There is a strange phenomenon in Kashmir where scholars,students and professors alike are passionately involved in ‘not’ understandingcertain topics, Postmodernism being on the hit list. Quite recently this (nowoutdated) innocent question of what postmodernism is, was posed to a person andyet again, like most people, he smirked and in a single breath denouncedeverything that Derrida, Barthes, Foucault and so many others haveaccomplished. He, like most people in Kashmir, seemed adamant on relegatingpostmodernism to what is called relativism and to the cult of anything goes. Itmade me think of two things. The first, how wrong our assumptions of thismovement are, only because it somehow doesn’t conform to our beliefs (if wehave any). The second, why do we still confine and limit ourselves to questionslike these when the whole world has gone past it? Of course, the need toaddress and explicate the question is not the focus of this article. What,however, is relevant, is the absolute necessity for the movement to beunderstood in the socio-political context. The history of literature from theeast to the west has always been a debate within itself where questions ofbeing, ethics, existence, free will, and morality (among others) take oncertain valuable roles. The same can be attributed to the history of postmodernliterature, as well, where the notion of the questioning of authority,transgression, and experimentation take centre stage in multiple and diverseways. The fact that these questions do not possess one single answer in itselfshould make us realize the very significance of the issues. That there is nosingle answer to the questions literature asks is what exactly Roland Barthesmeant when he said that literature is the question minus its answer. Thecontemporary director Michael Haneke echoes the same notion in relation to artwhen he says that its foremost duty is to raise questions and not provideanswers.
Whenever Postmodernism is discussed here in Kashmir, mostpeople relate it to its theoretical understanding and not its fictive trend.This attitude relegates the movement to a bland academic discourse and, thus,disregards the intense workings of Postmodern Fiction. The fictional work ofwriters like Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, DavidFoster Wallace, elegantly charts the course of the past and present stance ofPostmodernism. Out of these writers, David Foster Wallace’s artistic trajectoryfrom being an ardent proponent of postmodernism to its militant critic laysbare the transition of the ideas associated with the movement. Wallace, towardsthe later part of his career, tended to be at cross-roads with postmoderntemperament. Wallace’s tweaking of the validity of the debate of postmodernliterature provides a proper locus (if not answers) to be able to understandthe situation. Among many other charges that Wallace levies on postmodernliterature, the primary ones he attacks are the usage of self-reflexivity andirony in those works where the writer tends unnecessarily to be nothing elsebut witty. Wallace, in interviews as well as in his writings, decries the usageof postmodern irony and self-conscious narration as nothing but ‘poisonous’because it only functions for him, in ‘avoiding some really thorny issues’ ofthe present time. Whereas for him the original urge of postmodern irony andself-consciousness was a way of rejecting the ‘ravening hypocrisy ofinstitutions like the government or advertising’, it has now become ‘thecontemporary mood of self-mocking materialism and blank indifference’. Hisposition becomes more clear when in his essay ‘E Unibus Pluram; Television andUS Fiction’, he dashes out against the hip culture, cynicism and nihilism ofthe postmodern fathers and hopes for a new generation of writers who, accordingto him, would be ‘anti-rebels’ (written in relation to postmodern writers asoriginary rebels); writers who would toss aside the stance of irony and wouldbe happier talking in single-entendres in opposition to the kind ofdouble-entendres which was so dear to the postmodern writing. Instead, thewriters of this new generation, according to Wallace, would look up to thebasic problems of human troubles and emotions and would be content to discardthe self-conscious attitude that seems to be an end in itself. Wallace’scomment opens up a debate about the need to return to old problems, not in thesense of nostalgia, but a dire necessity to attempt to focus on the problemsthat cater to the struggle which human beings face in their daily lives.Because for Wallace, fiction is all about ‘what it is to be a fucking humanbeing’ the definition of ‘good art would seem to be art that locates andapplies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live andglow despite the times’ darkness.’ According to Wallace, thus, the real job of fictionin the twenty-first century is to address ‘the loneliness that dominatespeople’ and to ‘aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death inpeople’ in order ‘to move people to countenance it…’
Wallace’s stance is now being dubbed by writers and criticsboth as post-postmodernism or New Sincerity, a writing that embracescontemporary human problems with a sincere non-ironic faith and disclaims theerudite techniques of postmodernism as nothing but redundant. The idea, here,is not to put the onus of the debate on Wallace only, but to approach the saidsubject keeping in mind the issues he raises. What Wallace’s scrutiny of thepostmodern debate teaches us is his crucial position in the literature of ourtimes – as someone whose idols were postmodern writers but who, at the sametime, wishes to go beyond them so as to understand the changing milieu.
To judge postmodernism as a banal array of relativism, ahollow movement of the west, among other things, has become way too easy for usin Kashmir. What one, however, needs is to survey the movement and thesubsequent ones as a crucial point where literature comes up as, what I earliertermed, a debate within itself – a debate that can lead us towards fruitfulevaluation of our times and not to some juvenile, semi-understood andregurgitated statements of detestation. New Sincerity or post-postmodernism, iflooked at from that point, comes very close to what most teachers, students andprofessors didn’t exactly want from postmodernism, the point, however, is toapproach it without prejudice.
Mubashir Karim is Assistant Professor (English) in S PCollege, Srinagar.