What are "post-modern storytelling techniques"?

Kitty Pryde · Sep 11, 2009

So I'm reading this nifty little blog post on sci-fi genres that end in -punk (steampunk, cyberpunk, sandalpunk, ad nauseam): http://scifiwire.com/2009/09/guide-to-sci-fi-punks.php They say:

Mythpunk combines post-modern storytelling techniques with folklore from various traditions. Catherynne M. Valente, author of The Labyrinth, and Ekateria Sedia are considered mythpunk authors.

What are post-modern storytelling techniques? Because loads of authors incorporate existing myth/folklore/legend into their work, especially in the fantasy genre...so what makes it post-modern? (And yeah, I think mythpunk is probably fantasy and not SF usually, but moving on...)

AFAIK post-modern means 'let's be clever and take a movement/genre apart and point to all the conventions and quirks it has'. But I'm willing to be corrected on that.

PS This might go better in SF/F or Interstitial or Critical Theory and Philosophy of Thingy forums...not sure.

eyeblink · Sep 11, 2009

I gave a quick definition of modernism and postmodernism in this forum a while back, here.

What particular techniques Valente and Sedia use I couldn't say, as I haven't read them.

K_Woods · Sep 11, 2009

Kitty Pryde said:
So I'm reading this nifty little blog post on sci-fi genres that end in -punk (steampunk, cyberpunk, sandalpunk, ad nauseam): http://scifiwire.com/2009/09/guide-to-sci-fi-punks.php They say:

What are post-modern storytelling techniques? Because loads of authors incorporate existing myth/folklore/legend into their work, especially in the fantasy genre...so what makes it post-modern? (And yeah, I think mythpunk is probably fantasy and not SF usually, but moving on...)

AFAIK post-modern means 'let's be clever and take a movement/genre apart and point to all the conventions and quirks it has'. But I'm willing to be corrected on that.

PS This might go better in SF/F or Interstitial or Critical Theory and Philosophy of Thingy forums...not sure.

That sounds more like deconstruction than post-modern. Granted, the two may often go hand in hand. I'm not familiar enough with post-modern to know, but I don't think they are synonymous.

Kitty Pryde · Sep 11, 2009

eyeblink said:
I gave a quick definition of modernism and postmodernism in this forum a while back, here.

What particular techniques Valente and Sedia use I couldn't say, as I haven't read them.

That post helps me understand it sorta. Post-modern literature has to involve knowing the tropes and conventions of the novel but not playing them straight? Is that right?

From Valente's own website, http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/263738.html :

Fantasy writers who were over Tolkien by roughly second grade, and start instead in folklore and myth and from there layer in postmodern fantastic techniques: urban fantasy, confessional poetry, non-linear storytelling, linguistic calisthenics, worldbuilding, academic fantasy, etc.

How are urban fantasy and worldbuilding post-modern techniques? Does mythpunk include people like Tom Holt, making myth and legend hilarious in modern-day England? or Terry Pratchett, shifting myth and legend and religion over to the Discworld and breaking it down to its most primal essences?

Ponder, ponder. Thoughts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#cite_note-17

sunandshadow · Sep 11, 2009

Metafiction (breaking the fourth wall) is probably the most basic postmodern storytelling technique. In mythpunk this applies to the wall between myths and more realistic/modern novel content. You might have the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse showing up riding motorcycles, or fantasyland might turn out to be superimposed on the mall, or that hunter named Ryan might turn out to be Orion, or you might have myths from two different cultures arguing with each other...

Kitty Pryde · Sep 11, 2009

sunandshadow said:
Metafiction (breaking the fourth wall) is probably the most basic postmodern storytelling technique. In mythpunk this applies to the wall between myths and more realistic/modern novel content. You might have the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse showing up riding motorcycles, or fantasyland might turn out to be superimposed on the mall, or that hunter named Ryan might turn out to be Orion, or you might have myths from two different cultures arguing with each other...

Interesting. Myths behaving badly. 4 Bikers of the Apocalypse turned up in "Good Omens" by Pratchett and Gaiman, which I usually think of as comic fantasy, maybe apocalyptic fantasy.

willietheshakes · Sep 11, 2009

sunandshadow said:
Metafiction (breaking the fourth wall) is probably the most basic postmodern storytelling technique. In mythpunk this applies to the wall between myths and more realistic/modern novel content. You might have the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse showing up riding motorcycles, or fantasyland might turn out to be superimposed on the mall, or that hunter named Ryan might turn out to be Orion, or you might have myths from two different cultures arguing with each other...

How is breaking the boundaries between myth and realistic fiction breaking the fourth wall?

Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller breaks the fourth wall, and uses other metafictive techniques from the first line (something along the lines of "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveller"). The 4 Motorcyclists of the Apocalypse is neither metafictive, nor does it break the fourth wall...

ETA: A couple of definitions:
Fourth Wall - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall
Metafiction - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

maestrowork · Sep 11, 2009

The way I understand them:

Breaking the fourth wall is also called the author's intrusion, I believe, where the narrator or author addresses the readers directly ("You're about to read a story about an elf").

Metafiction is fiction about fiction, or at least references the fiction form.

Post-modernism seems to be more of a movement than a sub-genre. Again, I think it has more to do with lit classes and lit analysis than anything else. I'd think something like Catch-22 or Children of Men or a Clockwork Orange would be considered post-modern. Or maybe Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.

I have no idea!

I just write stories.

Kitty Pryde · Sep 11, 2009

I think of fourth wall breakage as like Ferris Bueller constantly stopping to turn and talk to the audience about stuff. Or in a book, some Dear Reader action.

But yeah, 4th wall breaking is not the same as breaking down the wall between myth and mundane world.

So, 4th-wall-breaking is a sub-technique of metafiction, which is in turn a sub-technique of post-modern fiction? This is causing my brain to hurt, but I would like to try to understand it all!

willietheshakes · Sep 11, 2009

Kitty Pryde said:
I think of fourth wall breakage as like Ferris Beuller constantly stopping to turn and talk to the audience about stuff. Or in a book, some Dear Reader action.

Exactly.

maestrowork · Sep 11, 2009

Kitty Pryde said:
But yeah, 4th wall breaking is not the same as breaking down the wall between myth and mundane world.

That, to me, is philosophical than anything else, and post-modernism perhaps fits into that definition. Say, the idea of good always triumphs over evil is a myth especially perpetuated by fiction. Or "god loves man." Or any of such myths that may very well be at odds with the real world.

Ian McEwan's Atonement (I keep coming back to this book because it is fantastic) is considered post-modern (oh, and it's also metafiction, but one probably doesn't have much to do with another) because of the subject matter, how the story is told around the subject matters, and the conclusions that defies general expectations of how the world should work.

So, 4th-wall-breaking is a sub-technique of metafiction, which is in turn a sub-technique of post-modern fiction? This is causing my brain to hurt, but I would like to try to understand it all!

Not necessarily. Breaking the 4th wall is to be self-aware (that there's a reader/author relationship here) and the narrator addresses the readers and the readers' world, thus calling into attention the fictive world. So, yeah, I think in a way it's like metafiction but I think metafiction is more than just that. Metafiction is either a story about stories, or at least about the story form.

For example, the movie Stranger than Fiction is metafiction. It references the fiction form and it's a story about a story. But the characters never broke the 4th wall. They never directly addresses the audiences. And the storyteller never acknowledges the audiences either, even though there is a highly self-aware omniscient narrator.

Kitty Pryde · Sep 11, 2009

maestrowork said:
Not necessarily. Breaking the 4th wall is to be self-aware (that there's a reader/author relationship here) and the narrator addresses the readers and the readers' world, thus calling into attention the fictive world. So, yeah, I think in a way it's like metafiction but I think metafiction is more than just that. Metafiction is either a story about stories, or at least about the story form.

For example, the movie Stranger than Fiction is metafiction. It references the fiction form and it's a story about a story. But the characters never broke the 4th wall. They never directly addresses the audiences. And the storyteller never acknowledges the audiences either, even though there is a highly self-aware omniscient narrator.

I meant more that, 4th wall breaking is sufficient but not necessary for something to be metafiction. Because the author is intruding on 'the fictional dream' on purpose, and pointing out the artifice of storytelling on purpose. And that metafiction is sufficient but not necessary for something to be post-modern fiction.

But I'm still not sure what mythpunk is.

PS Awesome quote found on wikipedia:

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

BigWords · Sep 11, 2009

Add stitchpunk to the list. Just found the word today in an issue of SciFiNow (or SFX or some damn thing) used in connection with games about stuffed dolls (in computer games I think).

Can we have a moratorium on _____punk terms please? My head is starting to hurt...

gothicangel · Sep 11, 2009

Metafiction pre-dates post-modernism, even modernism. Victorian Realist writers such as George Eliot wrote using metafiction techniques (check out Adam Bede, chapters 1 and 17)

I would suggest that multiple voices/pov are a postmodern storytelling techniques.

John Fowles [The Collector] is popularly blamed for the 'postmodern mess.'

eyeblink · Sep 11, 2009

gothicangel said:
John Fowles [The Collector] is popularly blamed for the 'postmodern mess.'

Don't you mean The French Lieutenant's Woman? The Collector is a pretty straightforward two-narrator first-person novel - modernist, rather than postmodernist.

On the other hand, French Lieutenant's Woman has a 20th century narrator telling a 19th century story and addressing the reader directly. The novel also has a false ending (with some 150 pages to go) and two "real" but mutually incompatible endings. The novel was a major bestseller in its day - it could be read as postmodern, but I'm sure many people read it as a good story told in an unusual but not inaccessible way.

Thomas Pynchon is usually thought of as a major postmodern novelist.

Post-modern literature has to involve knowing the tropes and conventions of the novel but not playing them straight? Is that right?

Sort of. I'd suggest its more like being aware of the novel as artifice. Irony is often involved, as is a blackly comic and absurdist world view.

eyeblink · Sep 11, 2009

gothicangel said:
I would suggest that multiple voices/pov are a postmodern storytelling techniques.

Even that goes back to the Victorians. Dickens's Bleak House alternates between third-person omniscient and first person, for example.

I'd suggest that multiple POVs is more of modernist technique, in the sense that there is a truth to be told, even if we can't grasp all of it (as per the link I give above).

sunandshadow · Sep 11, 2009

willietheshakes said:
How is breaking the boundaries between myth and realistic fiction breaking the fourth wall?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

maestrowork said:
Breaking the 4th wall is to be self-aware (that there's a reader/author relationship here) and the narrator addresses the readers and the readers' world, thus calling into attention the fictive world.

The universe in which ancient myths exist is not the same universe in which modern realistic novels exist. It's breaking the wall between these universes. 'Level-crossing', to toss out another term. The example of fantasyland being superimposed on the mall is from Fair Peril by Nancy Springer. In this book the protagonist is a divorced woman plagued by the existence of her politician ex-husband, his mother, and his new wife; the protagonist is also the mother of a teenage daughter who sees her as hopelessly disorganized and not-together. The protagonist is also struggling to create a career as a story teller, and because she has studied various theories of myth she thinks in terms of patriarchal restrictions on women, Freudian analysis, myths as code for things which were a little too risque to talk about, and the fact that a myth exists in relation to the storyteller's mind, that the storyteller is a part of the story even if not explicitly mentioned. A universe where this type of protagonist lives is NOT the same kind of universe with witches curses and people being transformed into animals; so the book has to break the wall between these two universes, confuse the role of the modern woman thinking analytically about old stories as cultural artifacts, with the role of the woman adventurer who has to work within the rule of magic and fight magical enemies who don't obey the logical causality of a modern reality, but instead operate on the dreamlike causality of the realm of myth.

willietheshakes · Sep 11, 2009

sunandshadow said:
The universe in which ancient myths exist is not the same universe in which modern realistic novels exist. It's breaking the wall between these universes. 'Level-crossing', to toss out another term. The example of fantasyland being superimposed on the mall is from Fair Peril by Nancy Springer. In this book the protagonist is a divorced woman plagued by the existence of her politician ex-husband, his mother, and his new wife; the protagonist is also the mother of a teenage daughter who sees her as hopelessly disorganized and not-together. The protagonist is also struggling to create a career as a story teller, and because she has studied various theories of myth she thinks in terms of patriarchal restrictions on women, Freudian analysis, myths as code for things which were a little too risque to talk about, and the fact that a myth exists in relation to the storyteller's mind, that the storyteller is a part of the story even if not explicitly mentioned. A universe where this type of protagonist lives is NOT the same kind of universe with witches curses and people being transformed into animals; so the book has to break the wall between these two universes, confuse the role of the modern woman thinking analytically about old stories as cultural artifacts, with the role of the woman adventurer who has to work within the rule of magic and fight magical enemies who don't obey the logical causality of a modern reality, but instead operate on the dreamlike causality of the realm of myth.

Which is all well and good, and certainly boundary-breaking, but it's NOT breaking the Fourth Wall. It might be ABOUT breaking the Fourth Wall (the awareness of the storyteller within the myths to the protagonist), but unless I'm missing something, that Fourth Wall, the one between the reader/audience and book/work of art remains intact.

Ken · Sep 11, 2009

... I create cracks in the 4th wall, rather than breaking it down, entirely.
(If I tore it down entirely I'd have no place to hang my towel rack :-(

megan_d · Sep 11, 2009

Pretty much every single damn post-modern storytelling technique can be found in Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel House Of Leaves.

What are "post-modern storytelling techniques"?

Kitty Pryde

i luv you giant bear statue

eyeblink

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K_Woods

9 of 10 Overlords prefer Evil Pie!

Kitty Pryde

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sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

Kitty Pryde

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willietheshakes

Gentleman. Scholar. Bastard.

maestrowork

Fear the Death Ray

Kitty Pryde

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willietheshakes

Gentleman. Scholar. Bastard.

maestrowork

Fear the Death Ray

Kitty Pryde

i luv you giant bear statue

BigWords

Geekzilla

gothicangel

Toughen up.

eyeblink

Barbara says hi

eyeblink

Barbara says hi

sunandshadow

Impractical Fantasy Animal

willietheshakes

Gentleman. Scholar. Bastard.

Ken

megan_d

Falling in the milk