Picture this, sez the post-modernist superwriter
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As our categories of perception of the world around us change, so does art. RANI DHARKER on the use of comic book techniques in post-modernist fiction.
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QUESTION: What is the difference between the Beetle Bailey cartoon and the following scene in Joseph Heller's Catch-22?
A roomful of soldiers, all moaning, "Oooooooooooooooooh." Their officer, Major Danby, moans in frustration because no one has heard his instructions. The General is so mad at the Major for moaning that he orders him to be taken out and shot. When told that he does not have that kind of power, his surprised response is, "You mean I can't shoot anyone I want to?"
Answer: Not much.
The cartoon could have, in fact, come straight out of the books of the postmodernists. Catch-22 is like an elongated comic book, a series of word cartoons, where no one would blink if an officer ordered a chair shot. Like a comic, it is full of wild improbable happenings, hysterical colonels, screaming majors, monadic characters obsessed with a single aspect of life, usually with something as trivial as marching.
The following quotations illustrate the difference between postmodernism and what may be termed "realism". The situation is the same: Yossarian and Minetta, both of whom are fighting in the war pretend to be sick so that they can stay on at the hospital. The doctors know that they are faking and this is how they react:
"Stand up," the doctor said. He looked coldly at Minetta.
"Sir?"
"Minetta, the Army's got no use for men like you. That gag you pulled was pretty low!"
"I don't know what you're talking about sir"
"Don't give me any of your lip," the doctor snapped. "I'd have you court-martialled if it didn't take too long, and if it wasn't just what you wanted anyway...You pull that trick again, and I'll see to it personally that you get ten years for it."
(Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead)
"I won't tell anyone you've been lying about your liver symptoms." Yossarian drew back from him farther. "You know about that?"
"Of course I do. Give us some credit..."
"...Why didn't you turn me in if you knew I was faking?"
"Why the devil should I?" asked the doctor with a flicker of surprise. "We're all in this business of illusion together. I'm always willing to lend a hand to a fellow conspirator along the road to survival..."
(Catch-22)
The larger-than-life heroism found in realistic war novels like The Naked and the Dead, is missing in Catch-22 where the protagonist, Yossarian's, main concern is survival. The writer foregrounds the horrors of war and relegates heroism and patriotism to the background. Inventing characters that are like those found in a comic book help him to do that. The soldier in white, for example, is "constructed entirely of gauze, plaster and a thermometer..." A jar is connected to his elbow from which he is fed fluid; another jar is connected to his groin into which drips waste from his kidneys. When the two jars are full they are switched so that "the stuff could drip back into him." The artillery captain's remark is like the punch line from a comic, "Why can't they hook the two jars up to each other and eliminate the middleman?"
A scene like this fits our present-day reality, which is the kind that could have come out of the imagination of a mad scientist or the writer of a comic book. There is, for instance, the true incident of a man who was shot in an American nightclub. People continued dancing, moving around his prone body on the floor. When real life is so fabulated, how can writers use straightforward realism? The only way they can deal with this surreal life is to produce fiction that is also way out in its portrayal. Comic book techniques, characters, situations and hysterical humour serve the purpose perfectly as do the elements of the fairy tale and the fable. In Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Marquez, for instance, characters have magical powers such as the ability to communicate without phones and to travel on flying carpets. Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude rises into the sky and flies away one day as she is folding the sheets in the garden. All this is done without fanfare as though it is the most ordinary of happenings because in our world the out-of-the-ordinary has become part of everyday reality.
The resultant fiction is an exuberant mix — the mad comedy of the strip cartoon and the fantasy of fairy tales combined with intellectual musings as cerebral as even a Henry James could have wished for. The writing veers dementedly from metaphysical and philosophical ruminations to comic book language (in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, e.g., there are words such as "sez", "critter", "Yaaagggghhh", "zippety zop"). Thus has postmodernism helped close the gap between high art and low art. The American critic, Leslie Fiedler, finds the intrusion of pop into high art an exhilarating experience because it does away with the distinction between high and low culture, which is symptomatic of an elitist ideology.
The strangest thing of all is that incidents depicted in postmodernist fiction sometimes find an echo in reality after a writer has written about it. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez describes a mass killing in which labourers who are on a strike and have gathered in a square are shot at with machine guns. One of those who manage to escape sees the bodies of 3,000 people but no one believes him. "There haven't been any dead here," he is told. The management has given out the story that there was a peaceful settlement and the workers had decided to go to their hometowns. The book was first published in 1967. Years later in China's Tiananmen Square almost the same thing happened when so many young people, who protested against the Chinese regime, were flattened by rollers. Later there was never an admission by the government that the students were killed. After the Gujarat riots of 2002, the Ministry of External Affairs website did not mention the riots although the Godhra incident was reported in detail.
Thus, though the happenings in postmodernist fiction seem fabulist, it is clear that the writers have one foot in contingent reality. Popular cartoon-strip and fable techniques, in fact, help the writers to focus the bizarre, surreal experiences of our times. Look around you. What else can you say but, "Yaaagggghhh"?
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