POSTMODERN FICTION AS CRITIQUE AND AFFIRMATION OF THE SPIRIT OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND MODERNITY

Abstract

 In this essay I argue that affirmations of traces of the Enlightenment project are locatable in the itinerary of postmodernisms simultaneously as the erosive disavowal of certain features of Enlightenment is persistently played out. Seeded in postmodernism is the disruptive iconoclas­tic act of Enlightenment. Enlightenment dismantled the edifice of feudalism to impose its own iconography and taxonomical protocols. But unlike Enlightenment/modernity, postmodernism’s subversion lacks the teleology to install a new iconography. While the impetus of Enlightenment/modernity formulates metanarratives and venerates the deployment of rationalism in creating coherent historiographies, postmodernism refuses any totalising/universalising/homogenising ideological and scientific narratives, as it privileges the deferral of meaning. Yet the relentless decentring of meaning formations must be the desire to equip the reader with discursive tools to know how to interpret a multiplicity of contesting narratives (affirmed in its praxis) similar to Enlightenment/modernity’s desire to accumulate knowledge as coterminous with knowl­edge as power to control and change. Arguably, postmodernism’s creation of renegade centres of meaning, after dismantling metanarratives, is inscribed with a romantic rapture; the desire for novelty and the realist ethos of capturing the underpinning social, economic and historic formations circumscribing realities, acts and events.