WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM

Abstract

Postmodernism as a cultural term has been in use since the mid-twentieth century. While a common use of the term refers to multiple cultural and economic conditions, it also suggests new artistic and literary forms. On the one hand, postmodernism is commonly considered as a reaction towards modernist movement in arts and literature, it is also regarded as an intensified version of modernist narrative techniques in literature. This article analyses and compares the various definitions of postmodernism and its literary forms to question whether or not there was a postmodernism before it began to be talked about. The article also reads the modernist texts of writers and poets such as James Joyce and Allen Ginsberg as the early examples of postmodernist tropes in literature in order to compare them with the narrative styles of postmodernist writers like Salman Rushdie.

Full text

JOMOPS
JOURNAL OF MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM STUDIES
Submitted: 22.05.2021 - Accepted: 15.06.2021
Year: July 2021 - Volume: 2 - Issue: 1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47333/modernizm.20211718 50
RESEARCH ARTICLE
80
WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM?
BİR POSTMODERNİZM VAR MIYDI?
Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL1
Abstract
Öz
Postmodernism as a cultural term has been in use since
the mid-twentieth century. While a common use of the
term refers to multiple cultural and economic
conditions, it also suggests new artistic and literary
forms. On the one hand, postmodernism is commonly
considered as a reaction towards modernist movement
in arts and literature, it is also regarded as an intensified
version of modernist narrative techniques in literature.
This article analyses and compares the various
definitions of postmodernism and its literary forms to
question whether or not there was a postmodernism
before it began to be talked about. The article also reads
the modernist texts of writers and poets such as James
Joyce and Allen Ginsberg as the early examples of
postmodernist tropes in literature in order to compare
them with the narrative styles of postmodernist writers
like Salman Rushdie.
Keywords: Modernism, Postmodernism, Joyce,
Ginsberg, Rushdie.
Kültürel bir terim olarak postmodernizm yirminci
yüzyılın ortalarından bu yana kullanılmaktadır. Terimin
yaygın kullanımı birçok kültürel ve ekonomik koşulu
nitelerken, aynı zamanda yeni sanatsal ve yazınsal
biçimlere de işaret etmektedir. Bir yandan
postmodernizm yaygın bir biçim- de sanat ve edebiyatta
modernist akıma bir tepki olarak değerlendirilirken, öte
yandan edebiyatta kullanılan modernist anlatı
tekniklerinin daha da yoğunlaşmış bir hali olduğu da
tartışılmaktadır. Bu makale postmodernizmin çeşitli
tanımlarını ve onun yazınsal formlarını analiz ede- rek
karşılaştırmasını yapmayı; ve postmodernizmin yaygın
olarak konuşulmaya ve tartışılmaya başlamasından
önce de var olup olmadığını sorgulamayı amaçlamak-
tadır. Makale aynı zamanda James Joyce ve Allen Gins-
berg gibi modernist romancı ve şairlerin eserlerini ede-
biyatta postmodernist özelliklerin erken örnekleri olarak
okumakta ve onları Salman Rushdie gibi postmodernist
yazarların anlatı teknikleriyle karşılaştırmaktadır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Modernizm, Postmodernizm,
Joyce, Ginsberg, Rushdie.
INTRODUCTION
Answering the question in the title reveals further questions. What is
postmodernism? Is it a period? How and when did it begin? Or did it really begin? Is it a
moment or condition? What differentiates it from modernism? What is it like? To
understand postmodernism, the condition(s) of the world should be reconsidered.
Modernism, which began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and lasted through
the first two decades of the twentieth century, consisted of innovations, changes,
developments and tendencies that were often controversial. It was in literature, art and all
fields of science. In the course of the twentieth century, there have been changes in all
1
Prof. Dr., Pamukkale University, Department of English Language and Literature, macelikel@pau.edu.tr,
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0402-9858.

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
81
sciences, arts, literature and life styles of the peoples of the world. All the innovations and
progresses against the conventions gave rise to globalisation and consumerism. The
liberal, free market economy introduced especially in the early 1980s generated a philistine
middle class that valued its own benefits. The hegemonic values formed by this globalized
economic model began to dominate the cultural and literary world too. These cultural
phenomena brought about the end of the Iron Curtain.
The developments in the telecommunication technology shortened the distances.
The earth is no longer a big, vast planet. While it is possible to see Western products,
values, cultural forms in the Eastern countries, it is not impossible to meet people from
Eastern cultures that fully practice their cultural forms, beliefs and lifestyles living in
Western Europe. By the same token, Eastern and Western cultures have begun to confront
with each other. As it will be seen below in the following pages, this confrontation turns
out to be one of the causes of postmodern condition. The main emphasis here will be the
reflection of this postmodern condition in literature which may be called postmodernist
literature. The literature of postmodernism is a collage, because the postmodern culture is
a collage due to the confrontations mentioned above.
While consumerism is at its highest point in the technologically modernised parts of
the world where people live a higher standard of living than the people in the other parts
of the world, the chain of fast food restaurants reaches the poorest countries. In a poor,
totally traditional and ethnic surrounding, a technologically equipped branch of a fast food
chain can be seen. The view is a collage. This collage can be observed in the postmodern
art, but as far as literature is concerned, what is the literature of postmodernism like? Is it
a result of the collage caused by globalisation and consumerism?
Definitions of Postmodernism(s)
Postmodernism is defined as a general term “used to refer to changes, developments
and tendencies” appeared in literature, art music, architecture “since the 1940s or 1950s”
by J. A. Cuddon (734). It is different from modernism. It is even a reaction against
modernism. It is not right “to imply that modernism is over and done with” to talk about
postmodernism according to Cuddon who points out that there is not a “demarcation line”
(734). In general, the movements in literature were originally modernist. Avant-garde
influences continue. Despite the impossibility of giving exact dates and the demarcation
so as to consider postmodernism an era like modernism, Cuddon claims that it is possible
“to descry certain in postmodernism” (734). For instance, the literature of postmodernism

JOMOPS July 2021 / Volume:2 / Issue:1 Mehmet Ali Çelikel
82
“tends to be non-traditional and against authority and signification” (Cuddon 734). In
fiction, “experimental techniques” may be cited “as displayed in the nouveau roman and
the anti-novel”, and there are also other experiments what is called “concrete poetry”,
eclectic approach, aleatory writing, parody, pastiche that are “other discernible features of
post-modernism” (Cuddon 734).
Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker mention that postmodernism,
which has been debated by critics and cultural historians during the last twenty years or
more, is seen as “simply the continuation and development of modernist ideas” (200). On
the other hand, some see it as “a radical break with classical modernism” (Selden et. al.
200). Some authors and texts of past literature, such as de Sade, Borges, the Ezra Pound
of The Cantos are considered already postmodern. In the contemporary age, “the ‘grand
narratives’ of social and intellectual progress initiated by Enlightenment are discredited”
(Selden et. al. 200). Political grounding of the Enlightenment in “‘history’ or ‘reality’ is no
longer possible”, because they have become “textualised in the world of images and
simulations” characterising the contemporary “age of mass consumption and advanced
technologies” Selden et. al. 200).
Selden et al. make the distinction between the terms postmodern, postmodernity and
postmodernism, which are often used “inter- changeably”, in order to periodize “post-war
developments in advanced media societies and capitalist economies” and to describe
“developments within or across the arts” (201). Employing the term postmodern or
postmodernity for general developments within the post-war period and reserving “the
term ‘postmodernism’ for developments in culture and the arts” appear to be a solution to
the problem that lies in the uses of the term postmodernism as both a descriptive and an
evaluative term (Selden et. al. 201). However, because postmodernism is perceived as to
denote “either a continuation of, or radical break with, dominant features in an earlier
modernism or the movements of the avant-garde”, a further problem of definition arises,
and thus, Selden et al. draw attention to that there is also much debate “about the identity
and boundaries of this earlier movements” (201).
What are the boundaries of those earlier movements? By 1929, modernism was “drawing
to a close”, as suggested by Randall Stevenson (A Reader’s Guide 50). None the less,
certain outstanding modernist novels were published in the thirties. Among them
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce, which “marks a terminus or consummation of modernist
energies and initiatives”, helped develop these initiatives to postmodernist writing

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
83
(Stevenson, A Reader’s Guide 50). If the term modernism is taken to mean the
relinquishment of conventions of storytelling during first few decades of the twentieth
century, which is called ‘the Modernist era’, the term postmodernism seems to refer to the
period that comes after modernism - which is difficult to claim. The term ‘postmodernist’
does not make any sense, according to Brian McHale, because if ‘“modern” means
“pertaining to the present”, then “post-modern” can only mean “pertaining to the future”.’
McHale suggests that “post” here “does not mean what the dictionary tells us it ought to
mean” (4). It only intensifies it. Therefore, postmodernism does not refer to a period.
Literature of postmodernism carries on extending the innovations brought into literature
by modernism. As claimed by Brenda K. Marshall, it is about language; it is about how
language “controls, how it determines meaning” (4). It is about “how ‘we’ are defined within
that language, and within specific historical, social, cultural matrices” (Marshall 4).
Postmodernism is about “race, class, gender, erotic identity and practice, nationality, and
ethnicity”, it is “about difference” and “does not refer to a period or a movement”, but “more
movement in logic than in time” (Marshall 5).
As well as the difficulties of determining a classification and a chronological
demarcation for postmodernism, there is much difficulty of defining it too, due to the
debates about it today. Even more, it is still difficult to put forward a clear distinction
between modernism and postmodernism. Since it is what may be called a condition rather
than a movement or an era in a specific period of the literary history, some authors within
the literature of modernism are possible to be considered already postmodern. Umberto
Eco believes that “postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather,
an ideal”, and it could be claimed that “every period has its own postmodernism” (226).
Eco draws attention to Joyce:
The Portrait
is the story of an attempt at the modern.
Dubliners
, even if it
comes before, is more modern than
Portrait
,
Ulysses
is on the borderline.
Finnegans Wake
is already postmodern, or at least initiates the postmodern
discourse: it demands, in order to be understood, not the negation of the
already said, but its ironic rethinking. (Eco 227)
As pointed out by Frederic Jameson, “one of the most significant features or practices
in postmodernism”, which is not “widely accepted or even understood today”, is pastiche
(1992: 164-5). This assertion evaluates the relevance of Eco’s claim, since pastiche is
widely accepted to be one of the characteristics of Joyce’s fiction, particularly in
Ulysses

JOMOPS July 2021 / Volume:2 / Issue:1 Mehmet Ali Çelikel
84
and
Finnegans Wake
, and of modernism in general. From Christopher Nash’s point of view,
it is true that “post-Modernists acclaim Modernists among their favourite influences, and
we can find them objecting to Modernism only in terms of those characteristics which it
shares with realism” (33). Modernists have never “participated, at the level of fundamental
issues, in the ‘struggle against’ Realism” (Nash 33). It is possible to come up with the idea
of confronting Eco’s and Nash’s claims. When Eco’s assumption is considered, the answer
to the question ‘was there a “postmodernism”?’ is yes, there was a ‘postmodernism’ even
before the invention of the term ‘postmodernism’, because Joyce’s fiction was already
‘postmodern’. On the other hand, when Nash’s assumption is thought of, another question
comes into being: Is postmodernism not realist, or, is it less realist than modernism? Is it
because Joyce was ‘struggling against’ realism that his fiction is considered ‘already
postmodern’?
How ‘Postmodern’ was Joyce?
Modernist fiction, according to Randall Stevenson, rarely abandons the story telling.
However, “it does resist as far as possible the arrangement of ‘events in their time
sequence’” (Stevenson,
Modernist Fiction
87). In the table where the distinctions of
modernism and postmodernism are made by Peter Brooker, it is observed that in
modernism there is form, creation, totalisation, synthesis, hierarchy, semantics, whereas
in postmodernism there is rhetoric instead of semantics, anarchy instead hierarchy,
antithesis instead of synthesis, deconstruction and decreation instead of creation and
totalisation. Brooker suggests that postmodernism, which “splices high with low culture”
and “swamps reality in a culture of recycled images” (1992: 11). It displays “a quite
different ‘knowledge’ from the way modernism is ‘known’” and, additionally, “the more
usual understanding [of] postmodernism came into being as a reaction to an
institutionalised modernism” (Brooker 12). Postmodernism functions “to further ‘undefine’
its supposed unitary identity,” and it often collaborates “in the construction of that very
identity as fit only for deconstruction” (Brooker 12). In Joyce’s fiction, certain departures
from the accepted characteristics of modernism might be observed. If
Ulysses
is
considered in terms of deconstruction, it is apparent that almost every chapter of the novel
is written differently, “and many of them appropriate and mock some specific style of
literature”, such as journalism, ordinary speech or officialdom (Stevenson,
Modernist
Fiction
167). In
Ulysses
, “stylistic variation and exaggeration make the nature of language
impossible to ignore” (Stevenson,
Modernist Fiction
193). There is a central significance
for “Joyce’s mode of representation, as well as for what is represented” (Stevenson,

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
85
Modernist Fiction
193). Joyce leaves deliberately “the habits of the novel form,” and
particularly in
Finnegans Wake
, “the inaccessibility of ordinary meaning is a necessary
condition” which in
Finnegans Wake
goes further than
Ulysses
“in exploiting and
celebrating aspects of language other than the semantic” (Stevenson,
Modernist Fiction
193).
In this respect, if Brenda K. Marshall’s assumption is remembered again, it will be
more convenient to claim that Joyce was already postmodern in
Ulysses
and
Finnegans
Wake
; postmodernism is about language, about how it controls and determines meaning.
An autonomy of language is found in
Finnegans Wake
, as suggested by Stevenson (
A
Reader’s Guide
113). This helps make
Finnegans Wake
“not only a kind of grand finale of
modernist innovations, but also a redirection of some of their potential for the later
twentieth century” (Stevenson,
A Reader’s Guide
114). It is the prophecy of postmodernity,
and this prophecy helps to justify terms such as postmodernity or postmodernism, which
extend the innovations of modernism. Stevenson continues to evaluate
Finnegans Wake
as postmodernist, since its language and representation have become “the distinguishing
characteristic of postmodernism” (
A Reader’s Guide
114).
Finnegans Wake
, which is the last and most problematic of Joyce’s works, belongs to
a genre of mythological anatomies from Frank Kermode and John Hollander’s points of
view. Joyce made up new words that might be called “portmanteau” words in
Finnegans
Wake
which he himself called “funferal”, a word made up out of funeral and fun for all
(Kermode & Hollander 303-4). Joyce’s creation of new words is outstanding:
- I apologuise, Shaun began, but I would rather spinooze you one from the
gests of Jacko and Esaup, fable one, feeble too. Let us here consider the
casus, my dear little cousis (husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemd[-]
amandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract) of
the Ondt and the Gracehoper. (Joyce 878)
In the above paragraph, Joyce’s use of language again draws attention to the role of
language in postmodernism. Joyce determines meaning beyond the context. He creates
new meanings by aiming the limits of storytelling, by extending the limits of word formation.
His new words are the description of new concepts. They possess new meanings. He plays
with history, philosophy, science by playing with words. In the interpretation of the above
paragraph, Kermode and Hollander point out that Shaun is the tight, crafty son who “would
indeed ‘guise’ an apology”, hence the verb “apologuise” is created. Spinoza is the first

JOMOPS July 2021 / Volume:2 / Issue:1 Mehmet Ali Çelikel
86
philosopher of time and space, good and evil. To refer to Spinoza, Joyce forms “spinooze”
also to “ooze” a tale. Grimm’s fairy tales, actually called geste, become “grimm gests”. And
a hundred-letter word, indicating the voice of thunder, marks a “cyclical progression in the
vision of phased history” (Kermode & Hollander 304).
Brian McHale sees postmodernist allegory in
Finnegans Wake
. Everything is
potentially allegorical in
Finnegans Wake
. It invites the reader to read it allegorically.
According to McHale, the allegories in
Finnegans Wake
are overdetermined, because they
have too many interpretations. Joyce establishes “the dominant mode of postmodernist
allegory” (McHale 141-2). As well as postmodernist allegory,
Finnegans Wake
has other
postmodernist characteristics. Since collage and language are what postmodernism is
about, it proves to be postmodern due to the fact Joyce “builds up his vertical collage not
merely from the registers and discourses of the English language, but from other national
languages as well” (McHale 171).
McHale points out the differences between
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
. These
differences are the distinctions of modernism and postmodernism (233). The text in
Ulysses
is the representation of mind. It has the direst interior monologue technique. The
story is told through the “represented consciousness of the character” (McHale 233). The
represented world is “stable and reconstructable, forming an ontologically unproblematic
backdrop against which the movements of the characters’ minds may be displayed”
(McHale 234). This is, in short, modernist fiction. There is an interior discourse of Anna
Livia Plurabelle represented in the end of
Finnegans Wake
, too. But her discourse, as
McHale suggests, is “not a consciousness like Gabriel Conroy’s or Molly Bloom’s, not ‘an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day,’ but more like a collective consciousness” (234). Molly
Bloom’s monologue, on the other hand, represents the ‘stream of consciousness’, whereas
Anna Livia is the thing itself. She is the personification of the River Liffey, for instance. She
‘literalizes the metaphor “stream of consciousness”’, as claimed by McHale:
There is no stable world behind [her] consciousness, but only a flux of
discourse in which fragments of different, incompatible realities flicker into
existence and out of existence again, overwhelmed by the competing reality
of language.
Postmodernist fiction, in short. (McHale 234)
Joyce was postmodernist if
Finnegans Wake
is taken into consideration. This also
proves the impossibility of putting a chronological demarcation line for postmodernism.

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
87
Thinking of
Finnegans Wake
, it might easily be said that there was a “postmodernism” in
the time of modernism. But as there is more than one modernism according to Brooker, (1)
“there are many possible constructions of postmodernism, however, this does not mean
that all constructs are equally interesting of valuable”, suggests McHale who
acknowledges that “postmodernism is the posterity of modernism” (234). Postmodernism,
as the descendant of modernism, has reached today in various forms in various genres.
Is There a Postmodernism?
Is there a postmodernism today? Does postmodernity still continue? Postmodernism
is a new avant-garde. It is still happening ac- cording to J.A. Cuddon (1991: 734).
Contemporary world is postmodern. Eclecticism, which is also one of the certain features
of postmodernism, is the degree zero of contemporary general culture, according to Jean-
Francois Lyotard:
One listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch
and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro”
clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find
a public for eclectic works. (Lyotard 76)
Although the term was used earlier, a general cultural phenomenon crystallised in
the 1970s, as suggested by Dennis Brown (1). And the term is used to refer to the changes
dating back to 1940s and 1950s. Changes brought into the twentieth century life and
society are represented in many literary texts. Many of these changes were brought by the
post war developments.
Allen Ginsberg and Salman Rushdie are the two literary characters of the second
half of the twentieth century. Although they appeared in different decades in different
cultures, what they have common is that they both collide different worlds. They both make
use of eclecticism of the twentieth century. Brown finds Ginsberg’s style agglutinative. His
“democratic, all-inclusive rhetoric implications of ‘End of History’ thesis” within the
“grotesque torsions of the Cold War”, “scenarios of nuclear exchange”, “pollution” of the
earth, “repression of sexual and spiritual desire”, his “paratactical, alogical,
comprehensive, insistently rhythmic, laid back, dialogical, ironic and passionate” discourse
are the assessments of his representation of the postmodern (Brown 30):
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.

JOMOPS July 2021 / Volume:2 / Issue:1 Mehmet Ali Çelikel
88
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
...
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery
is too much for me.
...
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
...
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I’m obsessed by
Time Magazine.
… (Ginsberg 262-264)
According to Brown, “America” constitutes a “peculiarly postmodern conjunction of
textual and oral modes” (31). The oral modes it constitutes are within an “electronic
culture” (Brown 31). The design of the poem allows itself to be read aloud. In Brown’s
interpretation of the poem, it is also suggested that “the mandatory voices of the Jewish
Major Prophets” lie behind the poem (Brown 31). It is possible to feel the shimmering
“video images of pop electronics and the sonorous tonalities of the electric guitar” and the
poem “registers a reemergence into print textuality of the repressed rhythms of oral
culture” (Brown 31). Therefore, as it seems, it is impossible to reevaluate the lyrics of Bob
Dylan, John Lennon or Van Morrison without the Ginsbergian background.
Ginsberg creates as alternative discourse which might be classified in the alternative
literature. Although J.A. Cuddon admits that whether or not an alternative literature really
exists is open to doubt, in the 1950s, “it might have referred to the poetry of the Beat
generation, much of whose best work has long since been ‘mainstream’” (32). Writers of
Beat generation were influenced by jazz, Zen Buddhism, and their lifestyle was associated
with drugs, free sex (Cuddon 84). In “America”, Ginsberg uses “comedic sexual
transgression as a way of getting in the last word”, and this is long before the “recognised
construction of a Gay Rights movement” (Brown 32). According to the definition of Beat
generation by Cuddon, this is a typical example of its kind:

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
89
I smoke marijuana every chance I get. (Ginsberg 264)
However, Ginsberg’s poetry is less important for being Beat than being postmodern.
There are a number of relevant qualities to con- sider Ginsberg’s literature postmodern. By
“Howl”, for instance, he intentionally breaks with “both formal metrics and High Culture
anti-formality” and to make it available to the public, he uses “psalmic parataxis” and
“hypnotic linear repetition” (Brown 42). His works have the “moral sincerity” or
“incisiveness of critique”, although they appear to be “depthless” and “non-serious”
(Brown 43). Ginsberg’s work’s “verbal and linear freedom” through fluency, and the “unique
combination of self-deprecating comic buffoonery and radically-engaged personal and
political passion” constitute his particular significance for postmodern poetry (Brown 43).
After Beat generation in which Ginsberg’s poetry is chronologically categorised -
chronologically, because his postmodernism has become more important than his ‘Beat’-
ness -, nineteen eighties were the years when argument of postmodernism was in its peak.
While Ginsberg provided his examples of postmodern poetry in the 1950s in the USA,
Salman Rushdie is among the writers who are invariably discussed as postmodernist in
1980s, on the other side of the Atlantic (Selden 203). Ian Ousby suggests that Rushdie’s
interests are “in reshaping the history of his time” and his novels are important examples
of magic realism, which is a postmodern quality (Ousby 804). In Midnight’s Children, he
“succeeds in matching a grand subject, the multitudinousness of India itself” and is
“concerned with the creative process”, rewriting “the history of a country founded in the
year of his birth” (Ousby 804).
Postmodern writers used and abused the modernist tradition of the more “open”
endings, as suggested by Linda Hutcheon (1988: 59). Postmodern writers have converted
the open endings of postmodernism to “self-consciously multiple endings or resolutely
arbitrary closure” (Hutcheon 59) which Rushdie uses in Midnight’s Children where the
ending is open:
One empty jar ... how to end? Happily, with Mary in her teak rocking-chair
and a son who has begun to speak? Amid recipes, and thirty jars with
chapter-headings for names?
...
Or with questions: now that I can, I swear, see the cracks on the backs of

JOMOPS July 2021 / Volume:2 / Issue:1 Mehmet Ali Çelikel
90
my hands, cracks along my hairline and between my toes, why do I not
bleed?
...
Or dreams: because last night the ghost of Reverend Mother appeared to
me, staring down through the hole in a perforated cloud,
...
No, that won’t do, I shall have to write the future as I have written the past,
to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet.
...
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three,
four hundred million five hundred six ... they will trample my son who is not
my son ... until a thousand and one children have died, because it is
privilege and the curse of midnight’s children
... to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the
multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. (Rushdie 462-463)
The contradiction of being unable “to live or die”, discontinuity, uncertainty,
hybridity, heterogeneousness are typical of postmodernism (Hutcheon 59). Edward Said
sees Midnight’s Children as a brilliant work which is “based on the imagination of
independence itself” (260). Rushdie’s effort is conscious to “enter into the discourse of
Europe and the West, to mix it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalised or
suppressed or forgotten histories” (Said 260). In Rushdie’s fiction, periphery is an
important aspect. He draws attention to the contradiction of peripheral and the central. In
Shame, Omar Khayyam, the Shakil sisters’ child, is a peripheral man who has no haircut,
no circumcision and God’s name is not whispered into his ears in a Muslim society. Three
of the Shakil sisters claim to be his mother, but neither the mother nor the father is known.
The Shakil sisters, who give a magic birth to a child, are leading a life closer to English
sahibs. The mysticism and magic realism of the Eastern world are together with the
Western life style full of parties, receptions, Christian ayahs and “an iron mortality that was
mostly Muslim” (Shame 13). This is also a postmodern characteristic which “does not move
the marginal to the centre” (Hutcheon 69). Marginal remains marginal, but it is often
presented in a collision. In Shame, everything happens in the fourteenth century of the
Hegiran calendar:

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
91
All this happened in the fourteenth century. I’m using the Hegiran calendar,
naturally: don’t imagine that stories of this type always take place longlong
ago. Time cannot be homogenised as easily as milk, and in those parts,
until quite recently, the thirteen-hundreds were still in full swing. (Rushdie
13)
There is a numeric contradiction here. The fourteenth century of the Hegiran
calendar refers to the twentieth century. So the stories of fourteenth century are “still in
full swing” in the twentieth century. Neither the calendar nor the stories are converted.
Postmodernism does not “invert the valuing of centres into that of peripheries and borders,
as much as use that paradoxical doubled positioning to critique the inside from both the
outside and the inside” (Hutcheon 69). The narration in Midnight’s Children is “excentric”,
and its male narrator is manipulative foregrounding the process of the production or
constraints, which often occurs in postmodern texts (Hutcheon 81).
Midnight’s Children is, in many ways, a postmodern text. It is suggested by Brian
McHale that, according to Midnight’s Children, Indian history is “supernaturally linked to
the fates of the children born at the same time as the state itself” since independence
(McHale 95). Each of the supernatural beings in the novel possess “some miraculous
power or talent” which represents the power that enables them “to read minds, to change
shape, to pass through looking-glasses”, and so on (McHale 96). Through telepathy,
Saleem, the novel’s narrator, make the midnight’s children become aware of each other.
According to his secret history of supernatural India, “Indra Gandhi’s declaration of the
State of Emergency in 1976” was, in fact, “to flush out the midnight children and expunge
their powers” (McHale 96). Rushdie’s falsification of history in order to imply that “history
itself may be a form of fiction”, because “postmodernist apocryphal history is often
fantastic history” (McHale 96). In discussing history in Hutcheon’s terms, Baysar Taniyan
asserts that “postmodern theories posit history as a ‘discursive construct’” emphasizing
that “history and historiography” stage conflicting sites where “multiple discourses
compete for power and claim to knowledge” (244). In Rushdie’s fiction, history, then,
functions as one of the materials of his plot rather than the source of information by being
falsified, thus empowering the author to claim to a kind of knowledge relevant in his own
fictional universe.
Relationship with cinema is what postmodernist fiction shares with classic modern
fiction. however, for modernist fiction cinema is a source of new representational

JOMOPS July 2021 / Volume:2 / Issue:1 Mehmet Ali Çelikel
92
techniques, whereas for postmodernist fiction cinema is not a repertoire of
representational techniques. In postmodernist fiction, movies and television appear as an
ontological level. In Midnight’s Children, a “film vocabulary” is distinctive (McHale 128-9):
“in short: my grandfather was holding a pamphlet. It had been inserted into his hand (we
cut to a long- shot - nobody form Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary) as he
entered the hotel foyer” (Rushdie 33).
As seen overall, there has been a postmodernism in the twentieth century. James
Joyce was postmodern even before the invention of the term postmodern. As it is
understood today, postmodernism is a condition. It is a moment. It is crucial to understand
that it is not a historical period or an era like modernism. Forming of the word must not be
mistaken, since the prefix “post-” does not convert the word into a term referring to a
period that follows modernism. Postmodernism is “an awareness of being-within a way of
thinking” and “an awareness of being-within, first, a language, and second, a particular
historical, social, cultural framework” (Marshall 3-4). Postmodernism cannot exactly be
defined because “we begin our definition with “Postmodernism is...” and we are already in
trouble. We cannot get very far without “is”. Language lays a trap: it says something must
be, always be. Thus, by attempting to define post- modernism, it is given primary
ontological status” (Marshall 4).
Another danger, according to Brenda K. Marshall, is to use the term synonymously
with “contemporary”. It is then understood that anything in the contemporary culture is
postmodern, but, as Marshall suggests, we are not living in a period “identified ‘totally’ as
postmodern”. For instance, Marshall sees nothing postmodern about Newsweek. However,
she draws attention to difference, race, class, gender, erotic identity and practice,
nationality, age, ethnicity which postmodernism is all about (Marshall 2-3). Placing
different worlds in confrontation, foregrounding their respective structures and the
disparities are underlying principles of ontological poetics in postmodernist fiction from
McHale’s point of view (60). If today’s world is thought to be a ground where different
nationalities, ethnic origins, classes, sexual identities are confronted, then it is possible to
claim that the world is in a postmodern condition. People from different traditions and
ethnic origins may be found leading conventional lives despite being in confrontation with
each other. This is the condition of contemporary culture. There may not be anything
postmodern about the individuals who are, within their reality, leading conventional lives,
although they constitute a postmodern condition. There may be nothing postmodern about
Rushdie’s Pakistan and its people in Shame in the sense that they live in conventions and

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
93
do not represent a postmodern society, but they are a part of a postmodern view. Their
existence within industrial plan that can produce no “refrigerators” but “atom bombs” is
the representation of postmodern condition, for collision of worlds is a postmodern quality.
Will There Be a ‘Postmodernism’?
Today, postmodernism is “recognised as an international phenomenon not only in
the sense that its characteristics appear in art world-wide,” but in that many of them are
fostered by “increasing pluralism in cultural vision”, as suggested by Randall Stevenson (A
Reader’s Guide 135). Contact with other cultures and literatures creates for writers “a
sense of the character and limitations of their own” (Stevenson, A Reader’s Guide 135).
Awareness of languages and cultures other than their own “encourages the self-conscious
questioning, reshaping and coalescence of forms characteristic of postmodernism” for
writers anywhere (Stevenson, A Reader’s Guide 135). Awareness of foreign cultures in
other words adds to the authors’ vision of form and nature of writing itself. As innovations
and technological developments of the contemporary world continue, it will always be
possible to be aware of foreign cultures. Globalization as a result of this awareness leads
to new nations, new states, new settlements and orders in which further collisions take
place.
Peter Brooker asks what is outside or beyond postmodernism? The key affect of a
politicised, “worldly”, deconstructive postmodernism, according to Brooker,
has been to disarticulate dominant narratives, traditions and ideologies. In
this way it has questioned the universalising assumptions of the male self,
the super monoagency of the traditional working class, the power of the
United States and the ethnocentricism of Western capitalist nations,
intellectual debate and media. Postmodern technologies and theory have
helped bring the marginal, the repressed and unvoiced into view and into
hearing. (Brooker 25)
Frederic Jameson makes a similar assertion. He believes that “the emergence of
postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer
or multinational capitalism” (1992: 164). For one major theme, Jameson shows that
“namely the disappearance of a sense of history”, has begun to live “in a perpetual present
and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social
formations have had in one way or another to preserve (164). Umberto Eco suggests that
postmodernism revisits the past ironically, not innocently (227). Although it is not a total

JOMOPS July 2021 / Volume:2 / Issue:1 Mehmet Ali Çelikel
94
departure form the past, it is not a total preservation of the past, either.
In the course of the history, it seems that mass consumption and multi-national
capitalism will expand its limits and literature will have new forms, not to preserve the
perpetually changing shape of the world, but to represent it. At least, “the last part of this
century and the beginning of the next - like the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries” will be a “particularly interesting one for literature” (Stevenson, A Reader’s
Guide 141-2).
Will there be a postmodernism? The question must be left open. However, it has
been proved by the debates of postmodern theorists that worlds in collision, difference,
rapid switches from high culture to low culture, ethnic origins in confrontation, traditional
versus modern or the other way round are the major qualities by which the postmodern
moment is created. The fact that the future will probably bring more of these is a matter of
concern when rapid changes the world is undergoing are taken into consideration. One
hundred years ago there was no television. Today, there is a phenomenon called internet
through which people from all parts of the world can meet and even get married. Despite
this amazing invention, the world is a small planet where arranged marriages are “still in
full swing”.
The difference between opposite cultures to be confronted gets bigger everyday as
the postmodern developments get faster, which will lead more collisions. So, the reflection
of these collisions in literature will be inevitable. As there is one postmodernism which is
too complex to define, there will probably be a more complex literary concept in the future.
There will probably be more debates about the possible concepts.
WORKS CITED
Brooker, Peter.
Modernism/Postmodernism
. New York NY: Longman, 1992.
Brown, Dennis.
Poetry of Postmodernity: Anglo/American Encodings
. London: The
MacMillan Press Ltd, 1994.
Cuddon, J. A.
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory
. London:
Penguin Books, 1991.
Eco, Umberto. ‘Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable’, trans. William Weaver. In Peter
Brooker (ed.),
Modernism/Postmodernism
. New York NY: Longman, 1992. 226-227.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947-1997. London & New York: Harper Perennial
Modern Classics, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda.
A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,

WAS THERE A POSTMODERNISM? Mehmet Ali Çelikel
95
Fiction
. London: Routledge, 1988.
Jameson, Frederic. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. In Peter Brooker (ed.),
Modernism/Postmodernism. New York NY: Longman, 1992. pp. 164-166.
Joyce, James.
Finnegans Wake
. London: Penguin, 2000.
Kermode, F. & Hollander, J.
Modern British Literature
. Oxford University Press, 1973.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ Trans.
Regis Durand, in
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
, Trans. Geoff
Bennington & Brian Massumi. Manchester University Press, 1984.
Marshall, Brenda K.
Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory
. New York NY:
Routledge, 1992.
McHale, Brian.
Postmodernist Fiction
. London: Routledge, 1987.
Nash, Christopher.
World Postmodern Fiction: A Guide
. London: Longman, 1987.
Ousby, Ian.
Companion to Literature in English
. London: Wordsworth Reference,
1995.
Rushdie, Salman.
Midnight’s Children
. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Rushdie, Salman.
Shame
. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.
Selden, R., Widdowson, P., Brooker, P.
A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary
Theory and Practice
. 4th Ed. London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997.
Stevenson, Randall.
Modernist Fiction: An Introduction
. Harvester/Wheatsheaf, New
York NY: 1992.
Stevenson, Randall.
A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth Century Novel in Britain
. New
York NY: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1993.
Tanıyan, Baysar. “The Porcupine and the End of History”. CUJHSS, December 2020;
14/2: 240-251. DOI: 10.47777/cankujh ss.848919.