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Modernism versus Postmodernism

- The English Literature of the 20
th
century: what defines and separates Modernism and
Postmodernism in James Joyces The Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man and
J ulian Barness Flauberts Parrot








Georgiana Necula
NO-EN, 3
rd
Year

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Introduction:

The aim of the essay is identifying and explaining Modernisms and Postmodernisms
characteristics, in correlation to the novels by James Joyce and Julian Barnes: The Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man and Flauberts Parrot.
The two texts will be analyzed in order to provide the essential traits for what makes
Postmodernism be one step away from Modernism and also what brings the two together,
because Postmodernism actually descends from Modernism, but it will eventually transcend
many of Modernisms concepts and beliefs. I will rely on various occasions on philosophical
thoughts and interpretations and other theoretical ideas as I personally see philosophy in a
direct connection with the social context it belongs to, characterizing it and eventually
modifying it. This connection stretches towards a continuous connection with the evolution
of thought about art and literature. I will undoubtedly use a fragmentarist method, because I
will treat and rely on the aspects I find relevant to the argumentation process, while
neglecting the others. The chronological order of the events in the plot, as presented in the
novel, will be left aside, while analyzing important aspects from the point of view of the
modern or the postmodern paradigm, without insisting upon elements of style of the text.


1. From the Modern paradigm towards the Postmodern - from the philosophical
thoughts to the literary concepts.
Considering literary Modernism and Postmodernism as effect of the social and
contextual modernity that do not emerge in vacuum, but rather have a complex history of
anticipations in modern theories and developments (Best, 1997) I can only start with an
attempt to historically identify the age of modernity in order to explain Modernism. Some
find that it started with the age of Reason, with the Enlightenment, with Descartes and
Kant (Suggs, 1997: 17). The Universal truth achieved exclusively through Reason
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represented a dominant in this age. This aspect makes the era center-focused, organized under
the sign of Reason, unlike the Postmodern Paradigm that shall arise in the 60s and 70s and
state from the start that all should wage a war on totality (Lyotard 1984 : 82). Although the
modern paradigm anticipated at the surface what was about to come with the postmodern
thought, it is hardly the same wine in new bottles (Milovanovic, 1997: 1) because
Postmodernism, as history did show up until now with all the other systems of thought in
philosophy or trends in literature, rises to be anti-Modernist, denying its truth value and
deconstructing it from its roots.
The modern centrality will now be decentered, because instead of relying on a
universal and totalizing concept like the notion of the individual, the centered subject, the
postmodernists were to advocate the notion of the decentered subject (Idem 2). From
decentrality to chaos was only one step. If the rational center imposed itself in modern
thought through Descartes and then through Kant, the same modern paradigm will end up by
suppressing becoming und thus chaos (Best S. , 1997: 70). The Postmodernism on the other
hand relies on chaos that will be identified with Nietzsches concept of ordered complexity
which is characterized by change, becoming, mutation and flux ultimately arranged in
patterns of order, regularity and similarity (Ibid.). The postmodern era will no longer be
defined by a central form of truth, but rather by an immense possibility regarding multiple
forms of truth, firstly because postmodernists are invariably critical of universalizing
theories (Sim, 2011: viii). Any form of equilibrium from Modernism will be lost as well as
any ordered structure. Thinkers methodologically placed under the sign of Postmodernism,
besides Nietzsche, are Heidegger and Jacques Derrida (Suggs, 1997: 2). With Derridas
deconstruction we are already in the field of Post-structuralism and it might be said that
Postmodernism subsumes Post-structuralism (Sim, 2011: x), which was against the
Structuralism belief that there could be a key to knowledge or to systems of knowledge that
Structuralism itself pretended to give.
Synthesizing with key words the two periods, the turn that happens with
Postmodernism will be from the previously Modern order, homogeneity, normativity,
transcendental signifiers to the Postmodern spontaneity, heterogeneity,
fragmentation, diversity (Milovanovic, 1997: 3). What Postmodernism denies, will open
multiple possibilities in interpreting discourse that does not have one single key waiting to be
discovered. The universal key of truth is lost with the death of the totalizing Reason.
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The only possible interpretation for the two periods to succeed each other resides in
the fact that without Modernism there wouldnt have been Postmodernism, which reacts
against some of the modernist beliefs and stretches the other beliefs even further away from
their previous roots.

2. The Universe in the novels: The Portrait of The Artist as young Man and
Flauberts Parrot

Starting from the fictional universes the two novels create, it is visible that The
Portrait of the Artist has a better defined structure. It follows the life of Dedalus from
childhood, using the stream-of-consciousness technique, until he becomes the man, the Artist.
In Flauberts Parrot the plot is anything but structured and the action seems quite diffuse ,
the whole novel being a generic, structural and ontological instability which challenges
from the start any attempt at categorization, classification and genre taxonomy, and mixes
fiction and non-fiction, and simultaneously exploits and subverts the need for structure
(Guignery, 2001: 1). Julian Barnes challenges linearity, and the subject rather than adapting
himself to the narrative, it stretches the discourse to adapt, while in The Portrait the
subject is in a continuous strive to adapt himself, and as it became the case with the modernist
writings, the subject takes on a new role that fits him snugly (web: Modernist vs.
Postmodernist Thought).
There is one other thing though, that would be worth mentioning while talking about
similar points in the two novels. In the case of The Portrait, what actually brings the
novel closer to the postmodern Flauberts Parrot is what Weldon Thornton names the
antimodernism of Joyces novel, but he does not dethrone him as a modernist writer through
this, but additionally identifies him as a postmodernist before his time (1994: 20). He gets
this postmodern shade by coming nearer to the relativism of truth and the belief that science
was prone to the same sort of thinking and dogmatic marketing of truth that Joyce saw in
religion, politics and art: an absolutist version of Truth and Reality as neatly packaged and
marketed by The Scientific/Religious/Aesthetic Establishment (Clark, 1995). Denying the
form of truth that any traditional establishment (exterior) could give is an idea that can be
identified as modernist, but denying any form of totalizing truth, consciously or
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unconsciously imposed upon the individual (exterior or interior) and embracing the void of
never-ending meanings that is left behind, is rather postmodern. And Joyce finds the talent to
make his character erase any form of academic or religious boundaries in order to recreate
new meaning from nothingness. Also his character finds his own values after deconstructing
and destroying the values that any form of knowledge had, traditional or modern and
continues by reconstructing himself after denying any form of exterior power. Being a
Bildungsroman and following the formation of the future Artist, on another level the novel
follows exactly that continuous deny of totalizing knowledge the family, religion, school tries
to impose upon the individual, but almost comes near to such structures identifiable in the
brain, structures that transcend exteriority and become unconscious patterns in life. These
patterns could be the same as Nietzsches good and evil that need to be overcome
(Beyond Good and Evil 2002: 90). These patterns only work towards a negativization of life
and the post-Nietzschean Artist seems to have understood this or be at the verge of
understanding. This and probably this only brings him closer to the postmodern that
somehow assimilated such philosophies better than modernism did.

Beyond the structure of the novel, it must be intentional that the two main characters
are giving voice to aesthetic theories, or that they comment upon aestheticism (Harkness,
1984: 13). Stephan Dedalus the artist had to be an aesthet in order to create, and there is a
whole process than needs to be fulfilled in order for him to become the aesthet, process that
continually denies the already known patterns of creating art. Geoffrey Braithwaite, on the
other hand, is the aesthet that returns after the death of the author (Barthes, 1967: 3)
towards the author Flaubert, almost like in an attempt to re-evaluate the whole evolution of
thought about art until him. Braithwaites character is definitely skeptical and the skeptical
individual becomes understandable because of the change in paradigm that happens with the
postmodern turn. Postmodernisms exreme skepticism, subjectivism and relativism have
been identified as the results of a two-centuries-long epistemological battle between those
pro- and those against- reason (Hicks, 2004: 37). In these terms, Barnes character becomes
the skeptical that can outrun any pattern, as does the novel, that constructs an aesthetic
system of its own and exlusively for itself.


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3. Moving towards the Artist

The quest of the two main characters in both novels happens essentially in perfectly
opposed directions. Geoffrey Braithwaite is in search for meaning in his attempt to
recuperate the past (PTRACU, 2011: 208). Stephen Dedaluss move is towards the future
and esentially against the past. He continues to distance himself away from any form of
ideology the past intended to sell and impose upon the individuals of his society (Ruch,
1995). It could be that both characters have the same aim, but different directions. In a fictive,
intertextual universe, the two characters walk towards eachother, one, the Joycean from the
past towards a certain point in the future and the Barnesian from a distant point in the future,
is coming back towards the same point the first one was intending to reach. This point is
represented by meaning as a secondary instrument of the work of art. For both characters
the main interest when speaking about the work of art is the Artist, the only one responsible
for the birth of the work of art. For its birth and only for it, because for its survival the
responsible would be the biographer Geoffrey Braithwaite, the critic of art, the reader.
Dedalus is interested in the formation of the Artist, Braithwaite skeptically tries to reach what
this artist, creator of art has been. If Dedalus came near the embodiment of the Artist,
Braithwaite tries again to do the same, but he does not speak of himself as an artist. Is this the
death of art happening after the previous death of the author? Has art already done what it
was supposed to, and now only lies in our past? Art cannot continue to exist as an act of
authentic creation, because everything has already been written? These are questions that
seem to bounce in Geoffreys head.







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