Postmodern Metanarratives

Blade Runner and Literature in the Age of Image

Kenneth A. Loparo, Décio Torres Cruz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137439727
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137439734
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

Postmodern Metanarratives investigates the relationship between cinema and literature by analyzing the film Blade Runner as a postmodern work that constitutes a landmark of cyberpunk narrative and establishes a link between tradition and the (post)modern.

1

On Words and Meanings: Contradictions of the Modern or Postmodern Contradictions?

Modern versus postmodern

Our inquiry into the postmodern starts with the focus on the word “modern”, which is in itself a contradictory term, since it depends upon a reference point, and as such, it is relative. According to The OED and The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, “modern” entered the English language via Old French, moderne, which is derived from Late Latin modernus (6th c.). Modernus – a derivation of modo – means “just now”, on the analogy of hodiernus, “that is of today”. The adjective means “now existing”, “being at this time”, “pertaining to or characteristic of present or recent times”. The OED informs us that in the 16th century “modern” also meant “person of modern times” or “ordinary”, “commonplace”, as the word appears in Shakespeare’s King John (III.iv.42). In the 18th century, Swift used the word in the sense of “supporter of modern ways”.

Quoting Hans Robert Jauss, Habermas states that the word “modern” in its Latin form modernus was used for the first time in the late 5th century in order to distinguish the present, which had become officially Christian, from the Roman and pagan past. For Habermas, “modern” appears and reappears “during those periods in Europe when the consciousness of a new epoch formed itself through a renewed relationship to the ancients – whenever, moreover, antiquity was considered a model to be recovered through some kind of imitation” (1993, p. 92). Habermas’s statement is related to the arguments developed by Octavio Paz.

In Children of the Mire, Octavio Paz presents the notion of the modern as a tradition made up of interruptions where each rupture is the beginning of a new tradition. In this sense, modernity is a creative self-destruction, since each modern creation that appears destroys its preceding tradition, and generates a new one, which, in its turn, will be obliterated by another new tradition in an endless series of interruptions and returns. According to Paz, our modernity differs from the previous modernities because it is not only grounded on novelty or on the shocking aspect of the surprise of the unexpected, but also because of its critical aspect, even being critical of itself. For Paz, this critical element was introduced in the 19th century. The previous modernities emerged in the traditions prior to them to reproduce or recapture their models, whereas our modernity established a rupture with the traditional model. Even when appropriation occurs, it occurs for the sake of critique and not for mere reproduction. Our modern bases itself upon heterogeneity and alterity. As Paz postulates, “[m]odernity is never itself; it is always the other. The modern is characterized not only by novelty but by otherness” (1974, pp. 1–18).

Hannah Arendt, writing at an earlier period, developed certain ideas that are consonant with some of Paz’s. She states that the pathos of novelty as revolution (the notion of seeing and thinking things and thoughts never seen or thought before) is not found in the great authors, scientists and philosophers prior to the 17th century, not even in Galileo, since their motives and intentions were secured in tradition (Arendt, 1958, p. 249).

Therefore, “modern” is always dependent on a time reference: yesterday’s modern is not the same as today’s, and today’s modern will not be the same tomorrow. The word “modern” brings in itself its own presentiation, its ability to become constantly present. The transformation of the modern into an eternal nascent state may account for the difficulties in the acceptance of the term postmodern, which seems to imply a rupture with and the death of the modern. Like the phoenix, the “modern” resists death and always reappears, soaring over the ruins and the dust of time and chaos.

From this perspective, the postmodern may be contemplated as a new tradition within the modern, which will last until another new tradition takes over. As a new Weltanschauung, the postmodern still has much in common with some of the tenets of Modernism. Even modern works, which have been considered the glorification of a “brave new world” of science and technology, may also be interpreted as being critical of these elements, which they apparently seem to glorify. Interpretation depends on how one approaches these works; it depends on the critical eye of the beholder, critique being one of the elements pertinent to modernism.

Let us consider, for instance, Walt Whitman’s poems in Leaves of Grass. Although this poet lived in the Romantic, Transcendental, and Realist periods, shall we consider him modern or postmodern? The elements in his poems, which appear to be the celebration of the promises of the Enlightenment, may also be interpreted as a critique of this world of progress through “the word En-Masse”. In his poems, one finds the assertions of modern man’s contradictions and fragmentation: “I am large, I contain multitudes” (verse 51), and the questioning of truths: “All truths wait in all things” (verse 30). However, these characteristics are considered as belonging to the postmodern.

By inaugurating free verse in American poetry, Whitman became one of the main defenders of democracy (and democracy is the stage of the postmodern play and the celebration of differences), not only of the political institution celebrated in his poems, but also of the freedom of versification by releasing the poem from the dictatorship of metrics. In “Song of Myself”, there is an election of an “I”, fragmented by civilization and urban reality, which tries to impose itself before the universe through the search for a cosmic self. The election of the self runs through the 52 songs of the poem in an attempt to establish a relationship between the micro and the macrocosm (later on recaptured by the beatnik poets who acknowledged his influence), body and soul, man and woman.

Through a process of superimposition of different images, similar to techniques that would appear much later – in film techniques, in collage in the plastic arts, and in the structural techniques in the French nouveau roman – Whitman foregrounds scenes that at first glance would not appear to have any relationship among themselves, but which form a unified whole when put together. He depicts the urban life of the 19th century as through a movie camera, “filming” fragments of quotidian life through his “peeringly view ... from the top” in an elliptical description of contrasting elements put together, provoking an imagistic synaesthesia: a baby sleeping in its cradle and a suicide sprawling on the bloody floor of the bedroom, the pistol, the blab of the pave, cart tires, the omnibus, the policeman, the crowd, the noise, “the impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes” (p. 339), descriptive scenes which resemble the cinematic techniques of aerial shots, close-ups, cutting, editing, and even soundtracks.

Similar aspects are also found in William Shakespeare’s fragmented and decentered universe (King Lear) at a time “out of joint” (Hamlet), although decentering and fragmentation are regarded as postmodern features. The postmodern depiction of Shakespeare’s works in recent films, such as Romeo + Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard III indicates that if such a reading is possible, it is because these elements are there in the text. Moreover, the way Shakespeare played with language evokes Derrida’s deconstructive play with signs, especially the one he establishes with the word pharmakon and its derivations in “Plato’s Pharmacy”. Deconstruction and irony are present in most Shakespeare’s plays, especially in Hamlet, Henry V, and Romeo and Juliet, through his constant reference to punning and to what Saussure would centuries later call the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.

Another example is Baudrillard’s postmodern notion of simulacra, which was already present in Plato’s allegory of the cave. However, the fact that the effacement of the differences between reality and its simulacrum is one of the main concepts in postmodern does not make Plato postmodern. If we strictly adhere only to some isolated categories that define the postmodern, there will be a long list of precursors that fit these definitions.

My point here is not to push the concept too far back and use “postmodern” in the sense that Eco described as a term bon à tout faire, which is “applied today to anything the user of the word happens to like” (1984, p. 65). Eco criticizes the attempt to make the term increasingly retroactive. He argues that it started being used to refer to writers of the last twenty years, gradually reached back to the beginning of the 20th century, and then went still further back. Although Eco sees postmodernism as an ideal category, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating, and not as a trend to be chronologically defined, he reproves this reverse procedure by saying that soon it will end up including Homer (1984, pp. 65–6). My intention, however, is to draw attention to the incongruities of the term in order to avoid this generalization, so that we may come up with a better understanding of what is being defined.

The division of the characteristics of modern as opposed to postmodern shows conflicts, as Eco, Smyth, and others have posited. Ihab Hassan’s schematic traits of the postmodern can be applied to many other texts not confined to the postmodern, as Smyth has observed (1991, p. 11). Also, what some authors consider a characteristic of the postmodern, others reject. The idea of the postmodern as “anything goes”, embraced by Appignanesi (1995, p. 50) and others, is rejected by Hal Foster as an apocalyptic belief (Foster, 1983, p. xi).

By the same token, one should not confuse the modern or the postmodern with the idea of contemporaneity, nor with what in Portuguese is called atualidade (or actualité, in French), that condition which makes a work of art universal irrespective of the time of its production, and renders a work of art its constant presentiation, its quality of being always present, up-to-date. Russian Formalist Tomashevski clearly distinguishes atual from contemporary in the Portuguese translation of his essay “Thematics” (1978, pp. 170–1), a distinction which was lost in English. (Tomashevski, 1965, pp. 64–5). What is contemporary may be just a passing fad that will not survive the judgment of time. Not all works produced in our present age (contemporaneity) are postmodern, nor are all postmodern works atual in the sense that their contemporaneity is no guarantee of their universality.

Another free-floating characteristic applied to the postmodern is the technique of montage/collage. Unless one considers Dadaism postmodern, as Hassan does in his schema in “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (1993, pp. 280–1), this distinction does not suffice, since collage was one of the paramount features of that modern movement in the early 20th century. This fact also leaves us with another contradiction, which is to consider the postmodern as belonging to a specific chronological period or not. If it started in the 60s, as most people argue, it excludes Dadaism. On the other hand, it is not clear whether the critics of modernism have Dadaism in mind when they talk about the negative side of modernism.

The division of modern versus postmodern is also dependent upon which modernism one is referring to, that is, which national modernism and which phase are being considered. Are Linda Hutcheon and Umberto Eco talking about the same modernism as Octavio Paz? Hutcheon describes the postmodern as the introducer of the ironic criticism of tradition (1988, p. x), which is the same characteristic described by Eco who sees the postmodern as a recognition of the need to revisit the past with irony, due to the impossibility of its destruction, which would result in silence (Eco, 1984, pp. 67–8). However, this same characteristic Paz attributes to modernism. Bakhtin also perceives the presence of criticism in the serio-comical realm of the classical Menippean satire in its critical relationship to legend. He applies this feature, which “at times even resembles a cynical exposé”, to the modern novel (1984, p. 108).

Furthermore, in Brazilian art and literature, modernism in the early 1920s was characterized mainly by its ironic appropriation of European tradition in order to deconstruct it, a characteristic considered pertinent to the postmodern American movement, whose roots are placed somewhere in the sixties, or possibly in the late fifties if one decides to perceive the beatnik movement as postmodern. Portuguese and Brazilian modernisms differ from the Spanish tradition, although they share some commonalities. National characteristics account for the differences in theme, form, content, and periodization, although we tend to forget those differences when we refer to a general understanding of what Modernism was. If the model we have in mind is French Modernism, that should be specified. Brazilian postmodern literature, as depicted in the works of Roberto Drummond, José Agrippino de Paula, and W. J. Solha, was very much influenced by the international Pop Art movement, which, in its turn, is indebted to Dadaism (Cruz, 2003).

Dating is also another conflicting issue. Jencks classifies Modernism as a cultural movement relating directly to modernity (“the social condition of living in an urban, fast-changing, progressivist world governed by instrumental reason”), which started in 1840 and ended in 1930 (1996, p. 8). He divides human society into three main forms in terms of production, society organization, space/time orientation, and culture: Pre-Modern, from 10000 B.C. to A.D. 1450; Modern, from 1450 to 1960; and Post-Modern, from 1960 onwards (p. 56).

For Jencks, the modern world arrived with the Renaissance and the rise of capitalism in Italy and France, and then with the Industrial Revolution in England and in the rest of Europe. This period is characterized by a centralized factory mass-production, a capitalist society of owning class of bourgeoisie and workers, a linear, sequential and progressive space/time compression, a nationalist orientation with a rationalization of business, and a machine-age bourgeois culture with a mass culture of reigning-styles. The postmodern Information Revolution presents a decentralized office-segmented production in a socitalism (socialized capitalism) society with a para-class of cognitariat (office workers) and a fast-changing linear and cyclical space-time implosion, an inclusive and open post-national, multinational pluralist and eclectic orientation, in a many-genred, knowledge-based culture of taste and cultures in the age of signs (1996, p. 57).

This division, however, is not closed in itself, since Jencks admits that “one of the benevolent paradoxes of the postmodern situation is that it willingly includes the modern and pre-modern conditions as essential parts of its existence” (p. 61). The postmodern may thus be understood as a revisitation to the past with displacement and irony, which literature portrays as the staging of an eclectic melting pot of differences.

Brazilian critic José Guilherme Merquior classifies Western literature into five phases: Romanticism (until 1848); Post-Romanticism (initiator of the modern tradition, a critical literature which opposes Romanticism mythology, but preserves its sacred function); Modern (between 1905 and 1925); and Post-Modern (from World War II to the present, characterized by a literary symbiosis and by the emphasis on the aspect of polysemy and ambiguity introduced by the Benjaminean concept of allegory). In modern allegory, the surreal and metaphorical aspects prevail. In postmodern allegory, the hyper-real and metaphorical aspects are emphasized. For Merquior (1980), postmodernism was preceded by a “neo-modern” stage, a phase dominated by the works of writers still attached to the modern avant-garde. While the moderns privileged a ludic poetics, the “neo-moderns” emphasized a humanist aestheticism.

Cahoone’s dates also differ from those established by Merquior and Jencks. He sees modernism as an ambiguous term, which refers not only to the philosophy or culture of the modern period as a whole, but also to a more circumscribed movement in the arts during the period ranging from 1850 to 1950 (Cahoone, 1996, p. 13). Cahoone’s periodization clashes with Charles Newman’s dating, however, as Newman describes the Post-Modern as “neither a canon of writers, nor a body of criticism, though it is often applied to literature of, roughly, the last twenty years” (p. 5). Since his book was published in 1985, his date references place the beginning of postmodern literature at around 1965. Today we must add the decades of literary works that have been produced since then. Newman sees Post-Modernism in its positive form as “an intellectual attack upon the atomized, passive and indifferent mass culture which, through the saturation of electronic technology has reached its zenith in Post-War America” (p. 5). This is congruent with Merquior’s dating, but not with Jencks’s. For Newman, the very term “signifies a simultaneous continuity and renunciation, a generation strong enough to dissolve the old order, but too weak to marshall the centrifugal forces it has released. This new literature founders in its own hard won heterogeneity, and tends to lose the sense of itself as a human institution” (Newman, p. 5).

The contradictions as to the first use of the word “postmodern” may be found inside the text of a single writer. Charles Jencks claims that the postmodern “carries the weight...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  On Words and Meanings: Contradictions of the Modern or Postmodern Contradictions?
• 2  Literature and Film: A Brief Overview of Theory and Criticism
• 3  Blurring Genres: Dissolving Literature and Film in Blade Runner
• 4  Revisiting the Biblical Tradition: Dante, Blake and Milton in Blade Runner
• 5  Revisiting the Psychoanalytical Tradition
• 6  Collating the Postmodern
• 7  When Differences Fall Apart
• 8  From Conception to Inception: A Never-Ending Story
• 9  Deleted and Alternate Scenes in BR
• 10  The Workprint
• 11  Postmodern Renaissance: The Final Cut and the Rebirth of a Classic 25 Years Later
• 12  Recycling Media: Blade Runner to Be Continued
• Conclusion: Replicating Life and Art
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index