On the basic characteristics of postmodern literature, there are also many different opinions and opinions, both repetitive and different. Here, we take Liu Xiangyu edited "from modernism to postmodernism" in a more systematic and mature point of view, supplemented by other more authoritative point of view and more representative of the United States of America postmodernist novels to be synthesized. According to Liu Xiangyu's viewpoint: "The basic features of postmodernist literature can be summarized in three aspects: indeterminate creative principles, plurality of creative methods, linguistic experimentation and discourse games." [18]
1. The Creative Principle of Uncertainty
American writer Donald Bascombe, who is regarded as "the father of a new generation of postmodern writers," once declared, "My song within a song is the principle of uncertainty." The uncertainty of postmodernist literature is reflected in the following four aspects: uncertainty of theme, uncertainty of image, uncertainty of plot and uncertainty of language.
(1) Uncertainty of Theme
Zeng Yanbing argues that "with realism, what matters is what is written, with modernism it is how it is written, and with postmodernism it is the writing itself that matters" [19] "What is written " which is also the question of what subject to write about, and "how to write" which is also the question of how to write about the subject, whereas with postmodernism the main thing has ceased to exist. Because the meaning does not exist, the center does not exist, the essence does not exist, "everything is scattered". For example, Kerouac's On the Road, a representative writer of the Beat Generation, unashamedly and without scruples confesses his most private and deepest sensibility in his work, and expresses himself casually and improvisationally. The author stuffed a long roll of white paper into a typewriter, recorded his wandering life and the conversations of his accomplices without thinking, did not talk about the rules and regulations, and had no theme, and arbitrarily spilled out the "spontaneous creation", and within three days, he hastily wrote this novel of more than 200,000 words. The name itself says it all: "Variations on a Theme" by Xu Xing in Lianxian.
(2) The uncertainty of the image
If it is said that in realism, the character is the person, and in modernism, the character is the personality, then in postmodernism, the person is the silhouette, and the character is the shadow. When postmodernism proclaims the death of the subject and the death of the author, the character in literature dies with it. The character in the work becomes a plane with no character, no background, no past, and no knowledge of the future, a code, a symbol, and can even be replaced by letters such as A, B, C. Some people summarize this kind of character image of postmodernism as "no reason, no background, no self, no root, no painting, no metaphor", in which "no painting" means no image depiction code, which does not give a portrait of the character; "no metaphor" means no metaphor. The meaning of "no metaphor" is that there is no code of metaphor and metonymy, because in postmodernist literature, there is no "meaning" hidden behind the phenomenon that can be explored. It is this "six no's" that completely dismember the certainty of the postmodernist literary image. In Bassem's Sinbad, an American teacher named "Sinbad" living in the 1980s, "I" tells the story of "Sinbad the Sailor," but in the end, it is hard to tell if the speaker is Sinbad the Sailor or not. But in the end, it's hard to tell if the speaker is Sinbad the Sailor or Sinbad the College Teacher? Or are they one and the same? How many protagonists are there, two or one? All of this is uncertain.
(3) Uncertainty of Plot
Postmodernist writers oppose the logic, coherence and closure of the storyline. It is argued that the traditional works of narrative which consider the story to have a complete sequence and ins and outs is only the author's wishful thinking and self-delusion. They invert real time, ephemeral time and future time at will, displace the present, past and future at will, and constantly divide and cut off the real space, so that the plot of a literary work presents multiple or infinite possibilities. One of the representative writers of the New Novel, Butor's diary novel Timetable is divided into five parts, which are the five months (May-September) in the diary. The diary written by the protagonist in this labyrinthine city no longer unfolds in a normal chronological order, but interweaves the present, the past and the future, reality, history and fantasy. If the reader reads this novel with the sanity of reading a Balzac-style novel, he or she will fall into a cloud and not know what to do, but if he or she reads it in the manner of a new novel, parsing layer by layer the author's well-designed structure, he or she will have a kind of pleasure and thrill of getting out of the labyrinth step by step and at the same time have to marvel at the author's ingeniousness.
(4) The Uncertainty of Language
Language is the most important factor in postmodernism, and it has even risen to the height of ontology. Roland Barthes, in his Zero Degrees of Writing, argues that the entire literature from Flaubert to the present day presents a linguistic conundrum. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has almost pushed this language of literature to the extreme. Although postmodernism has always advocated "no center," it is precisely the language game they play after abandoning all modes of depth that leads them to inadvertently create another kind of center - the center of language. The center of language. This point will be discussed in detail later in the "language experiment a discourse game".
2. Diversity of Creative Methods
In From Modernism to Postmodernism, the editor compares Postmodernism with Realism, Modernism and Romanticism, and argues that the interpenetration of the former and the latter three has led to the emergence of many excellent Postmodernist works. For example, the magical product of the combination of postmodernism and realism, magic realism (represented by Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude), the late works of Joyce (The Night of Finnegan's Wake), who absorbed the nourishment of modernism, and the school of black humor influenced by existentialism (represented by Heller's The Twenty-Second Rule of the Road), are all examples of postmodernism. For example, the American postmodernist poetry school of Confessionalism, which pushes the Romantic characteristic of "expressing personal emotions" to the extreme. This way of comparing postmodernism with other literary trends highlights the characteristics of postmodernist literature, but just like B to the left of A, C to the right, and D in front of A. If we answer that A is to the right of B, to the left of C, and to the back of D, we will end up with no answer at all. In view of this, the author in this session will introduce the American postmodernist novels of many creative methods, and combined with specific examples, detailed discussion, because the United States is the birthplace of postmodernist literature and the town, the novel is the most representative genre type of postmodernist literature, so this will be able to play a peeping tom in a tube, to see the big picture of the effect of a small.
These new methods of creation include the following[19]:
(1) Combination of fact and fiction
Postmodernist novels are no longer the product of the writer's personal imagination and fiction, but a skillful combination of fact and fiction. Historical figures and events have come back into the postmodernist novel, which has become one of its major features. But this kind of "revisiting history" is no longer like the objective reproduction or subjective representation of historical figures in traditional novels, but a kind of parody, flirtation and irony. In postmodernist writers, there is no such thing as objective history or grand narratives, and famous historical figures are also obscene and ridiculous in their writings. 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 critiquing and ridiculing the persecution of scientists, Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg, by McCarthyism in the 1950s.
(2) Combination of Science Fiction and Fiction
In the post-industrialization era, the depiction of the relationship between man and machine, and between man and animals has once again attracted the attention of postmodernist writers, and with the development of television and the Internet, science fiction, which was originally unappreciated, has revived and rejuvenated itself. The advancement of technology has made people rethink the mystery of time. Vonnegut's long novel Slaughterhouse-Five is a typical example. After the protagonist of the novel is abducted by a flying saucer onto Volkswagen 541, he is able to travel through time and space at will. He enters through a door in 1955, exits through another door in 1941, and enters through this door again to find himself in 1963. This seemingly dystopian science fiction nevertheless reawakens thoughts about life, death, time and space, and is thought-provoking without being uninteresting.
(3) The Combination of Fiction with Poetry, Drama and Epistolary
The novel of postmodernism is different from the traditional novel in that it has become a cross-genre artistic creation. It is different from the previous epistolary novels, or novels with a few poems inserted, but it is fundamentally changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Nabokov's The Shadow Fire presents a Nabokovian interpretation of a story within a story through Sid's poems and Goldenbaud's annotations, demonstrating a Nabokovian approach to empirical reality. It has been praised as "the first major formal innovation in the field of fiction since the Night of Finnegan's Wake." In the creation of this novel, he exploded the earlier unification of poetry and fiction. Turning his fictional world inside out, he poured out the novel's fragmented content onto the table, leaving the unification of poem and narrative to the reader. Poetry and exegesis are synchronized in the novel, and the text as poem and the text as exegesis are apparently unrelated to each other but actually dependent on each other, thus forming a third text created by the reader.
(4) The Combination of Fiction and Nonfiction
Postmodernist fiction not only dissolves the boundaries between fiction and other genres, such as poetry and drama, but also greatly transcends the traditional demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. In DeLillo's long novel White Noise, advertisements for supermarkets, television commercials, travel ads, and drug ads proliferate everywhere, stimulating people's nerves. The main character, Professor Jack, often finds his daughter, Steffi, repeating the sounds of the advertisements on television in her dreams. This is already suggesting to people that noise is not necessarily the vibration of the air, it may have been visualized as people's subconscious mind, hidden secretly in the human brain. So much so that in the silence of the night, people either have trouble falling asleep or murmur. This noise is perhaps more frightening than the former.
(5) The Combination of Elegant and Popular Arts
Unlike modernist writers who pursued an elite position of elegance, postmodernist writers have been committed to drawing on the artistic techniques of popular literature to express serious social themes. It is true that, as Jameson said, "By the stage of postmodernism, culture has been completely popularized, and the distance between refined and popular culture, between pure literature and popular literature, is disappearing." [20] Adopting the techniques of popular fiction can enable serious novels to gain a wide living space, further adapt to the needs of the public, and continue to be enriched and renewed. Popular fiction includes gothic novels, detective novels, adventure novels, romantic novels, romance novels, etc., with a wide variety of genres, a long history, and popular favorites. Post-modernist writers have selected their good artistic skills and melted them into innovations, which have achieved better social effects. For example, in Billy Bathgate, Doctorow utilizes the techniques of popular fiction to the fullest. At the beginning of the novel, the flashback technique of movie montage is used to depict the gangster Sulz ordering his thugs to throw the subordinate into the sea in order to dominate the subordinate's wife. The plot is tense and the scenes are thrilling, sometimes with lights, sometimes with blood. The novel was adapted into a movie and was well received by the audience. Doctorow has published eight full-length novels, five of which have been adapted into movies, and three others are under negotiation. He became a most notable American postmodernist novelist.
(6) Combination of Fairy Tale or Myth with Fiction
Postmodernist writers, like modernist writers, sometimes leaned extra heavily on fairy tale or mythological genres to rework their fiction. But in contrast to the modernist writer who deliberately creates a metaphor, the postmodernist writer seeks to avoid any degree of mythicism toward his observations. Bassem's full-length novel (1967) reproduces the famous German author Grimm's fairy tale Snow White (1918) in a loose collage. The novel retains the basic plot of the fairy tale with Snow White and the seven dwarfs, but the characters have begun to morph and the plot has become very strange. The modern Snow White is tired of being a housewife and looks forward to a prince to save her from the world. But the clumsy and cowardly prince is y concerned and hides in a monastery to escape his princely mission. The author's non-linear narrative, playful format and extreme fantasy combined with everyday details convey the anti-fairytale nature of postmodern life: its emptiness, its uniformity, its vulgarity and boredom, as well as the inevitable disappointment and failure of human beings in it.
(7) Combination of Novels with Paintings, Music, and Especially Multimedia
The 1970s and 1980s were the era of the Internet, and some multi-talented writers who dared to be bold and innovative combined their novels with paintings, music, and especially multimedia, which is the most fashionable, and created novels that were even more postmodern than those of the postmodernists. The most prominent is the famous female writer Laurie Anderson. She is herself a novelist as well as an actress, painter, photographer and composer. Her famous short story, "War is the Highest Form of Modern Art," is one of the masterpieces in The Nervous Bible. It is illustrated, short (less than 500 words), and seemingly uninformed. The piece vividly and succinctly chronicles the author's story of bringing her own electronic equipment to perform in various Middle Eastern countries 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 on his shoulder, a smoke screen created when a bomb explodes, and the fire when a bomb explodes at night. The four paintings form an intertextuality with the textual description, creating a strong emotional impact on the reader. Not only that, but Anderson has taken this short piece to the podium. Equipped with relevant background images and background music, she recites it herself at the stage and creates a unique atmosphere through the pitch of her voice. Her performances are always well recognized by the audience. She has been described as a cross-genre artistic generalist and an innovative postmodernist writer.
Of course, the above is limited to the main features of the American postmodernist novel, in fact, postmodernism is different in different countries, France's new novel, Latin America's magical realism, Russia's "another kind of literature", China's pioneering novels and so on have their own nationalities. However, the above new creative methods can also be regarded as a general characteristic of postmodernist literature in various countries: the border of literature and art is blurred, diffused and increasingly diversified. It transcends the boundaries between art and reality, between literary genres, and between various kinds of art, presenting a wonderful and diversified situation.
3. Language Experimentation and Discourse Game
As we said earlier, postmodernism inadvertently led to "linguistic centrism" while advocating "no center" in everything. Gadamer pointed out that "there is no doubt that the question of language has taken a central place in the philosophy of this century." Of course, this center is not a center in the traditional sense; firstly, this center is not intentional; secondly, this center has the nature of dissolution of the other and self-dissolution. Postmodernism has unconsciously stood on the side of diametrically opposed to tradition by virtue of this center. The emergence of the center of language has a deep philosophical background, we can see what the theorists say. Heidegger said: "Language is the house of existence"; Gadamer said: "Whoever owns the language, owns the world"; Lacan said: "Truth comes from words, not from reality"; Derrida says: "By the absence of a center or origin, everything becomes discourse"; Habermas says: "Power is such a thing that, in a particular sense, it belongs only to discourse and not to utterance"; Tugenhardt says: "The world is divided according to the way we divide it, and the main way we divide things is by using language. Our reality is our linguistic categories." The world thus suddenly becomes a world of discourse. All knowledge of human beings and human societies is produced by discourse, truth is constructed by discourse, and all reality is only discursive reality. "I am only a part of a system of language; it is language that speaks of me in one word, not I who speak language." [21] Saussure's one-to-one correspondence between referent and denotation is seen by postmodernists as artificial, and the meaning of linguistic signs is nothing more than the process of replacing referents to be elaborated with new referents, or the never-ending regression of slipping from one referent into another. Meaning is always in a perpetual limbo, the physical object to which the sign refers is never actually present, and the denotation is always confined to a linguistic sign, never able to reach the entity to which it refers. Expressed in Lacan's formula: signifier/suggestor (S/s), the signifier and the signified are always separated by a horizontal line, and cannot be combined into one. The chain of denotation breaks down completely. Thus, "we enter into schizophrenia in the form of a pile of fragments composed of clear but unconnected energetic referents."
Thus, critics and writers engaged in deconstructionist criticism had to, or could, indulge in the free frolic of the text's denotative symbols with peace of mind. That is why Roland Barthes said, "Writing, or 'reading as writing,' is the last unencroached territory where intellectuals can frolic at will, enjoying the luxury of the energetic signifier and arbitrarily disregarding what may happen in the Elysée Palace or the Renault factory. In writing, the free play of language can temporarily undermine and disrupt the tyranny of structural meaning; and the writing-reading subject can be freed from the bonds of a single identity to become an ecstatically diffuse self." [22] This is one of the most important features of postmodernist literature.
For these reasons, postmodernist writing takes on a very different flavor from modernism. If modernism is centered on "self", postmodernism is centered on "language". This is the biggest difference between the two. We can continue to look at what postmodernist writers who are engaged in front-line writing have to say. Garth said: "There is no description in literature, only plosives", "I never doubt language, I know it's confusing, but I just believe in it"; Beckett in his novel "The Man with No Name" said through the mouth of the main character: "It all boils down to a question of words", "Everything is a word, that's all"; the poet G?lderlin once wrote: "Words are shadows / Shadows become words / Words are games / Games become words "; the Language Poetry School bluntly showed that the main raw material of poetry is language, and that it is language that produces experience. And Roland Barthes, who combines the multiple identities of philosopher, literary theorist and writer, argues that the postmodernist writer is not a person who uses language as a tool to express his thoughts, to express his emotions or to express his imagination, but "a person who thinks about language, a thinker and a linguist (in other words, neither entirely a thinker nor entirely a linguist) " [23] Contemporary writing has wrenched itself from the dimension of expressing meaning and refers only to itself. Writing is like a game, displaying itself in the constant transgression of its own rules and violation of its boundaries.
This playfulness of narrative in postmodernist literature has given unprecedented freedom to the writing itself and has enabled the reader to derive great pleasure from reading the text. The postmodern text is a "linguistic construct," a mesh structure that allows the reader to start and stop reading from anywhere. The reader does not need to explore or scrutinize the content hidden behind the text, he only needs to pay attention to his own experience and feeling at every moment. The following is still an example of American postmodernist novels to show the wonderful world created by postmodernism in terms of language experimentation and discourse games.
(1) Ironic Discourse Across Genres
Robert Coover's novel Public Fury contains poems, songs, newspaper clippings, advertisements, mini-opera, Eisenhower's conversations with prisoners, and so on, in addition to fictional discourse. Particularly striking is the narrator Nixon's political speech at the execution site of the Rosenbergs in New York's Times Square. He exclaims a call to "take off your pants for America," and it is followed by a series of one-liner platitudes, such as "Take off your pants for God and country!" "Drop your pants for Jesus Christ!" "Drop your pants for all mankind!" "Drop your pants for Dick!" And so on. Taking down one's pants in public is originally a vulgar and obscene action, but when the author associates it with Nixon's lofty political discourse, the two immediately form a strong contrast. The noble political discourse and the dirty action constitute a mockery of the persecution of the innocent scientists, Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg, by the United States. The strength of its irony can be said to be in the right place.
(2) Narrative Discourse Constituted by Direct Quotations from Characters' Dialogues
Narrative discourse in novels is generally composed of direct and indirect quotations from characters' dialogues as well as the author's narrations and descriptions, but William Gaddis's long novel "The Little Tycoon" is composed of direct quotations from characters' dialogues. Just as there is no punctuation between sentences in the modernist novels of the school of consciousness, this novel composed of direct quotations from the characters' dialogues simply omits even the narration and description connecting the dialogues, showing the artistic characteristics of strong fire. This reminds us of Ernest Hemingway's short story "White Elephant Mountains" and Robbe-Grillet's "Eraser". Hemingway, who called it "Iceberg Narrative", and Grillet, who took the responsibility of writing "materialized novels", share the same principle: don't describe and comment, but present things as they are. The same principle is shared by Hemingway and Grier, who is responsible for writing "materialized novels": don't describe and comment, present things as they are. William Gaddis seems to have inherited this tradition, in his view, the so-called consciousness is elusive, and only the presented words are the only real and credible ones. Among the postmodern writers who advocate language experimentation and discourse play, William Gaddis is perhaps the most radical one. He abandons all narratives and descriptions, and lets people look directly at the living words, perhaps he just wants to show that: there is no big deal about it, our lives are just like this in the first place.
(3) Supermarket advertisements, travel advertisements and drug advertisements, constituting a narrative discourse rich in market information
Commodity advertisements are the drummers and the lucky ones of the market economy, and they have become the favorites of the post-industrial era. When you turn on the TV at home or walk through the door of a supermarket, you are greeted with a wide range of colorful advertisements. True and false advertisements of all kinds guide or mislead people's consumption. Too much and too many advertisements break the peace of life and disturb people's mind. This is the post-industrial era of consumerism to people caused by the disturbance. All kinds of advertisements themselves also form an invisible ideological discourse that silently guides the direction of people's consciousness and obliterates the individual and the subject in the noisy world of advertisements. Postmodernist writers incorporate this advertising discourse, which is full of characteristics of the times, into the narrative of novels, collaging, juxtaposing, and mixing them up, so that people can comprehend the intertextuality between the various voices on their own, and thus develop their own different perceptions and understandings. The narrative discourse of DeLillo's novel White Noise reflects these characteristics, as the novel is filled with a variety of advertising brands. For example, the three major credit cards: Master Card, Visa, and American Express; the three Toyota brands: Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, and Toyota Cressida; and other brands such as Dacron, Orion, Lycra Spandex, Kleenex Softique, Lyda, and more.
(4) Paradoxical Discourse of Lyricism and Narrative, Praise and Complaint
Postmodernist writers, unlike modernist writers who deliberately maintained a cold-eyed posture of writing and carried out the so-called "zero-degree narrative," have turned to a great deal of emotion, sometimes devoting themselves to the so-called "zero-degree narrative. Instead, they put a lot of feelings into their writing, sometimes rejoicing, sometimes mourning, sometimes praising, sometimes complaining, sometimes flirting, sometimes criticizing, like a playful child, playing in the language with impunity. They both praise and criticize people and things, forming a "paradoxical" discourse. Nabokov is one such influential master of language. He was the mentor of Thomas Pynchon and an admirer of Barth, Hawkes and Balsam. His masterpiece Lolita, which was initially banned, has since been recognized as a classic of postmodern Western literature. For example, in the opening chapter the author writes in an emotionally charged tone: "Lolita, the light that illuminates my life, ignites the fire of my lust. My sin, my soul. Lo-lyta: the tip of the tongue to the hard palate to do a triple trip, Lo-lyta." In fact, he is full of paradoxical moods towards Lolita: "Innocent and scheming, churlish and vulgar, dark blue sullen and rose-red carefree, that's how Lolita is portrayed. ......" this kind of " Paradoxical" discourse makes the novel full of tension and intriguing.
(5) The author's voice intervenes in the narrative at will, constituting "intrusive" discourse
Previously, it was taboo for authors to intrude into the plot, but in postmodernist novels, this kind of "intrusive" discourse is common. But in postmodernist fiction, this kind of "intrusive" discourse is commonplace. Vonnegut writes frankly in Timequake (1997): "Trout [the protagonist of the novel] does not really exist. In several of my other novels, he is my alter ego." This "intrusive" discourse, in which the author intervenes in the narrative at will, is centered in metafiction. Metafiction can be defined in layman's terms as the creation of a novel while at the same time commenting on the creation of the novel itself, or simply put, a "novel about novels". The metafiction exposes the traces of the novel's artistic operation to the readers intentionally, and points out the fictional and imitative nature of the narrative world, in order to declare that everything is a forgery, and that even the world is a narrative. The term "metafiction" was first proposed by the American postmodernist writer William Gass, who himself is a practitioner of "metafiction" and is known as "the muse of metafiction". In Deep in the Midlands, phrases such as "I can't make it up anymore" and "I want this page to look like this" often appear. By utilizing this creative technique, Garth allows both himself (the author) and the reader to allow the novel greater freedom to explore its fictionality and tear away its pretense of reflecting the real world.
(6) Discourse constituted by hypertextual computer language
The popularity of computers has led to the emergence of cyberliterature, and hypertextual computer language has aroused the interest of postmodernist novels. They tried to use it to construct new artifacts monumental events in their novels.E.L. Doctorow in his middle grade novel "Leather Men" had used 3 groups***12 nouns to describe the social background of 1960s America:
Night Ladder Window Scream Penis
Patrol Mud Flare Mortar
President Crowd Bullet
In Chinese that is:
Night Ladder Window Scream Penis
Patrol Mud Flare Mortar
President Crowd Bullet
In fact, after careful consideration, it is not difficult to decipher the meaning of these 3 sets of words:
Firstly. In the 1960s some men used ladders to climb into windows at night to meet or rape women, and the women screamed. The woman screamed. This refers to the social evils of adultery and rape brought about by the "sexual liberation" of the 1960s. Second, a soldier on patrol on a dirt road sees flames from mortar fire. A reference to the Vietnam War. Third, the president was shot by a bullet in a crowd. A reference to the assassination of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963. These words don't mean much in isolation, but when juxtaposed together, they immediately create a scene. Of course, this scene is only one kind of reality, and there can be other interpretations. This also fully reflects the way postmodernist literature tries to present the world through language experimentation and discourse games.
The above six kinds of language experiment and discourse game are the writing style of postmodernist literature presented at the discourse level. And the specific techniques are various. Some commentators believe that in postmodernist works, the most commonly used artistic techniques of the modernists such as stream-of-consciousness inner monologue, metaphors, symbols, associations, temporal and spatial dislocations and so on have not been abandoned though. However, they have taken a back seat to some new means of expression which are commonly used, of which four are the most prominent:A, montage; B, ironic parody; C, splicing; D, collage. Dewey Folkmar pointed out five prominent semantic fields of postmodernist literature compared with modernist literature:assimilation, doubling and arrangement, sensation, movement, mechanization and other factors. A number of techniques more commonly used in postmodernist literature are proposed, such as interruption, accretion, and doubling (including the doubling of plots and the doubling of old words, the intersection of two stories in a single text, the "meaningless loop," the "found poem," and the doubling of writing activities), Proliferation (including multiplication of symbolic systems; mixing of language with other conformities, proliferation of endings, proliferation of episodes without endings), enumeration, and prose (including interchangeability of parts of a text, prose of a text with its social context, prose of semantic units, etc.). Moreover, it has been specifically pointed out that the "prose method" may be even more destructive to some of the early modernist programs, and that it is even sufficient to overthrow the hierarchical order that may still be present in the postmodernist system. These specific techniques take on different forms in the narrative discourses of various postmodernist novels, and in the case of "metafiction," for example, they can be divided into specific subsections. David Lodge, commenting on the linguistic treatment of metafiction writers, mentions six techniques: "contradiction, arrangement, interruption, randomness, excess, and short-circuiting."[24] It can be argued that these techniques have been used in a variety of postmodernist narrative discourses. [24] Suffice it to say that no literary genre has ever possessed so many and so dazzling techniques as postmodernist literature. For this reason, in just half a century, they have both produced to the world a large body of work of a thousand and one shades of color and light.