now
re-framed and made flexible and mobile.
l Plurivocity and the dialogic structure, in Bakhtin’s
tradition, help to push aside the “reference of US” and
to split the reference into “I” and “Thou” (compare with
Gianni Vattimo, La Finne della Modernitá, 1994).
l The Babel Tower returns as the world cultures open
to “Space”. The world becomes a “world museum” of
oddities. The view on culture now is encyclopaedic. But
the world cultures open to “Time” as well and in this way
they induce a crisis of historical motivation (see Georg
Steiner). Cultures proliferate and the contemporary
Ian McEwan’s constant preoccupation in all his novels –
age becomes accumulative instead of selective. As the
be they simple or sophisticated –, has been the overlapping
“Context” is intertextual or social direct access to history
of imagination and the scientific spirit. One could hardly take
is impossible, as direct access to God is impossible in
the British novelist for a scientific mind. Nonetheless, on the
traditional religions. History now is understood as a
one hand, he ironizes the hot-headed fanatics and, on the
human construct. The fact that there are no objective
other hand, laughs at those who take logic for granted. The
structures, only fictions, leads to the vision of history
nucleus of my paper will be the massive, mainstream-like
as an amorphous body of events (cf. Thomas Brooke,
novel Atonement. Making use of the approaches specific to
1992, New Historicism: “historicity of the text and
cultural studies, I shall try to highlight the tense relationship
textuality of history”; Hayden White, Metahistory, 1973:
between the imaginative and the scientific spirit. Of course,
“Historismus”=an organic concept, monologic; “New
this tension does not exist between imagination and
Historicism”=pluralistic, the whole body of culture”).
science taken as organizing categories, as long as they
are not narrow states of mind. The far-fetched focus on
imagination or on science generates erroneous statements
and approximations of reality and the results are tragic all

74 75
the time. Tragedy can be restored to an initial happy stance
only with the help of fiction. Fictionalizing the damaged
universe has a regenerative and healing effect on reality,
be it physical or mental.
a. Memory as mediator
The most obvious link between science and imagination
is memory. Let us consider this fragment from Waiting for
Godot:
Estragon: I’m unhappy.
Vladimir: Not really! Since when?
Estragon: I’d forgotten.
Vladimir: Extraordinary the tricks that memory play!
(Beckett, 2006, p. 49)
Maybe Estragon’s unhappiness has its origins in the loss
of memory. Aphasia means a blockage in the present. Why
cannot one live up to the carpe diem precept when memory
vanishes? Perhaps because there is no term of comparison
between what is and what will be. Postmodernity actually
resorts to aphasia in order to enjoy the irresponsibility of
the present. Already with the modernists the mysterious
forces that manipulated people’s destinies became obvious.
As it were: common people could do nothing to control
their lives, so they satisfied themselves with minimalist
environments and non-historical approaches to history.
Paradoxically, this forgetfulness and plunging into routinely
present is the attitude specific to modern people, who
76
started losing their knowledgeable metaphysics (Bell, 2012,
p. 83).
Putting aside T. S. Eliot’s modernist pessimism in The
Waste Land, Ian McEwan approaches postmodernism in a
sceptical, self-amusing way. All his narratives concentrate
on controversial aspects of apparently common destinies.
He identified some of them: “I have a number of obsessions
[…] Oedipal situations recur constantly in my work [...] I
think there is a projected sense of evil in my stories” (Rogers,
2010, p. 16). But evil can be spotted only by remembering
and re-living things with the help of memory. Otherwise,
evil deeds become surrogates of life-intensifiers.
b. Irony – the second mediator
In fact, the writer enjoys relativizing whatever certainties
humans may have. In The Cement Garden, 1978, the
family values and the adjacent ethical code are shattered
by the early death of the parents of four underage kids.
The situation is pretty much similar to the one in William
Golding’s The Lord of the Flies. The kids and the adolescents
are now stranded on an urban island, namely the messed up
periphery of an industrial city. Their father dies in an attempt
to civilize nature - that is to cement the house garden. Once
this effort proves to be a fatal failure, the children become
an easy prey for their own instincts. Later on, their mother
dies too. In an effort to preserve their family, so that they
should not be sent to different orphanages, they hide their
mother’s corpse in the basement of the house. From a
heterogeneous family they advance to a “real” one. Jack,
77
the fifteen-year-old brother, and Julie, the seventeen-year-
old sister, embark upon an incestuous relationship. The
author confessed that he had an “idea that in the nuclear
family the kind of forces that are being suppressed – the
oedipal, incestuous forces – are also paradoxically the
very forces which keep the family together”. This coincides
with the fact that “the oedipal and the incestuous are
identical” (Rogers, 2010, p. 17). The connection between
imagination and science is realized with the help of irony,
which encompasses and transcends every good deed. On
account of incompleteness in the human psychological
development every good deed ends up as an evil action.
Very much the same is the situation in Atonement (2001),
where the target of authorial irony is Briony Tallis, a thirteen-
year-old girl belonging to the upper-middle-class. As I shall
highlight, Ian McEwan’s irony is always intertextual. In this
novel he parallels Briony’s mindset with that of Catherine
Morland, the heroine from Jane Austen’s Northanger
Abbey, who avidly reads Gothic novels. Both characters
mistake the boundaries of reality for those of fiction. More
than this – and here is to be traced the ironical vein – Briony
loves to generate order, even if this one is established in a
dictatorial manner. But in every McEwan’s novel imposing
order at the level of details means generating disorder at
the higher levels. It is impossible to clarify one’s life prior to
obtaining full possession of the big picture of reality. Not
the complete picture – an accomplishment impossible for
a being trapped in a tridimensional existence –, but the
big one, at least.
78
c. The scientific imagination
Much in the same way does science come to its conclusions.
First, the scientists venture all sorts of hypotheses, and then,
once the selection is done, they stick to it and refute all
other arguments. After a while, they are forced to admit that
their knowledge was completely biased. Thus, imagination
is exploited and afterwards is completely banned. The
cycle is resumed over and over again in a strict loyalty to
a politics of small steps.
In the wake of James Joyce’s style, McEwan also aims
at clarity (Reynolds and Noakes, 2003, p. 8). As I was
telling above, Briony too is obsessed with clarity, in sheer
opposition to her elder sister Cecilia, who conjugates an
artistic temperament with disorderly habits. From this we
deduce two types of imagination: a scientific one, enforcing
some quick conclusions upon a larger-than-life elusive
reality, and a truly artistic one, free of the temptation to
distribute people and events into categories. The writer
admits to have been preoccupied with “the idea that security
is a comforting illusion, but only an illusion” (ibidem, p. 12).
Ironically enough, Briony tries to save her elder sister from
somebody she considers to be a sexual maniac. But Robbie
Turner is Cecilia’s newly acquired lover, promoted to this
position after a friendship which lasted all their childhood
and teenage. For the pre-teen Briony sexual intercourse
looks very much like an assault and she decides to save her
sister by testifying against Robbie. Besides being a subtle
ironist, McEwan is a wizard when it comes to blending
coincidences with predestined gestures. He adores acting
as Fate in his novels. So, he pays great attention to “how
79
private fates and public events collide” (ibidem, p. 12)
and to “the way time accelerates in a crisis” (ibidem, p.
13). Atonement is a slow-motion massive novel which
simply takes off after 150 pages. The writer is an executioner
indulging in the destruction of his characters’ happy plans.
Right in the beginning of the novel Briony envisages her
success in the adults’ world when she casts herself in the
leading role in her own play: Arabella’s Trial. Unexpectedly,
Briony’s cousin, Lola Quincey, subtly substitutes herself
in this role leaving the dramatist with no other solution
than to suspend the rehearsals. As Briony longs to be in
the limelight, she has to commit something di grande, so
she speculates much in the same way a scientist would
do. Once the conclusions are drawn, she will not lose time
to double-check them and tragedy is at an arm’s length.
Robbie will be imprisoned and after three years spent in jail
he is set free on the condition to go on the front and fight
in the first line. Thus, Cecilia and Robbie’s life is practically
ruined. The study of the incomprehensibility at the level of
macro and microuniverse is practised by McEwan in a way
that reminds Katherine Anne Porter’s description of Thomas
Hardy’s method, namely that he believed that “human
nature is not grounded in common sense, that there is a
deep place in it where the mind does not go, where the
blind monsters sleep and wake, war among themselves
and feed upon death” (Porter, 1952, p. 31).
80
d. The risks of islandization
Significant for Ian McEwan’s perception of imagination is
another one of his novels, Enduring Love (1997). The central
couple here is hybrid in terms of intellectual approach to
reality. While Joe Rose fetishizes rationality, his wife, Clarissa
Mellon, relies more on John Keats’s “negative capability”,
namely the apophatic understanding of the universe.
When Joe praises the evolutionary psychology with its
deterministic implications, she calls him a child (in Gibson,
2003, p. 17); because children long for certainties, even
if they are able to cope with fairy-tale creatures. It is not
that they like imagination more; children do not imagine
para-realities, they vividly live in them as in an enlarged
pluridimensional world. There is no effort to imagine new
dimensions. Of course, Joe painfully and stubbornly tries
to scientifically assimilate the strange events taking place
in the world that surrounds him. But moral decisions and
infatuation are unpredictable. Why only one man remains
suspended to the rope hanging from the wind-swept
balloon? Why is John Logan ready to sacrifice his life in order
to save an unknown child? Why does Jed Parry fall in love
with Joe following the fugitive look they exchange while
they are grasping the rope of the balloon? Why some people
develop the Clérambault syndrome and, consequently,
have the impression that a certain person loves them
without even knowing them? This is the inexplicable
side of the world, but Ian McEwan’s narratives are never
simple, manicheistic binomials. The scientific minds are
many times limited, but the imaginative and the religious
ones, although larger-than-life, get closer to craziness and
81
violence. It is clear that a balanced person should keep away
from excess and fanaticism but, similarly, such a person
should not linger in a cosy, lukewarm existence. There are
few happy characters in McEwan’s novels. Still, they do exist!
One condition for happiness is to avoid psychic isolation.
Reclusiveness mortifies Jed Parry who is described by his
creator as “a lonely man, very much an outsider with his
own deep, intrapsychic world” (Reynols and Noakes, 2003, p.
16). Isolation and islandization generate perversity or moral
numbness: it is the case of the protagonists in Amsterdam
and The Cement Garden. This can be understood as a
“game that highlights cultural difference and in a sense
engages in what we might call ’othering’ the other side,
exaggerating difference while ignoring continuities and
parallels” (Kroes, 2012, p. 22).
e. The problem of truth – more geometrico
In the case of Briony Tallis imagination could be
“lacanized” up to the point where we could risk the
supposition that the younger sister saves her elder sister
from incomplete jouissance. In one of his seminars, Jacques
Lacan identified the causes of mediocre pleasure:
Analytic discourse demonstrates […] that the phallus is
the conscientious objector made by one of the two sexed
beings to the service to be rendered to the other […].
I would go a little further. Phallic jouissance is the
obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas), I
would say, to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what
he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ (in Miller, 1973, p. 7).
82
In such a context, sheer sex becomes expressive of
limited knowledge. When the younger sister perceives
the implication in a sexual act of her elder sister Cecilia as a
physical assault exercised by a man upon her, she reads the
event correctly up to a certain point. Briony’s theory upon
truth is geometrical: “the truth was in the symmetry which
was to say, it was founded in common sense (McEwan,
2002, p. 169). There is an obvious dissymmetry in sexual
intercourse and Briony wants to straighten the world around
her. In a society deprived of tradition and moral rules:
“The truth had become as ghostly as invention” (ibidem,
p. 41). Such a line of interpretation offers an opening
towards a writer taken aback by the profusion of possible
decodings within his work. An older Briony’s lifelong sense
of unredeemed guilt is all the same motivated by her “self-
mythologizing” (ibidem, p. 41) and by the “temptation for
her to be magical and dramatic” (ibidem, p. 39). In other
words, the character’s efforts to purify and organize the
appearances are polluted by a narcissistic bias right from
an early stage in life.
Ian McEwan advances the hypothesis that without
imagination there is no knowledge. Even wrongfully used
imagination stimulates understanding, be it in the form of
life-long remorse. The writer wants us to assume his vision
that Briony’s life moved from initial narcissism towards self-
flagellation, on account of the harm she produced: “how
guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the
beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered
for a lifetime” (ibidem, p. 173).
83
 f. The architecture of the subjectivized reality
Imagination more than gives birth to knowledge
– it extracts the latter even by way of force. The biased
gnoseology, obtained with the help of ambitious
imagination, was characteristic for the Enlightenment’s
scientific enthusiasm. This way of enlarging the scope of
the known facts does not necessarily improve the quality of
life; it only satisfies narcissistic representations. For Briony,
to know more means to gain access into the adults’ world.
While she walks slashing nettles pitilessly: “she decided
she would stay there and wait until something significant
happened to her. This was the challenge she was putting
to existence – she would not stir, not for dinner, not even
for her mother calling her in. She would simply wait on the
bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not
her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her
insignificance” (ibidem, p. 77).
Properly said, imagination becomes perilous when its
products are forced upon reality. Reality, not the real, is
commonly shared by everybody, while imagination has
individual specificity. We are told that “Briony began to
understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its
execution” (ibidem, p. 17). The moment she realizes this, she
starts deforming reality. As a matter of fact, the girl does
not invent as much as she distorts the general accepted
outline of reality. The weird fact is that the adults around
her, police forces included, are ready to take for granted her
suppositions announced as undisputable truth. With such
reasons, it becomes conspicuous that people are irritated
by truth. They only want to support their favourites and
84
to eliminate the intruders, especially when these ones are
full of resources. That is why only Grace, Robbie’s mother,
has the courage to oppose to the general condemnation,
in a “gesture of scepticism, an antifoundational bias, and
an almost dislike of authority” (Sim, 2001, p. 7). Even Cecilia
does not openly side with Robbie when he is accused
of having raped the underage Lola. All she can do is to
reproach her family – Robbie’s foster-family – their narrow-
mindedness. Whatever argument might Robbie bring
in support of his innocence no one of his friends seems
disposed to accept it. At a closer look, the reader notices
that the maze of guilty evidence built by the author is rather
flimsy. McEwan intends to highlight, ironically mimicking
E. A. Poe’s ratiocinated stories, that the human mind is
fundamentally biased, unwilling to deeply analyse the
objectivity of facts. Assuming this line of interpretation,
we get to the conclusion that imaginary is necessarily
subjectivized or politicised. The author cleverly suggests the
possibility that artistic products are compulsory ingredients
in the subjectivization of the imaginary. The Tallis mansion
is strewn with symbolic artefacts. Architecture, anyway, is
seen as essential to the craft of writing by McEwan: “novels
do resemble buildings. A first chapter, a first line is like an
entrance hall, a doorway” (Reynolds and Noakes, 2003, p.
15). He favours clarity at the level of style, but, on the other
hand, plays with contingencies and cultural interpretations.
Consequently, his style invites, even entraps the reader, but
later on this one gets baffled by the profusion of significant
details and openings. As Dominic Head observes, “one of
his primary motivations as a novelist is to dramatize the
emphatic impact of contingency on imagined lives, and
85
to trace the personal tests and moral dilemmas that result
from the unforeseen event” (Head, 2007, p. 12). Modernist
and postmodernist devices attack and counterattack all
along the novel.
Imagination gives vent to fiction and fictionalising offers
supplementary powers to the fictionalizer over reality. The
young Briony gets intoxicated with the fumes of re-writing
reality: “writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also
gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization” (McEwan,
2002, p. 7). Producing fiction as such equates to playing
chess with people’s lives. It means power. That is why Briony
is an unreliable witness, as Henry James’s narrators were.
g. Artistic symbols of conformist representations
Symbolic vestiges of power are the artefacts or their
reproductions. In front of the Tallis house there is a fountain,
a “half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton in the Piazza
Barberini in Rome” (ibidem, p. 18). The miniaturized
reproduction of the classic objet d’art would indicate the
qualities of the family: decency, harmony, equilibrium and
elegant beauty. Instead, the fountain will be the place
wherein a precious vase, transmitted from generation to
generation, gets broken. Also, it is next to the fountain
that Briony, positioned at a faraway window, sees her sister
undressing in Robbie’s presence in order to dive into the
fountain and recover some broken pieces from the vase.
She will interpret this gesture as a masculine threat. The
vase in its turn should be the symbol of an Arcadian family
tradition: “It was genuine Meissen porcelain, the work of
86
the great artist Höroldt, who painted it in 1726”. Cecilia,
nonetheless, is not fascinated by the delicate porcelain: “Its
little painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden
around a table, with ornate plants and implausible birds,
seemed fussy and oppressive” (ibidem, p. 24). The same
intention of creating and Arcadian realm is salient in the
construction of a temple on the island in the middle of a
lake found on the property. The temple had been “built in
the style of Nicolas Revett in the late 1780s […] intended
as a point of interest, an eye-catching feature to enhance
the pastoral ideal” (ibidem, p. 72). There was no religious
destination attached to it.
The structural formula of this rationalistic environment,
which is supposed to engender forged Victorian ideals, is
congruent with Briony’s state of mind. While she rambles
across the fields and thinks of a possible admission into
the adults’ world, she slashes the nettles as if she disliked
their disordered arrangement. With Cecilia, in exchange, the
situation is completely different: she wonders how flowers
can distribute themselves in various patterns every time
she drops them into a vase. Both sisters are imaginative
beings, only that Briony’s departure from reality is artsy
and all-round affected: “Wasn’t it writing a kind of soaring,
an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination”?
(ibidem, p. 157). Her imaginary is double-folded: first, as a
child, she destroys her sister’s happiness trying to protect
her; second, as an old famous writer, she redeems – in one of
the two endings of the novel – the two lovers’ sufferings. Of
course, we could see Briony as the fictional and fictionalizing
consciousness of a coward and frigid Cecilia – but this would
make a totally different line of interpretation.
87
 Conclusion
Imagination is considered by Ian McEwan one of the
most active tools in advancing hypotheses. In his novels, the
weakest characters are those who fetishize the extremes:
science or mysticism. No one would admit the role played by
imagination in formatting their beliefs. In fact, imagination
controls everybody’s intellectual activities, whether they like
it or not. The knowledge the protagonists obtain from their
experience or from the hypotheses they launch are fatally
biased. Objectivity is impossible within a tridimensional
world. Whatever relates to humanity gets to be biased. Ian
McEwan’s novels are a fictionalized study of the conditions
of moral objectivity in an epistemologically biased society.
We have to err in order to advance. The author seems to
suggest that we should plan our errors in order to forward
epistemology and to avoid non-ethical implications of
our actions. My analysis will focus in the future on the
relationship between ethical plausibility and successful
activities.
References:
Beckett, Samuel, 2006. The Complete Dramatic Works.
London: Faber and Faber Limited.
Bell, Karl, 2012. The Magical Imagination. Magic and
Modernity in Urban England, 1780-1914. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gibson, Jane, 2003. Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love,
Nottingham: Cotton & Jarrett.
Head, Dominic, 2007. Ian McEwan. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
88
Kroes, Rob, 2012. “Citizenship, Nationhood and Multi­
culturalism: European Dreams and the American Dream”,
in Hypercultura, no. 2(10)/2012, pp. 21-32. Victor Publishing
House, Bucharest. Available at http://hypercultura.zzl.org/
Hypercultura%202012.pdf.
McEwan, Ian, 2002. Atonement. London: Vintage.
Miller, Jacques-Allain, (ed.), 1972-1973. The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love
and Knowledge, Book XX. Translated by Bruce Fink. New
York: W.W. Norton&Company.
Porter, Katherine Anne, 1952. “On a Criticism of Thomas
Hardy”. In The Days Before, pp. 55-73. New York: Harcourt,
Brace.
Reynolds, Margaret and Jonathan Noakes, 2003. Ian
McEwan – the Essential Guide. London: Vintage.
Rogers, Ryan, (ed.), 2010. Conversations with Ian
McEwan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Sim, Stuart, (ed.), 2001. The Routledge Companion to
Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
89
 Democracy versus market economy
Lots of people take the notion of democracy as
overlapping the one of market economy. This confusion
is possible because they both characterize Western
civilization, but in fact they are opposites:
Democratic Society:
– what matters is individual promotion.
– minorities are supposed to accept the predominance
of majorities, but both groups are secured advantages.
– equal rights to all individuals are guaranteed.
Market Economy:
– individuals are considered mere commodities and they
can be marginalized because of their type of education or
of lack of suitable professional skills.
– inequality is the key word. Selfish and egocentric
behaviour is encouraged by different “groups of interests”.
– a rich minority dominates a much larger majority while
young generation is not held responsible for the traditional
aid offered to the elderly people.
90
Realism and the new canon
The canon is a selection of representative works of art
made by the specialists in the field. The canon proposes so-
called masterpieces together with rules of creation derived
from these examples. But the canon changes with times
and even one epoch does not recognize only one canon.
That is why it is dependent on memory. Harold Bloom:
“The Canon is the art of memory because cognition cannot
proceed without memory”, Bloom, 1994.
The new realism shares some of the traits specific to the
Theocratic era: oral and visual culture.
Repetitive elements in realist texts:
1. The subject matter is domestic.
2. Ordinary people are presented as complex characters.
3. The underlying message is moralistic.
4. The language of the text does not occupy the limelight.
What matters is the plot.
5. The story features some events disposed in chronological
order.
6. The narrative ends with a well-specified resolution.
7. The narrator keeps a low profile in order not to shade
the story.
8. Description is realised with attention to detail, even if the
detail is often arbitrary, not compulsory to the building
of the action.
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 Modernity The paradoxical doctrine of counter-modern
modernity

Modernity came with values previously prized during

the Enlightenment: rationality, democracy, pluralism, and
firm principles.
Arguments against modernity invoked its individualistic,
bourgeois, decadent, and corrupt nature. It was predicted
that modernity will be replaced by a collectivist future and
a mythical past.

Charles Baudelaire was the poet and art critic who in

1863 (Le peintre de la vie moderne) enlarged the under-
standing of artistic modernity. He asserted that modernity
represents fluidity of representation (“distinctive”, “fugitive”,
and “ephemeral”). It is not renewal of the latest event, but
the “memory of the present” («la mémoire du présent»). But
the first theorist of modernity was Paul Valéry (Situation
de Baudelaire, 1924: describes the “poetry of Modernity”).
Actually, the emergence of a radicalized consciousness
of modernity was possible during romanticism, when the
antique ideals were set against the contemporary ones.
Modernity at that moment was perceived as the clash
between tradition and the present.

92 93
 How is the Individual (Self) their dynamism and lack of communication with tradition.
modified in modern societies? Their activity has global effect and intervenes in the most
private forms of life all over the globe. Public and private
spheres interfere more and more and the surprising result
can be the revival of nationals or, at least, localisms.
Identity has substance when it comprises a relationship
with an individual self, with God, and with “the Other”.
Its nature is tripartite. But the people of the turn of the
century (19th to 20th century) are bereaved of their historical
function. The key word now is solitude, not participation.
The new social system needs “submission” and no “spirit of
community”. Alexis de Tocqueville conjugated modernity
with “democracy” and forecast that democracy would
bring about alienation and estrangement: “Not only does
democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it
hides his descendants and separates its contemporaries
from him (…). It throws himself forever upon himself and
threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the
solitude of his own heart”. Family lineage is broken and
there is role left for “pedigree” in the new world.
Bertold Brecht signalled too the ontological solitude
and realities of alienation: “When one sees that our world
of today no longer fits into literature (drama) then it is
merely that the literature no longer fits into the world”.
The world of community (Gemeinschaft) stepped down to
a collective society (Gesellschaft) since the Renaissance and
the Industrial revolution.
At the turn of the 21st century researchers have
reconsidered modern institutions and they have noticed
the fundamental difference between them and their
precedents. Modern institutions are remarkable through

94 95
 From Modernism to Postmodernism
Modernism – a community world
Modernity implies co-participation: everyone is part
and parcel of constructing society. Private life is absorbed
into the public one in order to contribute to the general
utopia. In postmodernism intimacy will dissolve into the
public realm. The difference lies in purposes and degree
of absorption/annihilation:
1. Society still relies on a community welded through tra-
dition: customs, rituals and memories. This is possible
on account of common origins.
2. Community precedes individuals, is pre-individual, and
it casts everybody in their future roles right from birth.
Nothing is hazardous.
3. People are bound by values, tradition and habits, that
is why human relationships are more personal than
official. The closeness in social relations is transmitted
from generation to generation.
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Postmodernism: the collective society
1. Community in the modernist sense survives only in
villages. Urbanization (England: 1880-1890; Ireland:
1900-1930; Central and Eastern Europe: 1910-1930) and
rapid industrialization transform the nature of human
relationships.
2. The second stage is the post-industrial society wherein
groups take shape and are informed by individual
members coming from different walks of life.
3. These urban communities take shape because their
individual members have common ends (e.g. political
parties, trade unions, business associations, educational
perspectives, churches). The traditional values which
informed communities in the past are lost, but some
people try to revive them in a museumified way. What
matters now is the function and persons are defined
in relation to their background group, not strictly
individually.
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 Modernity assumes an aesthetic stance
Baudelaire is the one who raised the stake. Then the
various avant-garde movements carried on his message
and pushed things behind their natural limits in Cabaret
Voltaire of the Dadaists and in Surrealism.
Modernity is fond of present, is decadent, tries to short-
circuit the continuum of history, and rejects the norms of
tradition. In fact, any type of norm is blown up and this
rebellion affects the standards of morality and of utility.
In Five Faces of Modernity (Duke University Press,
Durham, 1987) Matei Călinescu remarks the growing role
of a phenomenon of compulsion and consumption. People
are afraid of getting bored and they search for an escape.
Art is perceived now as play and display: “in kitsch the two
bitterly conflicting modernities are confronted with their
own caricature”, or “in Postmodernism, kitsch is the triumph
of the principle of immediacy (of access, of effect and of
instant beauty), designed to either save time (its enjoyment
is effortless and instantaneous) or to kill time (it frees man
98
of his disturbed time)”. Consciousness is useless because
kitsch both justifies aesthetically and makes bearable the
empty meaningless present.
Daniel Bell, in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
(1976), puts the blame for the crises of the developed
societies of the West on the divide between “culture” and
“society” (civilization). In modernism culture still penetrated
the layers of everyday life, while in postmodernism culture
is permeated by entertainment. The hedonistic motives
are noticeable in:
a. Unquenchable thirst of self-realization;
b. Craving for innumerable self-experiences;
c. The sensitivity lives a frenzy of subjectivism and hyper­
stimulation.
It is the moment when capitalists confront neo-conservatives.
The former are after modernization of technological means
and profit at the expense of marginalization of culture,
while the latter take distance from status and achievement
competition. Neo-conservatives attach hedonism, obedience
and narcissism to a minus in social identification.
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 The aesthetic and scientific sides
of modernism
(Pablo Picasso, The Weeping Woman, 1937)
Pablo Picasso covered modern faces with primitive
masks in order to debunk the artistic clichés of his time.
Flaubert, Baudelaire, even Gautier manifested attraction
towards the Modernist activity.
The real modernism irrupted in Édouard Manet’s paintings
of the early 1860’s. He innovated in terms of technique,
although traditional resources were useful, yet, as the old
Spanish painting. Past experiences are productive in order
to open new directions, not as models. The phenomenon
emerged in painting first because here the invention of
photography disparaged painting’s future of “photographic”
or “literal realism”.
100
Modernism in English Literature
Wyndham Lewis makes responsible for the renewal in
literature “the men of 1914”, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land enhances the vision from Lausanne
in order to underline his historical pessimism: “that city
over the mountains/Cracks and reforms and bursts in the
violet air”.
Eliot was preoccupied with the creative role of tradition
in an epoch decided to erase the inheritance of the past:
“The people who ceases to care for its literary inheritance
becomes barbaric; the people which ceases to produce
literature ceases to move in thought and sensibility. The
poetry of a people takes his life from the people’s speech
and in turn gives life to it”.
Life is not as pristine as it used to be. Every human
activity needs perspicacious interpretation in order to make
any sense of it. Michael Levanston put it in 1999: Marx,
Freud, and Nietzsche “turned human life into a hermeneutic
activity”.
Sigmund Freud focused on the inner realm of the
psyche, highlighting how by the process of “sublimation”
consciousness blocks the recognition of instinctual desire
as a natural drive. For him, instinctual desire is the fuel
of civilization and should not be treated as a personal,
shameful matter.
Friedrich Nietzsche had the courage to baptize the
tradition of Western metaphysics from Socrates onward
as a “form of falsehood”. This form of dominance was
101
encouraged by the “gigantic fraud” of Christianity. That is
why he required a new man, the overman.
Modernism and science
The 19 century relied heavily on “natural science”;
th
this one informed even fiction, for instance Émile Zola’s
naturalism, which he theorized in the Experimental Novel.
The ultimate ambition was to demonstrate that literature
was scientific in all aspects. The strongest links were with
biology and history. Characters and temperaments were
the consequence of hereditary dispositions. Nothing was
chaotic or mysterious for this modernist positivism.
102
What does modernism retain from myth,
history, and tradition?
History remains an obsession for modernist writers,
at least for its mythopoeic basis. So history is a source of
inspiration and is built up on several myths. The first two
ones are captivating:
1. History creates values and offers motivation to
different actions.
2. History, in Nietzsche’s opinion, would affirm “trans­
historical” values and confirms a version of “superhistorical”
spirit. The historical time is thus transcended and a mythic
timelessness emerges.
a. The modernist critique of idealism
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, triggered
modern thought. In his book, the philosopher from Königsberg
contested the scepticism of David Hume and challenged
the dualism of Descartes who had separated thought from
space. Kant nurtured the ambition to demonstrate that
the categories of thought are lucrative in explaining the
structure of the world. Transcendental realm was no longer
separated from the phenomenal world and experience could
be anticipated by deductions. Basically, Kant demised the
idealisms of Fichte (the world is an aspect of the mind) and
of F. H. Schelling (The mind is an aspect of the world).
This trend will be carried on by William James’s prag­
matism, by Bertrand Russell’s mathematical logic, and
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Wittgenstein’s limitation of philosophy to the language
use. They no longer believed in question and answers, in
subject and object, and rejected metaphysics.
At the beginning of the 20th century there was a shift
from Nietzsche’s preoccupation with the question of value
instead of knowledge to Martin Heidegger’s interest in
the question of being as mystery instead of knowledge.
Nietzsche was closer to aestheticism, while Heidegger
focused on ontology.
Paradoxically, modernism turns to the archaic. The
sophistication of anthropology studies resides in the
promotion of the “primitive” and of myths in literature,
as the “primitive mind” was prone to criticize established
“civilized” values. The “Other” gets de-colonized by many
writers: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim; D. H.
Lawrence, The Rainbow, The Plumed Serpent; E. M. Forster,
A Passage to India.
But the British and Anglo-American approaches to
modernism differ. For instance, David Lodge, in Two Types
of Modern Writing, 1977, pointed out that postmodernism
emerged as early as 1916 and considered some distinctions:
the modernist/metaphor distinction and the anti-modernist/
metonymy distinction. For Frank Kermode, in The Sense of
an Ending, 1984, the “early” modernism is still imbued with a
Victorian sense of order (see the works of H. James, J. Conrad,
W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Marcel Proust). Only during “late”
modernism order would be capsized by irony and apparent
chaos: “Writing becomes its own problem and its own
impossibility”. Ihab Hassan, in exchange, in The Postmodern
Turn, 1987, saw a connection between postmodernism and
modernism. More than this, postmodernism would have been
104
anticipated by Mannerism, Romanticism and Modernism in
a tradition of Silence prolonged through Samuel Beckett to
the present. Hassan coins the denomination of “literature
of silence” for the postmodern literature, which is haunted
by apocalypse and an uncompromising rejection of the
Western history and civilization. Even the human identity is
repelled, as the image of man is not anymore the measure
of all things, as Plato saw it in Gorgias. Andy Warhol, a star of
pop art declared his anti-humanism: “I want to be a machine”.
The postmodern turn favoured the role of photographic
art in contemporary history. Only a few years later, Fredric
Jameson, in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, 1991, feared that photographic art may be
linked to the death anxiety on the level of the context, as it
functions as contamination and assimilation. Beforehand, in
1981, Jean Baudrillard had published the treatise Simulacres
et Simulation in which he announced the disappearance
of the original reality. Finally, Andy Warhol invoked Van
Gogh’s utopian gesture: he sacrificed himself for figuration
against photography. Photographic images reflect only the
external and coloured surface of things, down to the glossy
advertising images. If we scratch them we reveal the deathly
“black” and “white” substratum of the photographic negative.
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 The elitist postmodernism:
mimicking modernism (David Lodge)
The world of academe is perceived as a competitive,
full of rivalry milieu. The professors find themselves in the
midst of a whirlpool of ideological and conceptual trends.
The effort of the academics to stay tuned and to catch
every new intellectual issue transforms universities into the
fiercest professional environment. David Lodge humorously
analyses the effects of this excessive professionalization
on the academics’ personalities and personal lives. His
approach in Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
(1975) and Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) is
different from the tenser one adopted by Malcolm Bradbury
in The History Man (1975).
The aim of such an intellectual impetus is not personal
development, but a life-long effort to get better integrated
into the social system. The subtitle of the first novel, A Tale
106
of Two Campuses is an intertextual link to Charles Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities. The opening statement of the Victorian
novel testifies, unwillingly of course, to the loose moral,
intellectual and humanitarian principles. What at Dickens
announced the Nietzschean epistemological perspectivism,
in postmodernism is a sign of debilitation or, at least, of
complete disorientation:
“It was the best of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the
Spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before
us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we
were all going direct the other way…” (Dickens 1994: 1).
a. The seductive profession. Acting capacities
In such a slippery environment, people cling to whatever
offers them at least short-term certainties. During the ‘70s
and until the ‘90s professorship is a profession of the stage.
Students expected to be seduced on all plans by their
tutors. Even the timid Philip Swallow – although with a
budding charisma while he reaches full maturity – gets
involved in putting ‘spells’ on his students. One of his
‘victims’ reproduces such an episode in her test paper:
“Question 5. By what means did Milton try to justify the ways of God
to man in Paradise Lost? – My tutor Professor Swallow seduced me
in his office last February, if I don’t pass this exam I will tell everybody.
John Milton was the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. He knew
many languages and nearly wrote Paradise Lost in Latin in which case
nobody would be able to read it today. He locked the door and made
107
me lie on the floor so nobody could see us through the window. I
banged my head on the wastepaper bin. He also considered writing
his epic poem about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table,
which is a pity he didn’t as it would have made a more exciting story”
(Lodge, Small World 1995: 288).
I had to reproduce the quotation in full as its implications,
besides its humour, are revealing. Milton’s puritanism is
abruptly abolished by the academe. The intellectual guides
are not spiritual masters too. Lodge exploits the myth of
King Arthur and his knights; for instance, Morris Zapp
declares: “Scholars these days are like the errant knights of
old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure
and glory” (ibidem: 291). “Adventure” obviously stands for
“affairs”. But more than an errant knight the postmodern
professor assumes the role of an actor. There is an issue
of imagology here: the academic actors and actresses
resort to a plethora of means in order to seduce their
young auditorium: they try to keep fit, to be fashionable
and updated even in terms of pop culture, to be trendy
when it comes to theoretical developments, and to stay
in contact with the world-wide academic milieu and with
the political one too. For example, Morris Zapp jogs even
if he dislikes physical training, buys sophisticated clothes
and invests in a new sports car able to transmit his sexual
openness. The same Zapp fascinates Swallow’s 11-year-old
daughter with his knowledge of pop-music and cartoons,
while he greedily absorbs the latest literary theories with
the declared purpose of becoming the highest paid English-
professor in the world. Even the provincial Philip Swallow
once arrived in the USA gets involved in the political turmoil.
All in all, professors need to stay in good shape in order to
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resist on the academic stage. That is why the private lives
of the best professionals are different from the common
bourgeois families. A discussion between the former erotic
rivals in Changing Places, but on friendly terms in Small
World, between the anti-theoretical British Swallow and the
over-theoretical American Zapp synthesizes the attitude
of some academics. Swallow: ‘Perhaps that’s what we’re all
looking for – desire undiluted by habit’. Zapp invokes the
“Defamiliarization” (Ostranenie) of the Russian Formalists
and quotes Viktor Shklovsky: “Habit devours objects,
clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war...Art exists
to help us recover the sensation of life” (ibidem 306).
b. Stimulants for vitality and hypocritical reactions
The question is whether these super-professionals are
super-beings boiling with vitality or they suffer a devitalizing
process the more they climb the social ladder. “The
sensation of life” is assured, surprisingly, by approximately
the same necessities at persons who seem different. This
unsuspected similarity explains the involuntary swapping
of wives between two characters with opposite profiles.
Harold Bloom remarked that the swarming opportunities
and collective enthusiasms of the ‘60s and ‘70s were just
traps set by the establishment. The authentic avant-gardist
movements were over: “The Nineteen Sixties benefit from a
general nostalgia compounded by political correctness and
the sad truth that erstwhile Counter-culture has become
Establishment-culture, visible upon every page of The New
York Times” (Bloom 2007: 2).
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 This competitive, not to say aggressive behaviour
characteristic to men generates strange responses from
women: Hilary, Swallow’s wife, when informed about
her husband’s infidelity, instead of divorcing him installs
central heating in the house. The cheated wife reacts like a
responsible mother, but her husband’s problems are weird.
While he is cheating on her he is fearful of Zapp’s allure
of a perverse Humbert Humbert in front of his daughter
Amanda, possibly a future Lolita (Lodge, Changing Places,
1989: 112). When Zapp proves an unexpected humanitarian
side by asking Hilary to shelter his American ex-student, the
pregnant Mary Makepeace, Swallow reproaches her from
the States the acceptance of “an unmarried mother on the
premises” (ibidem: 120). Once his hypocrisy is revealed, he
tries to make amends by inviting Hilary to the USA. She rejects
his proposal using Mary Makepeace’s psychoanalytical-
feminist interpretation: “men always try to end a dispute
with a woman by raping her, either literally or symbolically”
(ibidem 130). The humorous intertextuality masks an
uttermost confusion in regards to the capital choices made
in life. Thus Zapp is a catastrophic father. He had walked
out on his daughter from his first marriage “leaving her a
five-dollar bill to buy candy”, a decision considered by his
second wife, Désiréé, “the most sordid transaction in the
history of conscience-money.” The twins resulted from his
second marriage take to cultivating marijuana or to what
their mother calls “avant-gardening” (ibidem: 126). The
competitive life grants no time for family or for spirituality.
The interesting fact is that these competitors are not forced
to climb up at a quick step the professional ladder. The
tempo is set by everyone depending on their ambition.
110
At the beginning of Changing Places, in the year 1969,
we meet two professors, Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp.
The former is only a lecturer and published a few essays
and reviews: “He lacked will and ambition, the professional
killer instinct which Zapp abundantly possessed.” Zapp is
a full professor and published “five fiendishly clever books
(four of them on Jane Austen).” (ibidem: 12).
c. The poststructuralist kitsch
Under such circumstances, “self-realization and self-
fulfilment have become central aspirations of self-polity
[…] in which every desire is a potential right, it is forbidden
to forbid” (Goulimari 2011: 65). Hedonism and maximal
professional development are more than interconnected:
they fuel each other. One cannot resist the tough rhythm
of competition without renewing their pleasures. In the
same time, competition is a pleasurable activity in itself.
Only those academics that evolve between these two poles
are able to establish complex communicational routes.
The other ones, the monomaniacs get isolated and bury
themselves in all sorts of minutiae. This is the reason why
Euphoria State University, with its gorgeous surroundings
(rivers, lakes, forested mountains and a splendid bay),
favours the gathering of highly-competitive academics. If
the American euphoric paradise suggests the Californian
geography, the British Rummidge reflects the dire cityscape
of Birmingham, encompassed by factories, smog and
motorways. Academic life here gets asphyxiated by routine
and pettiness. The broken parallelism between the two
111
institutions is described by the quality of the symbolic
simulacra they both find pride in. Rummidge and Euphoria
have on their campuses a replica of the inclined Tower of
Pisa, but restored to verticality in both cases. The American
replica is built of white stone and “twice the original size”,
while the British one is made of red brick and “to scale”
(Lodge, Changing Places 1989: 10). The architectural
artifices are telling about the pomposity and loftiness in one
case, and of deplorable scarcity in the other one. When the
two universities pay no attention to the original materials
of construction and, worse, they change the peculiar and
authenticating mark of a renowned monument they both
fall into hubris, through excess or through insignificant
approach.
In postmodernity hubris is imbued with kitsch. Bad taste
should not be the attribute of superior education. But,
again, what are the purposes of such an elite education?
Zapp dreams of writing a nec plus ultra book on Jane Austen.
This aspiration has structuralist implications: civilization is a
hierarchical structure and some interpretations are central
while others fall at periphery. Structuralism is implicitly
colonialist. Ten years later, Zapp makes a pirouette and gives
up Jane Austen studies taking to poststructuralism. Not
that he disliked his initial preoccupations, on the contrary,
but he needed to stay fashionable if he wanted to remain
a communicational relay in the academic world. On the
other hand, Zapp’s humour makes him more suitable to the
relativistic poststructuralism than to the rigid structuralism.
That is why his conference paper, “Textuality as striptease”,
excludes the possibility of establishing a final meaning. The
true intellectual existence implies an eternal quest:
112
“The classical tradition of striptease, however, which goes back
to Salome’s dance of the seven veils and beyond, and which survives
in a debased form in the dives of your Soho, offers a valid metaphor
for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text
teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is
infinitely postponed.” (Lodge, Small World 1989: 253).
Aiming at a crystal-clear understanding of texts and, in the
end, of the world, would be similar to living in a possessive
and reductionist couple. Zapp invokes psychoanalytical
hermeneutics: “Freud said that obsessive reading […] is
the displaced expression of a desire to see the mother’s
genitals.” The text reacts as an untameable bachelor to this
superficial and target-oriented reading: “The text unveils
itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and
instead of striving to possess it we should take pleasure in
its teasing.” (ibidem: 254).
d. Academic weaponry
The transparency of the meaning encourages, para­
doxically, the earthliness of the researchers. The multiple
ways of interpretation seem to excuse the necessity to
ground in material attachments. Matter can be spiritualized
in Zarathustra’s view: “Remain faithful to the earth, my
brothers, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing
love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth”
(Nietzsche 2006: 57).
Excess is the rule of thumb in this academic enclave. A
postmodernist mythology of hubris is frantically frequented
by those who aspire to the highest ranks of academics.
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Swallow, in his turn, if he is not a fertile and creative scholar,
compensates this drawback with excessive scrupulosity
in examining his undergraduates. When Zapp arrives at
Rummidge University and browse through Swallow’s
observations on his students, he is amazed at the level of
knowledge regarding students’ public and private lives
(Lodge, Changing Places 1989: 14).
In the same line, in Small World, the young Angelica
Pabst shows such an erudition that baffles even the all-
knowing ever-trendy Morris Zapp. She masters mediaeval
culture as well the latest theories in literary criticism (Lodge
1989: 257). If Zapp is an academic who approaches the
university as if it were a corporation and “aims for financial
and sexual success, loves power and is not despised or
punished for being crass, sexist, competitive, hedonistic and
horny” (Showalter 2005: 78), Angelica, as her name suggests,
is fond of knowledge not only as power, but as intellectual
nutrient in itself. She does not belong to that category of
“successful female intellectuals [who] are necessarily either
frigid or sexually deviant in one way or another” (Björk
1993: 120). She follows the same track pursued by the older
professors: flies to conferences all over the world, writes
articles and books, does a lot of documentation. But we
can suppose, on account of her passion, that The Robbins
Report of the Committee on Higher Education from 1963,
upon which the Conservative Govern of Margaret Thatcher
based their politics of cutting financial resources for the
universities would not affect her dramatically.
114
e. The variegated perks
The main difference between Philip Swallow and Morris
Zapp is the approach to pleasure. Zapp “professionalizes”
pleasure whenever he resorts to it, which is not a rare
choice. Even the private facets of pleasure are part of a
competitive endeavour, as Désiréé confesses: “with Morris
it had to be a four-star fuck every time. If I didn’t groan and
roll my eyes and foam at the mouth at climax he would
accuse me of going frigid on him” (Lodge, Changing Places
1989: 144). This is one reason – getting tired with such
performances in marriage – for Désiréé’s transformation
into a writer of feminist best-sellers. Philip Swallow indulges
in milder pleasures, even if, with the occasion of landing
on the American territory, he diversifies the range of
hedonistic involvements. He reads out of pure interest
and does not have a PhD. The English academic milieu
tolerates such a relaxed professional life. In exchange,
Morris Zapp is disconcerted by the cosy atmosphere in
the British university: “No talk of ‘lows’ or ‘highs’ here: all
was moderate, qualified, temperate.” (ibidem: 173). A non-
competitive environment seems stifling for him, as he
needs external stimuli. Sex is another mark of domination
and that is why he interprets Jane Austen’s later novels
in terms of Eros and Agape. When one male character of
Jane Austen offers a woman a pencil without lead this is
interpreted as a psychoanalytic suggestion of impotence
(Ibidem: 186). Such a “hermeneutic of suspicion” (Ricoeur
1981: 34) is indicative of the fissures in self-assurance and
in inner resources. In order to boost his energy, Morris Zapp
proposes “group marriage”, as a unique opportunity to
115
“pool their [the two swapping couples] resources” (Lodge,
Changing Places 1989: 213).
In Small World: An Academic Romance, professors
are presented as modern knights-errant, flying from one
conference to another. The archetypal model for the
globalized academic world is the Arthurian romance. But
exactly as it happened at Camelot, the knights – be they old
or new – need challenges in order to preserve their high-
spirits. Intellectual and spiritual contemplation does not
constitute a sufficiently-powerful incentive. Derek Pearsall
highlighted the Arthurian passivity, if not exhaustion:
“In the English tradition from which he was transplanted, King
Arthur himself had a very limited romantic interest: he has no interesting
love-affairs either before or after his early marriage. It seems impossible
to imagine any being invented for him. So in Arthurian romance he is
relegated to the role of, at best, a great king who stays at home while
his knights go off on romantic adventures and report back to him,
or, at worst, an ineffectual cuckold. Nothing is said of his campaigns
against the Saxons and the Romans. Arthurian romance has Arthur’s
court as its background or point of reference, but it is not about Arthur.”
(Pearsall 2005: 20)
Conclusion
We should consider King Arthur’s wisdom and self-
possession as an explanation for his sedentary attitude.
On the contrary, faculty members in the postmodern era
continuously seek stimulants to keep them in the academic
race. The imperative of external stimuli indicates that they
are not super-humans, but only super-clerks, dependent
on the resources allocated by the government to the
universities. Sooner than later, in Margaret Thatcher’s
116
epoch the politicians spotted the weak point and aimed
at it: universities were forced to become corporatist in the
educational approach.
References:
Lodge, D. 1989. A David Lodge Trilogy: Changing Places,
Small World, Nice Work. London: Penguin Books.
Bloom, H. (ed.). 2007. Bloom’s Modern Interpretations:
Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York:
Infobase Publishing.
Dickens, Ch. 1994. A Tale of Two Cities. London: Penguin
Books.
Goulimari, P (ed.). 2011. Postmodernism: What a
Moment?. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Björk, E. L. 1993. Campus Clowns and the Canon.
David Lodge Fiction. Stockholm: University of Umeå,
Almquist&Wiksell Int.
Nietzsche, F. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book
for All and None. Translation Adrian DelCaro. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Pearsall, D. 2005. Arthurian Romance: A Short
Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Ricoeur, P. (ed.). 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences. Translated and introduced by John B. Thompson.
London: Cambridge University Press.
Showalter, E. 2005. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel
and Its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
117
 Samuel Beckett steers modernism
to postmodernism
Consciousness is identified with an object of parody
in Beckett’s Cartesian monologues about thinking and
being. Do we really exist if we (try to) think? Many critics
explained his works as parodies to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
notion that language is a set of games, akin to the
arithmetic of the primitive tribes. The former realist text
as a determinate representation, an intelligible structure
which strives to convey intelligible relationships is pushed
to reflect a coherent and internally consistent world that
not only exposes but explores absences, incoherencies,
omissions, transgressions only to reveal the inability of
the language ideology to create coherence. The new text
seems to functions as a perfect machine but it never starts
off. The choice of texts is done so as it reveals contradictions
between the diverse elements drawn from the different
118
discourses. The resulted collage highlights an absence at
the centre of the work, as F. Jameson noticed in 1991: “a gap
between a. the ideological project and b. the specifically
literary form”. The many possible meanings fight between
themselves and this fight puts forward the critique of the
ideology included in the text. The limits of ideological
representations are pointed out by amalgamating in the
text the critique of its own values.
In David Lodge’s opinion, (After Bakhtin, 1990) fiction in
the last 150 years crossed three phases which overlapped
chronologically and formally: classic realism/modernism/
postmodernism. In Britain postmodernism maintained the
link with the past, as it was satisfied with the experiments of
modernism and subsequently it revivified and perpetuated
the mode of classic realism. The author is understood as
only a function of his own fiction, a rhetorical construct,
nor a privileged authority, but an object of interpretation.
Diegesis resurrects in the postmodernist British fiction, but
directed against mimesis; thus, the stream of consciousness
becomes a stream of narration.
119
 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane
(1981/1990) reconsider modernism
Modernism implements the Flaubertian dream of an
order in art independent of the author, the material, and the
real; the art that engenders life. Nietzsche also supported
the self-centred and anarchic art: “No artist tolerates reality”.
In spite of stressing novelty, modernism is another
Mannerist movement as it creates works underpinned by
sophistication, introversion, technical display, and internal
self-scepticism. The main technical features, specific to
previous movements too, are: anti-representationalism
(painting and literature); atonalism (music), vers libre
(poetry), and stream of consciousness (the novel). As
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle gained recognition,
modernism simply reacted to it by producing an art in
consequence.
Outline:
1. Modernism is not only an aesthetic movement. It had in
common with Romanticism the revolutionary appetite
and intellectual contestations.
2. Modernists were in search of a style and a typology, but
mainly as individual searchers.
3. This new development spread internationally and diffused
the Western tradition. The sources of transformation
were the symbolist aesthetics, the avant-garde view of
the artist, and the crisis of the relationship between art
and history.
120
Results:
– The subjective is objectified;
– The rational is irrationalized;
– The sure knowledge is defamiliarized and dehumanized;
– The emotional is intellectualized;
– Space becomes gradually a function of time;
– Mass is now displaced into a form of energy;
– The only certain thing is uncertainty.
All these pulverize the neat categories of thought and
topple linguistic systems. The formal grammar and the
traditional links between words and words, words and things
are disrupted and ellipsis, parataxis, new juxtapositions and
new wholes come into power.
Space is predominant through layers of consciousness
and the logic of metaphor or form. The use of symbol or
image on a large scale contributes to the distillation of
diachronicity and the instauration of synchronicity. During
High-Modernism the act of imagining is best realised
through fictionality, as it stands for the “victory of the Word
upon the World”.
Randall Stevenson, in Modernist Fiction, 1992, asserts
that modernism creates utopian compensations for the
dehumanized life in a late phase of industrialism. Even
the landscape of the “old merry England” does not permit
the liberation of the soul, because it gets crowded and
restricted. D. H. Lawrence, in The Fox, confirms this
impression: “suddenly it seemed to him England was
little and tight, he felt the landscape was constructed…
tight with innumerable little houses”. In her turn, Virginia
Woolf is after a lonely and rural place which she found on
the island of Skye in To the Lighthouse. But she is anti-
121
pastoral and anti-Romantic in the same time, considering Modernist architecture in postmodernist
that nature diminishes consciousness and human agency academy (Malcolm Bradbury)
and it does not reflect the torments of the Self. Let’s not
forget that some romantics, like Alfred de Vigny hated
nature for its impassibility. V. Woolf replaces the “beauty
and order outside” with the “vision within”, the only one
able to offer compensation for the objectified and fractured
surrounding world

In spite of the excessive specialization in the ‘70s, with

a concentration on sociological studies, the contemporary
interpretation of Malcom Bradbury’s The History Man (1975)
allows for an interdisciplinary approach using the methods
and concepts of cultural studies. The obsession with history
in the novel is made obvious not only by shooting political
riots and radical attitudes during academic meetings,
but also by laying heavy emphasis on the architectural
innovations. Architecture refers especially to the new
buildings of Watermouth University, but it comprises the
inner structure of some characters, too. Consequently, my
paper will discuss the structural implications of routinely
fulfilled tasks or deeds of those characters coming into
contact with the momentum of Sex Revolution in U.K., as
this is reflected in the novel. The reflection of the system

122 123
of signs belonging to archaeology, on one hand, and to
sociology, on the other, is transfer specific to intersemiotic
translations.
a. The dominant code
Transparent architecture symbolizes the formal equivalence
resorted to in the translation of official texts. The content
matters very little compared to the ritualized form. Jop
Kaakinen’s geometrical vision functions as a two-way
intersemiotic translation: sociological postulates are
reflected in the simplified and corporatist architecture
of the new university. Accordingly, the sociologists get
intimidated by and show aggression towards the intimate
and embellished genre of architecture specific to the Faculty
of Humanities. Transparency affects both sides, architectural
and translational, adding to the proliferation of signs void
of material content. There would be two types of such
signs: “Either they have a primarily content and are post-
industrial or informational goods. Or they have an aesthetic
content and are what can be termed postmodern goods”
(Lash and Urry 1994: 4).
People live up to their fashionable credos. Barbara Kirk’s
characterization of the parties she and her husband use
the throw can be extended to the general profile of the
epoch: “An accidental party, the kind where you might
meet anyone and do anything […] or meet anything and
do anyone.” (Bradbury 2000: 8). All these gatherings are
characterized by architectureless, amorphous situations.
But it is not this aspect that defines them, because they
124
are casual relaxations. What matters in the ‘70s is structure,
or, better, imposing patterns of thinking and behaviour.
Such an approach contradicts Stuart Hall’s delimitation of
the concept of identity, which “does not signal [the] stable
core of the self […] without change […] Identities are never
unified […] never singular but multiply constructed across
different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses,
practices and positions […] are constantly in the process
of change and transformation […] identities are therefore
constituted within, not outside representation.” (Hall 1996:
3-4).
In the interval dominated by sociology we have exactly
the opposite understanding of identity. The History Man
is Professor Howard Kirk who despises bourgeoisie and
expects radical attitudes from his students. His life summons
contradictory aspects: he comes from the lower-middle-
class, wherein education was a springboard toward upper-
middle-class, he marries and have kids at the expense of
his wife, Barbara, who has to interrupt her academic career,
then he changes university, descending southwards, to
the Watermouth University (the name being suggestive
for the well-being of its employees) and there meets an
ex-colleague, Henry Beamish, with his wife Myra. Howard
disapproves of their cosy life style and chooses to refurbish
a house populated, until then, by squatters. Once settled,
he develops his theories about open-marriage and
the historical necessity of giving up tradition, which is
considered hypocrite and selfish. The Kirks are famous ‘not
to have such things as customs and traditions’ (Bradbury
2000: 2). So they want to be people of the day. Howard
lectures on Revolutions and grows a moustache à la Fidel
125
Castro. His radicalism targets privacy, that is why he writes
The Defeat of Privacy, wherein he theorizes sociability
and the “parameters of the encounter” (ibidem: 6). Their
parties, in spite of the happening atmosphere, are carefully
planned beforehand: they map the rooms and despatch
the persons who are supposed to interact and, most often
than not, have intercourse (that is why the rooms are dimly
lit and some of them provided with mattresses).
Malcom Bradbury wrote his novel in 1975, a little after
the fireworks of the Sexual Revolution, and the drugs-
stimulated anarchism of the 60’s and early 70’s. He critically
considers every step the History Man – the man of the
moment – takes. For instance, in the Kirks’ household there
is all the time a girl-student taking care of the two kids.
Generally, they succumb to Howard’s rhetorical charisma
and sleep with him, as it is the case with the exalted Felicity
Phee. The author resorts to the onomastics as well, to offer
hints about the characters’ frailties or qualities.
b. Globalized translation. Fashion
Bradbury strives to remain on a neutral ground, but it
is obvious right from the beginning that he is in a biting
mood towards the radicals’ hysteria and their self-deceit
in pretending to be democrats while they make use of
power whenever they are in the position to do so. This
happens even in the radicals’ families: “your idea of a
good party is to invite the universe. And then leave me
to wash up after!” (ibidem: 7), Barbara Kirk accuses. If we
take a short stroll along the best known campus novels in
126
UK we remark that David Lodge’s professors happily and
promiscuously indulge the perks of their professions. The
justification for their expensive research style is that they
represent the postmodern facet of the Arthurian Knights
of the Round Table. Their pretentions pitted against their
hedonism and careerism is the source of comic in his novels.
Martin Amis’s Lucky Jim mocks the affectations and the
bombastic language of the faculty stuff. Miles away from
these humorous intentions, Bradbury studies the process
of twisting ideas into ideologies. The relationships, too, are
built upon power scaffolding, even if they are wrapped
up in democratic rituals. Howard, for instance, consumes
people with the pretext of setting them free.
Barbara: “You’ve had all the people you can eat! We need some
fresh ones, says Howard.” (ibidem: 8)
Barbara: “how this heart bleeds for victims. And he finds them all
over. The only ones he can’t see are the people he victimizes himself.”
(ibidem: 10)
Another accusation brought to her husband is that he
varies with the fashions, careful not to miss the leading role
in the special play. In complete distinction of David Lodge’s
and Martin Amis’s mediocre professors (only some of
them), Bradbury’s personages suffer not from professional
mediocrity, but from emotional and relational handicaps.
What they follow is a globalization of community in
conformity with their rules. The implications of globalization
for identity are many: “Globalization […] produces different
outcomes for identity. The cultural homogeneity promoted
by global marketing could lead to the detachment of
identity from community and place.” (Woodward 1997: 16).
127
 c. Architectures of message:
inner and outer perspectives
The process of corrupting identity is insidiously accelerated
with the help of architecture. The modernist context
created by the Finnish Jop Kaakinen clearly indicates the
differences between sciences. The distinction between
the old, decorated and cosy buildings of the university
and the new, purified, glass-and-steel ones is made with
the occasion of Howard’s employment interview. He is
received in the panelled Gaitskell Room of the Elizabethan
hall which had been the ‘original starting place of the new
university, before the towers and the pre-stressed concrete
and the glass-framed buildings that were now beginning
to spread across the site.” (Bradbury 2000: 37).
The architectural differences between old and new
buildings regard style, shape, materials, and functionality.
Sociology studies are the stars of the moment, as people
are more interested now in building relationships and
increasing their sway on others’ minds than in interpreting
texts or finding hidden meanings. Propaganda and political
upheaval eclipse hermeneutics and arts. The insurgent
spirit of sociology is backed up by the explosive dynamism
of technique and new management approaches. There is
only a small stake left to humanities. The mechanization of
purposes is internalized in the narration through the use
of alliterations, repetitions, and parallelisms. The pages of
the novel appear as a block, without relaxation or graceful
indentations. Jop Kaakinen’s programme: Creating a
Community/Building a Dialogue enrols personal options into
a wholesale march enflamed by Marxist- Freudian views.
128
Because Henry and Myra Beamish settled “outside
Watermouth, in an architect-converted farmhouse, where
they were deep into a world of Tolstoyan pastoral, scything
grass and raising organic onions” (ibidem: 41), they would
be condemned as bourgeois. The Beamishes and the Kirks
changed Leeds for Watermouth, the former being a working
class environment, while the latter was “built on tourism,
property, retirement pensions, French chefs” (ibidem: 41).
Education did not transform Howard’s mentality: he still
belongs in the slums. Not only is he against luxury, but
he fights whatever tranquil way of living. That is why he
contributes to the dismemberment of the Beamish couple.
Howard develops a “hermeneutic of suspicion” (Ricoeur
1981: 6-7; 34), without manifesting an intellectual irony
towards “final vocabularies” (Rorty 1989: 73).
Without realizing, many faculty members and students
skid from ideas to ideology, thus suffocating dialogues or
polemics. Henry Beamish tries to bring arguments in favour
of his decent and traditional life: “I’m not wild about all this
violent radical zeal that’s about now, all these explosive bursts
of demand. They taste of a fashion. Punch a policeman this
year. And I can’t see what’s wrong with a bit of separateness
and withdrawal from the fray.” (Bradbury 2000: 43). Howard’s
response is non-argumentative and inquisitorial: “Oh, Christ,
evasive quietism.” (ibidem: 43). Such a fashionable anarchism
enforces regulations and prescribed mentalities without
proposing structures. They are not able to deconstruct,
as they do not accept a dialogic formula. A structure is a
constructive geometry, not only supportive scaffolding. That
is why structures imply complexity and even variation. A
structure could not be dictatorial without going bankrupt.
129
 d. Dictatorship or plurivocity
in decoding messages?
How structural are Kaakinen’s new university buildings?
Robert A. Morace considers that the modernist looking
university is managed like a factory. He defines Watermouth
University as being less a university than a factory “where
everyone must conform to the rule of non-conformity”
(Morace 1989: 71). Here all the rooms are repetitiously alike
and “in such an aggressively and architecturally modern
environment conservatives […] appear not merely freakish
but psychologically deviant.” (ibidem: 71).
Malcolm Bradbury’s attacks on Sociology and the
related fields are motivated by the limitations imposed on
thinking. In Watermouth’s sociological seminars students
are supposed to think, write and act in line with their
professors’ preferences. Howard is irritated by Carmody’s
meticulousness and lack of radicalism, the dialogue
between them, after the reading of an essay, being a sample
of non-argumentative polemics.
Howard: “this Anglo-Catholic classicist royalist stuff you import from
English and want to call sociology?” Carmody: “It’s an accepted form of
cultural analysis” Howard: “I don’t accept it. It’s an arty-farty construct
that isn’t Sociology, because it happens to exclude everything that
makes up the real face of society” (ibidem 147).
Howard justifies the low grades of Carmody using
slogans: “He’s a juvenile fascist. He’s both incapable and
dishonest.” (ibidem: 152).
As we can see, between Sociology Department and English
Department it is a mutual intellectual distrust. Especially the
130
sociologists are vehement in accusing the humanists of
futility, lack of scientific method and nostalgic approaches.
The epitomes of these two confrontational stances are
Howard and Miss Callender. Howard’s seduction of the
reclusive and independent Miss Callender at the end
of the novel functions as a twisting deus ex machina
and symbolizes the submissive role reserved to arts in
postmodernity.
The contentious items between the two Departments are
reflected in the architecture and decoration of the buildings
that shelter them. It is like a display of forces between Apollo
and Dionysus: “now the campus is massive, one of those
dominant modern environments of multifunctionality that
modern man creates: close it down as a university […] and
you could open it again as a factory, a prison, a shopping
precinct.” (ibidem: 69) This multi-purpose architectural vision
is the equivalent of a novel cleansed of every local flavour.
There is no peculiar point of reference and the novel can
be translated using formal and functional equivalences
without any obstacle. Randall Stevenson noticed that
The History Man is written especially at present tense
(Stevenson 1976: 191) and that there is an antithesis in
the title. History is reduced to present and the history man
is actually an opportunist, as his wife remarks: “Howard’s
books are very empty but they’re always on the right side.”
(Bradbury 2000: 78).
131
 e. Transparent translations
against personalized ones
We must admit that opportunism is a form of attention
“liberated” of any defined reticence. The opportunist is a
person who annihilates his/her message or distorts it in
order to endorse somebody else’s message, irrespective
of its toxicity. This abdication from personality is reflected
by means of intersemiotic translation in the all-purpose
university architecture. The Durkheim Room in the Social
Science Building is a neutralized space for the meetings,
where the sociologists fiercely debate over their contentious
items:
“It is a long, thin chamber preserved only for conference purposes; as
a result, a certain dignity, a spacious seriousness, has been attempted.
On two sides there are long glass windows, giving onto the distractingly
good views; to prevent these being distracting, white slatted Venetian
blinds have been hung […]. The other two walls are pure and white
and undecorated, conceived by a nakedly frantic sensibility, open a
large, obsessive hole into inner chaos. […] on the floor is a serious,
undistracting brown carpet; on the ceiling, an elaborate acoustical
muffle.” (ibidem: 164).
This undistracting decoration serves as a stimulus for
some ludicrous or extremist proposals and polemics.
The staff want to obtain a grant for research into senile
delinquency (ibidem: 174) and Dr. Zachery contemplates the
efficiency of fascism: “an elegant sociological construct, a
one-system world – its opposite is contingency or pluralism
or liberalism. That means a chaos of opinion and ideology
(ibidem: 170).
132
Bureaucracy needs a protestant type of architecture
with as little decoration as possible. Austerity is the concept
applicable only to arts, while for morals it is sparingly
valued. Howard implements radicalism in his life in a way,
while Bradbury translates it, using architectural reflections,
in a different way. As D.J. Taylor underlines: “The History
Man’s overriding theme is the ability of extreme liberalism
to degenerate into totalitarianism – a disease of society”
(Taylor 1993: 210). For instance, in spite of the modern,
interactive methods of teaching practised at Watermouth
University, the enclosed, artificially lit precincts wherein the
courses are held point to a deficient intellectual process.
The analogy to the platonic myth of the underground cave
is easily discernable. Howard teaches in “an interior room
without windows, lit by artificial light” (Bradbury 2000:
136). The rooms reflect the exterior of the whole project:
“the shuttered concrete of Kaakinen’s inspiration, which
in its pure whiteness is intended to induce the sense of
unadulterated form, and hence belongs really in some
distant, utopian landscape of sun and shadow, in New
Mexico, perhaps” (ibidem: 125). There is no connection
between the architectural code of the university and
the urban architectural code. The predominant colour of
the city is dirty grey. This discordance indicates that the
academic environment is a cotton-like shelter, unable to
improve the surrounding dystopian world. The atmosphere
inside is artificial, bunker-like, autarchic and indifferent
to the problems of real world: “The pink sodium lights of
Watermouth shine in through its glass roof; this is now the
only illumination” (ibidem: 93). Recesses and niches are
not tolerated – everything has to be visualized and public,
133
pretty much like blunt translation relying on functional
equivalence: “There are buildings in the world which have
corners, bends, recesses; Where seats have been put, or
paintings hung on the walls; Kaakinen, in his purity, has
rejected all these delicacies” (ibidem: 64). Even the offices
are all the same: “stark, simple, repetitious, each one an
exemplary instance of all the others” (ibidem: 66). The only
professor who wants to domesticate this chilly, outright
inhuman perspective is Henry Beamish. He brings into his
office some decorative objects from home.
f. Deterritorialization as abstraction and geometry
Abstraction is present everywhere, details giving in
to inexpressive, depersonalized wholes. As the author
remarks, the era of the crowd and the factory arrived
and “Gemeinschaft yielded to Gesellschaft. Community
was replaced by the fleeting passing contacts of city life”
(ibidem: 68). The wholeness of urban centres is specific
only to academic precincts. Faculty seem to be the future
corporatists in that they inhabit ghost-spaces and obstruct
more relaxed opinions on life. Their anarchic-communist
attitude is supported by an environment without memory
or destiny. Reminisces of the glorious past are geometrized:
“there are big, bare windows; beyond the windows you can see,
dead centre, the high phallus, eolipic in shape, of the boilerhouse
chimney, the absolute focus, the point of maximum architectural
eminence of the entire university, its substitute for a tower or a spire
a campanile” (ibidem: 66).
134
If in David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World the
fake campaniles attached to the university buildings were
kitschified through the use of under – or overestimated
materials, in The History Man the effect of comparing a
boilerhouse chimney with a medieval campanile is ludicrous
and degrading. The architect did not respect the least law of
creativity; he simply pilfered previous styles of their details
and used cold and transparent materials of construction.
This is Bradbury’s suggestion when he studies the effects
on sociologists’ behaviour and thinking. We could as well
take the opposite stance and underline the modernistic
principle of creativity:
“to value creativity is to value less the particular products of creation
than creative activity itself. If the good is the activity rather than its
final products, then the creator should have no qualm leaving them
behind, inasmuch as they mark the end of particular spells of creative
activity.” (Leiter and Sinhababu 2007: 49).
Conclusion
Irrespective of the stand we take, The History Man has
resisted time corrosion owing to its ability to conjugate
architectural purity with ideological convulsions. Fact is
abstraction cannot become as metaphysical as to escape
biased reasoning. More than this, architecture as structure
restructures human substance. Exaggerated careerist
involvements simply boost the sway of environment
by rendering sparser the contact with inner strata of
personality. The transparent architecture highlights a dim,
incomprehensible human structure. The incomprehensibility
of one range of signs may be untranslatable, but it can
be reflected by a different category of signs. I would call
135
this possibility the mirroring capability of intersemiotic
translation.
References:
Bradbury, Malcom. 2000. The History Man. London:
Picador.
Hall, Stuart, Du Gay Paul, (eds.) 1996. Introduction: Who
Needs Identity? Questions of Cultural Identity. London:
Sage. pp. 1-17.
Leiter, Brian and Neil Sinhababu, (eds.) 2007. Nietzsche
and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lash, Scott and John Urry. 1994. Economies of Signs
and Space. London: Sage.
Morace, A. Robert. 1989. The Dialogic Novels of Malcom
Bradbury and David Lodge. Illinois: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. (ed.). 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences. Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stevenson, Randall. 1976. The British Novel since the
Thirties: An Introduction, London: Greener Books.
Taylor, D.J. 1993. After the war: The Novel and England
since 1945. London: Chatto & Windus.
Woodward, Kathryn. 1997. Identity and Difference.
London: Sage.
136
Postmodernist theorists
Postmodernists are not very happy with technology. In
1991 Fredric Jameson writes about “the deathly quality of
photography” that “mortifies the eye of the viewer in a way that
has nothing to do with death”. The “death obsession” or anxiety
is related to the phenomena of inversion, contamination
and assimilation. The researcher mentions the surrealist
and the uncanny properties of René Magritte’s Le modèle
rouge wherein consciousness is altered through parody (the
“carnal reality of the flesh itself is more phantasmatic than
the leather”). Leslie Fiedler too insisted on the uselessness
of photography when we dispose of simpler and more
spectacular ways of reforming reality: “We can see a different
world without figuring a shot or framing a syllogism, merely
by altering our consciousness; the ways to alter it are at hand.
It is the dream of a revolution to and all revolutions”.
In Five Faces of Modernity, 1987, Matei Călinescu quotes
F. Nietzsche with Ecce Homo, On the Genealogy of Morals,
in order to demonstrate the historicity of the concept of
postmodernism: “All concepts in which an entire process
is semiotically concentrated elude definition…Only that
which has no history is definable”. So postmodernism would
be only “face of modernity” – that one which contests the
principle of authority. The difference from modernism is
that the new current opposes both the utopian reason and
the utopian unreason, which some modernists admired.
Postmodernism is marked by a refined eclecticism and
a morphotic unity which might remind of the “decadent
137
euphoria” of the 1880’s. But “the popular code”, the kitsch
prevents it to do so. Also the common traits with the non-
nominalist versions of the “avant-garde” can be mentioned.
The sociologist Anthony Giddens does not agree with the
complete gap between postmodernism and modernism.
In A Phenomenology of Modernity: Objections to Post-
Modernity, 1990, he states: “As ordinarily understood,
conceptions of post-modernity – which mostly have their
origin in post-structuralism thought – involve a number
of distinct standards. I compare this conception of post-
modernity (PM) with my alternative position, which I shall
call radicalized modernity (RM)”.
In 1987, Matei Călinescu spoke about a space of ne­
gotiation and creative compromise: “a dialogic space of
understanding and self-understanding, a space in which
complicated problems had been inventively solved, in which
recurrent questions had received diverse creative answers”.
Thus, we go back to the architectural origins of
postmodernism and to the New Rules announced by
Charles Jencks in The Rise of Postmodern Architecture,
1975, in The Language of Postmodern Architecture, 1981,
and in Postmodernism: the New Classicism in Art and
Architecture, 1987. He considered that Contemporary
architecture continues the building traits (the Street,
the Square, and the Monument) instead of replacing the
historical character of the European city.
In contrast to the American development, architecture
in the Europe would not be dictated by functionalism and
utilitarianism but by contextualism (the city centres are
restored so that the demands of the modern traffic must
not ignore re-visiting the past).
138
The “New Art” generates a new canon
In the world of fragmentation, pluralism and inflation
eleven “canonic” rules express the contrast with the older
notion of classical rules. Relativism is opposed to absolutism:
1. The new beauty is hybrid and dissonant, while harmony
becomes disharmonious (Renaissance harmony, Modernist
integration). We shall have now a “difficult whole” (Venturi),
and a “fragmented unity” instead of “finished totality where
no part can be added or subtracted except for the worse”
(Jencks). Complexity and richness are the new preoccupation
(approximating the Mannerist skill) in a pluralist society
(Welsch, Unsere Moderne Postmoderne, “utter pluralism”)
which finds old harmony as oversimplifying.
The juxtaposition of tastes and worldviews creates a new
sensibility where “the simultaneity of the mutually exclusive”
is possible. Scientists support the theory that the universe
is dynamic and evolving, opposed to “the cosmic harmony”
of the past. Lots of concepts and ideas are contradicted
now: Renaissance with its perfect human body, the celestial
order, and the well-proportioned buildings and sculptures.
The predominant trope now is the oxymoronic
“disharmonious beauty”, which encompasses lots of
paradoxes: “asymmetrical symmetry”, “syncopated
proportions”, “fragmented purity”, “unfinished whole”, “and
dissonant unity”.
2. Cultural and political pluralism: in the 1970’s post­
modernism is characterized by stylistic variety (celebration
of difference, otherness, irreducible heterogeneity). The
139
stylistic counterpart of “pluralism” is radical eclecticism (“the
mixing of different languages to engage different taste
cultures and to define different functions”, Cf. Jencks).
The two specific postmodern genres are “enigmatic
allegory” and “suggestive narrative”. They generate
ambiguity and many possible readings, so the reader is
supposed to supply a unifying text. The effect on the public
will be frustration rather than gratification, but also the joy
of creativity.
3. Urban contextualism: buildings extend the urban
context.
4. The postmodern anthropomorphism incorporates
ornaments suggestive of the human body. The “human
presence” is subliminal but inserted in detail and ornament.
5. Historical continuum: the relation between the past
and the present is uninterrupted. The use on a large scale
of parody, nostalgia and pastiche results in anamnesis or
suggested recollection.
In a post-Freudian age the unconscious is often invoked
as the source of anamnesis, as it characteristically works
with the juxtaposition of related and opposed fragments
(Iser, 1993: the “simultaneity of the mutually exclusive”).
For instance, “enigmatic allegory” uses partial memories
and creates simulacra of meaning. The “harmonious” aura
becomes the subject matter of this paradoxical genre and
the result is a narrative without a plot.
6. The return to content: the subject matter is extended
now from autobiography to high and popular culture, from
painting of nature to portrayals of psychological nature.
Traditional genres are enlarged to narrative, story-telling,
thriller, the gothic etc.
140
7. The double-coding: the copious use of irony, ambiguity,
contradiction, double-meaning, and “coincidentia
oppositorum” assures a plethora of decodings.
8. Multivalence emerges from the coherent contribution
of several codes with many different associations and many
adjacent references – linking forms, narratives, and themes.
Charles Jencks underlines the non-specific overlapping
of two almost separate arts: “This idea stemming from the
notion of ‘organic unity’ is relatively rare in our culture (i.e.
The Western), where art and architecture tend to have gone
their separate ways: art to the gallery, architecture to a
limited institutionalized practice”. This interaction generates
an unlimited semiosis, which means a continual discovery
of new meaning in complex works.
9. A structured relation to the past: the idea that without
“memories” and “associations” a novel is diminished to
meaning, even if it is revivalist.
Emphasis on anamnesis, or on the “historical continuum
is prevalent now, in spite of the displacement of conventions
and the reinterpretation of tradition. Many old forms are
given new meanings to justify their existence and there
comes the fashion of “returns” to figuration, to ornament,
to comfort, to the human body. The re-interpretation of
tradition consists in affirming and distorting conventions
simultaneously.
10. New rhetorical figures are elaborated: paradox,
ambiguity, double-coding, disharmonious harmony,
complexity, contradiction, and irony.
11. The “absent centre” returns and the work of art can
be read for pleasure again.
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 What exactly is Postmodernism?
This term exasperated many people as it can be applied
at different levels of conceptualization to objects and
phenomena of reality. Thus, it is many things in the same
time.
At a first level of conceptualization the Western
representation was undermined by two simultaneous but
contradictory developments:
(a) universalist: Freedom-Equality-Fraternity, as the
Enlightenment promised;
(b) anti-universalist, which means to apply those principles
fully democratized, on a truly universal scale, in an
attempt to force Enlightenment live up to its promises.
Both tendencies act to do their best on behalf of freedom
and emancipation.
The older Enlightenment dispensation is giving way to
a new one to confront the problem of the other.
One can see Postmodernism as resorting to Enlightenment
principles while simultaneously being subjected to a thorough
deconstruction. This takes place in a confusing social situa­
tion that mirrors the universalizing and simultaneously
self-destructive tendencies of modernity. The emphasis on
decentrement and difference implies centrifugality. The
impressive fragmentarization is counteracted by a further
homogenization.
At a second level of conceptualization Postmodernism
has been defined as the attitude of the 1960’s counterculture
or, more restrictively as “the new sensibility” of the 1960’s
142
social and artistic avant-garde. This new sensibility is eclectic
and it implies a juxtaposition of tastes and worldviews
by the collision of cause alternating with its effect. The
consequence is “disharmonious harmony” [Charles Jencks]
or “the simultaneity of the mutually exclusive” [Wolfgang
Iser] that encompasses paradoxes. The effect is a hybrid,
dissonant beauty which finds simple harmony false and
unchallenging. So, postmodernism is radically democratic
and it rejects what is seen as the exclusivist and repressive
character of liberal humanism and the institutions with
which it identifies that humanism. Consequences:
a) displacement of conventions or tradition reinterpreted.
The re-interpretation of tradition means that conventions
are affirmed and distorted simultaneously;
b) elaboration of new rhetorical figures: stylistic formulae
are invented and adopted within which fashion and
function play a role.
“New figures” are encouraged: paradox, oxymoron,
ambiguity, double-coding, disharmonious harmony,
amplification, complexity, contradiction, and irony.
In the course of the 1970’s postmodernism was
drawn into a poststructuralist orbit as it was identified
with the deconstructionist practices informed by the
poststructuralism of Barthes and Derrida. In Structure,
Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences, 1970,
Derrida said that the human discourse is a “freeplay”, that is,
the extension ad infinitum of the “interplay of signification”
in the absence of metaphysical meaning and that it is based
on intertextuality. In 1968, Roland Barthes had seen the text
as “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original blend and clash”. This was not only a
143
crisis of representation, but the end of representation: an
important political act, a celebration of the death of the
Subject/of the Author.
The end of representation raised questions of subjectivity
and authorship redefined as agency: “Whose history gets
told? In whose name? For what purpose? (Marshall 1992). In
the absence of transcendent truth it matters who is speaking
(or writing), and why, and to whom.
In its later stages, the debate on representation is
influenced by Michel Foucault, who assumed a reality of
textuality and signs, of representations that do not represent.
He was preoccupied with the workings of power and the
constitution of the subject.
During the 1980’s knowledge is not neutral and objective
as with the positivists, but powerful and suspect. Foucault
became interested in the role of representations in the
constitution of otherness, as opposed to the liberal humanist
subject (white, male, heterosexual and rational). Foucault’s
otherness is represented by women, people of colour, non-
heterosexuals, and children.
The translation of J. F. Lyotard in English (The Postmodern
Condition 1979, 1984) signalled a fully-fledged merger
between an originally American Postmodernism and French
poststructuralism. Both of them focused on language and
they reject the idea that language can represent reality, or
that the world is accessible to us through language because
its objects are mirrored in the language that we use. So,
postmodernism: gives up on language’s representational
function.
Postmodernism follows poststructuralism in the ideas
that language constitutes rather than reflects the world and
144
that knowledge is therefore always distorted by language,
that is, by historical circumstances and by the specific
environment in which it arises.
At the third level of conceptualization: Postmodernism
is a Weltanschauung, a philosophical view about world. It is
not the world that is postmodern; it is the perspective from
which the world is seen that is postmodern. This means
that a set of intellectual propositions that to some people
make a lot more sense than they do to others.
Charles Olson, in Human Universe and other Essays, 1967,
seeks to develop an alternative “to the whole Greek system”
in order to recapture genuine experience. The Western
culture would close upon itself against true experience,
against life’s authenticity because of its orientation on
rationalism, and intellectualization of all human experience.
The condition for reaching back beyond “the Greek system”
is a proposed Weltanschauung (view upon the world). The
new Weltanschauung involves the getting rid of the lyrical
interference of the individual as Ego, of the Subject and its
replacement with language: “language allows a primordial
experience of the world, it is not the expression of an
essentialist, transcendent subject; it restores to experience
the immanent, authentic, sacramental character”.
At a fourth conceptual level of conceptualization: one can
speak of a postmodern world, that is, the world has become
postmodern and it entered a new historical era of postmodernity.
This is limited to certain areas of contemporary culture: mass
culture, mediated by the visual, by the electronic means
of communication at present, elitist yuppie (“young urban
professionals”) life style promoted by designer magazines, or
certain sociologically definable groups within the world.
145
 Postmodernism as a complex of artistic strategies and
as a coherent set of theoretical assumptions is a sign of
the times, a cultural shift of epistemic proportions. A
new “cultural logic” emerges as a reflex of the changed
nature of the Western capitalism. The ever increasing
commodification of both public and private life coincides
with the penetration of capitalism in the everyday life.
The effect will be the obliteration of the classical Marxist
distinction between the economic and the cultural.
Jean Baudrillard created the notion of semiurgy in order
to describe the sinister production of signs, wherein the
economic and the cultural representations and signs create
and feed each other. The common denominator for all these
facets of postmodernism is a crisis in representation, a loss
of faith in our representation of the real.
There are many consequences of these mutations:
(a) the transcendent seems to be forever out of reach:
hermeneutics must replace our former aspirations to
objectivity, already rejected by Marxists;
(b) all representations are constructs that are ultimately
politically informed to break away from our current ones
and really confront the other;
(c) the changed map of the humanities: the spectacular
upgrading of the cultural studies in the 1980’s.
Culture had become a major constitutive power in its
own right. The Sign becomes a term that includes all forms
of representation and the most important constitutive
element in the contemporary world. There is an accentuated
interest in the origins and history of specific representations,
in the play of textuality.
At a first level of discussion postmodernism can be:
146
a. A prolongation of anti-modernist artistic strategies.
It emerges in the 1950’s and develops in the 1960’s. The
influential American critic Clement Greenberg defined
modernism in terms of a ‘wholly autonomous aesthetic of
a radically anti-representational self-reflexivity”.
Modernism focused on formalism, social non-involvement
and self-reflexive exploration. Oppositely, postmodernism
returns to the pictorial narrative and to representational
practices (for instance in the architecture of Robert Venturi
and Charles Jencks). The new current turns from technocratic
purism to history and reintroducing the humanizing narrative
element.
b. Most American critics of the 1960’s and the early 1970’s
consider that postmodernism moves away from narrative,
from representation, that it turns to self-reflexivity and the
so-called metafiction of the period of Becket, Nabokov,
Barth, the Nouveau Roman. Obviously, this is a first stage
of the new movement.
Thus, postmodernism would be more inclined towards
radical aesthetic autonomy, and pure formalism, rediscovering
and radicalizing the self-reflexive moment in an otherwise
representational Modernism (for example, the later Joyce
in Finnegan’s Wake).
Postmodernism’s profile varies with every domain. It
can be:
a. a radicalization of the self-reflexive tendency in
modernism putting on a second plan the narrative and
representation or
b. an explicit revival of narrative and representation.
c. sometimes it can be both.
147
 One trait is undisputable: postmodernism defies the self-
imposed limitations of modernism as a movement towards
autonomy and purity. Modernism had intellectualized and
reduced experience in order to transcend reality and reach
the timeless truth.
The separation from modernism was realized in two
ways:
a. either modernism’s premises and procedures were
questioned from within the realm of art;
b. or the idea of art itself was undermined as a modernist,
self-sufficient inheritance. The ex- autonomy of art is now
perceived as a self-imposed exile engendering impotence,
neutralization and depoliticizaton.
Postmodernism revivifies some of the Enlightenment
principles while simultaneously it subjected them to
deconstruction in order to approach the “Other”. There
are three ways of doing this:
a. by sabotaging universalizing situations and by
accentuating the self-destructive tendencies of modernity;
b. by highlighting centrifugality, decentrement and
difference;
c. by taking a profit from the interplay of fragmentarization
homogenization.
At a second level of discussion, Postmodernism has been
pointed at as the “attitude” of the 1960’s counterculture or as
“the new sensibility” of the 1960’s social and artistic avant-
garde. The new sensibility is eclectic, radically democratic
and rejects the exclusivist and repressive character of liberal
humanism. The avant-garde attack on art-as-institution is
taken to a socio-political level (defined and identified by
Leslie Fiedler, in the mid-sixties).
148
In the course of the 1970’s Postmodernism circles the
poststructuralist orbit:
a. Researchers start identifying it with the deconstructionist
practices (informed by the poststructuralism of Barthes and
Derrida). Jacques Derrida, in “Structure, sign and play in
the discourse of human sciences”, 1966, names the human
discourse a “freeplay” based on intertextuality, or the
extension ad infinitum of the “interplay of signification in
the absence of metaphysical meaning”.
In 1968, R. Barthes sees the text as “a multidimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash”. The representation is contested and the
death of the Subject/of the Author is celebrated. The
Subjectivity and Authorship are redefined as Agency:
“Whose history gets told? In whose name? For what
purpose?” (Marshall 1992). If the transcendent truth is a
phantasm, the only thing that matters is Who Is Speaking
(or writing), and Why, and To Whom.
b. in later stages of Postmodernism Michel Foucault
admits to a reality of textuality and signs, of representations
that do not represent. The topic is no the workings of
power and the constitution of the subject. For the first
time, knowledge is perceived as not neutral and objective,
as with the positivists, but powerful and suspect. Foucault
is preoccupied with the role of representations in the
constitution of “Otherness”. What is the point of view of
the liberal humanist subject (white, male, heterosexual and
rational) on women, people of colour, non-heterosexuals,
and children? Lacan’s revisions of Freud are taken into
consideration by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari. Focusing
on language, the two philosophers reject the idea that
149
language can represent reality; that the world is accessible
to us through language because its objects are mirrored
in the language that we use. In these conditions, two
situations are retained:
1. postmodernism gives up on language’s representational
function.
2. postmodernism follows poststructuralism in the idea
that language constitutes rather than reflects the world and
that knowledge is therefore always distorted by language.
When they say language, they understand historical
circumstances and the specific environment in which it
arises.
c. The translation in English of J. F. Lyotard’s The Postmodern
Condition (1979:1984) meant the complete overlapping
of an originally American Postmodernism and French
poststructuralism.
III. At the third level of conceptualization Postmodernism
is a Weltanschauung, a conception upon the world,
belonging only to some individuals. Not everybody lives
in postmodernism; but they live in postmodernity.
In Human Universe and Other Essays (1967) Charles
Olson proposed an alternative “to the whole Greek system”
in order to get back to the genuine experience. The Western
culture loses access to true experience as it closes upon itself.
It is not authentic because of its exclusive orientation on
rationalism and intellectualization of all human experience
(since the Enlightenment). In order to reach back beyond
“the Greek system”, with its “old controlling humanism”, we
should get rid of “the lyrical interference of the individual as
Ego, of the Subject and his soul, that peculiar presumption
by which the western man has interposed himself between
150
what he is as a creature of nature and the other creations
of nature which we may call objects. He has to free himself
from the rationalistic liberal humanism”. Olson votes for a
Heideggerian poetic practice in which language favours a
primordial experience of the world, and not the expression
of an essentialist, transcendent subject. For Heidegger,
in the truly poetic language, the Real speaks for itself,
and the poet functions as a mediator. In the same line,
William Spanos and Ihab Hassan supported the rebirth of
the spoken word as conceived by Heidegger, while they
signalled the ending of logocentric metaphysics.
IV. There is a fourth conceptual level where the accent
falls on the new historical era of postmodernity. Its traits are:
a. Limitation to a few areas of contemporary culture: mass
culture, mediated by TV, elitist yuppie life style promoted
by designer magazines, or certain sociologically definable
groups within the western world.
b. The complex artistic strategies and the loosely coherent
set of theoretical assumptions, a sign of the times (a cultural
shift of epistemic proportions). A new cultural logic, a reflex
of the changed nature of the Western capitalism: the ever
increasing commodification of both the public and the
private life, the penetration of capitalism in the everyday life.
The effects of all these four levels are:
– The obliteration of the classical Marxist distinction
between the economic and the cultural, as F. Jameson and
J. Baudrillard highlighted. We are entrapped in what Jean
Baudrillard denominates as “semiurgy”, that is the sinister
production of signs. More explicitly put, the economic
and the cultural representations and signs create and feed
each other.
151
 Outcome:
– Hermeneutics is responsible with wiping out our
previous hopes for Objectivity. It follows that the transcendent
becomes unattainable
– Our representations are constructs politically determined.
The only way to change this is to confront the Other.
– Cultural studies reign supreme over other files inside
humanities.
152
The secret bridge between
modernism and postmodernism
In the 1960’s Ihab Hassan proceeds to a critique of
modernism (The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Reflections
on Modern Culture, Language and Literature, 1963)
wherein he discusses the notions of indeterminacy and
immanence. Eight years later, in The Dismemberment of
Orpheus: towards a Postmodern Literature, he identifies
the branched nature of modernism: a traditional modernism
(!) and a “silent”, anti-representational one. Postmodernism
would have borrowed this silence and multiplied it to a series
of “silences”: “whatever is truly new in the new literature
evades the social, historic and aesthetic criteria which
defined the identity of the avant-garde in other periods,
by accepting chance and improvisation. Its principle
becomes indeterminacy. By refusing order, order imposed or
discovered, this kind of literature refuses purpose. Its forms
are therefore non-telic; its world is the eternal presence”.
In an article from 1978, “Culture, Indeterminacy and
Immanence: Margins of the Postmodern Age”, Hassan
tried to demonstrate that between postmodernity and
modernity is not only a cultural shift, but a reconsideration
between humankind and their environment. An age of
Gnosticism emerges, when “Mind becomes its own reality.
Consciousness becomes all”. There is no palpable point of
reference in the outside world.
Immanence is “the capacity of the mind to generalize
itself in the world, to act upon both Self and World, and so to
153
become more and more immediately its own environment”.
In Hassan’s view, gnoseology dominated ontology in
postmodernism. Humanity became an auto-referential
species: “The emergence of human beings as language
animals, ‘homo pictor’ or ‘homo significans’, gnostic creature
constituting themselves…by symbols of their own making”.
In this way, words gained their freedom from the connection
with things. Language is dwelled upon as metalanguage.
By taking sides with post-structuralism, Hassan describes
the characteristics of Indeterminacy as a capital postmodern
concept: “compounded of subtendencies that the following
words evoke: heterodoxy, pluralism, eclecticism, randomness,
revolt, deformation. The latter alone subsumes a dozen
current terms of unmaking: decreation, disintegration,
deconstruction, decentrement, displacement, difference,
discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, decomposition,
de-definition, demystification, detotalization, delegitimation”.
a. Space and time
William Spanos enlarged upon the spatialization
practised by modernism and the temporality favoured
by postmodernism. So the postmodern literature would
propose an “aesthetic of decomposition” that “spatializes”
time. The same as in the case of modernism, the new
movement tries to evade temporality and to create an
autonomous sphere of transcendent Timelessness: “In
the past decade or so there have emerged a variety of
postmodern modes of writing and critical thought that,
despite certain resemblances to aspects of the existential
154
imagination, are ultimately extensions of early iconic
modernism. I am referring, for example, to the structuralist
criticism of Roland Barthes, the phenomenological criticism
of George Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard and the neo-
imagism of Marshal McLuhan…These modes of creativity
attest to the variety of the postmodern scene, but this
pluralism has also tended to hide the fact that, in tendency,
they are all oriented beyond history or, rather, they all
aspire to the spatialization of time”. The point is to obtain
the eternal, the purified art, far away from daily common
matters.
Postmodernism, like all the other previous cultural
movements, is not only a chronological event, but also
a permanent mode of human understanding and being
(Euripides’s Orestes, Petronius’s Satyricon, Cervantes’s
Don Quixote, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy, and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House).
Deconstructionist aspects are present in this mode
of understanding, as we can perceive the rejection of
metaphysics in the interest of temporality and the critique
of speech as logocentric.
b. Expansion and hybridization
(Rosalind Kraus, 1979)
The mimetic painting, that incorporated photography,
stimulated discussion about “impurities” and “expansion of
fields” through the substitution of “both/and” for “either/or”.
Through appropriation and hybridization the larger
public may understand that representation and culture
155
are always political. The aesthetic side remains limited to Residence and complicity
a reduced group of artists and critics.
Craig Owens, in “The Allegorical Impulse”, 1980, tried
to “problematize the activity of reference” by resurrecting
the classical strategy of the historical avant-garde. Being
at odds with the mainstream art, postmodernism does not
want to present the world as it is, but to present it from
its point of view. Their point is that the real can only be
presented as it is not, being a priori unrepresentable. The
steps of this invention of the real are:
a) disrupting, discontinuous presentations of the world-
as-it-is;
b) new representations insure the flux of progress;
c) a new world is signalled by the presidency of Donald
Reagan, the former actor. Now aesthetics meets politics, Linda Hutcheon discussed these concepts in A Poetics
the capital penetrates the world of culture, and the avant- of Postmodernism, 1988, and in The Politics of Postmo­
garde strategies lead to the apparition of new markets dernism, 1989. Postmodernism is “unavoidable political”
rather than of new worlds. and “unavoidable compromised” because “it manages to
install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the
conventions and presupposition it appears to challenge”.
Postmodernism confirms and subverts (representations,
The Subject, liberal humanism and capitalism itself ). The
new movement is an accomplice of the power system as
it refuses the ivory tower. Hutcheon considers that the
problematization of representation is a political strategy.

a. The development of the novel

The line of evolution in massive prose represents (sym-

bolically) the way of the literary text from the realist project

156 157
(which determines representation, intelligible structures The hyperreal: Simulacra and Simulations
and relationship) to the modernist text (that creates a co-
herent “world of the text”). The postmodern text reveals
contradictions drawn from different discourses and the
gap between the ideological project and the specifically
literary one. Unfortunately, the ideological representation
is limited.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote extensively

on the lack of substance of the contemporary world in:
L’echange symbolique de la mort, 1976; Simulacra et
Simulations, 1981, and The ecstasy of communication, 1983.
He underscored the connection between the neo-capitalist
cybernetic order, in control of everything, and contemporary
structures of communication, the media. By enhancing the
‘hyperreal’ that has replaced the real, the media sabotage
communication.
Simulacra have come in three stages:
a) the first order – value was still ‘natural’, not artificialized
and disputed. The interval includes the Renaissance until
the industrial revolution.
b) the second order – the commercial value of the interval
between the industrial revolution and the WW II. What
matters now is the exchange.

158 159
 c) the third order – the hyperreal has completely replaced that the rest is real. In fact, Los Angeles and the America
the real. The code controls everything with the help of surrounding it are no longer real but of the order of the
electronic media. hyperreal and of simulations.
As advertising and TV have changed the public space (the Jean Baudrillard discussed the transition from an older,
street, the monument, the market, the scene) and the private industrial capitalism to a later capitalism characterized by
space (‘the most intimate processes of our life become the technology and high tech electronics, by reproduction
virtual feeding ground of the media’), the distinction between rather than production. Thus, the world has imploded into
the two becomes oblivious. Baudrillard enlarges upon the the hyperreal.
obscenity of the transparence and immediate visibility. We
all must be informed about non-essential events. This is
the state of terror, proper to the schizophrenic. Information
has been degraded to non-information because media’s
binary structure of question and answer pre-programmes
responses.
The “phases of the image” coincide with “the pure
simulacrum”: if the real was produced, the hyperreal is
re-produced from “miniaturized units, from matrices,
memory blanks and command models” (1983). Such a
meticulous reproduction of a completely inexistent real can
be realized through another reproductive medium (1988).
In the hyperreal phase the representation has become
irrelevant as it has no referentiality and is reduced to the
status of meaningless sign.
What does a simulation mean? It is “a procession of the
model, of all models around the merest fact – the models
came first… Facts no longer have any trajectory of their
own, they arise at the intersection of their models; a single
fact may even be engendered by all the models at once”.
(1983). For instance, Disneyland merely conceals the fact
that the “real” country, the “real” America, is Disneyland.
It is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe

160 161
 Pastiche and Schizophrenia The Modernist “Discours” versus
the Postmodernist One”

Frederic Jameson wrote in 1983, 1984, and 1991 about

the logic of multinational consumerist society. He identified
new consumption patterns, faster turnover in the areas
of fashion and styling, the presence of advertising and
media, explosion of suburbia at the expense of both city
and country, the demands of standardization, and the
arrival of automobile culture. In this new context there is
no room for the memory of tradition.
In art we are left with pastiche as blank parody, parody
without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical
impulse, pastiche as left-over gains precedence.
Schizophrenia is a language disorder that results from
the subject’s vision of a fragmented reality into images.
In connection to this, several theorists consider that the In Scott Lash’s Sociology of Postmodernism, 1990, the
postmodern is affected by a crisis in representation: history “figural” cultural formation replaced an earlier modernist
has disappeared and the present had dissolved into images. “discursive” formation, because the postmodernist is fond
As representation becomes impossible, emancipatory of a theory of desire. Building up a discourse necessitates
politics becomes impossible too. Consequently, Kant’s logic and argumentative effort, so it is not an easy form of
“sublime” is replaced by the “hysterical sublime” (the entertainment, as visualizing images is.
informational technology: the computer, the television Additionally, postmodernity means “a break with
set, and other machines of reproduction rather than of formalism”:
production which no longer possess the capacity for a) on the aesthetic level (where “it leads to the suppression
representation. All these “articulate nothing”). The postmodern
of the unconscious and the bodily, of the hegemony of the
“hysterical sublime” envelops a world in which our bodies are
symbolic”) and
bereft of spatial coordinates. By moving closer to the surface
b) on the theoretical level (where is supports a Nietzschean
of our consciousness we enter into the new global space.
“divorce with structuralism”) – the privileging of the image
and of the spectacle.

162 163
 In modernism discursive signification favoured words
over images. Form was privileged as culture supposed a
rationalist view, a distance between the artistic object and
its audience.
In postmodernism the figural signification privileges the
visual over the discursive. Formalism and rationalism are
dismissed and what matters is the impact not the meaning.
With Lash, postmodernism goes back to the mid 1960’s and
the early theorizations of Susan Sontag and Leslie Fiedler.
Time and Space are compressed in postmodernity:
“the laws of physics vary from one observer to another”
(Don DeLillo: 1980). The Earth enters a Mohole: all forms of
representation come abruptly to an end (a moral, political
and cognitive Mohole). A Mohole is a huge hole drilled by
humans.
Postmodernity discovers that rationality cannot ground
itself, and, as a result, the rationality of modernity appears
groundless all of a sudden. Jürgen Habermas’s view on
modernity is shuttered by the postmodern theorists.
164
Architecture and the visual arts in relation to
postmodernism in the interval 1950-1970
The term “Postmodernism” emerged in the public
debate owing to architecture criticism, in the mid 1970’s
America. In 1960, Robert Venturi spotted a “new tendency”
and described it as “the puritanically moral language of
orthodox modern architecture”. This defined the austere
and technocratic modernist urban planning.
The term “postmodernism” was also used by Charles
Jencks in 1975, in The Rise of Postmodern Architecture,
which was a plea for pluralism: the restauration of old
buildings, consumed-oriented architecture, a new social-
realism, and radical traditionalism. This is the postmodern
melting pot.
The emergence of Postmodernism coincided with an
attack on Modernism following the lines of a debate on
urban planning and on the inadequacies of modernist
architecture. The first books on the topic were:
l Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, 1961
l Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture, 1966
l Robert Stern, New Directions in American Architecture,
1969
l Peter Blake, Form Follows Fiasco, 1974.
Robert Venturi (1966) expressed preference for the
“difficult unity of inclusion” over what he saw as “modernist’s
165
easy unity of exclusion”. His reference was to a complex
contradictory architecture based on the richness and
ambiguity of “modern experience”: “I like elements which
are hybrid rather than ‘pure’, comprising rather than ‘clean’,
distorted rather than ‘straightforward’, ambiguous rather
than articulated, perverse as well as ‘impersonal’, boring
as well as ‘interesting’, conventional rather than ‘designed’,
accommodating rather than ‘excluding’, redundant rather
than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent
and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy
vitality over obvious unity”.
Venturi voted for “both-and”, in contrast to “either–or”.
He was the promoter of an architecture able to evoke
“many levels of meaning and combination of focus”, an
anticipation of the “double coding” that Charles Jenks would
later see as central to postmodern Architecture. The levels
of meanings refer to a new meaning being superimposed
upon, or merging with an older one. In order to achieve
such a double meaning we have to use the conventional
elements in a new way. But the new elements will contain
in their changed expression some of their past content.
Thus, the break with the Modernist past is only a crisis of
representation, a problem of a new Mannerism.
In 1987 Matei Călinescu perceived the new historicism
as an expression of a thin line between historicism and
nostalgia: “a dialogic space of understanding and self-
understanding, a space in which complicated problems
had been inventively solved, in which recurrent questions
had received diverse creative answers”.
166
The postmodern architecture and visual arts
The main characteristics of the new movement were:
1. Modesty, irony, and playful humanism;
2. “Contextualism”, that is, the recognition that an individual
building is a fragment of a larger whole;
3. “Allusionism” = the perceiving of architecture as an act
of historical or cultural response ;
4. “Ornamentalism” uses the wall as a medium of
architectural meaning: eclecticism, hybridity.
In Late Modern Architecture (1977), Charles Jencks
discussed “eight ideological definers”:
a) double coding;
b) pluralism;
c)a preference for the semiotic over the functional;
d) form;
e) active involvement;
f ) active participation;
g) stylistic variables (hybridism, interest in metaphor,
historical reference, symbolism, and humour);
d) “design” ideas: contextual urbanism and rehabilitation,
functional “mixing”, collage and collision, and the rhetorical
means.
Charles Jenks distinguished between “Late Modern”
and “Post-Modern” Architecture. The Late-Modern one
emerged together with Postmodernism, manifesting a
high-tech character and ironic gestures in the direction of
the postmodern. It is single coded and self-referential in
167
its exposed technology. The Post-modern one expressed The anti-Establishment attitude:
social and cultural responsibility and opened up artistic parables (Ken Kesey)
production to a public role which Modernism, by virtue
of its self-referential Formal Strategies, had denied itself.
Robert Stern, in New Directions in American Architec­
ture (1969), remarked that the postmodern shift confirmed
the reawakening of the artist in every field to the public
responsibilities of art. Once again art was regarded as an
act of communication as opposed to one of production and
of revelation. The artist’s intention for the building or for
his design, his Ego, is a source of irony and double coding.
In his turn, Michel Foucault enlarged upon the obsessive
relation of power to knowledge in postmodernism and
upon the ideological discursive context. Art for art’s sake
is completely delegitimised.

Ken Kesey belongs to the second wave of the Beats,

when the original ideals of the generation had become
commercial stuff for the pop culture. As Christopher Gair
underlined, the Beats were in possession of a paradoxical
nature: on the one hand, they envisaged a new type of
writing, with the help of hallucinatory stimuli; on the other
hand they acquiesced to the seclusion and traditionalism of
the Transcendentalists. If the Beat writer put up a carnival
of his own life, this was only meant as a contestation of the
establishment, the way Mikhail Bakhtin understood the
function of the carnival in relation to François Rabelais’s
work. This rebellious stand will go on with the Desperadoes
as it will be the case with Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange. For Alex, the Beethovenian hero, the blueprint of
the bourgeois society could be summarized with the phrase

168 169
“all that cow”. Alex will be reformed through overexposure
to violence. Reformed to such a degree, that he will not
stand anymore Beethoven’s music.
Ken Kesey’s hero in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
was harder, if not impossible to reform. One had to be
“cagey enough” (Kesey: 8) to escape the pressure of the
hospitalizing system. Speaking about the status of craziness
in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault noticed that the
lunatics were treated like some delinquents. In the 20th
century, the situation is capsized: those who don’t accept
to be “adjusted” are subject to psychiatric treatment. In One
Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Nurse Ratched embodies an
aseptic and disciplined world. The marks of her exacerbated
femininity can be seen as an irony practised at the expense
of her lucidity or, on the contrary, as a token of her capacity
to subdue bodily instincts. Randall Patrick McMurphy will
be delivered to the “Shock Shop” (Kesey: 2) on account
of his incessant challenge to the nurse’s self-annihilated
protruding sexual characteristics.
Outside the hospital, one can afford giving in to instincts
and jocular vices as long as one doesn’t criticize the
system. But the moment somebody dares to sabotage the
established order, they will realize that inside the hospital
the establishment has turned into the Combine, where “the
fog machine” (Kesey: 52), the “fake time” (ibidem: 95) and
the electrodes discipline every disobedience. This inside
looks very much like an Orwellian dystopia where every
grain of thought has to be targeted. There is no place for
the loose stream-of-consciousness. Harding, the raisonneur
of the novel, first signals the political side of the asylum:
“Never before did I realize that mental illness could have
170
the aspect of power” (Kesey: 285). And he warns against
the Biblical implications of repression: “You are strapped
to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of
electric sparks in place of thorns” (Kesey: 87).
a. Gender or political problematic?
Of course, the Combine through its ensuing effects: the
fog, the deceleration of time and the electrical destruction
of brains (concluded, in cases of miraculous resistance –
as it will be the case with McMurphy – with mechanical
annihilation, that is lobotomy) could be seen as a brilliant
anticipation of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and all-
flattening illusion. In terms of gender studies, the victory of
the Combine, whose opulent representative is Mrs. Ratched,
was apprehended as an oppressive, castrating matriarchy.
As Daniel J. Vitkus put in an article: “The text celebrates
a ‘natural’ maleness which is placed in opposition to a
domineering, emasculating representation of the feminine”
(1994: 66). But this drive of interpretation simply confines
the larger implications of the novel to some sexist role-play.
It is true Pierre Bourdieu anticipated the womanization of
society, but Mrs. Ratched doesn’t act on behalf of her sex.
Following such an approach would mean confusing gender
with sex. On the contrary, sex is overprized in the novel or
perceived as a perilous drug able to generate indiscipline or
political turmoil. It is on this account that McMurphy will end
up lobotomized. The hospital regulations tend to be similar
to those of an extremely well-regulated state. When Daniel J.
Vitkus identifies a misogynist in the delinquent gambler, he
171
simply belittles the conflict for power. McMurphy assumes
the role of a “sacrificial scapegoat” (ibidem: 78), but not as
a retribution for sexual sins. And we can hardly identify
him with a coherent social protester. His top pleasures are
gambling, partying, sex and friendship. In plain words, he
enjoys life. Of course, we are entitled to a misreading, in
Harold Bloom’s terminology, because Kesey ciphered his
protagonist with the help of symbolic tattoos, phrases,
gestures and actions. Thus, he could stand very well for
a postmodern captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn or John
Falstaff. His personality is cunningly ciphered. He doesn’t
do anything for free, and it is here that the nurse spots
the tragic flaw where she can hit. But McMurphy doesn’t
behave like a capitalist. He only uses money as a stimulus,
transforming it into simulacra. Jean Baudrillard would have
understood him as an agent who deconstructs the utopian
– which means hypocrite and inhuman – Big Nurse. Leslie
Fiedler considers that the Chief smothers the lobotomized
Irish in a sort of eroticized rape, the way Othello did to
Desdemona (85). Again, this misogynistic approach curtails
the political implication of the writing. Since then, Judith
Butler produced her arguments in favour of the gender
understood as a constructed reality.
b. Staying awake not to lose the disaster
The political bias is no more obvious in Susanna Kaysen’s
Girl, interrupted (1993), and this on account of the more
subtle means of dealing with the patients in mental
institutions. This time, the nonconformist gesture is the
tentative of committing suicide with aspirins. Everything
172
is set, apparently, in a derisory context. The hospitalizing
conditions are opulent and Lisa, the most difficult to deal
with from the patients, flees the institution only to surrender
afterwards, because nobody took care of her in the so-called
free world. Somehow, she represents the watchdog of the
dwindling humanity. That is why she never closes her eyes.
Actually, she sustains that she has been awake for two years.
If McMurphy reports a great victory over the Big Nurse by
having his fellow patients cheer at an imaginary baseball
game in front of the turned off TV set, Lisa wants to protect
her “parallel world” (Susanna Kaysen: 28). She wraps in toilet
paper the TV room together with the inert catatonics. Being
isolated equates to staying pure, uncontaminated. Even
the main heroine nurtures the ambition to negate “my
enemy, the world” (ibidem: 42). In the meantime, the asylum
borrowed the atmosphere of a democratic institution. They
preserve a seclusion room where those patients fed up with
their spic-and-span paradise may yell at will. There is even a
cultural pedigree of the hospital. It is there that Ray Charles,
Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell found their refuge when they
could bear the world no more. In fact, the right to say NO is
dearly paid: “We were stripped down to the bare bones of
our selves” (ibidem: 94). To be a nonconformist has nothing
poetical anymore. The price is isolation and the scornful
attitude of the employees. The effect is depersonalization
and suspicion as to the real existence of the body. This is
the reason why the heroine feels the impulse to cut herself
in order to check, by visible bleeding, her physical reality.
She even “would like to see an X-ray of herself” (ibidem:
105). The degree of lucidity is similar to that of Poe’s. The
neurotic inadaptable girl invokes Freud’s argumentation
173
about the incapacity of distinguishing between fantasy
and reality in the case of neurosis.
In conclusion, Borderline Personality Disorder is mainly a
protest against social snobbery and pretensions. Modernity
began liquefying, as Zygmunt Bauman noticed. The world
of the 50’s and the 60’s started to look like a dream that
trickled into a red-tape nightmare.
In the conditions of the inflexible “onlyism” (James
R. White: 12), the problem of freedom allows for two
solutions...only. Namely the ones discussed by William
Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Louis Borges: to try
and escape the labyrinth or to simply enlarge its scope.
Hamlet saw the world as a set of concentric labyrinths;
Kafka created bureaucratic dystopias, while Borges took
up the intricate puzzle at the level of narration. In all these
cases is noticeable the endeavour of the political system to
control and even suppress the small narratives, as Lyotard
called them. In his book, The Inhuman (1988), the French
philosopher signalled the perverse purpose of techno-
science (in Stuart Sim: 11).
c. Obsessions turned into manias
The world of mental asylums as a negation of consu­
merist happiness moves in the 21st century towards petty
obsessions and fake refuges. Man, Interrupted (2006),
by James Bailey, describes the interruption of personal
evolution in terms of bizarre obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The subtitle of the novel offers supplementary clues:
Welcome to the Bizarre World of OCD, Where Once More is
never enough. What with Ken Kesey was protest and slyness
174
and with Susan Kaysen become an all-embracing negation
limited to teenage, with James Bailey the stage is occupied
by “health-freaks” (Man, Interrupted: 10). Again, we have
an esteemed institution: Berkeley Triumph Psychiatric
Hospital. The resemblance to a prison is more and more
diminished. If McMurphy desired to be put into a hospital,
that was because he wanted to escape physical work.
When his madness was questioned, he had to strive hard
to demonstrate his social inadaptability. Bailey’s characters,
in exchange, crave for the condition of patients. It is not
about being lost in a different world. They only desperately
feel the need to wash the remote control with soap or to
purify the money with shampoo. The doctors categorize
them as nose-pickers, butt-scratchers or hand-washers. It
is like they feel contaminated and want to wash away the
fungus of responsibility, affection and racism. The point is
they actually dream of being free of their obsessions and of
re-conquering the others’ love. To be obsessed with Asian
girls or with lying in order to create an inflated self-image
does not qualify as a revolutionary standard. These derisory
weaknesses are not dangerous for society, but only to their
hosts. It is very difficult to see McMurphy as a catalyst of a
revolt against oppression in this new context. This happens
because the establishment managed to undermine the
self-control of those reluctant to fit in.
The human being transformed into a patient is imbued
with suspicion. There is no need for a guardian – this
time the Big Nurse is located right within. One character
describes her inner doubts: “I have this obsession that I
might be gay, among other obsessions. I am not gay but
my mind keeps saying, what if?”(117).
175
 An interesting fact to notice is that Susan Kaysen’s and
James Bailey’s heroes tried to commit suicide, which was
not the case with Ken Kesey’s main hero. It is true that Billy
Bibbit kills himself after his first-time erotic experience with
a sensitive prostitute, but this only because the Big Nurse
talked him into feeling ashamed for his deed. What should
have been an instinct was deviated to conscious debauchery
and, this way, the image of his mother overlapped that
of the prostitute. Billy is blackmailed and pushed into a
Freudian conflict. As Alfredo Mirandé remarked in his article
Hombres and Machos: “my mother and her sisters were
socializing me into my sex role” (in Shira Tarrand: 49). This
doesn’t mean gender oppression, but only instilling the
idea that individual, socially unorganized pleasure is a sin.
In Ken Kesey’s novel, as well as in Harold Pinter’s play The
Caretaker, the opponents to the system have their brains
destroyed by electroconvulsive therapy or by lobotomy.
Subsequently, the opponents will be hospitalized by
their families. Once institutionalized, they are sedated
and checked every half an hour. Towards the end of the
century, we can hardly speak of opponents, but of alienated
people, incapable of manifesting their feelings and in
doubt when they have to declare their identity. Pushing
things a little further, in the 21st century, we shall come
across Jacob Andreson-Minshall, a former dyke, now a
man, who affirms: “Masculine transpeople are assumed
to be renouncing femininity by their transition; they are
often accused of gender treachery” (in Shira Tarrant: 33).
In the context of my paper, this statement indicates only
that the establishment ascribes social roles to its citizens
in order to easily control them. Even the delicate subject
176
of human rights is respected as long as these rights are
not infringed upon from the exterior. The greatest art is to
subtly induce people to diminish their critical judgement
by themselves. And this strategy can be achieved with what
Jean Baudrillard called simulacra: to artificial needs, artificial
remedies. Such a remedy is not supposed to eradicate the
illness, but to tune it. The contemporary illness has become
a virus which the establishment may use the way a hacker
does. Consequently, it is not necessary to wound the body
anymore in order to have the brain wounded.
References:
Bailey, James, Man, Interrupted, 2006, Mainstream
Publishing Company (Edinburgh) LTD.
Fiedler, Leslie, The Return of the Vanishing American,
1969, Stein and Day, New York.
Forrey, Robert, “Ken Kesey’s Psychopathic Saviour: A
Rejoinder”, in Modern Fiction Studies, 21, 2, summer 1975, 228.
Géfin, K. Laszlo, “The Breasts of Big Nurse: Satire Versus
Narrative in Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, in
Modern Language Studies, volume 22, no.1, winter 1992.
Kaysen, Susanna, Girl, Interrupted, Virago Press, 2000,
U.S.A.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 2002,
Penguin Books Ltd., England.
Vitkus, J. Daniel, “Madness and Misogyny in Ken Kesey’s
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, in Journal of Comparative
Poetics, no. 14, 1994.
Whitmer, O. Peter and Bruce VanWyngarden, Aquarius
Revisited. Seven Who Created The Sixties Counterculture
that Changed America, 1987, MacMillan, New York.
177
 The postmodern deconstruction have an inescapable political component. Pushing the
and the politics of culture margins towards the centre creates the illusion of freshness
and a-politicization.

In the late 1970’s, a few art critics, such as Douglas Crimp,

Craig Owens and Hall Foster, switched the attack on artistic
representation from the literary field to the other arts.
Douglas Crimp, in a catalogue for a photographic exhi­bi­
tion, Pictures (1977), tried to place recent developments in
one of the visual arts in a deconstructionist framework. Craig
Owens proceeded in the same way with landscape sculpture.
In the early 1980’s a debate on the “postmodern” was
launched by the journals where these critics were writing and
the new movement was considered. Their politics relied on
the poststructuralist idea that the real has “coded” nature and
on Foucault’s considerations upon the interconnectedness
of representation and power. It as the poststructuralism
the one that transformed the “leftist cultural politics” into
an interesting project. The Marxist approach marginalized
the cultural politics, as the main focus was on economy.
British poststructuralism made its debut in 1968, stemming
from the fashionable “Althusserianism”, which showed
interest in matters of ideology and politics.
The Americans oriented towards Derrida and that is
why the British and the American critical avant-garde in
the 1970s scarcely interacted.
The politics of culture favours the authentic margins
over the inauthentic centre. This attitude alienates the
mainstream side. The Western “representations” always
resume earlier representations and on this account, they

178 179
 Macropolitics exhaustion creates “(…) politics of difference, where in many of the voices of
a problem of legitimation colour, gender and sexual orientation, newly liberated from
the ‘margins’, have found representation under conditions
that are not exclusively tailored to the needs and interests
of white, male, intellectuals”.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the hierarchies are overthrown This complete politicization allows for transpositions and
and the political arena allows an enlarged access. This contingencies of imagination, strategy and creativity. These
postmodern political condition anticipates the possibility new possibilities for intervention in postmodern politics
of a “plurality of cultures”, because the limiting function of have no legitimation. For instance, the post-Marxist politics
tries to reconcile the postmodern “pluralism” with Marxism.
modernity is contested.
Two all-encompassing categories are prominent:
Zygmunt Bauman’s The Left as the Counter–Culture of
1. those who reject the Universalism, the localist
Modernity, 1988, announces the replacement of the “party
postmodernists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe with
politics” with “imagined communities”. The emancipatory
their books Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards
political platforms of modernity are no longer in use and
a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) and Post-Marxism
the politics are functional now, rather than structural.
without Apologies (1988).
Macropolitics, like Margaret Thatcher’s project of a “popular
2. those who seek to salvage “Universalism” with the price
capitalism”, expands the Zeitgeist (spirit of time) and offers
of sacrificing its essentialist basis. Here belong Steven Best
the “Geist” a firm support, a body. Consequently, people lose
and Douglas Kellner with Postmodernist Theory: Critical
faith in party politics and in traditional macropolitics. Mono-
Interrogations (1991).
directed movements and coalitions flourish, whereas the
ethnicity component of politics (fanatical ethnic identity)
is inflamed. Thus, the political field becomes completely
unstable and unpredictable.
The end of macropolitics meant that postmodernism
besieged the legitimation of modernism. If our represen­
tations (epistemological, moral, politics) are without
groundless, it means that they are produced by structures of
power are unconsciously political. Politicization proliferates
and this implies a dispersal of power.
In Universal abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism
(1988), Andrew Ross discussed the new developments:

180 181
 Freedom can be positive or negative
J. F. Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) describes
the benefits of democracy for multicultural societies: “the
need for democracy, for institutional arrangements which
guarantee that protagonists of similar or different forms of
language games can openly and continuously articulate
their respective forms of life”. In spite of his defence of
multiplicity, the French philosopher realizes that this
equality and cooperation can end up in utopia: “The idea
that I think we need today in order to make decisions in
political matters cannot be the idea of the totally, or of the
unity, of a body. It can only be the idea of multiplicity or of
diversity. Then the question arises: How can a regulatory
use of this idea of the political be implemented? How can
it be programmatically efficacious, to the point where, for
example, it would make one decision just and another
unjust? Is a politics regulated by such an idea of multiplicity
182
possible? Is it possible to decide in a just way in, and
according to, this multiplicity? And here, I must say that I
don’t know”. Following this trend, the postmodern theory
will deny totality, unity, and will focus on micropolitics.
The same, much of postmodern politics will concern itself
with what John McGowan coined as “negative freedom”,
in opposition to the “positive interpretation of freedom”.
The negative and unproductive freedom is blamed on
modernism: “Phrased positively, postmodernism is the
attempt to legitimize knowledge claims and the moral/
political bases for action, not on the basis of indubitable
truths, but on the basis of human practices within established
communities”. (John McGowan, Postmodernism and its
Critics, 1991). This is a strong motivation for postmodernist
contestations of traditions and social environments.
Anyway, the democratic impulse instilled in the
postmodernist thought does not escape the defeatist
gestures of modernism: “the ideal of an egalitarian,
pluralistic, democratic order informs most postmodern
work”. This may generate suspicions related to power-
trappings. But how can one live without hierarchy?
a) One possibility is to subvert the existing order by way
of play, or “jouissance”. This may offer an illusionary freedom
founded on an aesthetics strategy which is “unprofitably
close to the Modernist goal of autonomy”.
b) Richard Rorty used the term “autonomy” to describe
the “objective of the postmodern ironist” who “is trying
to get out from under inherited contingencies and make
his own contingencies, get out from under an old final
vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own.
This means that their criterion for resolving doubts, their
183
criterion of private perfection, is autonomy rather than
affiliation to a power other than themselves”. (Contingency,
Irony and Solidarity, 1989).
The postmodernists begin to emulate the negative modernist
strategies because they distrust the fear of representation and
of power. Their radical anti-representationalism creates distance
and silence.
Hans Bertens, in The Idea of the Postmodern (1995)
highlights the perils of such distancing: “On the level of
the group, or community, the postmodern insistence on
distance and difference hides a similar danger because
on this level difference can exist only in the interstices
of hegemony. The centrifugal forces of the postmodern
may easily cause a rupture between the ‘margins’ and the
hegemonic ‘centre’, and thus hurl the ‘margins’ into what
is in effect a political void, even if that void is experienced
as a new freedom”.
184
Jürgen Habermas
and the post-rationalist modernity
In his Adorno lecture published in New German Critique
(Modernity versus Postmodernity, 1981, republished as
Modernity - an Incomplete Project, 1983), Jürgen Habermas
analyses modernity from a left-liberal perspective. This
action made him the target of Lyotard’s La Condition
Postmoderne.
Central to Habermas’s thought are the principles of
the Enlightenment, with their rationalistic imperatives.
In his view, modernism started in the 18th century. Unlike
the poststructuralists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Habermas
refuses to see a monolithic rationality as the cause of the
diseases of modernity. He is wary of “the snares of Western
logocentrism” and of a “foundationalism that conflicts with
our consciousness of the fallibility of human knowledge”.
Political health is granted, in his opinion, by rationality
and philosophy. Thus, he counterattacks R. Rorty’s attacks
on philosophy: “the stubbornness with which philosophy
clings to the role of ‘guardian of reasons’ can hardly be
185
dismissed as an idiosyncrasy of self- absorbed intellectuals”.
(Question and Counterquestion, 1985).
However, Habermas is confronted with some drawbacks:
a) to defend the plausibility of a rationality that distin­
guished itself from the rationality denounced by the
poststructuralists.
b) to prove the existence of a rationality that is not
transcendental in the sense that it is foundationalist, but
which transcends the limitations of time and space.
In order to purify such rationality which is subject
to change over time, to offer it a “unifying power” to be
emancipatory; he created the notion of “communicative
reason” in his Theory of Communication Action, 1981. He
invested it with three “cultural value spheres”:
1. The theoretical (science)
2. The practical (morality)
3. The aesthetic (art)
Each value possesses its own inner logic quite at odds
with those of the others. The Enlightenment had envisaged
an interference of these three. Their separation engenders
three different forms of argumentation:
1. Empirical – theoretical discourse
2. Moral discourse
3. Aesthetic critique
Of these three different “rationality complexes”, the
empirical-theoretical or cognitive-instrumental rationality
complex dominates the other modes of knowing in the
“regime of capitalist modernization”.
The “communicative reason” or “communicative rationality”
has the purpose to reconnect these “rationality complexes”
at the level of the life-world and to counter the “colonization”
186
of life-world by instrumental rationality. This new form of
communication would escape the distortions provoked
by “power, self-interest or ignorance”. Habermas rejects
intuition or metaphysics in defining what is reasonable. The
procedures that structure argumentative discourse through
rationality can be highlighted through “the analysis of the
already operative potential for rationality contained in the
everyday practices of communication”.
Consensus is a key concept which synthesizes the
general willingness to accept communicative rationality
based on the individual’s acts of social solidarity. Such an
intersubjective procedure can survive only in a democratic
context. The intersubjective consensus distances Habermas
from the deconstructionist avant-gardists such as Lyotard.
Habermas praises the emancipatory value of anti-
representationalism as it stimulates change. Criticizing the
poststructuralists, he states that progress can be achieved
through a more enlightened consensus on the basis of
reasoned debate, not by the way of a permanent crisis that
refuses to resolve it.
Richard Rorty signals this hierarchical world view:
“Abandoning a standpoint which is, if not transcendental,
at least “universalistic”, seems to Habermas to betray the
social hopes which have been central to liberal politics”
(Questions and Counterquestions, 1985).
In supporting “the unifying, consensus-creating power”
Habermas becomes the greatest fan of post-rationalist
modernity. For him, the aesthetic modernity (avant-gardist
modernism) should contribute to a return to the project
of modernity as it was originally conceived, that is: “to
develop objective science, universal morality and law, and
187
autonomous art, according to their inner logic…to release Modernism
the cognitive potentials of each of these domains to set
them free from their esoteric forms” (Modernity versus
Postmodernity). Such a strict and pragmatic rationalism
may impede the aesthetic valorisation of artistic creations. Its main characteristics are:
1) An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in
writing, an emphasis on how seeing (or reading) takes
place, rather than on what is perceived.
2) A movement away from the apparent objectivity
provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed
narrative point of view, and clear-cut moral positions.
(Conrad’s multiply-narrated story).
3) A blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry
seems more documentary (T. S. Eliot) and prose seems
more poetic (V. Woolf, J. Joyce).
4) An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous
narratives, and collages of different materials (J. Joyce).
5) A tendency towards reflexivity (or self-consciousness)
about the production of the work of art, so that each
piece calls attention to its own status as a production,
as something constructed and consumed in particular
ways. The acceptance of narrative awareness of duplicity.
6) A rejection of the distinction between the “high” and
“low” or popular culture, both in choice of materials
used to produced art and in methods of displaying and
consuming art (Joyce).
7) It refers to the broad aesthetic movements of the
20th century, whereas Modernity refers to an age
characterized by a set of philosophical, political, and
ethical ideas which provide the basis for the aesthetic
aspect of modernism.

188 189
 The new realist project of modernism:
Henry James and Joseph Conrad
A “new novel” emerges at the turn of the century.
In 1945 E. M. Forster suggests the actuality of the new
prose: “prose, because a medium of daily life as well as of
literature is particularly sensitive to what is going on” (The
Development of English Prose between 1918-1930). The
new novel still possesses:
a. A certain coherence
b. Particular patterns of evolution
c. A continuity with the novel established in the period
of its rise (the 18th century) and of extension in the period
of Modernism established in the three decades of the
century. Fiction has become increasingly international in
the meantime.
190
Henry James (1843 – 1916)
and the focalizing characters
H. G. Wells had a dispute with Henry James and in 1905
he wrote that “the business of the novelist is not ethical
principle, but facts”. He preferred to dislodge a “slice of
life” simply transcribed from reality without being shaped
by a technique that would give it significant form. Henry
James considered that the realist project was to entail less
faithfulness to the “perceived objective world” and more
interest in the “perceiver” (the human subject).
The realist project, in its traditional form, was too much
aware of objective reality. D. H. Lawrence was also critical
about it: “characters, not one of them seem to be a really
human being”.
The new realist project shifted from a satiric focus
upon society (the “moralizing” tone of the “old realism”) to
the individual human psychology. Henry James praised
191
Conrad’s method of story-telling as “not directly but through
the interpolation between author and subject matter of a
narrator”. His opinion includes “the proper shift of fiction”,
which is “the workings of a fine mind” viewed against a
chronotope. The roots of transformation of the story-telling
must be considered as reaching back to Henry James’s fiction
in “the spirit of psychoanalysis” excluding “the innumerable
small facts and aspects” (The Younger Generation, 1914).
No meticulous attention to the externally perceived world
should be internalized by the “intense perceiver” around
whose experience could be shaped into art.
H. James opposed to H. G. Wells’s statement: “I’d rather
be called a journalist than a novelist” would imply that
facts are the focus of every novelist. His “new attitude” was
a challenge and a review of the realist project as a promise
to reveal “the psychology of the free human individual”,
in the same time “capturing” small facts and aspects with
the intent “to seize meaning”. Similarly critical about other
contemporary novelists (Horace Walpole, Arnold Bennett),
about whom he thought that they simply transcribed
from reality without being “shaped by technique”, H.
James defined the work of his contemporaries as “a raw
and undifferentiated transcription of reality” giving way
to “shapelessness” and “lack of significance of actual
experience”. The alternative was Joseph Conrad’s “story-
telling as a screened consciousness” perceiving the events
of the novel as the story “unfolds” in his words and the
narrator’s.
James’s strategy is to provide “a property and perspective”,
a selection and perspective organized around a structured
centre - “an organic centre” -, a character whose perceptions
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of the “material of fiction” could be carefully focused and
shaped.
James’s principles of writing implied that:
1. “the persons are, so far as their other passions permit,
intense perceivers”
2. “(the author is) placing right in the middle of the light
the most polished of possible mirrors of the subject”.
In the beginning Henry James aimed to be a social
historian with the novels written in the late 1880’s. To his
first phase belong The Bostonians, Princess Casamassima,
and The Tragic Muse. This phase is associated with the
criticism of H. G. Wells that James had “no grasp of politics
or economics”. However, James’s characters are committed
drastic action. His strategy is to report the surface life from
a conventional point-of-view.
In his second phase he wrote What Maisie Knew, The
Turn of the Screw, and The Awkward Age. Again, his
characters turn their back on the commercial world and
finance. They disdain vulgarity as they attempt to enrich
their experience through the “society and art of Europe”,
while bringing qualities such as “habits of mind” of a
puritan morality, timidity and prudence. The new strategy
is to expand the psychological atmosphere. Generally, the
cultivated “American Observer” in his novels comes from
some form of business activity (usually left vague). With this
“phase”, James’s characters remind Flaubert’s whose hero
of. L’éducation sentimentale influenced the delineation
of his own protagonist (he is sensitive, cautious, afraid of
life and sometimes devastatingly ironic).
The third phase contains novels like The Ambassadors,
The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl and two
193
unfinished novels (The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the The invisible “reality” of Joseph Conrad
Past). It is perhaps the apex of his career as a writer. (1857 – 1925)
In 1881 his central care for “structure” is embodied in The
Portrait of a Lady. In the prefaces of his novels he expressed
his intentions and narrative strategies, as the famous “the
figure in the carpet” (the carpet = the solid skeleton of his
stories). The use of “screened consciousness” fascinates
through its limited specific and suggestive nature.
By communicating his vision in a relatively conventional
way, Henry James represents an early stage of Modernism.
His narratives are excellent illustrations of the sort of
distinction Gérard Genette draws within the general
category of “point-of-view”, that is who “sees”/the mood
and who “speaks”/the voice. In his works, there are many
focalizers whose points-of-view orient the narrative
perspective. Hugh Kenner appreciated the focalizer as
“the foreground character over whose shoulder authorial As Henry James, Joseph Conrad is often considered
infallibility permits us to look”. In his turn, Randall Stevenson a transitional figure in the gap between the “ideological
remarked that the “individual consciousness in H. James’s project” of his work and the “work’s literary form”. Cf. Fredric
fiction determines the field of the novel’s vision, rather than Jameson considered upon the new type of narrative
the process through which this vision is communicated”. communication: “Conrad mark a strategic fault-line in
Thus, Henry James’s work represents the transitional the emergence of contemporary narrative. In Conrad we
stage between the 19th century and the Modernist mood can sense the emergence of what will be contemporary
with the notion of “intense perception” and the interest modernism”. Jameson also seems in Lord Jim “a structural
in “the nature of individual vision”. The “authorial voice” breakdown of the older realisms”. In older realisms Marcel
of the 19th century is associated with a haughty position Proust had considered a type of writing within which
in reporting events. The same Randall Stevenson noticed “things are presented as they really are”. Conrad expresses
his objective authorial infallibility even “in reporting the skepticism about how things present themselves:
subjective experience of a fallible individual perceiver”. When Jim faces the Court of Justice he despises the
However, James is an early figure in the transition from facts as Dickens had done in Hard Times: “…Facts! They
objective to subjective. demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything.

194 195
The facts those men were so eager to know had been
visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place
in space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-
hundred ton steamer and twenty-seven minutes by watch
and something else besides, something invisible, a directing
spirit of perdition that dwelt within”.
For Conrad, as for Proust, the “tangible, visible world”
is less significant (less “real”) than the invisible reality
which dwells within. For instance, at Jim’s trial the range
of spectators are there because “the interest that drew
them there was purely psychological”. The inquiry is
preoccupied with asking Jim purely “factual questions”.
The defendant looks taciturn and evasive as an iron box,
no matter how many varying points-of-view are directed
upon him. The inclusion of many narrators (i.e. of various
points-of-view) shows the impossibility of facts, given
the uncertainties of subjective, individual views of the
world and the discrepancies which appear between them.
The conclusions about Jim vary according to context (i.e.
depending upon the point-of-view recorded at the time)
For Conrad “external reality” is not generally “open to
senses” but conflictingly envisaged and impalpable as
perception itself: the central subjects of fiction become
the nature, the motives, and the mental processes of the
perceiver (Marlow, in two novels). The most important
for him are the human scene and the reflected elements.
He breaks down an old realism “that assumes relatively
unproblematic contact between the mind and things as
they really are”. He envisages a technique in which objective
certainties dissolve and the human scene of the novel
is marked with the consciousness of the observing and
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narrating figure. The autobiographical source enforces his
realism in a psychological way.
Conrad’s first writing phase covers the years until 1903
when the early experiences are highlighted: his life at sea
(exotic settings and the passionate poetry of the sea). Here
enter novels like: An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of
Narcissus, Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Typhoon.
The second phase comprises the series of great novels
up until 1920 casting light upon human psychology in
extreme circumstances: Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret
Agent, Under Western Eyes, Victory, and The Rescue.
The third phase may be associated with his great attempt
to create an epic about Napoleonic wars, the English
equivalent of War and Peace, by Lev Tolstoy.
The roots of his novels are widely spreads:
a. The use of exotic/remote places and extreme situations
against an experimental environment (to isolate man from
society and to examine his behaviour while confronting nature
and himself, i.e. his own nature in special circumstances)
b. An approach to the “sense of evil” whose nature
cannot be readily grasped but it is buried deep into the
characters’ souls and hearts, bursting out under straining
circumstances. This approach is framed by the conflict
between “wills” and “morals”.
The romantic attitude modifies his realism through
his emotional approach towards moral virtues and vices.
Romance and realism fuse in support of the idea that the
only salvation is human solidarity: “…The temporal world
rests on a few simple ideas…It rests notably on the idea
of fidelity”. The other source of the romantic element is his
fascination with the oddities and mysteries of the world (the
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world untouched by civilization). The romantic atmosphere D.H. Lawrence and the dangers of modernism
is emphasized by the sea, the remote places and primitive
rites and rituals. Anti-romantic drives are also visible in the
ironic mode (he made reality prevail over illusion).
Communicational narrative strategies: he further
departs from conversations (a break from earlier interest
and conventions). In conclusion:
a) no narrator is omniscient
b) every voice is idiosyncratic and highly particularized
in style and language
c) the breakdown of older realism is specifically structural,
i.e. depending on a construction which juxtaposes disparate
views of the world (to make inescapable the conflicts
between them and the uncertainties of perception itself )
d) conflicting (colliding) views leave no secure place in
the world. Context disperses and reality is known by each In 1920, D.H. Lawrence indirectly expressed his suspicion
individual. in Women in Love as to the modernism’s dehumanizing
Conrad avoided direct, extended denotation of objective premises: “There was a new world, a new order, strict,
reality and concentrated upon the means through which terrible, inhuman […], a great and perfect system that
reality is perceived: 1. the reflection in the individual mind;
the subject life to pure mathematical principles”. Later on,
2. the effect in his writing upon a narrator whose responses
in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928, he launched the same
to the world, his re-telling from his experience form the
warnings: “soon there’ll be no for men on the face of the
substance of the novels.
earth, it’ll be only machines” two years later, in The State
of Funk, he invoked the necessity to strengthen the vitality
of feelings against the robot-like attitudes of capitalist
professionals: “Social changes interest me and trouble me,
but it is not my field. I know a change is coming and I know
we must have a more generous, a more human system
based on life values and not on money values […]. My
fields are now ‘fields’ inside men, and to make new feelings
conscious […]. What really torments civilized people is

198 199
that they are full of feelings they know nothing about it;
they can realize them, they can’t fulfil them, they can’t live
them. And so, they are tortured, and feelings are a form of
vital energy”.
On one hand, D.H. Lawrence’s work sums up the progress
in time and history from “timing” with the cyclic life of
seasons or “agricultural stage of human civilization” (Randall
Stevenson, 1990), from “collective time”, characteristic of
premodern communities, to the individualized, fragmented
time, characteristic of modern societies of capitalist
organization.
On other hand, D.H. Lawrence’s work is the highest
expression, in the English literature of the first half of the
20th century, of Modernism’s disposition against time on
the clock, or what Fredric Jameson defines as “a Utopian
compensation for the logic and dynamics of capitalism”.
The Rainbow (1915) charts the process of gradual
fragmentation in the “organic” (agricultural community) and
the “new timing” of the “logic and dynamics of capitalism”
and unveils the gradual emergence of a scale of events
oriented around an individual who is separated from either
nature or from the full unity of a society. This is represented
as both the summing up of the character of the “agricultural
stage” and by the symbolical representation of “time split”
between the “personal life” and the “events of history”.
The integral continuity of the Brangwen family in
The Rainbow and Women in Love is emphasized by the
biblical vocabulary ruptured by the effects of the Industrial
Revolution (i.e. “the canal”, “the cut”, “the railroad” cut within
the fields, the crops extinguished by the “cuts”: they all “cut”
the Brangwens in space and time from a part of their land,
200
from their past. Ursula Brangwen is outside the “established
cycles”, uncertain and alone, bereft of shared values and a
sustaining community, ejected from a secure society and
a collective historical life: “I have no father, no mother, no
lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do
not belong to Beldover, nor to Nottingham, nor to England,
nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled
and entangled in them, but they are unreal”.
Lawrence’s way of finding unit between nature-society-
individual and human life is perceived “at the level of
vision and hope” (Randall Stevenson) in an image of “a
new germination” for Ursula’s society as a whole, a vision
about the “redeeming power of [human] relationships able
to restore the spirit and nature of a whole civilization”.
This is the context in which one may understand and
interpret D. H. Lawrence’s supposed “sex” obsession. It is,
actually, Lawrence’s unconventional integration of sex with
other components of experience that are usually regarded
as unrelated to it. Moreover, he presented all perceptions
(including sex) not as we “rationalize” (i.e. conceptualize)
them, but as they come to us with:
– the incongruous juxtaposition;
– the intricate relationships;
– the contamination;
– the obscure emotions.
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 a. Time and the “new timing”
The dramatic sense of time is closely associated with D.H.
Lawrence’s attempt to integrate feelings (that is, emotions)
into the more complex experience of life. “Feelings” are
not outside political implications and his novels exhibit
sequential efforts to understand the complex external
forces affecting those feelings, in an effort to trace their
effect on our social history.
Lawrence was deeply concerned with the origins of
industrialism (“forcing all human energy into a competition
of mere acquisition”), with its effects over the individuals and
on the whole society by promoting anti-aesthetic cityscapes
(“The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters
of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the
condemning of the workers to ugliness, meanness and
formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion,
ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly ideals,
ugly relationship between workers and employers. The
human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread”.
The attempt to regain the “source of all living”, “the quick
of the self” (or basis of individuality) could be victorious
through the interchange and meeting and mingling of
man and women (“our civilization has almost destroyed
the natural flow of common sympathy between men and
men, and men and women. And it is this that I want to
restore into life”).
Lawrence’s particular thinking about “social insertions”
connects chronological time (the “new timing”) with
oppression and domination of nature. The aesthetics of
D. H. Lawrence brings him close to some contemporary
202
“eco-feminist” writers (the association of “mind-‘body” split;
the privileging of mind over matter). He was influenced
by the anthropologist Jane Harrison, whom Virginia Woolf
also admired.
Lawrence borrowed from Harrison two major ideas: (a)
the damage instilled by technology and the displacement
of the worshipping of “Mother-Earth” as a manifestation
of mind-matter split and (b) the emphasis on humanity’s
kinship with the rest of the earth (i.e. the tendency to
ascribe human emotions to animals and inanimate objects).
The poem Manifesto, 1917, launches the idea that art
may reach beyond human perception by admitting the
unknown, the “non-knowledge”.
In The Rainbow, this idea is illustrated by the deconstruc­
tion of the whole concept of progress: the image of the
railway as an emblem of progress (on which much of the
19th century literature relied) changes into a blind self-
perpetuating instrumentality: the emphasis on the presence
of the material world. This image is also bound up by the
modernist attempt to subvert linearity (Randall Stevenson,
1990) and it is source of an aesthetics of organic wholeness,
reinforced by D.H. Lawrence’s desire to escape linearity, or
the linear version of time (the “new timing of clocks and
calendars”, Randall Stevenson, 1990):
“Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight
line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan
conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it
allows movement upwards and downwards and allows for
a complete change of state of mind, at any moment. One
cycle finished we can drop or rise to another level, and be
it a new world at once” (Apocalypse, 1931).
203
 Linearity is represented in imagery, in both The Rainbow
and Women in Love, by “chains” of any kind, metaphoric
chains of cause and effect; houses seen as “crawling like
some serpent up the hill” and the insidious linearity of the
“expanding Midlands “, oppressive and dehumanizing.
b. Subordination of style and narrative technique
to the idea of time and the “new timing”
The present of individual lives is subordinated to
narrative: three stories of the same family-in-progress are
presented. The style consists of repetition-with-variation,
during which the “concrete present” is repressed in favour
of an intangible future. Lawrence came with a new view on
realism, with emphasis on presence. He linked realism to
the exploitation/corrosion of the physical world: a release
of “Difference” is central to what he calls “the subterfuge
of art”, his art being a celebration of “difference”.
D.H. Lawrence’s new view on realism opposes the linear
conception of time that is central to realism in art, because
forms are sequence bound (and incomplete at any given
moment in time). Only when time and space are seen to
be homogenous “it becomes possible to chart both the
difference and similarities” (Anne Fernihough, 1993). Thus,
the realist project as a rationalistic/scientific project can be
seen to imply an erosion of presentness.
Lawrence’s realist project opposes the modern process
of progressive thought, “the old pagan process of rotary-
image” (Anne Fernihough, 1993), defined by Lawrence
himself in Apocalypse, 1931: “Every image fulfils its own
204
little cycle of action and of meaning, then is superseded by
another image”. As a matter of consequence, every image is
a picture-graph, and the connection between images will
be made, more or less differently, by every reader:
a) to allow the mind to move in cycles;
b) to move and fro and over a cluster of images;
c) to reject abstraction from the concrete, the individual
case (which deprives objects of completeness)
c. Lawrence’s symbols (images) preserve
an ontological status
A close reading of his writings reveals the discrepancy
between “theory” (that is, Fantasia of the Unconscious/1922;
Apocalypse/1931) and practice. In theory, the symbols are
organic units of consciousness, partaking of the natural,
material world. In practice, Lawrence’s symbol seems to
cause rift/gap between art-work and world.
Lawrence himself defined the symbol in opposition to
allegory, to a “realist”, “mimetic” model of language. He
attacks “photographic” or “illusionist art”, criticizing “the
snapshot vision” because it naturalizes or assumes an
essential grip on the world, thus making its own ideological
content: “We have learned to see ourselves for what we are,
as the sun sees […]. We see as the all-seeing Eye sees with
its universal vision. And we are what is seen […]”.
Allegory is establishing one-to-one link with the
phenomenal world, appropriates it in way which symbolism
does not. Henceforth, Lawrence’s symbol does not split the
sign into “signifier” and “signified”. It initiates a different kind
205
of split within the sign as the relationship between “signifier”
and “signified” is problematized. Hence, the notion that
there is some unarticulated, mysterious meaning which
is, in some way, synonymous to the text itself.
d. Characteristics of communication
in D. H. Lawrence’s novels:
(1) symbols communicate some mystical notion of
“Being” encompassing a proliferation of meanings and
ideologies, none of which is given the final say;
(2) symbols are “organic units of consciousness” and
their value is dynamic, emotional and not simply mental
because they reflect the characters’ subjective experience
as a dramatic assimilation of some objective experiences
“translated” into symbols or “thematic metaphors” (i.e. a
complex of feelings and thought going beyond reference
and the limits of discourse, not only images but repetition,
juxtaposition, structure);
(3) a holistic vision upon art-language: the need for
semantic fluidity. Lawrence’s theory of “art-speech” only
makes sense as a theory of reading (i.e. “it is the critic’s task
to save the tale from the artist who created it”).
The effects of the longed for communicability are the
dynamic conception of time and change and the repudiation
of the concept of “progress of mankind”, which is replaced
by “cyclical territories of time” (R. Stevenson), traditionally
associated with the “organic”, i.e. Nature and Women.
Lawrence did not separate art from political message
completely, but he expressed the rebellion of life against
206
convention: “A book only lives while it has power to move
us, and move us differently, so long as we find it different
every time we read it”.
e. D.H. Lawrence’s attitude to language
Considerations upon language are implicit in the
dynamics of linearity and bipolarity (at work in The Rainbow)
and they continue to figure in the plot construction of
Women in Love, 1920. Lawrence’s suspicion of language
is reflected in the “verbal reticence” (Katherine Hayles,
1984) of the characters. The characters are even reluctant
to acknowledge their experiences in words: “It was so
significant such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality
that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away
the remembrance and the knowledge. They hid away the
remembrance and the knowledge” (Women in Love).
Lawrence’s attempt to master language is reflected in the
use of the language beyond language in the paradoxical
imagery, in which language becomes a “non-verbal gesture”
or even a “dumb-show” (K. Hayles, 1984): “There was always
confusion in speech. Yet it must be spoken. Whichever way
one moved, if one were to move forwards, one must break
through. And to know, to give utterance, was to break a
way through the walls of the person as an infant in labour
strives through the walls of the womb” (Women in Love).
The womb stands for the need to give utterance; it provides
the link between language and the differentiation of the
Self from the Mother.
Women in love (1916) was published in 1920. It stands
for Lawrence’s need of a new mood. This novel explored
207
the possibility intimated in the last page of The Rainbow:
carrying the glamour organic life into the ugliness of society,
i.e. extending the satisfactory sensuous experience into a
chaotic world: “And the rainbow stood on the earth. She
knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and
separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living
still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would
quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off the horny
covering of disintegration, that new, clean naked bodies
would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising
in the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She
(Ursula) saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture,
the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept
away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting
to over-arching heaven”.
Lawrence’s conviction that our culture is disintegrating
was confirmed by the war and the need of coming to
terms with death (the natural and unavoidable death
which haunted him in his early books complicated by the
death agonies of an epoch). This was one of his favourite
themes. One must accommodate oneself not only to the
rhythms of individual life (Sons and Lovers), but also to the
rhythms of social growth (The Rainbow), of community
alteration (Women in Love). The individual caught in a
disintegration phase of history might live his/her own life
under the shadow of death.
Women in Love is a successful portrayal (through the feeling
of individuals) of the death of a whole culture: an asserting
case of the times. Therefore society and culture are reflected in
each individual. The working out of personal difficulties should
provide an interpretation of the external world:
208
1. He saw his work as a search for a better way of living;
2. He thought of himself as approaching rather than
arriving at an ever elusive truth;
3. He conceived the characters of the novel working
out their salvations according to the nature of each. They
are divided into persons: a) who refuse to see our culture
as in a degenerating phase; b) persons accepting that
degeneration was an end in itself; c) persons who regard
degeneration as a precondition of a new development.
f. Postmodernist traits of Lawrence’s works
There are postmodern characteristics of these characters:
strong individualism, power is grasped as the only reality
in the world of inward contradiction, non-submittal to an
exaggerated social order.
For example:
Skrebensky: “…you can’t live unless you come in line
somewhere” (The Rainbow).
Gerald: “What mattered was the pure instrumentally of
the individual. As of a man as of a knife: does it cut well?”
(Women in Love).
Women in Love relates about submittal to an inhuman
system: “the first great phase in the substitution of the
mechanical principle for the organic”. The lotus flower is
a symbolic motif, as its roots are in the mud and its flower
in the sun.
For instance, Hermione and Ursula develop relationships
to men which grow on a base of cynicism and fear: “the
perverse joy of brutality” (they would live conventionally on
209
the surface). Hermione represents the cultural aristocracy flux of the novel’s unified “life forms”. And yet, D. H.
of the world; her intellectual liberalism is an effort to build Lawrence was a dogmatic, metaphysically absolutist, a
a verbal defence, to steady herself as a vulnerable person radically dualistic thinker fascinated by “mechanism” and
within an insecure class. Ursula is fluid and subtle; she has “disintegration”.
gone through a deadening shock and has emerged with D.H. Lawrence’s social organism rejected the atomistic,
greater integrity: “The lurid glow of death colours life more mechanistic ideologies of industrial capitalism to which he
vividly than the virtue of the past”. opposed values of liberal tradition and the protest against
Then, Lawrence writes dynamically contradictory texts; the society of “products”.
there are tensions, inconclusiveness, and abrupt change All in all, Women in Love describes the collapse of the
of perspectives. The characters are subjected to irony and liberal humanist heritage, with its idealism and “personal”
ridicule (Birkin makes contradictory remarks at different values, clearing the way for the “dark gods” of discipline,
points in the novel). action, hierarchy, individual separateness, mystical
Some of his novels “suffer” from radical indeterminacy. impersonality and pragmatism.
Gamini Salgado remarks that “Lawrence’s novel does not
merely deploy a series of paradoxes and contradictions in the
service of a larger unity. It is certainly paradoxical because
it is shot through with the continuous and continually felt
tension between the necessity of articulating a vision and
its impossibility and sometimes its undesirability”. The text’s
radical indeterminacy is a function of its own impossible
desire:
a) to achieve “the passionate struggle into conscious
being”;
b) to struggle for “verbal consciousness” which should
not be left out in art;
c) to articulate the impossible: at once the propagation
and the negation of its philosophy of life;
d) the polyvocal, heteroglossic discourse

The elements of the novel are interrelated: they spurn

dogma and metaphysical absolutes tracing the sensuous

210 211
 Virginia Woolf and the Negotiation with Form
In resorting to the stream-of-consciousness technique,
Virginia Woolf took into consideration auto-referentiality,
while she also contested the recognizable autobiographic
elements in her writings:
1) “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his
life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works”.
2) “[if ] life has a base it is memory”.
3) “Fiction exaggerates and selects so that to read back
from the work to life is a dedicated task”.
Walter Benjamin, in A Small History of Photography,
1931, explained the frame of the authorial eye: “For it is
another nature that speaks to the camera than to the
eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human
consciousness gives way to a space informed by the
unconscious […]. We have some idea what is involved in
the act of walking, if only in general terms we have no idea
at all what happens during the fraction of a second when
212
a person steps out. Photography with its devices of slow
motion and enlargement reveals the secret. It is through
photography that we first discover the existence of this
optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual
unconsciousness through psychoanalysis”.
G. E. Moore’s famous The Refutation of Idealism, which
he published at the age of thirty in 1903, illustrates the
relevance of his epistemology on V. Woolf’s fiction. In this
work, Moore as a modern philosophical realist criticized not
the idealist contention that really was spiritual (he said he
devoutly hoped it was) but their central assumption that
everything was mental because “to be is to be perceived”.
Moore argued that the assumption is contradictory because:
a) “we must distinguish between consciousness and the
objects of consciousness that exist independently of it”, and
thus he maintained the position of modern philosophical
realism (as opposed to medieval).
b) he is not a materialist because he asserts the non-
material reality of consciousness;
c) he is not an idealist because he asserts the separate
reality of material objects;
d) his basic point is the distinction between the act and
the object of consciousness.
Bertrand Russell explained this versatile philosophical
undertaking: “What I think at first chiefly interested Moore was
the independence of fact from knowledge and the rejection
of the whole Kantian apparatus of a priori institutions and
categories, moulding experience but no other world”.
Moore believed (and did not alter) all his life in his
assumption of the basic dualism of consciousness and
its objects. He is, along with Henry James and Henri
213
Bergson, a philosopher of consciousness. For him, the
very ideals of this ethics are the states of consciousness.
It is the epistemological dualism, with its distinction of
fact from knowing, that becomes a basic philosophical
presupposition of Woolf’s criticism and fiction.
Moore’s realism and V. Woolf’s critical theory mirror each
other. V. Woolf’s theory can be seen in her essay Modern
Fiction (1919). Here, she attacked “the literary materialists” as
she called Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy and she attended
that “other reality” that she described as “a luminous halo,
a semi-transparent envelope”. In her opinion, the “literary
materialists” have ignored the life of consciousness; they
were more interested in “the fabric of things” instead of
“recording the atoms as they fall upon the mind in order in
which they fall […] the pattern […] however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident
scores upon the consciousness”.
V. Woolf’s emphasis on consciousness and her critique of
“literary materialists” does not make her an idealist. Neither
had she neglected her concern with sense impressions, but
this does make her an empiricist or materialist. She is instead
a realist (Rosenbaum, Aspects of Bloomsbury, London,
1998, Macmillan). This is relevant for her first experimental
stories and sketches: how Moore’s realism helped her to
write about the life of consciousness that the Edwardian
materialistic novelists missed. Most of the stories in Monday
or Tuesday are studies for the way consciousness combines
with what it perceives to produce with those states of
mind that V. Woolf felt fiction should be about: truth is to
be found in both the correspondence of the deliverances
of consciousness with external reality and the coherence
214
of mystical elements. Consciousness is intermingled with
external reality and the coherence of mystical moments.
Her first published story, The Mark on the Wall, combines
the reveries or trains of thought (as they are called in the
story), and are represented by a technique that Woolf herself
said in her Diary allowed “one thing to open to the other”.
Her commentators described it as stream of consciousness
technique. It is a label that was indiscriminately affixed to
such different writers as Joyce, Faulkner, but it is not what
Woolf herself meant by the phrase. In her essay Middlebrow
she refers to “lapsing into that stream which people call, so
oddly, consciousness, and gathering wool from the sheep
[…]”. Woolf’s stream of consciousness resembles Joyce’s only
in its depiction of internal subjective awareness and in the
representation of thoughts and feelings as opening out of
one another. She never abandons punctuation syntax and
rarely tries to represent the subconscious. They are usually
presented in the 3rd person (i.e. “one” not “I” is her favourite
pronoun). In her Diary she referred to her technique in To
the Lighthouse as oratio obliqua and her technique in The
Waves she described as “soliloquies”. The sequence she
represents in these novels owes more to John Locke and
Laurence Sterne that they do to Freud. It is more useful to
think of Woolf’s representations of consciousness in terms of
states rather than streams. In these “states” consciousness is
not chopped up but represented as organic whole (William
James also used the images of a halo and a penumbra to
illustrate his conception of consciousness).
The term stream-of-consciousness has a complex
historical background. In 1918, in a critical review of early
volumes of Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair
215
suggested that: “In this series there is no drama, no situation,
and no scene. Nothing happens. It’s just life going on and
on […]. It is the character’s stream of consciousness going
on and on. And it neither is there any grossly discernible
beginning or middle or end”. Sinclair may have borrowed
the concepts from the philosophy of William James, that is:
“[…] consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in
bits […] it is nothing jointed; it flows as ‘a river’ or a stream”.
There was the claim that “stream the consciousness” was
the invention of Edouard Dujardin (for Valery Larbaud, in
1925, the term indicated: “a forceful and rapid expression
of the most intimate and spontaneous thoughts, ones
which seemed to be formed beyond consciousness and
seemed out of organized discourse […] a form which
makes it possible to reveal and seize upon the welling up
of thoughts so deep within the self”.
This form’s novelty is that it was a technical breakthrough:
a radical new way of forceful expression of thought, that
is a more direct, intimate entry to consciousness, a kind
of natural, logical continuation of earlier techniques of
recording thoughts, deep within the self. Henry James
focused his fiction around the mind and experience of
a single individual. D. H. Lawrence, Fox Madox Ford and
Dorothy Richardson have expanded its use to allow narrative
an extensive contact with the inner voice of characters.
In Modernist Fiction (1990) Randall Stevenson stated that
“[…] the appearance of stream of consciousness in English
may thus be seen not only as a breakthrough, but as an
extension of the evolving literary history, and the evolution
in fictional language […] as a natural consummation of a
general trend from objective to subjective”.
216
The work of a woman writer representing a “female”
character was signalled by Henry James for the first time
in 1899. He referred to “the revolution taking place in the
position and outlook of women and the new possibilities
for fiction that would result”. The 1920’s characters are
generally females “figurations of male anxiety about
women’s rejection of conventional ‘designed conduct’”
(Randall Stevenson, 1990). D. H. Lawrence was the writer
more sympathetically interested in what he called “woman
becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own
initiative”.
V. Woolf took the initiative to create this type of character:
a female attitude “alien and critical” (A Room of One’s Own)
to her background. She developed new narrative forms
in which the “workings” of consciousness, split away from
eternal reality, and the objective world could be fruitfully
sustained and explored.
The source of V. Woolf’s change of outlook and vision
were: a) family background and education; b) the aftermath
of WW I with the feeling of insecurity and the experience
of rejection of the rational, the emphasis on irrational and
unconscious; c) a new view upon “reality” as a “complex
lying beneath the surface of things” and the “human brain”
defined as the “location” of a “wonderer through time”. V.
Woolf, J. Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson
appeared to be united by their reaction against the
“naturalist” tradition and sustained a new meaning of reality
and “the real”.
In Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown V. Woolf stated that the
distinctive quality of a novelist is the permanent interest in
character itself, Woolf does not maintain that the “realistic”
217
manner of writing is appropriate, but a character’s mind is
employed instead and “eyes to see the world through”. She
was fascinated with the new technologies of her age (the
camera, film): “[…] the others are but the reflections who
act upon the consciousness of the main characters”. The
experience and “feeling” of a community are crucial: each
of us is a part of a “fluid life” and therefore “a part of one
another”. The unifying factors are “the connected incidents”
and ‘the catcher” (the consciousness of her characters
“moving up and down”).
The Woolfian characters are tied together by different
incidents: “tunnelling” in their past by stream of consciousness
from an objective position of authorial report to unexplained
events, representative for those characters and for many
more, suggesting the frame of reference of somebody’s
mind. This voice never replaces the author’s completely.
In The Waves (1931) she experienced interior monologue:
thoughts and characters are presented in the first person,
in great detail and uninterrupted by an authorial voice.
In exchange, thoughts are carefully organized, clearly
expressed and show a sophisticated capacity to find
metaphors for states of mind. This gives the novel a carefully
chose structure and, as accomplishment, it is as close as any
novel to the condition of poetry: “As in much of Woolf’s work,
subjective experience forms the substance of appropriate
term for the style in which it is recorded”. (R. Stevenson, 1992)
By comparison with stream of consciousness, interior
monologue shows a relatively conventional form (repeated
speech or thought, representation of “innermost flame
of mind”, a thought of herself that “forms the indirect
discourse”.
218
To the Lighthouse (1927) belongs to the type of oratio
obliqua (indirect speech). This technique was defined by
J. Hillis Miller “a sensitive register for communicating inner
experience”.
Randall Stevenson praised the same quality of indirect­
ness: “[…] the indirect discourse, the consciousness of the
narrator married to the consciousness of the character and
speaking for it […] To the Lighthouse is a masterwork of
the exploration of consciousness of others with the tool
of indirect discourse”.
This novel presents Woolf’s capacity to reach “the quick
of the mind” opposed to the external world. Mrs. Ramsey
is mentally dissociated from “the moment”, free to float
like “the hawk”, the flag, the fume. The similes describe
“the character’s mind”. V. Woolf’s characters, as framed and
figured in this work, are eager “to snare” the significant,
the transcending moment as it flies. Her attitude to life
experience is aesthetic.
According to Randall Stevenson (1992), V. Woolf’s style
may be defined as a “marriage” as well between the voice of
the narrator and character moving from indirect discourse
to stream of consciousness.
Virginia Woolf wrote an unsigned essay about the
modern novel, in which she remarked:
a) “the inner life exists so richly that nothing could be
said to equal it in direct speech”.
b) “[…] the task of the novelist is to convey this varying,
this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit (‘the semi-
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning
of consciousness to the end’) with as little mixture of the
alien”;
219
 a. The tense relationship between Experiment
and Tradition
Virginia Woolf shared part of the early 20th century avant-
garde movement’s idea that realist narratives were obsolete
and trite. In Mr. Bennet and Mrs Brown (1924) she attacked
the realist tradition of novel writing: the documentary
inventory of social aspects and the fictional characters in
which the essence of personality escaped the writer. In
Modern Fiction (1925) reality as actually experienced by
each of us is compared to “a myriad of impressions - trivial,
fantastic, evanescent with the sharpness of steel”. She asked
herself and the world: “is it not the task of the novelist to
convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display,
with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?”
The opposition between the “realist” absorption of the
materiality of things and “the uncircumscribed spirit” as
artistic consciousness of subjective reality is a reaction
of the modernist writers against consumerism and mass
production of their culture. Modernist art was “new” and
aimed to shock bourgeois tastes. Woolf was against the
orderly pattern imposed on life by realist fiction whereas
Conrad (experimenting with narrative form) developed his
modernist techniques in the service of literary art defined
as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of
justice to the visible universe by bringing to light the truth,
manifold and one, underlying its every aspect…The artist,
then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and
makes his appeal” (1897).
In 1930 James Joyce explained that his aim in Ulysses
(1922) was to present a hero as “a complete human being”
220
seen from all sides, in all human relationships, “an anatomical
human body that lives in and moves through space and is
the home of a full human personality”. Modernist writers
wrote mainly out of a “troubled” sense that “reality” (whether
material or psychological) was elusive, complex, multiple
and unstable. Consequently, the modernist artists believed
that the aim of their art was to convey knowledge, by
some new aesthetic means. Their quarrel with realism is
an epistemological and an aesthetic one.
In relation to realism and realism, Virginia Woolf nuanced
the debate: “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience
of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his
works”; and “[if ] life has a base it is memory”; but, in the
same time, “[…] fiction exaggerates and selects so that to
read back from the work to life is a delicate task”. It means
that biography becomes completely melt into art.
In 1931, Walter Benjamin made the connection between
photography and psychoanalysis in A Small History of
Photography: “For it is another nature that speaks to the
camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space
informed by human consciousness gives way to a space
informed by the unconscious […]. We have some idea what
is involved in the act of walking, if only in general terms
we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of
a second when a person steps out. Photography with its
devices of slow motion and enlargement reveals the secret. It
is through photography that we first discover the existence
of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual
unconsciousness through psychoanalysis”.
This flickering technique was applied by Virginia Woolf,
who may have benefited from the example of Ulysses. She
221
admired Joyce for what she called his attempts to “come
to the quick of the mind” and to “reveal the flickerings of
that innermost flame which flashes its messages through
the brain”. She had also reservations about Ulysses but
she defined it as “modern” (equivocal feelings for Joyce,
recording in her Diary that Ulysses is “a misfire…diffuse,
brackish….pretentious”. In her conception, modernist
writing must be “a kind of writing able to alter its conventions
and generate new styles”, to accommodate the tastes of
the new age. Modern is the writer who recognizes that
“the proper stuff for fiction is a little other than custom
would have us believe it” whereas the most prominent
and successful novelists” of the period [Bennett, Wells,
Galsworthy] remained restricted in the outmoded fictional
conventions.
By 1926, Thomas Hardy, the last of the Victorian writers,
admitted the great, brutal change, emphasizing the
conventional fiction’s chronological construction: “They’ve
changed everything now…We used to think there was a
beginning, a middle and an end”.
V. Woolf’s stylistic and structural innovation in the novel
of the 1920’s was generated by previous canon changes.
The year 1908, sometime before Joyce and Woolf began
publishing, is indicated by critics and literary historians as a
time when: “…the old fixed canons of taste [had] lost their
validity….the novelist ignored the earlier conventions”. But
V. Woolf saw these innovations less unique: “In the course
of the centuries […] we do not come to write better; all that
we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this
direction, now in that”. For instance, the departures from the
serial, chronological construction of story-telling (its usual
222
beginning, middle and end) are by no means unique in the
history of fiction. Again, the stream of consciousness was
extensively used in French fiction in the late 19th century
(and Dickens used it in Pickwick Papers/1837). In English
literature it was extensively used by the 1920’s modernist
writers (Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and V. Woolf ).
The dissolution of conventions of construction equally
manifest in the European writing and painting:
l changes were not made in their subject or theme, or in
the nature of what was represented;
l changes were made in the form and structure of the
representation, the style and strategy of art itself. Pablo
Picasso, in Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1906-07),
abandons the tradition of seeing things from a single
point in space. There results an apparent multiplication
of points of view, with many sides of an image in the
same picture);
– the Post-Impressionist painting exhibition takes place
in London late in 1910. V. Woolf registers the “change of
sensibility” (“human character changed”, Collected Essays, I).
Many contemporary commentators confirmed this
change as well as the new challenges to the period’s life
and thinking:
(a) as early as 1880, F. Nietzsche in Premises of the
Machine Age: “The press, the machine, the railway, the
telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion
no one has yet dared to draw”;
(b) 1913, in The Futurist Manifesto, the Italian Futurist
F.T. Marinetti talked about: “…the complete renewal of
human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries
of science. Those people who today make use of the
223
telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the
bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner,
the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis
of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that the various
means of communication, transportation and information
have a decisive influence on the psyche”. He announced
the shrinkage of time and space owing to faster ways
of communication and travelling: “The earth shrunk by
speed…Time and Space died yesterday…because we have
created eternal, omnipresent speed”.
(c) an epistemological shift: from relative confidence
to a sense of unreliability and uncertainty in the means
by which reality is apprehended by thought (in the 1920’s
Mikhail Bakhtin while referring to Einstein’s ideas, coined
the term chronotope (literally “time-space”) as a central
category employed in his analysis of the novel.
b. The relevance of G. E. Moore epistemology
for V. Woolf’s fiction
In The Refutation of Idealism (1903), G. E. Moore’s
criticized the central assumption that everything was mental
because “to be is to be perceived”. Moore argued that the
assumption is contradictory because:
a) “we must distinguish between consciousness and the
objects of consciousness that exist independently of it, and
thus he maintained the position of modern philosophical
realism (as opposed to medieval);
b) he is not a materialist because he asserts the non-
material reality of consciousness;
224
c) he is not an idealist because he asserts the separate
reality of material objects;
d) his basic point is the distinction between the act and
the object of consciousness.
Moore believed all his life in his assumption of the basic
dualism of consciousness and its objects. He is, along
with Henry James and Henri Bergson, a philosopher of
consciousness. The very ideals of his ethics are states of
consciousness. It is this epistemological dualism, with its
distinction of fact from knowing, that becomes a basic
philosophical presupposition of Virginia criticism and
fiction.
c. Moore’s realism and V. Woolf’s critical theory
V. Woolf’s theory can be read in her essay Modern Fiction
(1919):
(a) she attacked “the literary materialists” as she called
Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy and she attended that “other
reality” that she described as “a luminous halo, a semi–
transparent envelope”;
(b) the “literary materialists” have ignored the life of
consciousness; they were more interested in “the fabric of
things” instead of recording “the atoms as they fall upon
the mind in the order in which they fall […] the pattern […]
however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which
each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness”;
(c) her emphasis on consciousness and her critique of
“literary materialists” does not make her an idealist; neither
had she neglected her concern with sense impressions that
225
could make her an empiricist or materialist. She is instead a
realist (S. P. Rosenbaum, Aspects of Bloomsbury, London:
1998, Macmillan). This is relevant for her first experimental
stories and sketches: how Moore’s realism helped her to
write about the life of consciousness. Most of the stories in
Monday or Tuesday are studies of the way consciousness
combines with what it perceives to produce with those
states of mind that V. Woolf felt fiction should be about:
truth is to be found in both the correspondence of the
deliverances of consciousness with external reality and
the coherence of mystical moments;
(d) Her first published story, The Mark on the Wall,
combines the reveries or trains of thought (as they are called
in the story), and are represented by a technique that V.
Woolf herself said in her Diary allowed “one thing to open
to the other”. Her commentators described it as stream of
consciousness technique. It is a label that is indiscriminately
affixed to such different writers as Joyce, Faulkner, but it is
not what V. Woolf herself meant by the phrase: in her essay
Middlebrow she refers to “lapsing into that stream which
people call, so oddly, consciousness, and gathering wool
from the sheep […]”
(e) Woolf’s stream of consciousness resembles Joyce’s
only in its depiction of internal subjective awareness and in
the representation of thoughts and feelings as opening out of
one another. She never abandons punctuation and syntax
and rarely tries to represent the subconscious. Characters
are usually presented in the 3rd person (for example, “one”
not “I” is her favourite pronoun). In her Diary she referred to
her technique in To the Lighthouse as oratio obliqua and
her technique in The Waves she described as soliloquies.
226
The sequence she represents in these novels owes
more to John Locke and Laurence Sterne than they do to
Freud. It is more useful to think of Woolf’s representations of
consciousness in terms of states rather than streams. In these
“states” consciousness is not chopped up but represented
as organic whole (William James also used the images
of a halo and a penumbra to illustrate his conception of
consciousness). For instance, Lily Briscoe’s discovery in To
the Lighthouse of the central role of memory: “the fertile
moments in the present which open doors upon the past”.
Division and continuity compete in V. Woolf’s construction,
as distinctions between fluidity and division, atom and
flux are made. She alternates between characters’ freely
associative thoughts/memories (recollections) and sections
which intrude upon them to reflect the passage of time
throughout a single day in a natural world: “[…] is life very
solid or shifting? I’m haunted by the two contradictions.
This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to
the bottom of the world - this moment I stand on. Also it
is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on
the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one
flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow
successive and continuous we human beings” (A Writer’s
Diary).
There is a switching relation between the successive
and the continuous, between “the myriad of impressions”,
“the incessant shower of innumerable atoms” and “the
luminous halo”. For instance, in To the Lighthouse Mrs.
Ramsey ponders and then thinks of “little separate incidents
which one lived one by one” and which have a wave-particle
duality: “[become] curled and whole like a wave”, seeing “the
227
eternal passing and flowing of the characters’ thoughts and
memories”. In the section Time Passes there are intruding
memories: “there falls the beam of the lighthouse with its
clock-like rhythm of recurrence, the shadow of time and
history”.
The perception of time in Mrs Dalloway is marked by
the irrevocable circles of Big Ben’s chimes, falling across the
novel’s “fabric of thoughts”. The chimes mix time sequences
with the stream of consciousness: “Shredding and slicing,
dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled
at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority,
and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a
sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far
diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a
shop in Oxford street, announced genially and fraternally
[…] that it was half past one”.
Woolf’s view of “clocks of Harley Street” and the coalescence
of the beam of the lighthouse with its clock-like rhythm are
displays of a new sense (in the early 20th century) of “a time
ratified by Greenwich”, closely connected with commerce,
goods production: of time commodified and turned into
saleable goods: time as a continuum of space views of time
in the mind, or reflected by the mental as something whole
or continuous.
In 1990 Randall Stevenson remarked in Modernist
Fiction that “[…] the appearance of stream of consciousness
in English may thus be seen not only as a breakthrough,
but as an extension of the evolving literary history, and the
evolution in fictional language […] as a natural consumma­
tion of general trends from objective to subjective”.
228
d. Femininity as protagonist
The female character in the novel as the work of a woman
writer representing a “female” character was signalled by
Henry James for the first time in 1899. He referred to “the
revolution taking place in the position and outlook of
women and the new possibilities for fiction that would
result”.
The 1920’s characters are generally females, “figurations
of male anxiety about women’s rejection of conventional
‘design conduct”, as Randall Stevenson put it. D. H. Lawrence
was the writer more sympathetically interested in what
he called “woman becoming individual, self-responsible,
taking her own initiative”.
V. Woolf took such an initiative by creating a female
attitude, “alien and critical” (A Room of One’s Own, 1926)
to her background. She developed new narrative forms
in which the “workings” of consciousness, split away from
eternal reality and from the objective world, could be
fruitfully sustained and explored.
The sources of V. Woolf’s change of outlook and vision
are: (a) family background and education (her father was
a critic and biographer, her mother: a sociologist and
historian); (b) the aftermath of WWI with the feeling of
insecurity and the experience of rejection of the rational,
the emphasis on irrational and unconscious; (c) a new
view upon “reality” as a “complex lying beneath the surface
of things” and the “human brain” defined as a “wanderer
through time”.
Actually, V. Woolf, J. Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy
Richardson appeared to be united by their reaction against
229
the “naturalist” tradition and sustained a new meaning of
reality and of “the real”.
The Woolfian characters are tied together by different
incidents “tunnelling” in their past by stream of consciousness
from an objective position of authorial report to unexplained
events, representative for those characters and for many
more. They suggest the frame of reference of somebody’s
mind. This voice never replaces the author’s completely.
Again Randall Stevenson Randall Stevenson noticed: “As
in much of Woolf’s work, subjective experience forms the
substance of the novel, but interior monologue, rather than
stream of consciousness, is the appropriate term for the
style in which it is recorded”. By comparison with stream
of consciousness, interior monologue shows a relatively
conventional form. It uses repeated speech or thought,
representations of “innermost flame of mind”, and a type
of thinking that “forms the indirect discourse”.
J. Hillis Miller defined To the Lighthouse (1927) as “a
sensitive register for communicating inner experience”,
whereas Randall Stevenson dwelled upon “[...] the indirect
discourse, the consciousness of the narrator married to the
consciousness of the character and speaking for it[…]. To
the Lighthouse is a masterwork of the exploration of the
consciousness of others with the tool of indirect discourse”.
In The Modern Novel Virginia Woolf explained that
“the inner life exists so richly that nothing could be said
to equal it in direct speech”. Consequently, “[…] the task
of the novelist is to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit (‘the semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to
the end’) with as little mixture of the ‘alien’ [i.e. woman’s
230
view/vision] as possible”. V. Woolf’s character, as framed
and figured in To the Lighthouse, is eager “to snare” the
significant, the transcending moment as it flies. Her attitude
to experience is aesthetic. Transience is the very stuff of her
material and her characters are abnormally aware of the
moment as it passes.
The complexity of characters’ vision is displayed in: (a)
the characters’ thoughts, feelings, moods, at the instant
of apprehension; (b) the sensuous apprehension of the
physical world in which the characters move; (c) the tie to
the past and the chain of associations with previous past
experiences.
The issue of the “Subject” is a strategic one for the “moder­
nist” dimension of V. Woolf’s novels. It is connected with:
(a) the production of a “new kind of objectivity” and (b) the
modernist invention of “forms of human consciousness” and
the mechanism of human psychology. These are “situation-
specific” and they account for the formation of the Subject.
Various theorists insisted upon the “working distinction”
between (a) the biographical subject; (b) the implied author;
(c) characters/voices/point-of-view and the reader. The
author is effaced; with Woolf and Joyce the effacement
process of the Author in Modernism is accomplished. The
effect is the “de-centring of narrative” that is to be found
in a rotation of characters’ centres which deprives each of
them, in turn, of any privileged status.
To the Lighthouse is an incipient form of psychobiography
wherein one’s life is related to a particular work. The life
itself becomes one more text by the same author. The
biographical situation traces the symptoms of a fundamental
family situation. The master narrative inspiring such a novel
231
form is fantasy, a phantasm: facts of the writer’s life can be
reconstructed in the form of a phantasmatic text, that is, the
imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to
her/his real condition of existence supports the daydream
text as a form of representation.
Lily Briscoe, composing Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey’s portrait,
enacts the obsessive drama of V. Woolf into “impersonal
art” from distant memories. The life-form debate emerged
in the late 19th century and the early 20th century after
the discovery of the camera: it appeared clearly at a time
when art had been moving closer to an objective register.
The “photographic text” offered the representatives of
the Bloomsbury group (and V. Woolf was one of them) an
alternative to the representation of “distant memories”:
the perfect stillness of the “instant”, the photo or the
snapshot because Bloomsbury’s aesthetics was neither
rationalistic, nor strictly formalistic (no exclusive concern
for line and colour) but intuitive and impressionistic. They
aimed at showing reality as “significant form” as opposed
to description; what it substitutes for is expression. They
also dispelled the myth of a naively mimetic art in order
to compete with the “new technologies” (represented by
the camera) and showed that “realism” is accomplice to a
“logocentric model”, namely centred upon language, upon
expression.
e. The functions of artistic communication
Virginia Woolf was concerned in her own fiction with
the disparities between “the mind within” and “the world
without”. She concentrated on “observable” aspects/facts
232
appearance in order “to allow the spirit of inner nature to
escape”. She refused to place “everything in the object” and
the tendency “to place everything in the mind”. Her interest
lay in “perceivers”, “human subjects”, complex “thought
processes”, and in complex emotions.
Her priorities for modern fiction were: (a) “examination”
of an “ordinary mind” during an “ordinary day”; (b) the
mind receiving “a myriad of impressions, trivial, fantastic,
evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of the steel”.
The task of the novelist was to convey the “varying aspects
of the spirit”. The substance of the novel focused on her two
persistent memories in her life as a writer: (a) the north of
Cornwall shires where her parents had a holiday house; (b)
her parents Julia and Leslie. Her main problem was how
to approach a person who left no work or sayings written
on the paper. She aimed at registering her “first” memories
(“lying in her nursery of the family’s summer house at St
Ives, she heard the waves breaking one, two, one, two[…]
behind a yellow blind”). Writing To the Lighthouse and The
Waves she relied on a “memory of the senses”.
f. To the Lighthouse as a novel of knowledge
and memory
To the Lighthouse is V. Woolf’s most overtly philosophical
novel and it is philosophical realism that shapes it. One of
the characters is a philosopher, as Mr. Ramsey has been
recognized as one. Despite this fact, the philosophy in the
novel has been overlooked because To the Lighthouse
is also V. Woolf’s most autobiographical novel. With the
233
evidence of V. Woolf’s Diary and Leslie Stephen’s [her father]
own “sentimental journal” it is certain that Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsey represent a close portrait of her father and mother.
One of the uses of biography in the study of fiction is the
emphasis it can give to dissimilarities: Leslie Stephen [a
historian of thought, a biographer, an editor, a literary critic
and a moral philosopher himself] appeared once before as
the classically scholar Ambrose in The Voyage Out.
But Mr. Ramsey is none of these; he resembles Leslie
Stephen in his sentimentality, his sense of failure and his
stoicism: “[…] one of those men who do their best before
they are forty [and] what came after was more or less
amplification, repetition”. There are similarities between
G. D. Moore, the English philosopher of realism, and Woolf’s
father. This is suggested in his method of thought, in “his
attempts to arrive at a perfectly clear understanding of
the problem”. Just what is the philosophical importance
of Mr. Ramsey can be seen in the dichotomies running
throughout To the Lighthouse: Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey can
be viewed as embodying not only the masculine and the
feminine principles but also reason and intuition, analysis
and synthesis, thought and action, truth and beauty, logic
and instinct, even realism and idealism. The lighthouse with
its physical isolation and purpose is a symbol for both. For
instance, Mr. Ramsey is described as being “out there on a
spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away […] marking
the channel out there in the floods alone”.
Philosophically, the novel displays the incompleteness
of “philosophical realism” and this is brought out by the
third major character, Lily Briscoe. For all its dualisms, the
novel is one of the triads:
234
– it is emphatically divided into three parts;
– it is V. Woolf’s only novel with a table of contents and
named chapters rather than simply numbered sections;
– even the lighthouse has three flashes;
– set against the antithesis that includes the different
consciousness of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey is the ultimate
extinction of consciousness presented in the second part
of the novel. In the third, Lily Briscoe struggles to harmonize
the Ramseys’ dichotomies through her love and art;
– significantly enough, the first section of the novel,
called The Window, indicates V. Woolf’s concerns with the
“innerness” and “outerness” of perception.
Erich Auerbach was one of the few critics to recognize that
Virginia Woolf’s “multipersonal” rather than “unipersonal”
method places her work in the broad tradition “of literary
realism by virtue of the way it investigates objective reality”.
For instance, the dinner party where it is a displacement from
one person’s private state of consciousness to another while
still maintaining the public conversations, by juxtaposing the
different awarenesses without sacrificing “the realities” of
the party, the “subject and object and the nature of reality”.
Time Passes, the last section of the novel, displays the
“double action” of Mr. Ramsey’s “ritual journey” to the
lighthouse and Lily’s “painted vision”: the opposition
between two kinds of consciousness and between con­
sciousness and temporal nature are brought together. Mr
Ramsey completes the action of the novel’s title and receives
his children’s love, as he received his wife’s at the end of
Part I. As a consequence, Lily Briscoe is able to give the final
touch to her painting and to finish it as a post-impressionist,
non-representational balancing of coloured shapes: “What
235
is the meaning of life? […] The great revelation had never
come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead
there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck
unexpectedly in the dark; here was one[…] Mrs. Ramsey
saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs. Ramsey making of the
moment something permanent (as in another sphere
Lily herself tried to make of the moment something
permanent) – this was of the nature of the revelation. In
the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing
and flowing […] was struck into stability. Life stand still
here, Mrs. Ramsey said. ‘Mrs. Ramsey! Mrs. Ramsey!’ she
repeated. She owed this revelation to her”. In addition to
the connections between art and ethics that it suggests,
this revelation is very significant because of its novelty and
of its incompleteness. Two ideas are demonstrated later:
the moments of illumination are no longer enough and,
as Lily struggles to finish her painting (“tunnelling her way
into the picture, into the past”), thinking of love and death,
Lily repeats her question about the meaning of life: “What
was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their
hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the first grasp?
Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of
the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and
leaping from the pinnacle of the tower into the air?”
As no explanations come, Lily struggles with her painting
and thinks of Mr. Ramsey sailing farther away to the
lighthouse. She suddenly returns as something flutters
at the window, and then she attains the final stage of her
thought and her painting: “One wanted, she thought,
dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary
experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet
236
at the same time, it’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy. The problem
might be solved after all”.
But then something moves at the window: a wave of
“white goes over the pane”: “Mrs. Ramsey! Mrs. Ramsey!
She cried, feeling the old horror come back - to want and
want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And then,
quietly, as if she refrained, that too because part of the
ordinary experience, was on a level with the chair, with the
table. Mrs. Ramsey – it was part of her perfect goodness to
Lily - sat there quite simply, in the chair”.
Virginia Woolf wrote about reality in A Room of One’s
Own: “What is meant by reality? It would seem to be
something very erratic, very undependable – now to be
found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the
street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a
room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one
walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world
more real than the world of speech – and then there it is
again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes,
too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern
what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and
makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin
of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left
of past time and of our loves and hates”.
237
 The binary oppositions between of origins and causes, metaphysics and the figure of God
modernism and postmodernism the Father. Postmodernism assumes idiolects, desires,
mutants, schizophrenia, differences and traces, irony, and
it invokes the Holy Ghost. Modernism needs determinacy
and transcendence, while postmodernism is satisfied with
According to Ihab Hassan (The Postmodern Turn, indeterminacy and immanence.
1987), postmodernism designates a new historical cycle
in the Western civilization that emerged around 1875. The
term Postmodernism was used by Federico de Onis for the
first time in 1934. If modernism is elitist, authoritarian,
dogmatic and interested in the exploration of the multiple
Self, postmodernism is anti-elitist, anti-authoritarianist and
interested in the dispersal of the Ego. Again, modernism
borrows from romanticism and symbolism the form
(conjunctive or closed), the purpose, the design and the
hierarchy. Postmodernism favours anti-form, Pataphysics
and Dadaism, play, chance, and anarchy. Modernism
focuses on mastery and logos, which implies distance,
creation and totalization, synthesis, presence, genre and
boundary, semantics, paradigm, hypothesis, metaphor,
selection, interpretation and reading, the signified, narrative
and grand histoire with the purpose of creating the art
object as finished work. Postmodernism, in exchange,
aims at exhaustion and silence, so it implies participation,
decreation and deconstruction, antithesis, absence, dispersal,
text as intertext, rhetoric, syntagm, parataxis, metonymy,
combination, anti-narrative and petite histoire. It is centred
upon the signifier and does not intend to eliminate
possible misreadings with the help of interpretation. The
oppositions do not stop here. Modernism implies a master
code, symptoms, types, the genital (phallic), the paranoia

238 239
 The central tenets of the Modernist novel
We remark the erosion of character, event and plot. This
strategy cancels the notions of reality and rejected the 19th
century idea of what realistic representation consisted of.
It takes shape as a manner of writing, transcending the
older opposition between the literal and the figurative
(dimensions of language), the factual and the fictional
(modes of discourse). It sets aside the distinction between
history and fiction, without collapsing one into the other yet.
It accomplishes a historical reality purified of the myths of
such “grand narratives” as fate, providence, Geist, progress,
and the dialectic. The “the writer as narrator of objective
facts” disappears. Everything stated appeared by way of
reflection in the “consciousness of dramatis personae”.
The “viewpoint” outside the novel from which the people
and the events within it are observed simply dissolves.
Circumspection, doubt and uncertainty and of questioning
in the narrator’s interpretation of events predominates.
Devices as stream of consciousness, interior monologue,
free indirect speech/erlebte Rede for “aesthetic purposes”
are largely employed; the impression of an objective reality
completely known to the author is obliterated; the use of
new techniques for the representation of the experience of
time and temporality. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, analyses
the distinction between exterior and interior time, the
representation of events not as successive episodes of a
story but as random occurrences, and “chance” in releasing
processes of consciousness.
240
The central tenets of the postmodernist novel
Ihab Hassan identified seven such tenets:
(1) it avoids symbolism whereas its reality is phenomeno­
logical;
(2) it promotes indeterminacy, that is why its language
slips and slides and resists interpretation. The breakdown
of syntax is designed to defer and postpone any absolute
translation. It is an open, dialogic and polyphonic, in a field
of possibilities;
(3) it seeks fragmentation, being against holism. it is
conceived with irony rather than catharsis;
(4) it is self-reflexive, conscious of itself and opposed to
realist verisimilitude;
(5) it is pluralist. It is a hybrid genre, an unlimited
discourse which privileges intertextuality;
(6) it uses topographic variation: the fragment itself is
visually and physically figured out;
(7) it celebrates parody, play and pastiche. It resists any
notion of textuality;
(8) it questions the unifying voice and is anti-authorship.
241
 Flann O’Brien between
modernism and postmodernism
As an early postmodernist writer (or late modernist?),
O’Brien’s repudiation of authorship as the central signifying
presence in the text also rejects realist premises. Flann
O’Brien’s “reality” is linguistically structured and ultimately
defines it as a work of postmodernism. The question posed
by O’Brien’s writing is to what extent the concept of literary
(post)-modernism is a valuable and proper context in which
to re-consider critically the metafiction of his novels.
O’Brien is usually associated with Joyce, the godfather
of high modernism, because of their historical and cultural
proximity. The critical implication always assumes that
Flann O’Brien is a late modernist by default. Similarly, it
conveniently ignores that with Finnegans Wake (1936)
postmodernism most likely finds its actual point of origin.
In The Postmodern Turn (1987) Ihab Hassan noticed that
“Finnegans Wake is a monstrous prophecy of our post-
modernity… all the elements of this postmodern novel
crowd this ‘novel’: dreams, parody, play, pun, fragment,
fable, reflexiveness, kitsch…the edge of pure silence and
pure noise”.
At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is obsessed with confronting
the Joyce of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
man and Ulysses, but it is best considered as a late-modernist,
transitory text which criticizes both realism and modernism
in an openly deconstructive manner, encouraging an
exciting new aesthetics.
242
Flann O’Brien is the creator of metafiction, which is,
according to J. Hawthorn’s definition of A Concise Glossary
of Contemporary Literary Terms: “Literally fiction about
fiction… It is generally used to indicate fiction including
any self-referential element… Metafiction typically involves
games in which levels of narrative reality (and the reader’s
perceptions of them) are confused, or in which traditional
realist conventions, governing the mimetic and diegetic
elements, are thwarted”. Metafictions disrupt the artificiality
of traditional narrative mode by forcing the distinction
between the mimetic (the illusion that the author is not
the speaker) and the diegetic (the illusion that the author
is the speaker). The degree of consciousness allowed to a
metafictional narrator is in a constant state of flux or narrative
flicker, similar to an existential condition: the idea of being
trapped in someone else’s order. It involves “a laying bare of
the literary process”. The literary convention itself becomes
a thematic issue. It is a method of “unveiling” (“unmasking”)
because it mocks the accepted narrative contract between
author-text-reader and calls into question “willing suspension
of disbelief” which classical realist fiction is contingent upon.
The dominant textual strategies of metafiction are those
which make the reader aware that a novel is nothing but
an artefact made upon words or that “telling stories is
telling lie” (Samuel Beckett); Language is only a “hermetic
circle” referring only to itself (“metafiction sets out to
undermine accepted and conventional modes of discourse
by concentrating on their inherent linguistic instability”,
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction, 1984). If art traditionally has
held a mirror up to society, then metafiction holds up a
mirror up to the mirror.
243
 Modernism, for all its radical innovation, had retained
and consolidated the key-convention of Author-God.
As a matter of fact, for Joyce, as for Flaubert, the author
should remain embedded within the literary machine:
“like the God of creation… within or behind or beyond or
above his handiwork, invisible, refined, out of existence”.
Through his representation of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce
reaches the limits of modernist aesthetics. Stephen, though
conscious of the literary symbolism of his name, is never
pushed so far into the metaliterary self-consciousness as
to consider that he is the symbolic “author” of his own
texts. Modernists envisaged the world as a chaotic flux,
but they still believed that meaning could be salvaged
and inscribed in words filtered and negotiated through
the presence of the author-god, the ultimate arbiter of
meaning. The Modernist interest in the heteroglossic text
and the possibilities of intertextuality remained rooted on
an aesthetic rather than on an ontological plane.
244
The postmodern James Joyce
Joyce used parallax as a new form of perspectivism. The
principle of parallax is to juxtapose two or more characters’
different constructions of the same world or of the same
part of the world. The use of parallax or counterpoint of
perspectives (Bloom’s and Stephen’s) is a parody of moder­
nity itself, as Matei Călinescu showed. The mobile mind
contaminates the world outside conscious­­ness. Contingency
and contamination are key words in interpreting the novel.
The metamorphic reality substitutes the mobile mind in
The Oxen of the Sun sequence. Uncertainty is the effect
of pastiche, between the notable influences being Gothic
fiction, Horace Walpole, Irish literature, Joseph Sheridan
Le Fanu, and the tradition of the ghost story. The world is a
hybrid, a “doubling” or a replica of “really real world”. The use
of discursive parallax: when discourses cannot be attributed
to personified sources within the fictional world Joyce used
an ontological parallax or a parallax of “Worlds”. Brian McHale
explained this procedure: “Ontological perspectivism, the
parallax of discourses and the worlds they encode, is not
a characteristic structure of modernist poetics but it is a
characteristic of postmodernism, where it may be traced
through a whole sequence of carnivalesque, collage and
cut-up or fold-in texts”.
245
 Conclusions
We still do not know what we are heading for after
postmodernity. The only solid concept thrown into debate
is post-industrial society. But this one concerns mainly
economic and social issues; culture is neglected. This fact
announces a severe crisis in communication, as profitability
and consumerism will not be able to calm down conflicting
issues. Maybe the future solution will be a trans-cultural
paradigm trying to secure an ecumenical perspective at the
level of contemporary aspects of life, whereas traditions and
differences will be respected. But this is a utopian project for
the time being and what matters most now is the wisdom
to avoid radical relativistic approaches, as, sooner or later,
they will engender radical dictatorships.
246
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248 249
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l Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London:
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l Banks, Russell. Continental Drift. New York: Harper &
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l ———. The Floating Opera. 1956. New York: Avon,
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l ———. Giles Goat-Boy: Or, The Revised New Syllabus.
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l ———. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” 1969. The Friday
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l ———. “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist
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l ———. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Bantam, 1969.
l Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen
Heath. New York: Hill &Wang, 1977.
l ———. Mythologies. 1972. Trans. Annette Lavers.
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l ———. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday,
1974.
l Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Trans. Chris
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250
l ———. Paroxysm. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso,
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l ———. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria
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l Baugh, Bruce. French Hegel: From Surrealism to
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l Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and Its Discontents.
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l Berce, Sanda. Modernity in Contemporary English
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l Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History.
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l Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and
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l Derrida, Jacques. “Differance.” Speech and Phenomena
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60.
l ———. “The Ends of Man.” The Margins of Philosophy.
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l ———. Envois. The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud.
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l ———. Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of
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