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  1. Recognition of weakness and non-duality.

    In principle, no matter how much there is talk about metamodernism and other “next” trends, it is now more convenient to note the main elements of what-will-be-after-postmodernism not on the example of some clear and outlined paradigm, but on the example of things that simply do not fit into postmodernism.

    Generally speaking, what writers who are trying to overcome postmodernism are doing is finding new ways to best talk about what is valuable. Formulate regulations. Postmodernism, after all, has not shifted any values — it has simply changed the terms of speech.

    For example, a classic postmodern novel illustrates how different we all are, but it doesn't deal with building communication routes. Wallace does just that. Postmodernism treats its heroes as characters. Wallace eliminates the stylistic boundary between characters and non-characters, overlaying these areas one on top of the other. Postmodernism uses culture as the basis for its entire vocabulary — “there's nothing outside the text”. Wallace uses culture as something used. Finally, for postmodernism, irony is the primary language-not because there is nothing else, but because it is beyond speech. For Wallace, what lies behind the irony should be on the same page.

    In other words, Wallace is trying to bring humanity back to the postmodern. Fragile, pathetic, shy, clumsy human — with infantile cynicism and secret sentimentality, in an invisible epic of the daily and constant struggle with boredom.

    It is easy to see that Wallace refers a lot to Pynchon and DeLillo, but he also refers a lot to the authors of late modernism — Faulkner and Updike. Modernism is used by him as a point of final preservation — where you can look back from the inside of the inevitably postmodern form, thereby voluntarily or involuntarily smoothing out the irregularities between them. This also becomes a way to talk further. And, of course, he also looks back at genre cultures like Stephen King and soap operas — not as cultural keys, but as generational keys, connections that are familiar to those whose communication with the narrative has largely come from television.

    After all, the Wallace scheme almost always has the format of starting with lobsters, going through a forest of academic footnotes, and ending with the question of why we're even alive. He always tries to keep an even balance between the extremely intelligent, extremely simple, and purposefully entertaining — often alternating them so that the most poignant, most emotionally necessary phrase reaches the reader exactly at the moment when he was ready to fall asleep. At the same time, the intellectual in Wallace is not devoid of value in itself, and is not a tool for pushing some existential thought. This thought just follows him anyway. Well, why not? Both are done out of love, and none of this is necessarily missing.

    Which unwittingly leads to the question of complexity. The postmodern novel uses complexity as a parallel to the complexity and nonconceptualization of the world itself — where something cannot be said directly because nothing can be said directly. Wallace complexity is part of its hierarchy — it pushes the story model away because the story model isn't important. The real story takes place in the context of states that are directly mentioned.

    Well, let me just say directly in honor of this that it works. In addition to being well-written, it also illustrates how our relationship with literary texts has changed over the past half-century, and what it has been possible to say in these texts.

    Например что “fiction is about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

    What the fuck is postmodernism?

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