Documentary Realism and the Postmodernist Scene

Abstract

From the late 1960s, metafiction, emphasizing intertextuality and thematizing the process and conventions of creative writing, and nonfiction ‘fiction’, claiming that reality in its pre-written state in itself provides the writer with story-ready material, have become established—and indeed already somewhat petrified — reactions against the convention of writing that takes for granted an objectively existing reality and the possibility of its transformation into writing. That we live in a time of mass production and mass dissemination of all kinds of ‘text’, of imitations in which the identity and the function of the originals are quickly forgotten, hardly needs documentation.¹ The changing twentieth-century sensibility, in accordance, as it were, with Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, seems to make itself most universally felt in the constant process of copying, collage, and the incessant change in functional status of the texts in which we articulate our situation. As a consequence of the shifting world picture we have developed a capacity for ceaseless transformation of signifiers into signifieds and vice versa to use familiar structuralist concepts.²

‘The paradox of the sophisticated modern mind is that it is unable to believe in the objective validity of meanings yet unable to do without meanings.’ (Graff, 1977, p. 225)