Die postmodernistiese roman: ‘n skakel met die 18de eeu?

Abstract

Summary Postmodernism is generally defined with reference to Modernism, but it may be rewarding to explore some of the roots of this movement in the 18th century novel, especially in terms of the obliteration of borders between text and extra‐text, the situation of a story in a context “replete with literature” (Butor), the exploration of the text as a process in which the reader becomes the accomplice of the narrator, and the ludic function of the narrator who replaces the logocentric notion of an Auctor. Two novels from the 18th century are of special interest: Tristram Shandy with its exploration of the text as lecture, and Jacques le Fataliste et son maître (Diderot) with its exploration of the novelistic text as an extension of oral narrative. (Both these initial impressions are revealed to be misleading.) Because of the familiarity of most Anglosaxon and South African readers with Sterne's text, this essay focusses more specifically on Diderot. Jacques springs from the interaction between Narrator and Reader, question and answer. The conventional expectation of a “story” is frustrated, deferred and interrupted by subordinating it to the processes of its production. The Reader becomes a condition of this production, and the Narrator engages openly in a process of fictification, not by acting as a primary agent or Auctor, but precisely by undermining the notion of the authorial and the definitive. Through Diderot's use of language the actual reader is in fact left in the dark about what “really happens” in the conclusive episode in the story (the “love scene” between Jacques and Denise), as well as in the key episodes about Jacques's initial loss of innocence. The text itself is demonstrated to have lost its innocence as all notions of “origin” are blurred. What remains is what Hassan terms “indeterminance”, as a result of which interruption ‐ a crucial narrative strategy in the text ‐ is foregrounded at the expense of “substance”. In fact, narrative substance as such is shown to become a dubious concept: what appeared to have been “supplement” is transformed into the “body” of the text, which does not “deal with”, or “tell about” love but, instead, becomes a discourse composed of elusive traces of love. In true Derridean fashion, not to talk about love becomes the manifestation of love, and absence coincides with presence. Although it would be foolhardy to ignore the essential differences between the 18th and 20th centuries, this preliminary investigation of Jacques should demonstrate that the notion of “postmodernism” should not be linked too exclusively with historicity, as that would obscure important parallels between this form and its early predecessors.