Taken from Barry’s ‘Beginning Theory’ chapter 4PostmodernismWhat is postmodernism? What was modernism?As with structuralism and post-structuralism, there is a great deal of debate about how exactly modernism and postmodernism differ. The two concepts are of different vintage, 'Modernism' being a long-standing category which is of crucial importance in the understanding of twentieth-century culture, whereas the term 'postmodernism', as is well known, has only become current since the 1980s. 'Modernism' is the namegiven to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.Modernism was that earthquake in the arts which brought down much of the structure of pre-twentiethcentury practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture. One of the major epicentres of this earthquake seems to have been Vienna, during the period of 1890-1910, but the effects were felt in France, Germany, Italy and eventually even in Britain, in art movements like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism. Its after-shocks are still being felt today, and many of the structures it toppled have never beenrebuilt. Without an understanding of modernism, then, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century culture.In all the arts touched by modernism what had been the most fundamental elements of practice were challenged and rejected: thus, melody and harmony were put aside in music; perspective and direct pictorial representation were abandoned in painting, in favour of degrees of abstraction; in architecture traditional forms and materials (pitched roofs, domes and columns, wood, stone, and bricks) were rejected in favour of plaingeometrical forms, often executed in new materials like plate glass and concrete. In literature, finally, there was a rejection of traditional realism (chronological plots, continuous narratives relayed by omniscient narrators, 'closed endings', etc.) in favour of experimental forms of various kinds.The period of high modernism was the twenty years from 1910 to 1930 and some of the literary 'high priests' of the movement (writing in English) were T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein, and (writing in French or German) Marcel Proust, Stephane Mallarme, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Some of the important characteristics of the literary modernism practised by these writers include the following:1. A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see rather than what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique).2. A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as: omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view and clear-cut moral positions.3. A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems more documentary and prose-like.4. A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative, and random-seeming collages of disparate materials.5. A tendency towards 'reflexivity', so that poems, plays and novels raise issues concerning their own nature, status, and role.

The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation. After its high point, modernism seemed to retreat considerably in the 1930s, partly, no doubt, because of the tensions generated in a decade of political and economic crisis, but a resurgence took placein the 1960s (a decade which has interesting points of similarity with the 1920s, when modernism was at its height). However, modernism never regained the pre-eminence it had enjoyedin the earlier period.This gives us a rough indication of what and when modernism was. Does postmodernism, then, continue it or oppose it? To decide this we need to attempt a working definition of this second term. As a starting point, we can take a selection of the most readily available descriptions of postmodernism. J. A. Cuddon'sentry in his Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory describes postmodernism as characterized by 'an eclectic approach, [by a liking for] aleatory writing, [and for] parody and pastiche'. So far, this doesn't really put much daylight between modernism and postmodernism, since the word 'eclectic' suggests the use of the fragmented forms which, as we have just said, are characteristic of modernism.(Eliot's The Waste Land, for instance, is a collage of juxtaposed, incomplete stories, or fragments of stories.) Also 'aleatory forms', meaning those which incorporate an element of randomness or chance, were important to the Dadaists of 1917, who, for instance, made poems from sentences plucked randomly from newspapers. The use of parody and pastiche, finally, is clearly related to the abandonment of the divinepretensions of authorship implicit in the omniscient narratorial stance, and this too was a vital element in modernism. It could be said, then, that one way of establishing the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is to dissolve the sequential link between them, by retrospectively redefining certain aspects of modernism as postmodernist. According to this view, they are not two successive stages in thehistory of the arts, but two opposed moods or attitudes, differing, as suggested in the next paragraph.The nature of the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is summarised in the excellent joint entry on the two terms in Jeremy Hawthorn's Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (Edward Arnold, 1992). Both, he says, give great prominence to fragmentation as a feature of twentieth-century art and culture, but they do so in very different moods. The modernist features it in such a way as to register adeep nostalgia for an earlier age when faith was full and authority intact. Ezra Pound, for instance, calls his major work, The Cantos, a 'rag-bag', implying that this is all that is possible in the modern age, but also implying regret about that fact. In his poem 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' he speaks of the First World War being fought 'For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books', and is evidently pained, in lines from the same poem like 'a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlast our days' and 'We see to kalon [beauty] / Decreed in the market place' by the rise of commercialism at the expense of'eternal verities'. In The Waste Land, too, the persona says, as ifdespairingly of the poem, 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'. In instances like this there is a tone of lament, pessimism, and despair about the world which finds its appropriate representation in these 'fractured' art forms (the collages of Kurt Schwitters, for example, which mix painted areas of canvas with

random clippings from newspapers, timetables, and advertisements). For the postmodernist, by contrast, fragmentation is an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief. In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it.A second, and related, difference between the two is also a matter of tone or attitude. An important aspect of modernism was a fierce asceticism which found the over-elaborate art forms of the nineteenth century deeply offensive and repulsive. This asceticism has one of its most characteristic and striking manifestations in the pronouncements of modernist architects, such as Adolf Loos's proclamation that'decoration is a crime', or Mies van der Rohe's that 'less is more', or Le Corbusier's that 'a house is a machine for living in'. These pronouncements resulted in the 'shoe box' and 'carbuncle' buildings which have generated such hatred and opposition, particularly through the 1980s, but the high idealism they represent retains its power to move. The same refined asceticism is seen in literature in the minimalismwhich (for instance) shrinks poems to narrow columns of two-word lines registering rigorously sparse, pared-down observations, or in the drama of Samuel Beckett, in which a play may be reduced to a running time of thirteen minutes, with a single speaker, no set, and language which is sparse in the extreme. By constrast, again, postmodernism rejects the distinction between 'high' and 'popular' art which wasimportant in modernism, and believes in excess, in gaudiness, and in 'bad taste' mixtures of qualities. It disdains the modernist asceticism as elitist and cheerfully mixes, in the same building, bits and pieces from different architectural periods - a mock-Georgian pediment here, a tongue-in-cheek classical portico there.A similar postmodernist 'edifice' in literature would be the 'Martian' poetry of writers like Craig Raine or Christopher Reid, where bizarrely colourful mixtures of imagery, viewpoint, and vocabulary jostle on a surface which seems happy to be nothing but surface, without the depths of significance which a literary education trains us to seek out. Nothing could be further in spirit from that austere modernist asceticism.