The First Postmodernist Novel
http://angam.ang.univie.ac.at/sess2001/pr2gabriel1.htm
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, in a way the first postmodernist novel because of its sheer playfulness in terms of perspectives used. The story begins with Tristram’s conception and keeps talking about his own birth and early childhood. In contrast, Slaughterhouse Five starts with a frame which does not stand in line with traditional frames, such as the one of Dietrich Knickerbocker in Washington Irving's Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. A frame story usually serves to give credibility to a very unlikely story and to bridge the distance between the reader and the strange happenings related. This is generally the case in tall tales of the 19th century, where an urban, civilized character relates his experience made in the wilderness. He assumes for himself the position of a cultural mediator who even translates the vernacular or explains uncommon behavior. In the frame of Slaughterhouse Five we are given a rather precise temporal setting, which is early June 1968, by the reference to the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. This precise timing of the frame is done by the means of a concept of time we are familiar with. This linear concept of time stands in contrast to the middle part, which seems random and follows the Tralfamadorian concept that all events are now. That concept seems unusual at a first glance, but in terms of consequences, the Tralfamadorian concept reflect simply our awareness of the events which is always one of now. In the course of the story, the Tralfamadorians prove more and more to be us, the readers, particularly in the scenes of sex and violence.
Time and place traditionally form a union, and one person therefore cannot be in two places at once. The setting is very important for a novel; Henry James, for instance, was extremely careful in placing his novel The Portrait of a Lady. Slaughterhouse Five introduces a different concept of place, and Billy Pilgrim travels between four stages of action which seem to exist simultaneously. These are the battlefield in Luxembourg, Dresden, Cape Cod, and Ilium (a reference to Ilium, the site of the Trojan war). Nevertheless, all references that are linked to the Second World War could also be linked to the Vietnam War. Discussing Dresden as a stage of action in more detail, we talked about Vonnegut's participation in the war and the particularity of Dresden. In fact, Dresden as the actual place of destruction is not so important; it could have been any other city that was destroyed in the war. Kurt Vonnegut just happened to be in Dresden as a prisoner of war when the city was destroyed. Now critics keep returning to his autobiography and wonder why he ended up behind the enemy lines, as sons of prominent families usually did not end up in a uniform at all, or if so, they were at least at a safe distance from enemy lines. It is worth mentioning that the Vonneguts' family fortune had been lost during the depression and that Kurt Vonnegut did not obtain such a good education as his brothers. So the question, if he had been foolish and did not know what the whole war was about, remains open.
http://www.chris-kutschera.com/A/Ahmet%20Altan.htm
"A Trace on Water" by Ahmet, is possibly the first Turkish postmodernist novel.
The Latest Postmodernist Novel
http://www.chris-kutschera.com/A/Ahmet%20Altan.htm
On this Saturday morning, as I wait for the coffee water to boil, I have "rediscovered" this thread because yesterday I "discovered" the wonders of clicking on the "Currently Active Users" link at the bottom of the main page of this forum (under What’s Going On), which shows what everyone else is looking at, including all the many guests. (Long live guests!) One of those guests happened at that very moment to be reading this thread.
I had never thought to click on that link, until yesterday. It is quite instructive to see what all the guests are reading. And, of course, it is deeply gratifying for me to see someone reading something which I worked long and hard on. I even saw someone E-mail one of my poems ,
http://online-literature.com/forums/...ead.php?t=3877
Ghost of Plato.
As far as I am concerned, there is not enough praise in the world to do justice to the quality and utility and robustness of this forum's software. Well, enough of sycophancy. On to the topic at hand.
I had started this thread because I was curious about what exactly Postmodernism is or might be.
I had never heard of Ahmet Altan until I did my google searches on "postmodern novels" (I forget now the exact search arguments and quoted sequences I used... they can make quite a difference in the results of the search).
I would like to examine a few things from the above link on Ahmet Altan for a very specific purpose, which I feel is literary in nature, rather than political.
I am thinking about Leo Strauss and his book "Persecution and the Art of Writing". Leo Strauss used come to St. John's, Annapolis, once or twice a year, to lecture, in the 1960's (when Jacob Kline was alive).
Strauss examined the various motives why an author might choose to "conceal" certain messages from certain groups of people, using certain "means" and "methods", and yet allow such meanings to be visible or accessible to other groups of people.
Now, avoiding prison and execution is an excellent motive for literary subterfuge.
We might even like our literary forum here to a small nation or empire. Stepping on powerful peoples toes by saying the wrong thing might result in a locked thread, which is the analogue of prison, or being banned, which is analogous to execution.
Someone once said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Well, censorship is also a power to destroy. And yet we cannot live in this modern world without taxation of some form. Nor can we live in an orderly and peaceful society without some form of rules which might fall under the general rubric of censorship. Our constitutions guarantee us freedom of speech, yet we are not free to shout Fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there really is a fire) and "crying wolf" in such a fashion may land us in jail.
Now, at this point, some of you might be asking "what does any of this have to do with Ahmet Altan in particular or Postmodernism in general?"
Let's look at an excerpt from the above link:
http://www.chris-kutschera.com/A/Ahmet%20Altan.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ahmet Altan
Literature is the only art which can penetrate at the deepest in the feelings of human beings... I am interested by individuals, their feelings and reactions. I am interested by the way love develops amongst people of very different backgrounds, in people who have traveled in Europe, who visited France or England, or in people who never left Turkey. Love has something special in the Orient: women are not supposed to have pleasure, it is considered as shameful”...
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Fictional Hero, Atakurd
all the Turkish dailies have stopped publishing his articles since he wrote in “Milliyet” a column titled “Atakurd” -- in which he wonders how the Turkish people would react if they were living in a country called “Kurdey”, ruled by the dogmas of a founding father called “Atakurd, which would prohibit the use of the Turkish language
We see Altan's plea that he is not an Historian but a novelist and an artist.
We also see a fairly obvious effort to talk about real historical figure of Kemul under the guise of a fictitious character, Atakurd.
But Sitaram, what does this have to do with postmodernist style?
I watched a movie on DVD recently, about undercover police and S.W.A.T. teams (I cannot honestly remember the title), but one of the characters said "sometimes part of the rules is knowing when to break them."
Well, one of the rules of Postmodernist style is breaking lots of rules of style.
Another aspect of Postmodernism is the notion of hyperlink text itself, the ability to jump about at the slights click of a mouse, which is a disruption of space and time, something similar to Vonnegut's Trafalmadorians.
There are scholars who speculate that various innovative novelists were striving towards hyperlinks long before the Internet and HTML (or even computers) were invented. A hyperlink is like that hole that the March Hare jumps into in Alice In Wonderland
Hooray! I just now clicked to see Who's Online (and what they are reading), and out of eighty guests (and one member, ME) there is one person reading what I am writing at this very moment (well, that is if they bother to click reload/refresh in their browser occasionally).
Speaking of hyperlinks and jumping about, take a transcendental leap over to this thread on "Understanding Point of View" and then come on back.
http://online-literature.com/forums/...ead.php?t=4536
Now, take a look at "The Question of Genre"
http://online-literature.com/forums/...ead.php?t=3843
The moderator of that writer's forum felt uneasy because I had written a short story (which is PROSE), but I had shoved a poem into the middle of it. The moderator demanded (in the nicest way) to know what genre that might be, which was really a way of pulling me to the side of the road and asking to see my driver's license and registration.
Now, there is one good reason I can see for censoring such hyperlink-infested texts as I write, and imprisoning or executing such writers as myself, because you see, I am just like that person who shouts "fire" in the crowded theater. If everyone starts reading this post, and clicking on all the links, then the level of hits on the forum server rises astronomically. The server heats up, and begins to smoke. In our little virtual empire, this is analogous to a plot to overthrow the government!
And next, before you know what’s happening, some infernal mind decides to devise a game, with posts, infested with links, which is the EASTER EGG hunt game, and everyone is supposed to visit all the links and find all the clue, and post them at some central thread, and the first one to gather all the clues..
Oh well, I see the very fabric of order and decency crumbling to hyperlink decadence as I write these very words.
Take a look at this link, and read through the various excerpts from "Look Homeward Angel", "The Bhagavad-Gita", Jorge Luis Borges "The Aleph"
http://toosmallforsupernova.org/page019.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Spatio-temporal Montage
Psychologist Alfred Adler would ask each patient for their “earliest memory.” Adler believed that the psyche “promotes” some early memory to the position of “first memory” and that the nature of that remembered experience is very revealing, setting the stage for the course of that individual’s development.
What we come to know as our self is a portrait which we have drawn over time. The brush strokes are a series of freewill choices.
Everyone experiences public events and incorporates them into a private, personal, secret interior world. Someone who writes seriously makes that secret world into a public event.
Life appears to us as an endless collection of unstructured images and events. We pick and choose and impose some narrative structure, theme and plot upon this cacophonous, kaleidoscopic confusion.
The self is a work in progress. As we construct our identity, we come to know our self through an emerging self awareness. Each of us is an author with respect to our autobiographical narrative sense of self. We define our selves.
The late Jacob Kline (Tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis in the 1960's) used to say “we become what we are.” He meant that a newborn infant is in no sense an adult as it lies there in its crib, helpless, and yet it is an adult inchoate in that it has the potential within it to develop into what we consider an adult.
In one sense, we become what we are. In a different sense, we are what we become.
If you are born with no fingers then you do not “have it in you” to become a pianist. If you were born with twenty fingers, then perhaps you could play the piano in a way that no other can play.
What I really want to write about, today, is my search for a new term to designate a phenomenon which I have seen several times.
The best term I can find so far is “spatio-temporal montage.”
Persecution and the Art of Writing
I can sense that post #2 is approaching the 10,000 character limit, so I shall continue here and touch upon what Leo Strauss had to say.
Censorship and Postmodernist Writing Styles
Quote:
Originally Posted by blp
I was questioning the relevance of bringing in Turkish novelists to a thread about the first postmodernist novel.
This is a very interesting observation you make, blp because, what you are saying, in essence is that there is a certain logical, thematic structure that ought to be imposed upon any thread, or writing (and you are perfectly right, in one sense). Your observation also lends support to my decision to speak in terms of the latest postmodernist Turkish novelist, in order to escape this very sort of valid criticism, and steer the topic in the direction those writers who are censored by their society.
But the fascinating thing about the Postmodernist writing style of, say, Pynchon, is that it is disobedient and rebellious and breaks free from the censorship of tried and true genres. Hence, in that spirit, theoretically, it should be very appropriate if I write about postmodernism in a rebellious style which struggles defiantly against the censorship of normative posting style.
It has occurred to me that there is a curious symbiotic relationship between postmodernism and censorship.
Whenever anyone challenges or objects to the subject matter which we express or the style in which we choose to express ourselves, then that constitutes a form of censorship.
Another hallmark, I suspect, of Postmodern style, is that often it becomes self-referencing, gazing in a mirror in the very act of writing, and commenting upon what it sees.
True freedom of expression invites the censorship of society, and conversely, the pressure of censorship drives the creative energy of expression deeper into the underground, into the implicit and connotative, into a forest of symbols and metaphors.
