Time Being on Time: A Postmodern Tale
1. IntroductionAbout a year ago, a fellow literary scholar and friend suggested I read a great new novel by Ruth Ozeki, which was among the finalists for the 2013 Man Booker prize. When I asked what it was about, her attempts to elaborate briefly on the bare facts of the content persistently resulted in the dissolution of the validity of the foundation she was elaborating upon. From what I could gather, the book was about alternative realities, the various modes of existence, Zen Buddhism, the problematics of writing, and quantum mechanics. I asked whether it was some kind of abstract, esoteric postmodernism. She thought about it and replied that the novel actually felt decidedly down to Earth and realistic regardless of its non linearity and seemingly abstract ways. This paradox, which in the course of my research of postmodern fiction proved to be the primary marker of a work's potential postmodern character, prompted me to immediately type A Tale for the Time Being into the search line of my kindle app. In a matter of seconds, the digital simulacrum of what over the last four centuries we have grown to recognize as a novel was safely stored in my e library.Implicit in the episode are the two main issues this paper is addressing. The first has to do with the ways of thinking about literature in terms of the radical restructuring of the metaphysical framework governing the social, cultural, economic and political processes which over the last six decades we have come to identify as the onset of the new historical age of postmodernity. The second issue pertains to the implications of the change of the dominant medium, which inexorably accompanies the instigation of each new historical age (Bolter 2001: 22) for literature and literacy in general.Literature first reacted to the new historical conditions in the earlyl980s through literary cyberpunk (cf. Krevel 2012:59 64) Since then, instances of fiction complying with the new metaphysical framework have been on the rise, but confined to genre and experimental writing. Analysing the worlds, protagonists and structural organization of Ozeki's novel in terms of the governing mechanisms of the new epoch, I intend to show that it is one of the first examples of the so called mainstream fiction its status corroborated by the type of awards it received or was nominated for that not only the matises the postmodern condition, but is fundamentally defined by it.2. The author, the book, and their timeRuth Ozeki is a Canadian American novelist and filmmaker, as well as a Zen Buddhist priest. A Tale for the Time Being, published in 2013,is her third novel. Like the first two, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003) it seamlessly combines fiction with factuality, and examines the various relations between Japanese and American traditions, looking at societies and cultures from multiple narrative perspectives. To provide a general idea of the contents, at this point it suffices to say it involves two narrators, sixteen year old Nao from Tokyo, and Ruth, an elderly novelist who lives with her husband Oliver on a remote island in British Columbia. One day, during a walk by the sea, Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing Nao's diary and some other documents that have washed up on the shore after the 2011 tsunami. The diary, which Ruth immediately starts to read, takes us into Nao's story. Before committing suicide after having been brutally bullied at school and experiencing problems at home, the girl is determined to document the life of her great grandmother Jiko, who is a Buddhist nun. Her narration, conveyed as a letter to the reader of the diary, combines the events from her life with those of her great grandmother. Ruth becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Nao, and the three women and their stories become inextricably intertwined.Brief as this summary may be, it makes it clear that the story is primarily anchored within contemporary social and cultural realities.