the end of adventure >> by adrian mihalache >> *spark-online issue fifteen

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.

Adrian Mihalache is a regular contributor to *spark-online. He originally hails from Bucharest, Romania.