ABSTRACT
Much energy has been expended on trying to place The Master and Margarita in terms of novelistic genre. There is no need to catalogue here all previous suggestions. Suffice it to say that, at this point in literary history, Bulgakov’s novel seems to sit most comfortably within the general category of postmodernism. More particularly, one may wish to apply the term “portmanteau” (multi-layered or multi-levelled) novel, or to pick up the term coined by Brian McHale (within whose definition of postmodernism as based on ontological preoccupations, rather than the epistemological concern of modernism, I wish currently to operate) of the “transhistorical party”: a work or a scene involving an assembly of characters apparently from disparate historical eras or worlds (McHale, 17). Very similar to this is Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “historiographic metafiction”.3 McHale (p. 78) actually cites The Master and Margarita as an example. These terms all fit the fiction of Salman Rushdie, as would any definition of postmodernism, whether based on intrinsic qualities or on period style. Umberto Eco, as literary theorist, favours the intrinsic quality variant and thus is prepared to seek out postmodern features in for instance Homer, while as a novelist he is, as even Rushdie (no admirer of Eco’s “computer game” fiction) is prepared to admit, “the consummate post-modernist” (Imaginary Homelands, 271).4 We have therefore contrived to group Bulgakov, Rushdie and Eco as postmodern novelists. So far so good, but there remain far stronger reasons for initiating a comparison.
