The development and change of postmodernist fiction

The American novel came into the postmodern, there are obvious changes:The boundaries of literature and art are blurred and diffused. Postmodernist novels transcend the boundaries of art and reality, the traditional boundaries between literary genres, and the traditional boundaries of various types of art. As a result, in the postmodernist atmosphere, new modes of creation have emerged in the American novel, which are quite different from the traditional American novel. These new modes are mainly the following: 1. The combination of fact and fiction

The American postmodernist novel is no longer a product of the writer's personal imagination and fiction, but an ingenious combination of fact and fiction. Historical characters and historical events re-entered the post-modernist novel and became one of its major features. In their view, literature is subjective, and writers fictionalize an imaginary real world according to their own ideas, whereas history and journalism are objective, and historical events are true records. Therefore, on the one hand, they questioned the traditional realism, and on the other hand, they dissolved history and news into their novels. "Revisiting history" became their fashion (Yang Renjing, "Attention to History and Politics" 6). For example, E. L. Doctorow's The Age of Ragtime (1975) fictionalized the stories of three different family characters, and borrowed real-life stories of Ford, the automobile king, Morgan, the plutocrat, Freud, the psychologist, Houdini, the master magician, and Ferdinand, the crown prince of the Austrian nation in the early twentieth century, so that the author's fictionalized Jewish immigrants, blacks, and middle-class whites "shared the stage" with these real celebrities. "on the same stage" to show the great changes in American society before the First World War. This interplay of fact and fiction in the novel reveals the author's concern for reality and politics. For example, Robert Coover's Public Fury (1977) takes former President Richard Nixon as the main narrator of the novel, inserting into the fictionalized plot Nixon's real-life experiences from his teenage years to his accession to the White House, and implicitly criticizing and ridiculing the persecution of the scientists, Mr. and Mrs. Lutsen, by McCarthyism in the 1950s. Don DeLillo's The Libra Constellation (1988) links the JFK assassination to the machinations of CIA agents. The assassin, Oswald, had been a classmate of the author's in high school. The novel's fiction contains this real-life material in a way that makes it relatable and believable. It is no wonder that it had former Presidents Reagan and Bush storming out of the room, calling DeLillo "the scum of the nation"! This provoked a controversy between dignitaries and writers. It took silence from Reagan and Bush to quell the controversy.

Slaughterhouse Five

2. Combination of Science Fiction and Fiction

With the great development of television and the Internet, all kinds of literary genres have been rejuvenated, and science fiction, which used to be unpopular with the modernists, has been revitalized and taken over a corner of the book market. Descriptions of the relationships between humans and machines, humans and animals, and humans and hybrids have once again attracted the attention of postmodernist writers. The science fiction component entered the postmodernist novel, forming an organic whole with historical facts and biographies. This became another new mode of postmodernist fiction. Vonnegut's long novel Slaughterhouse Five is a typical example. The protagonist of the novel, Billie, is abducted by a flying saucer to Volksstadt 541 in 1967 and put on exhibition in a zoo, but he is not desperate. He finds the people there kind and learns much from them, such as the concept of time. He was an old widower when he got out of the hallucinatory stream of consciousness, and woke up as a groom at a wedding, but the bride died an hour later. He went in through a door in 1955, came out through another door in 1941, and went through that door again to find himself in 1963. He said he had seen life and death many times and could return at will to all the events he related between life and death. Eventually, he suffered from time spasms and could not control where he went next. In the post-industrial era of the United States, science fiction and postmodernist fiction have influenced and merged with each other. Science fiction has become postmodernized, while some postmodernist novels have been "science-fictionized". In different postmodernist novels, the degree of expression varies, but the development trend is obvious. Such as Delillo's "Ratner's Star", Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and Burroughs's "Nova Express" and so on, which shows that the combination of science fiction and fiction has become another major feature of the American post-modernist novel.

3. The combination of fiction and non-fiction

The American postmodernist novel is different from the traditional novel, which has become a cross-genre artistic creation. For example, more than 50 poems are inserted into Public Fury. It is not uncommon for previous novels to occasionally insert a few poems, but it is rare to see such a cross-genre form. The texts of postmodernist novels are complex and varied. Nabokov's A Shimmering Fire demonstrates Nabokov's transcendent reality by acting out the story within the story through Sid's poems and Kinbote's annotations. The American postmodernist novel not only dissolves the boundaries between fiction and poetry and drama, but also greatly transcends the traditional demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. The above mentioned Public Fury also contains news advertisements, clippings of current events, and the song "The Star Spangled Banner Never Falls" to name a few. This kind of transcendence is also becoming more and more common in short and middle grade fiction. In DeLillo's long story "White Noise," advertisements for supermarkets, television commercials, travel ads, and drug ads proliferate everywhere, stimulating the nerves of the people. The main character, Professor Jack, often finds his daughter, Stephie, repeating the sound of the advertisements on television in her dreams. The author describes how Jack's family passes their days amidst the distractions of supermarkets and TV advertisements, revealing the evils of consumer culturalism that bring mental trauma to people. Norman Mailer's novel The Executioner's Song (1979) is a collection of letters between the prisoner Gilmore and other people, evidence from the courtroom, statements from witnesses, and the author's transcripts of more than 100 interviews with relevant people. His "journalism" brings fiction closer to life. Based on true stories and non-fiction material, the author digs deep into the inner subconscious of the criminal Gilmore and the social environment that corrupted him. This makes the work a full-length novel about the life of executioner Gary Gilmore.

Tony Morrison

4. Combination of Elegant Art and Popular Art

Unlike the modernist writers who pursued elegant art, the American post-modernist novelists have always been committed to drawing on the artistic techniques of popular literature to express serious social themes. This is the information age, and the popularization of computers and television has made the fever of popular culture enduring. As Jameson said, "By the stage of postmodernism, culture has become completely popularized, and the distance between refined culture and popular culture, between pure literature and popular literature, is disappearing" (162). Adopting the techniques of popular fiction can enable serious novels to gain a broad space for survival, further adapting to the needs of the public, and constantly enriching and renewing. Popular fiction includes gothic novels, detective novels, adventure novels, romantic novels, romance novels, and so on, with a wide variety of genres, a long history, and popular favorites. Among them there are both good and bad works. Post-modernist writers have chosen their good artistic techniques and melted them into innovations to achieve better social effects. Toni Morrison used the technique of Gothic novel to create a mysterious atmosphere in Eva, which was very successful. The novel depicts the story of Seth, a slave girl who killed her own girl during the Reconstruction period in the American South. Later, Seth faces life head on with the help of her daughter, Danf, and Eva finally mysteriously disappears. In Billy Bathgate, Doctorow uses the techniques of popular fiction to great effect. The novel opens with a movie montage of flashbacks, depicting New York gangster Sulz ordering his thugs to throw that subordinate into the sea in order to dominate his wife. The plot of the novel is tense and thrilling with many thrilling scenes, sometimes with lights, sometimes with blood, which is thrilling. The author skillfully writes the inside story of the New York underworld in the 1930s through the experience of the young protagonist, Billy Bathgate, who was born to die, full of biting sarcasm and fascinating charm. The novel was adapted into a movie starring megastar Hoffman and was well received by audiences. Doctorow has published eight full-length novels, five of which have been adapted into movies, with the other three under negotiation. He became a most notable American postmodernist novelist. Black author Ismil Reid, on the other hand, uses the detective novel model to mock detective fiction in his full-length novel Mambo Jumbo. The novel centers around an ancient Egyptian text sacred to the Yez-Gelu movement, and features a struggle between detection and counter-detection between a 15-year-old black teenager, Private Investigator Rabbas, and Henk of the Knights Templar. Later, the Khudu text is burned by the black Muslim Abudar. Not to be discouraged, La Paz believed that America would reconstruct its own text. After 50 years of dormancy, the Hudoodoo text showed signs of resurrection.

5. The combination of fairy tale or myth with fiction

In the history of European literature, Marlowe and G?del wrote immortal plays and poems from the German folktale Faust, and Byron and Browning from the Spanish folktale Don Juan. Byron and Browning used the Spanish folktale "Don Juan" to write monumental plays and poems, which were popular among readers in various countries. The American post-modernist novelists, on the other hand, used some household fairy tales and legends to construct long novels, whose content and form were very different from the original works. Donald Bascombe, in his long novel Snow White (1967), reproduced in a loose collage the famous German author Grimm's fairy tale Snow White (1918). The novel retains the basic plot of the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but the characters are somewhat deformed and the plot is eccentric. The modern Snow White in the novel is only 22 years old, with white skin and black hair, tall, with a beauty mark on her body, and with an appearance as beautiful as that of the fairy tale Snow White. She lived with seven short men. These seven men work every day in a Chinese food factory, filling jars and scrubbing floors. Bill, the head man, began to hate Snow White. Snow White is also tired of being a housewife and hopes that a prince will come and rescue her. In the novel, there is a woman, Jane, who is jealous of Snow White's beauty and makes up many rumors against her. Jane becomes the image of a witch. Paul digs a burrow, sets up a dog training program, and invents the "Long Range Early Warning System" to spy on Snow White in order to observe her movements and finally get her. He is the prince that Snow White expects. In the end, Paul drinks a glass of poisoned Gibson that Jane has prepared for Snow White and dies suddenly. Snow White arrives at the news and scatters flower petals on Paul's grave before ascending to heaven and going away. Bassem's combination of Grimm's fairy tales and fiction is meant to expose the anti-fairy tale nature of contemporary American social life. In contrast to the pure fairy tale of Snow White, the author is surrounded by spiritual emptiness, monotonous boredom and disappointment. Some writers did not borrow all the famous fairy tale materials to build their texts, but sometimes they used nationally colored myths to enrich the plot and enliven the atmosphere. For example, Chinese female writer Tang Tingting's "Warrior Woman" Americanizes the story of China's Hua Mulan, combining the impact of Western culture and the bitterness of Chinese immigrants with the suffering of women in China's old society, constituting a cross-cultural and unique text that has gained recognition and acceptance among American readers.

Breakfast of Champions

6. Combination of novels with paintings, music, and especially multimedia

The 1970s and 1980s were the era of the Internet, and some multi-talented writers combined novels with paintings, music, and especially multimedia, which is the most fashionable, to create novels that are even more postmodern than those of the postmodernists. The most prominent one is the famous female writer Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson is a novelist as well as an actress, painter, photographer and composer. War as the Highest Form of Modern Art is one of the masterpieces in The Nervous Bible. It is a vivid and succinct account of the author's own electronic equipment as she traveled to countries in the Middle East to perform during the 1991 Gulf War. Next to the text are four paintings she drew herself: a bomber in flight, a soldier carrying a rocket gun, a smoke screen created when a bomb explodes, and the fire of a bomb exploding at night. The four paintings constitute intertextuality with the textual description, creating a strong emotional impact on the reader (Gan Wenping 9). Not only that, Anderson also puts the said short story on the stage. The stage was equipped with relevant background images and different background music, and she recited it herself on the stage and created a unique atmosphere through the height of her voice, mobilizing the audience's emotions and making their minds go from calm to unsettled and then back to calm, from nervousness and fear to lightness and humor with the changes in the melody of the electronic music. Her performances have been fully recognized by the audience. People call her a cross-genre artistic generalist and innovative post-modernist writer. In addition, in Vonnegut's novel Breakfast of Champions, one can often find illustrations drawn by the author herself, such as printed sweatshirts, American flags, egg-cone ice creams, Chinese yin-yang diagrams, beavers, women's underwear, masks, revolvers, hypodermic syringes, road signs, and diagrams of the molecular structure of plastics, among other things, which are different from the usual illustrations, and often become part of the text of the novel. Vonnegut likes to use a combination of science fiction and fictional modes to achieve satirical and humorous effects, and these illustrations often serve as a finishing touch.