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Modern
literature started by telling the story of the intricate relationships
between the Person, the World, and the Fiction and, for a long
time, has been focused on the interactions between the first two
entities. It is true that the first novelists liked to play a
little with the conventions of realistic illusion and permanently
fueled the reader's doubt as to whether the book's characters
were purely fictitious phantoms or quasi-live persons. Don Quixote
belonged simultaneously to the real sunny landscape of La Mancha
and to the virtual reality of heroic stories; his story being
thus a harbinger of postmodernism. Similarly, Fielding enjoyed
reminding the reader every now and then that Tom Jones is a paper
figure, not a real life character. However, the viscount of Valmont,
Becky Sharp, Julien Sorel, Heathcliff, Werther, Rastignac, and
Andrei Bolkonski are characters deeply involved in the real world,
which they desperately try to understand, conquer, and seduce.
Modernism
begins when the story of the conflict between individual and society,
between man and woman, between class and history, gives way to the
story of the story itself. The story of the confrontation between
the person and the world has become less interesting than the one
of the relationship between the world and the fiction. It is less
important how the characters relate to the world than how the world
relates to its own story. The basic task is to change the world,
to reinvent it by fiction. Now the main figure is no longer the
hero but the narrator, who is more interesting since, being self-aware,
he suffers more.
Balzac,
had he written Remembrances of Things Past, would have focused
on the baron of Charlus (whom he would have probably named Vautrin)
and on the duchess of Guermantes (de Langeais, according to him).
Proust, however, preferred to concentrate on Marcel. Dickens, had
he written Ulysses, would have dramatically described the
magic encounter between Bloom and Dedalus; Joyce preferred to tell
the story of the English language. The modernists explored the possibilities
of capturing the fugitive dynamics of the real as a process in order
to find a means of directing the process itself. Fiction was important
for them because it could change the world. Changer le monde,
dreamt Rimbaud, before deciding to change him instead. Fictionalizing
the world was the ultimate project, since it made the world fulfill
itself into a book. As Mallarmé said: All in this world exists
to end into a book. (Tout, au monde,existe pour aboutir à un livre.)
The writing of an adventure was replaced by the adventure of the
writing.
Postmodernism
left the world aside, as merely another fictitious realm among the
many the culture has provided, and started to reconsider the relationship
between the person and the fiction. This approach transforms all
the characters involved in the act of reading--heroes, authors,
and readers--into fictional entities. Once the world has already
become a fiction, it is now high time to completely fictionalize
the person. In the postmodern story that exhibits all its seams,
the author is not more real either than his own characters, whom
he may sometimes casually meet, or his readers, whom he more or
less lavishly entertains. The conflict dissolves into conversation,
the invention becomes inventory, and the illusion is turned into
allusion. We have seen that postmodernism made the Web its home
and unfolded ironically the same old stories over it. The modernist
ambition to continuously bring in the new, to keep oneself tuned
to the source of unheard-of stories has been quietly discarded.
"The past," Umberto Eco claims, "since it cannot be destroyed, because
its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony,
not innocently." Consequently, one can write detachedly about any
apparently 'new' subject, such as the disturbing challenges of the
high-tech, using (ironically) any past rhetoric; for instance, the
one from the time of the carriages. One writes casually that "the
alien got out of the shuttle," hinting at "the Marquise went out
at 5 p.m." while whimsically turning to Valéry, who naïvely believed
that nobody would ever again write like that.
The
unification between Person, World, and Fiction must be understood
in the sense that the latter engulfed the first two and, afterward,
went decidedly cyber, to occupy the Web. The ultimate effect of
this process is conciliation between the person and the world: the
fiction playing the part of a median term, a common element, acting
as a catalyst, or simply as a sort of glue. However, one must be
aware that this conciliation closely resembles manipulation. Getting
at peace with a fictional world, wherin everyone lies happily in
his own particular fiction, amounts to giving up any opposition
to the only too real established authority. As Guattari said about
Baudrillard and Lyotard, "The postmodern condition they promote
is the very paradigm of every sort of submission, every sort of
compromise with the existing statu-quo." Consequently, the story
of the story, which the postmodern fiction lavishly offers, promises
an end to any adventure.
The
adventure came back, recaptured by the imagination. The happy postmodern
threesome World-Person-Fiction was soon to be subverted. Cyber culture
threatens to distort its balance, by focusing on the conflicting
relationship between the person and the fiction, leaving the 'real'
world to fade away. This new opposition brings forth a new type
of subjectivity, mainly characterized by its romantic drive to global
comprehensiveness and, hence, to self-destruction.
Copyright
© 2000 Adrian Mihalache. All Rights Reserved.
Adrian
Mihalache is a regular contributor to *spark-online. He originally
hails from Bucharest, Romania.
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