Scholars generally believe that postmodernism is a pan-cultural phenomenon, is a postmodern atmosphere, touching almost all aspects of literature, art and other aspects of real society, familiar with the theories of Derrida, Foucault and others; the criticism of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and others; the poetry of Ginsburg, Plas and others, the novels of Borges, Calvino and others; the dramas of Beckett, Ionescu and others. Postmodernism differs from the traditional so-called genres in that it focuses more on the uniqueness of a kind of thinking. Prose creation that survives this "post" wave naturally cannot be "left out of the matter."
World prose, descending from Montaigne and Bacon, through Pascal, Rousseau, Kafka, Lawrence, Gide, Paz, Borges, Roland Barthes, although the range of subject matter is different, the narrative has changed many times, but the genre as a way of speaking has never been interrupted. Not only that, but I think that among the huge ranks of writers in the world of prose creation, there are also masters such as Roland Barthes, Borges, echoes, etc.
As a concept of observing and understanding the world, postmodernism is intended to break the myth of an "integrated world" and replace it with a pluralistic world. Postmodernist prose is embodied in the dissolution of the center of meaning and replaced by fragmentation. No center, or de-center, is the fundamental strategy of deconstruction or dissolution. Because of the pursuit of "no center", the echo of the title and the main text in the traditional concept has also been repeatedly broken in Benjamin's "One Way". At the same time as the central dissolution, the emotional elements that were held by traditional ideas in the past also faded out at the same time, and rational thinking dominated. In "Lover's Whispers", it is not a traditional "narrative love", but a rational sorting out of various details that may appear between "lovers", and the "form" of paying attention to details and paying attention to details has become the main content of the work.
The ultimate point of the spiritual core of postmodernism is the innovation of art, a feature that is extremely prominent in postmodernist prose. For example, Echo's "Misreading" and "Traveling with Salmon" epitomize the author's strong breakthrough of old thinking in terms of the operation and layout arrangement of the article, which brings readers no less reading stimulation than watching Hollywood blockbusters, and completely subverts the tradition in terms of structural form. "Sorry, return your... (Review Report)" in the conception of the article is very innovative, a number of world famous classics, in the form of review reports to affirm or deny, funny, humorous, the analysis of these famous classics, seemingly careless, in fact, to the point, into the wood. "Letter to The Son" uses the form of a letter to freely criticize the ugliness of society, with a pungent irony. The article sometimes says and sometimes contradicts, indicating that the real society is full of the haze of war, guns and other weapons are rampant, and even children's toys are not spared. "Discover America" is also arranged in the form of a script. Echo experimented with almost every form of writing, including letters, review reports, and scripts. The author is like a mysterious magic master, completely out of the expectations of the viewer, constantly changing into an endless form of article.
From the perspective of narrative discourse or style, the prominent feature of postmodernist prose is the divergence and jumpiness of the narrative process; the representation of history has also become a kind of "reproduction" or even "drama". In terms of "divergence", Nabokov recounts his love of butterflies in Say, Memory, with the following description: "A small black leopard-print butterfly with the name of a Scandinavian goddess low skimmed over the moor lingonberry bush with hazy blue fruits, skimmed the brown backwater circle, skimmed over moss and mud, and skimmed the spike-like inflorescence of the fragrant moss orchid (the night violet of the Russian poet's penchant)." The beautiful Cordigera, a jewel-like moth, buzzes all over the wetland plants it uses for food. I chase pink butterflies with rose-red edges, gray marbling eye butterflies. There is no traditional language structure at all, only "skimming" and "skimming", such descriptions are full of movement, just like the movie picture, presented one by one in front of the reader. It's still Nabokov: "But the snow is real, and when I bend down to pick up a handful of snow, sixty years have shattered into a shining frost dust between my fingers." "It's all about a movie frame made of words. Regarding a certain "reproduction" of history, a description of the ninth section of Levi Strauss's "The Melancholy Tropics", "Guanabara Bay", illustrates this characteristic very well. This section begins with a story from pages 89 to 94, which is a story from 378 years ago, and this idea of narrating the story, until the 94 pages of storytelling is completed, is not explained in passing, and this content casts a special narrative of this work, using different narrative methods in the same article. It is worth mentioning that, as far as the content of this section is concerned, not only through ancient and modern times, but also through Europe and the Americas, through travel and philosophy, the picture presented by the text is more dynamic and quiet, completing the complete transcendence and subversion of the traditional form of articles. In addition, Jean Baudrillard's "Cold Memory" is full of strong jumps, which most ordinary people cannot understand.
Postmodernist theory has been prevalent in the West for more than half a century, and although Chinese mainland has many cultural differences with Western society, its influence is as inescapable as flowing air. And the effect, to a large extent, is likely to be two-way. Ai Ke not only knew Li Bai and Du Fu, he also knew Lu Xun and even knew Chairman Mao's quotations. Ai Ke's constantly renovated article structure is familiar to Lu Xun's "Wild Grass"; Lu Xun's "A Chang and the Classic of Mountains and Seas", which first deconstructs and examines the object, and then writes praise from the perspective of criticism, superficially criticizing the actual praise, which is completely different from the direct interpretation of traditional thinking such as Zhu Ziqing's "Back Shadow". Qian Zhongshu's "The Devil's Night Visits Mr. Qian Zhongshu" is also reproduced in Nabokov's "Say, Remember". As far as the "west wind is moving eastward", the south sail of Fujian, China, greeted Roland Bart with works such as "Guard or Copy", "Knocking Feeling", and "Comfort on the Tip of the Tongue". In "Comfort on the Tip of the Tongue", Nanfan combed through everything about "eating": of course, not pure food, but analysis of all the mechanisms that may come to mind behind it: human somatic sensations ("hunger and hunger", "the three functions of the mouth"), socialized expression forms ("meals", "snack snacks"), classification under the cultural perspective ("McDonald's", "hometown food"), etc. An article is divided into several fragments, and the author includes the fragments of social and cultural thinking that can be thought of under the topic of "eating". The cultural code behind the elaboration of gastronomy that brings physical and psychological comfort is social occasions, economic expeditions under cultural aggression, and psychological bondage with personality symbols. In addition to Nanfan, it is worth noting zhong ming, the dictionary-style article structure and the highly jumping language, which have led readers to the temple of postmodernist prose, although there are traces of storytelling in "Animal World, Human World" and "Graffiti Notes", but the jumping nature of its thinking, the breadth of information capacity, and the profundity of its thoughts have impressed readers; the information capacity of its essays also has the legacy of Liang Shiqiu. Of particular concern is Taiwan's writer Lin Yaode, who died young, and the "Copper Dream" and "Corpse" published two years before his death are completely mature and typical postmodernist prose works, "Corpse" recounts meditation next to his grandmother's coffin, and other statements about corpses and death are placed on the same platform, cut and spliced together, which is the zero-degree intervention of emotion, and it is also a broken form of emotion. Lin Yaode's brushstrokes are full of irony, paradox, weirdness and paradoxes, and some scholars say that Lin Yaode was the first person to bring contemporary Chinese prose creation into line with postmodernism.
To read postmodernist prose, we must constantly compete with traditional ideas, which constantly stand up and "ridicule" and "after", and "after" is stubbornly and rationally "shelling" tradition. Traditional prose presents feelings, while postmodern prose presents feelings with illusions, the illusion of facing the face! What postmodernity directly brings us is a new way of thinking, which is closely linked to openness, inclusiveness, pluralism and innovation; let people gradually move away from single-string thinking and fixed patterns, and face various new challenges with a more innovative vitality.