Postmodernism

More than other movements, such as Romanticism and Existentialism, Postmodernism is perhaps the one that most often results in confusion. Put simply, it is a rejection of the notion of certainty. It is also about artists (writers, sculptors, architects etc.) having fun – while reminding us that this is a construct and not life.

It is not that postmodernists say that there is no such thing as ‘Truth’ – but that we cannot be sure exactly what that thing is (ToK connection here). Since our perceptions are filtered through our senses, we cannot really know that what you see as ‘blue,’ I also see as ‘blue.’ Taking it to the extreme, we are reminded of Descartes – “I think; therefore I am” being the most that I can say with any certainty!

Victorian writers tended to aim for verisimilitude (many readers got rather upset when a train was cited wrongly in a Sherlock Holmes story), sounding sometimes like a Police report. By contrast, postmodernist writers may remind us that this is fiction, introducing metafiction elements (a great example of this being John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman in which the author himself pops up in the story). Perhaps, after WWII, many artists simply wanted a “brave new world” (to coin a phrase) and wanted to focus not so much on the world per se but how we perceive it. Hence, literary techniques such as the unreliable narrator, the vivid instant, non-chronological narrative, stream of consciousness and metafiction.