Эссе на тему: "Does the postmodern novel signal the death of the novel as a genre? Discuss with reference to at least two novels by a different authors. Considered through works of T. Stoppard and Sam

The formation of postmodernism in England was affected by important changes in the development of society and information technology, obvious shifts in the modernist epistemological focus, cardinal changes in the very logic of obtaining knowledge. The emergence of postmodernism is attributed to the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, when its main features were quite clearly revealed, primarily in architecture. Soon this process captured other forms of art. However, it took time to realize what was happening in modern culture. In this sense, one of the first works of Ch. Jencks "The Language of Postmodernity in Architecture" (1977) is indicative. Some critics (I. Hassan) attribute the beginning of literary postmodernism to the time of the release of J. Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake (1939), while others associate it with the names of S. Beckett and T. Stoppard. D. Lodge, in particular, wrote this in his work “Types of Modern Writing” (1977). Shocking the perception of contemporaries with new methods of writing, literary postmodernism used intertextuality, self-reflection, irony and parody, a mixture of high and low forms as the main tools for updating the narrative (primarily the genre of the novel and the role of the author in the story).

The research question of this essay is to what extent we can call the writing style of Stoppard and Beckett unique for their time, and also call it consistent with the genre of postmodernism.

Tom Stoppard first came to prominence in the 1960s, becoming one of the leaders of English New Wave drama. The term "postmodernism" had not yet entered the scholarly vocabulary of literary scholars, and Stoppard's plays were often classified as theatre of the absurd. This applies primarily to the play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", which brought an international fame for the playwright: it was seen as the influence of the famous play by S. Beckett's "Waiting for Godot".

More about this work, the mysterious figure of Godot, in anticipation of which the heroes of the play live and the meeting with which should solve all their troubles, in a sense symbolizes the mystery of being. Waiting for Godot is the expectation of death, which is a universal symbol of the entire artist's work. Beckett seeks to metaphysically typify a concrete, private history as a universal tragedy of humankind, which manifests itself in the miserable helplessness of a person in an alien world, in the aimlessness of any action and thought. To this end, the author abandons the usual genre structure of the "drama of ideas" and creates an option of the philosophical "anti-drama", in which the traditional Aristotelian dramatic forms and categories, such as the plot structure of the action, the logically developing conflict, character, language, are destroyed.

To recreate the horror of the imaginary immobility and aimlessness of human existence, Beckett follows the principle of theatrical static, within which the main categories of human existence, space and time, lose their usual content. Since everything in the world is monotonous and has no meaning, then time itself is unreal and indefinite. It is used as closed, excluded from the historical context and has lost its obligatory chronological sequence, since in the world there is only a direction towards death. Therefore, in Beckett, a special way of unfolding events becomes an appeal to the memory of a character as a special internal space in which, through memories, the time of a human life is recreated. The uncertainty of time corresponds to the uncertainty of space, which also loses exactness, turning only into the boundary of earthly existence, into a way of indicating the “abandonment” of a person in this world and the need to live out his share of life due to him. The images of the characters are also devoid of concreteness and development, since there are no slightest real contours that clarify them.

Indeed, many similarities with Beckett's famous play can be found in Stoppard's play. Primarily is the aforementioned sense of fear and incomprehension, which permeates the whole play and determines its basic intonation. The main characters here, as the title suggests, are two pathetic noblemen who played more than a modest role in Shakespeare's tragedy. Their foregrounding, however, does not mean that their personal characteristics have become completely different. On the contrary, Stoppard clearly draws on Shakespearean imagery. The characters are just as levelled and similar to one another as Shakespeare’s are, but here this identity is taken to the point of absurdity. Moreover, their insignificance even in comparison to Shakespeare's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is clearly seen when Stoppard gives them the diminutive names Roz and Gil.

In the same way, the motive of incomprehension is deepened and taken to the point of absurdity. Shakespeare's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had very little insight into what was going on, they were not at all concerned with the philosophical questions Hamlet was pondering, they were primarily concerned with their own gain. As for the characters in the modern play, their lack of understanding is frightening. Not only are they unable and unwilling to understand the problems plaguing the Prince of Denmark, they are also unable to understand simpler things. They do not know who invited them to Elsinore and why, what is going on in the royal family, what is the meaning of the play the itinerant actors are putting on in the palace, why they are being sent to England and, finally, why they came into the world in the first place:

But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?! We don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.