The Pre-POST-erous world.

Abstract

Comparing Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) to Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002), this essay argues that Márquez is not employing the postmodern aesthetic merely for some hidden agenda. Like Kafka on the Shore, One Hundred Years of Solitude is characteristically postmodernist as it is a depthless work of art that uses a medley of styles. Through postmodern pastiche, Márquez and Murakami seek to eschew the possibility of meaning that is so important to modernist fiction. Modernist fiction is notably consumed with consciousness and concerned with the meanings and limits of language and knowledge. In contrast, postmodernist fiction revels in what I have called “the pre-POST-erous world” – the absurd, plural world – in order to convey that cognitive questions are imposed too often that there is no answer anymore.