Postmodernist metanarrative. Double coding of aesthetic communication: discourse and personality

The author proposes a view of postmodernist art metanarrative as a set of texts of artistic culture based on a predominantly fundamental-ironic attitude to the majority of narratives of European socioculture. The art of postmodernism thus reveals the limitations of the models of thinking that in the postmodern era seem to extol the dignity of the individual, but in the practice of a predominantly functional attitude to her reveal indifference to her soul and pain, in fact devaluing the human personality. The aesthetic communication of postmodernism is a reaction to the conflict of cultural discourse with the ‘life world’ and the individual. The principle of ‘double coding’ of the aesthetic object caused by this conflict is related not so much to the ‘filling in of the ditches’ between one and the other, but rather, on the contrary, to the collision of value relations incompatible with each other in the aesthetic object. Thus, in Tom Stoppard’s Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, the code of the ironically objective representation of the surface of existence of the average person turns out to be the code for constructing the signs of the hidden suffering of the characters, who for culture are nothing more than third-rate material for the tragedy of Hamlet. In John Fowles, the code of the inability of the self-contained cultural consciousness to understand the personality is confronted with the code of the opposites of the living inner life of the personality to this consciousness. In John Barth’s Chimera trilogy, the technically sophisticated system of narrative discourses and narrators created to tell the story of the heroes of the mythological epic, as if capable of encompassing all times, reveals the disorientation of ‘heroes’ entangled in illusions and finding themselves only in the denial of themselves as heroes of legend. These variants of postmodern aesthetic communication are united by their organisation as metafiction: a metaromance in which the author sees his characters as fully belonging to a ready-made text be it the text of tragedy, the text of Victorian culture or the texts of myth; his task is to find the possibilities of the mismatch between personality and discourse.