Literature Essay on Postmodernist Fiction

‘I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name’. There has been, in postmodernist fiction, an obsessive concern with identity, either subjective or objective. Indeed, it is not only self-identity – or ‘human’ identity – which has become problematic but also the ‘real’ itself, the very notion of a stable reality.

The huge number of ‘unnameable’ characters or narrators that are to be found in contemporary fiction or films betray a serious questioning of identity in the widest sense of the word.

From Clint Eastwood’s triple performance as the ‘man with no name’ in Sergio Leone’s Westerns to Fight Club’s schizophrenic plot, postmodernism has always shown unmistakable signs of a lost identity.

The crisis, in my opinion, can be explained in two ways. The first has to do with a problem ‘inside’ fiction itself, with questions of textuality. Post-structuralist theories have brought forward issues of authorship and originality as well as a key concept in the study of postmodernist fiction: intertextuality.

However, maybe even more relevant to this essay is McHale’s concept of the ontological dominant which puts problems of identity and reality at the centre of an understanding of postmodernist fiction.

The other approach to the question consists in analysing the influence of the ‘outside’, that is, in reflecting on how postmodernist fiction interacts with and reacts to postmodernity. This, in a way, means taking the other end of the stick and debating the influence of postmodernist thinkers on writers.

While the lost identity of narrators can arguably be justified as a reaction to Barthes’ reduction of the text to ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’, this does not satisfyingly explain the authors’ obsession with names and selfhood.

‘In Project Mayhem, we have no names’, chant the ‘space monkeys’ in Fight Club, while in The New York Trilogy, the second story follows Blue, White, Black and Brown, a bunch of nameless characters playing unclear roles in a case of pointless spying. The question of subjectivity, as Hutcheon seems to indicate, can be directly linked to the wider problem of intertextuality.

‘The postmodern way of defining the self’, she argues, ‘has much to do with this mutual influencing of textuality and subjectivity’. Auster’s novel, one might say, is entirely based on intertextuality insofar as it is a conscious rewriting of different narratives mainly drawn from detective fiction.

In this context, ‘naming’ the characters would be a vain attempt to give identity and individuality to amnesiac clones. Palahniuk also admitted that Fight Club was entirely made up of stories he had heard in bars.

Once again, the construction of the narrative around urban myths and other recuperated texts renders the textual identification impossible, the reality of the characters disappears as soon as their textuality appears.