Magnus and a Post-Postmodernist Sense of History: The Phenomenological Impulse in the Postmodernist Form

Abstract

What this essay considers worthy of close attention is the unique narrative mode Sylvie Germain employs to orchestrate thematic issues in her novel Magnus. As this essay aims as much at the content of form as at the form of content, it also addresses the question of the literary period as a way of speculating on the meanings of the narrative modes in Magnus. Germain’s work employs an aesthetic strategy to find a way to confront history. Magnus contains all the formal traits of postmodernism: genre mixture, intertextuality, quotation, blurring fact and fiction, polyphony, and anti-plot. However, it is not a postmodern work in the final analysis. All the formal traits are not under the author’s control. Still, they retain among one another something like what Goethe tried to articulate through ‘elective affinity.’ That is, fragments and quotations form a constellation, from the depth of which some meaning, or what may be called an idea, can spring. Germain’s Magnus is ironic in that it is punctuated by the uncontainable tension between the modernist and the postmodernist ethos. For her, remembering history, the major concern of this novel, is not a matter of choosing modernity over postmodernity, but rather a matter of recognizing their local validities and finding new ways of approaching history. Indeed, Germain’s Magnus, located in extreme tension between modernist and postmodernist ethos in terms of form, content, and the sense of historicity, may shed light on what comes after the postmodern literature.