Door de mazen van het net geglipt. Lyricisering in postmodern proza

Abstract

Slipped through the net”. Lyricisation in postmodern fiction. This contribution investigates the role and the evolution of the lyric in the postmodern type of fiction that appeared from 1975 onwards in the Netherlands and (a few years later) in Flanders. Three stages are discerned. The “ emergent” phase (a term borrowed from Raymond Williams) sees three early postmodern novelists, who do not make up a generation : Willem Brakman, Louis Ferron, and, to a lesser extent, Gerrit Krol. With Brakman and Ferron the lyric is to be found primarily in the use of imagery replacing the narrative sequence, in the self-conscious exploration of language, and in the stress on the individual consciousness. Krol’s lyricism, on the other hand, involves semantic condensation and abstraction. Around 1990, postmodernism becomes a “ dominant” literary phenomenon, involving a whole generation of novelists born around 1960. Their lyric fiction draws attention to the poetic aspects of objects (the subject being undermined by postmodern relativism) and melts imagery with philosophical and essayistic digressions. The third, “ residual” phase, starting in the late nineties, is represented by authors of the same generation as the second stage. They underscore two seemingly contradictory lyrical functions : the musical play with words and the encyclopedic transfer of knowledge. In none of the stages does lyric fiction cut the ties with social reality, but in the final stage social criticism becomes most explicit.