particular type of behaviour, and to highlight the obsessions, blindspots,
energies and neuroses which are a familiar part of contemporary society.
Non-human characters
Postmodern fictions are sometimes based on characters who are not fully
human (Exercise 2c), such as the half-goat, half-man at the centre of John
Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy or, The Revised New Syllabus (1987). Other examples
of the animal point of view would be that of the stowaway woodworm in
Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10^1 ⁄ 2 Chapters (1990), and the
dinosaur in Calvino’s Cosmi-Comics (1993, pp. 97–112). Such non-human
characters project a different perspective on human behaviour and history,
one which sees it in a conceptually defamiliarised (and sometimes satirical)
light. The animal point of view is often used to critique the hierarchy
the human world imposes, and the way we place animals at the bottom
of it by highlighting the blindness and prejudice of anthropocentricity.
In order to meet this challenge, write a piece (Exercise 3c) from the
point of view of an object or animal. What does this say about the merits
and limits of a human way of viewing the world?
Marginalised characters
Postmodern novels often concentrate on characters who are at the periph-
ery of society, or have been marginalised because of their gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, class, age or physical disability. A good example of this is Sethe
in Beloved (Morrison 1988) who has been the victim of slavery: she
symbolises the whole American predicament of silence and suffering sur-
rounding slavery. Concentrating on such characters is a way of reacting
against the comfortable, white, middle-class world which has preoccupied
some fiction writers.
The question of point of view here is hazardous. Beloved is written by an
African-American, Toni Morrison, but it would raise a plethora of different
issues about cultural identification, and the right to speak for others, if it
were not. In a sense, fiction writers have always projected into situations,
perspectives and cultural backgrounds that were not their own. But there
are political sensitivities surrounding this, and the degree to which anyone
from one social or ethnic background has the right to adopt the perspective
of a person from another. It is important to remember that however strong
your fictional writing, you can never totally escape from your own cultural
experience and its bias. You are always implicated in your own cultural
context: if you are a westerner trying to write from a non-western perspec-
tive, it may be impossible for you to totally bridge the gap.
Postmodern f(r)ictions 143