THE CONCEPT OF NARRATION IN POSTMODERNISM Moving from narration to a narrative

In its conventional sense, narration refers to the act of telling or retelling of an action or a story. The process of storytelling uses certain stylistic devices like mode - first person, third person, linear or fractured storyline, parenthesis, personification, repetition etc. for an effective telling. The use of these devices vary according to the medium used for the narration; for instance in case of language the operating tools like hyperbole, simile, analogy, metaphor, alliteration are employed through the medium of words where as in case of visual mediums like cinema or painting the same devices are translated through images. Classics of the Greek civilization are a testimony to the act of narration where the central idea of storytelling was the conveying of a myth, exemplifying the bravery of the central hero, his trials and tribulations. Styles of narration have undergone changes from genre to genre over centuries, reflecting, critiquing and echoing the social, economical and political conditions of the era. The socio-economic conditions of a given time period have been instrumental in the style of narration picked by authors to tell their stories. This is not to undermine their individual circumstances background, education, class and talent as writers and attribute a generalized understanding to all writers belonging to a time period but to see it as a point of mediation between the two. 18th century literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason): a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The British romantic poets like William Blake and William Wordsworth of the 19th century were concerned with the changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine that has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories. The poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment caused a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets like Blake to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Jane Austen's works critiqued the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and were part of the transition to 19th century realism. Austen brought to light the hardships faced by women. They did not usually inherit money, could not work and their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She revealed not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she did with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, received exactly what they deserved. Literary realism, a style which is a combination of high Victorian literary detail combined with an intellectual understanding was seen in the novels of George Eliot.

In her novel, Middlemarch, through the voices and opinions of different characters we become aware of various broad issues of the day: the Great Reform Bill, the beginnings of the railways, the death of King George IV and the succession of his brother. We also encounter the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community, facing the prospect of an unwelcome change. With the coming of the 20th century, writers like T. S Elliot and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf arrived on the scene with a different voice. Joyces Ulysses and Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway employed the narration mode of stream of consciousness, a device used to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings passing through the characters mind. Another phrase for it is 'interior monologue'. Narration, for the greater part of literary history has been the prerogative of the teller. It is his/her internalized version of a story, an action or a memory. The stage is set by the author and the only point of entry into the story becomes his/her own. We see what he/she wants us to see and comprehend from his understanding. The 21st century saw a shift in this style of narration that was purely from the authors point of view. Unlike the tortured heroes of the 20th century literature, who suffered existential crisis and internal conflict, characters of postmodern literature revelled in their fragmented existence. They are self-consciously deconstructive and selfreflexive narrators of their novels. POSTMODERNISM Perhaps the first philosopher to talk about postmodernism among modernists was Jean-Francois Lyotard. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (Manchester university press) stands prominently among a number of books which develop attacks on modernity. According to professor Tim woods in his book Beginning Postmodernism, Lyotard argues for a rejection of logically consistent selfevidently true grounds for philosophical discourse. According to Lyotard Metanarratives are foundational and thus should be avoided, since they work to limit the abuse of language power. He argues that there should be an attempt to recoup the power of the individual to tell his or her own petit or little narrative. Thus, antifoundationalism in this disguise becomes the access to the control of ones own politics. In answering the question what is the postmodern?(Postmodern Explained to Children, Sydney, Power Publications, 1992) Lyotard says It is undoubtedly part of the modern. Everything that is received must be suspected, even if it is only a day old. What space does Czanne challenge? - The Impressionists. What object do Picasso and Braque challenge? - Czannes. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? - The idea that one has to make a painting even a cubist painting and Buren examines another presupposition that he believes emerged intact from Duchamps work: the place of the works presentation. The generations flash by at an astonishing rate. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Thus understood, postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent. In the postmodern condition Lyotard describes modernism to be the aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unrepresentable to be put forward only as the missing content; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to reader or viewer matter for solace or pleasure [...] the

postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the attainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable. One of the hallmarks of Post-modern writing is non-homogeneity. The nonhomogeneity was with the purpose of challenging psychological realism present in modernist fiction. Instead of using the stream of consciousness narrative device, which could be attributed to writers of psychological realism, postmodern writers attempted a decentred and fragmented analysis of the unconscious, aiming to recapture pre-linguistic experiences. For this purpose they used narrative devices like 1. Pastiche which in Postmodernist literature can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. 2. Inter-textuality or Interdependence of literary texts based on the theory that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the "absorption and transformation of another". 3. Meta-fiction or writing fiction that is self aware .It is making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "wilful suspension of disbelief". It is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. THE AUTHOR IN POSTMODERNISM The postmodern becomes a contested space for the Author. While the Modern Author enjoyed the often controlling position of guide who was in charge of the readers response to his work, the Postmodern writer created an "open" work in which the reader must supply his own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his own interpretation. In his 1969 essay, what is an author, Michel Focault talks about with the relation between the text and the author and the manner in which the text points to the figure of the author. He says Beckett nicely formulates the theme with which I would like to begin: "What doesIt matter who is speaking;' someone said; 'what does it matter who is speaking.' In this indifference appears one of the fundamental ethical principles of Contemporary writing or criture. Foucaults seems to be complaining about the then trend of writing freeing itself. By this he is referring to the inferior treatment given to the theme of expression. Writing he says writing has become an interplay of signs arranged less according t o its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a s b pace into which the writing Subject constantly disappears.

The Idea of writing freeing itself (perhaps from its conventional role, till now) can also be seen reiterated in the essay Death of the Author by the French poststructuralist Roland Barthes. Barthes championed the cause of W riterly fiction in this essay which was written in the beginning of his transition from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism. Writerly fiction challenged the reader by leaving gaps that were open to multiple interpretations, thus involving the reader in the act of creation; whereas its opposite Readerly fiction left no such loose ends and constrained the reader into the interpretation of the narrative that the author wanted. For Barthes, writerly fiction marked the death of the author and the birth of the reader. Freedom appears as a value in Barthess first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953), as the freedom of the writer to choose his forms. This is a high modernist tract that identifies writing in its difference from both style, a writers utterly personal signature born in the depths of his body, and language, an algebra-like system of rules, impersonal and abstract. The modern writer, refusing to inherit traditions forms of literature, bears the responsibility of choosing the forms in which he shall write. The necessity of positioning himself with respect to the tradition follows from the historicism to which modernism is committed. Based on Barthes's astonishing study of Balzac's story Sarrasine, S/Z (1970), literary critic Terry Eagleton in his book literary theory observes that The literary work is now no longer treated as a stable object or delimited structure, and the language of the critic has disowned all pretensions to scientific objectivity. The most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read, but those which are 'writable' (scriptable) texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer. He further explains that it is not exactly as though 'anything goes' in interpretation, for Barthes is careful to remark that the work cannot be got to mean anything at all; but literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform than a free space in which it can sport. All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of 'influence' but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which precedes or surrounds the individual work. There is no such thing as literary 'originality', no such thing as the 'first' literary work: all literature is 'intertextual'. A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point. Terry Eagleton, Literary theory. When post-structuralists speak of 'writing' or 'textuality', it is usually these particular senses of writing and text that they have in mind. The movement from structuralism to post-structuralism is in part, as Barthes himself has phrased it, a movement from 'work' to 'text'.' It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings Which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing it as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single centre, essence or meaning. This obviously makes for a radical difference in the practice of criticism itself, as S/Z makes clear. Barthes's method in the book is to divide the Balzac

story into a number of small units or 'lexies', and to apply to them five codes: the 'proiaretic' (or narrative) code, a 'hermeneutic' code concerned with the tale's unfolding enigmas, a 'cultural' code which examines the stock of social knowledge on which the work draws, a 'semic' code dealing with the connotations of persons, places and objects, and a 'symbolic' code charting the sexual and psychoanalytical relations set up in the text. None of this so far may seem to diverge much from standard structuralist practice but the division of the text into units is more or less arbitrary; the five codes are simply five selected from an indefinite possible number; they are ranked in no sort of hierarchy, but applied, Sometimes three to the same lexie, in a pluralist way; and they refrain from finally 'totalizing' the work into any kind of coherent sense. Rather, they demonstrate its dispersal and fragmentation. The text, Barthes argues, is less a 'structure' than an open-ended process of 'structuration', and it is criticism which does this structurating. NARRATION IN POSTMODERNISM By the time of S/Z, Barthess focus had turned from the modern writers choice of forms to writerly reading, and the opposition between classic and modern which yields to that between readerly and writerly. According to Barthes readerly is the comfortable, familiar way of reading, whereas the writerly is what unsettles all that the readerly assumes: it undoes the readers historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, [and] brings to a crisis his relation with language. The readerly brings pleasure, the writerly bliss, where bliss is an ecstasy in which are dissolved all familiar conceptions, including those along whose lines the readers identity is drawn. The reader, then, loses herself in the act of reading in the writerly way. This interaction and participation of the reader in the act of interpreting the story according to Barthes makes him an active participant in the process of narration, thereby giving the narrative a whole new interpretation. The end product is no longer the sole property of the Author alone but it is now a collaborative effort where the reader and the writer are both involved. The process of creation continues to propagate beyond the realm of the author. Detaching writing from a source, releases the text from an anchor, an author's intention. The Weight shifts to a (general) reader, and an indefinite range of possible readings is opened. Death of the Author, Barthes The "Author" himself is a product of the culture, a convention, a reflection of a capitalist society that is concerned with ownership and the prestige of the individual. Barthes felt that it is not the author but language that should speak. Analysis of text needs to explore writing and writing structures rather than a speaking voice, a self. Writing is the destruction of every voice; every point of origin. The Author is always in the past of the text whereas the Writer is simultaneous with it. Writing always occurs now, in the act of reading it, enunciating it, unpacking its structure. In the multiplicity of writing - everything is to be disentangled rather than deciphered. The structure is to be followed at every point, rather than reduced to a single angle. In a similar vein, narration in the plastic arts went through a sea change as well. The 1960s saw the emergence of appropriation art which has been thought to support the view that authorship in art is an outmoded or misguided notion. It questioned what makes an artist the author of an artwork. In what, does the special relation of

authorship (to the work) consist in? So much so that the work of art should be interpreted in terms of the artists meaning. APPROPRIATION IN ART The appropriation artists, beginning with Elaine Sturtevant, simply created copies of works by other artists, with little or no manipulation or alteration, and presented these copies as their own works. The work of the appropriation artists, which continues into the present, might well be thought to support the idea that the author is dead. Appropriation has a long history in art. Our knowledge of Classical Greek sculpture, for example, exists largely through Roman appropriations copies made in order to document, preserve, and evoke a culture they hoped to emulate, or at least appear to have emulated. In the middle Ages, a perfectly copied icon was considered as sacred as the original. Although appropriation existed in art for centuries and continues till this day, in the last thirty years the term has been weighed down by connotation with New York based appropriation art that dominated art and criticism for much of the 1980s. What came to be called appropriation art in this newer context was centred on the primarily photographic appropriations of artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and others. These artists, who looked to Duchamps readymade as their progenitor, took cue from the staged Pictures from imagery appropriated from the simulacra of late capitalist visual culture. The Critic Douglas Crimp first theorized these emergent practices in 1977 in the Ambiguously (possibly deliberate) exhibition titled, Pictures at Artists Space in New York. This show featured five artists Tony Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith. Elaine Sturtevant, often considered the earliest practitioner, began in the 1960s to reproduce, as exactly as possible, the works of her contemporaries, including Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. She aimed to use the same techniques they used, and in some cases enlisted their aid. On at least one occasion, Andy Warhol lent his screens for her copies of his silkscreen works. Sturtevant has said that in the 1960s, she usually allowed in one mistake Which distinguished her product from the original work but in general, the Results were very close to the originals. Simply to paint a precise copy of another artists work and claim it as ones own artwork, while openly acknowledging that it is a copy, poses a certain kind of challenge to the concept of authorship that had never previously been posed. Of course, Marcel Duchamp had brought ready-made objects into the gallery and Andy Warhol had appropriated from popular and consumer culture like the Campbell soup cans, yet, there was a pre-decision made to treat these objects as art. Sherrie Levine, one of the best known appropriation artists, produced a substantial body of radical photographic appropriations during the 1980s. For these works, she sought out reproductions of well-known works by artists such as Walker Evans and Alexander Rodchenko in art history books and catalogues, photographed the reproductions and presented the resulting photographs as her own work. In addition to the photographic series, she created paintings and sculptures based on well known artworks. She often produced these works in a medium different from that employed by the original artist: Matisses paper cut-out Creole Dancer is

appropriated in watercolour, while Duchamps Fountain is recreated in polished bronze. She said The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts; their relationship to the original images is tertiary, i.e., three or four times removed When I first started doing this work, I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when theyre both manifest; that vibration is basically what the works about for me-- that space in the middle where theres no picture. Another well known appropriationist, Mike Bidlo in the 1980s did projects similar to that of Sturtevants works of 1960s. He repainted works by Warhol, Pollock, Duchamp, de Chirico and few others. In none of these works is there any attempt to deceive. In fact, the name of the original artist is often acknowledged within the title of the work. In 2000, he exhibited Not Duchamps Bottle Rack, 1914, in which he presented a number of ready-made bottle racks as his own work, just as Duchamp had, in the early 20th century, presented bottle racks and other ready-made objects as his artwork. This in a way became appropriation of an appropriation. By the 1960s, there was a widespread feeling that novelty and innovation in the arts had been exhausted and that all that could be done had been done. The modern slogan of make it new was now fraught with a "sense of ending. All That was left for the postmodern artists now to play with the objects of the past and re-assemble them in different ways. Rather than emphasizing on bold innovation and originality, postmodernists deployed eclecticism, pastiche, and parody. In Robert Rauschenbergs pasted texts from newspapers and images from classical paintings, Cindy Shermans movie stills or Barbara Krugers photographs, juxtaposed with clichd text riddled with new meaning. Kruger is concerned with the manner in which images and messages position, manipulate and subject the social body. A typical example might be your gaze hits the side of my face. Kruger here seems to be examining the manner in which women are represented as passive objects by patriarchal gender machinery. Kruger has said that she desires to welcome a female spectator into a mans world. Her visual/text strategies collaborate to disrupt the power imbalance associated with the gaze in western culture. Postmodernism replaces the work with Text. In the poststructuralist lexicon, "text" refers to any artistic or social creation that signifies and can be conceptually interpreted. Thus, not only are artworks like novels and paintings "texts" but so too are buildings, landscapes, and cities. The shift from "work" to "text" is meant both to broaden the category of objects for critical interpretation and decoding and to suggest that the meanings of the text are usually multiple and conflicting, which require new methods of interpretation that maybe multi-perspectival and decentre the authorial voice. The Postmodern Turn, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner

FROM AUTHOR (IAL) NARRATION TO PERSONAL NARRATIVE From the above cited examples, one can understand that the positioning of the appropriation artists was clearly from a place of deliberate decentring and multiperspecitivity that emphasized on heterogeneity. This heterogeneity has some common characteristics. It renounces, implodes, deconstructs, subverts and parodies conventionally defined boundaries such as - high and low art, reality and unreality, artist and spectator, and among the various artistic media themselves. The Postmodern Turn, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. The blurring of all boundaries allows for an open dialogue between all parties involved - artists/writer, reader/viewer and work/text. The end result is a free play of possibilities, starting with these three points and propagating endlessly. This brings us back to the line from the Michel Foucault essay what is an author, where he talks about how does it matter who is speaking? Indeed, in the light of the works created by the appropriation artists this question becomes impregnated with renewed meaning. The artists themselves seem to question the authority of the creator, blurring the line between the creation and its process.Our traditional understanding of the artists role refers to the artists as the sole voice of his work. Even if some accident happens along the way, it is now without the artists choice that the accident can remain within the work. In contrast to the differentiating impetus of modernism, postmodernism adopts a dedifferentiating approach that wilfully subverts boundaries between artist and spectator, among other things. In postmodernism, since the artist is no longer the originator of an authentic vision but rather an arranger who just re-arranges the pieces of the cultural past, the narration of the work also undergoes a transformation. Like Barthes writerly text, this new art, if it can be called so, also requires the viewers participation in the process of its production. In such a work, the completion of the process may not necessarily take place, as each new connect made by each new viewer and his memories, its further transmission gives rise to many more discourses possible, in way this narration becomes never ending and , in signification and therefore in meaning, giving rise to many individual personal narratives.

Bibliography
Books/Essays 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Beginning Postmodernism, Tim Woods Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton Michel Foucault Essay What is an Author? Roland Barthes Essay Death of the Author The Postmodern Turn (Chapter Four: Postmodernism in the Arts: Pastiche, Implosion, and the Popular), Steven Best and Douglas Kellner 6. Ihab Hassan Essay, Toward a Concept of Postmodernism. 7. A Companion to Aesthetics, Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker and David E. Cooper 8. Jean-Franois Lyotard Essay "Answering the question: what is the postmodern?
(The Postmodern Explained to Children)

Websites 1. www.jstor.com 2. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/visualarts/r4100/inter.html