Postmodernism Essay

A Close Analysis of Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism with reference to “Shipwreck” from Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters.

Postmodernism is a movement of aesthetic practice and has been regarded as the culture of multinational late capitalism. In this extract of his work, Frederic Jameson, a literary critic and Marxist political theorist, argues that the postmodern era suffers a crisis in historicity. He states: ‘[T]he producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles’; he argues that postmodernity has distorted the historical past into depthless stylisations, which he calls pastiche, that merely draw attention to a fascination of the present that can be commodified and consumed (Jameson 1991). Hutcheon points out that ‘one of the few common denominators of postmodernism is the […] agreement that the postmodern is ahistorical’ (Hutcheon 2004, 87). Jameson is just one critic who claims this; however, this argument can be problematic when applied to some postmodern texts.

In Julian Barnes’ postmodern novel this debate of representing the historical can be examined in the chapter, “Shipwreck”. This chapter is divided into two parts with one presenting an account of the sinking of the Medusa, while the other discusses the representation of history through art. Barnes uses history throughout his novel to examine the difficulty of writing the past. Hutcheon argues that both fiction and history are discourses; both are interpreted and history becomes a construction of the past, using the same linguistic frames of reference as fiction (Hutcheon 2004). Postmodernism, therefore, moves away from the idea of a unified past and narrative singularity, to portray the complexity and diversity of history.

Barnes does not merely place historical facts in the present, as Jameson suggests postmodernism does, but uses history to examine its complexity and the difficulty of portraying the truth. His text, therefore, is not pastiche or ‘the cannibalization of all styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion’ but becomes a complicitous critique of the difficulty of representing and retelling history (Jameson 1991). Jameson’s call for the return to history is rendered almost unnecessary, as this postmodern text directly concerns itself with the past. In “Shipwreck”, Barnes asks the reader ‘How do you turn catastrophe into art?’; or rather, how can you turn history into art, something which is no longer present to portray accurately? (Barnes 2009, 125). He goes on to argue that ‘perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for’, for people to interpret and recreate within art, to turn into something reassuring (Barnes 2009, 125). However, Barnes shows that although there may be some consolation, the full truth of the past is lost. When Géricault was asked about the painting he says ‘Bah, une vignette!’, or ‘a thumbnail’, thereby highlighting that art cannot capture the full truth and extent of history (Barnes 2009, 139).

The extract from Jameson’s work is also concerned with the ‘consumer’s appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself’ (Jameson 1991). He argues that postmodernism is a reproduction of history and therefore fits with capitalist society, in which the world is more concerned with reproduction rather than industrial production of goods (Jameson 1991). He also finds that the late capitalist age focuses on commodification and the recycling of old images and signs (Jameson 1991). While modernity believed it could represent reality in signs, it was troubled by the possibility that signs might not represent any reality beyond themselves; the signifier no longer having a signified meaning. Jameson argues that postmodernity no longer fears this and assumes that signs exist alone, detached from external reality. This portrays Plato’s conception of “simulacrum” or ‘the identical copy for which no original has ever existed’ (Jameson 1991). Jameson argues that our images of all historical events are merely built of simulacra; the idea that reality is replaced by a representation, history is replaced with an alternative history. Barnes writes the story of the sinking of the Medusa based on a translation of a narrative, therefore, re-writing history based upon another history, saying ‘It began with a portent’ (Barnes 2009, 115). Although Barnes does not actually know this, his narrative suggests truth and authorial knowledge, thus presenting a fictionalised narrative, based upon another narrative of history, as truth.

Barnes also examines this idea in Part II of his chapter which discusses the painting and the artist’s portrayal saying: ‘It begins with truth to life. The artist read Savigny and Corréard’s account; he met them, interrogated them […] got him to build a scale model of his original machine. On it he positioned wax models to represent the survivors’ (Barnes 2009, 126). Similar to Barnes, the artist also read the account to capture the catastrophe in the form of art and even re-created it. However, by doing this he no longer painted a representation of the history, but a representation of a re-creation. Although Barnes states, ‘You can tell more by showing less’, by doing this history is no longer solid, and the representation of the past, becomes a representation of a representation, or as Jameson succinctly describes, a ‘simulacrum’ (Barnes 2009, 128). Without any grounding in the real, our knowledge of the past is confined to the symbols we associate it with when we portray it. As Barnes suggests, the artist could have painted any moment of the shipwreck but chose certain aspects. With two representations of the shipwreck in the novel, Barnes asks the reader ‘do we end up believing both versions?’ and therefore disregarding that there ultimately was only one version of what happened, one history (Barnes 2009, 133). Barnes goes on to describe the painting as having ‘slipped history’s anchor’ as it no longer represents the event itself (Barnes 2009, 137). This idea coincides with Jameson’s argument that in ‘The new spatial logic of the simulacrum […] The past is thereby itself modified’ (Jameson 1991). Jameson’s idea of the depthlessness of postmodernism manifests itself through the postmodern rejection of the belief that it can move beyond the external appearances of ideology to a deeper truth; we are instead left with ‘a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum’ (Jameson 1991).

Ultimately, Jameson’s argument that we should look to the past for ‘any vital reorientation of our collective future’ is accurate to an extent (Jameson 1991). Nonetheless, having examined Barnes’ text, postmodernism does engage critically with the past and is not merely a pastiche of representation. However, Jameson’s view of the postmodern commodified society, in which the past is modified through signifiers with no signified, is clearly portrayed in Barnes’ novel; he equally examines the complexity of portraying history, and the fallibility of human interpretation, when history fictionalised, based on symbols which may have no meaning.

Bibliography

Barnes, Julian. [1989] 2009. A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. London: Vintage Books.

Barthes, Roland. 1984. “The Death of the Author” from Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text. London: Flamingo.

Hutcheon, Linda. [1988] 2004. “Historicizing the Postmodern: The Problematizing of History” from Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge.

Jameson, Frederic. [1984] 1991. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.