Being in Time: Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and the Postmodern Paradigm

Abstract

The article analyses Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being from the perspective of the governing mechanisms of postmodernity. We argue that the structuring of its literary worlds and realities, literary subjectivities, as well as its organization implement the principles inherent in the structuring, functioning and perception of contemporary postmodern realities and individuals, while complying with the laws of the dominant digital medium. The correspondence of the structure and functioning of literary realities and subjectivities in the novel to postmodern principles is examined in terms of their agreement with the features the majority of theoreticians observe as paradigmatic of contemporary social, historical and cultural circumstances, i.e. non-linearity, intertextuality, polyvalence, decentralisation, and networked, rhizomatous structuring. For clarity’s sake, Baudrillard’s categories of hyperreality and fractal subject are used, as they anticipate all the stated qualities, and conceptually correspond to the dominant postmodern medium. – The analysis reveals that the construction of Ozeki’s literary realities is defined by the principles of equality, interference, connectivity, interchangeability and fluidity of all the involved worlds, which are established as hyperreal systems of media-generated information. Literary identities in the novel also correspond to the fractal nature of postmodern selves, as all the participants in the literary act are revealed as identity variants of the same subject. These variants are structured as networks of compatible mediated data, and exhibit the qualities of fluidity, interference and connectivity. As such, they corroborate the structural principles of hyperreality. Finally, the novel is examined from the perspective of the alterations the digital writing space instigates in the field of literary creation. The analysis reveals that the structuring of realities, identities and the plot in the novel, as well as the organisation of the text itself corroborate the modi operandi of the digital medium regardless of the medium in which the novel is read.