ABSTRACT
The article examines narratives which aim at a synthesis of the antithetical positions of modernist and Postmodernist fiction. A.S. Byatt’s 2002 novel A Whistling Woman transcends the primacy of reason by representing the ‘anomalous’. It thereby also fuses the ‘two cultures’—the scientific and the mysterious. Byatt’s text opens the reality of characters considered as strange or mentally ill, which in social interaction is normally not considered sharable. Narrativizing realities that are often socially ostracized or inaccessible to others, including the scientists, proves feasible and deserving representation. The author employs diverse narrative modes and linguistic codes to achieve it.
The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips (2015) connects three narrative strands and time-levels by the theme of marginalization and loss of rational control to demonstrate the necessity of opening compartmentalization and divisions in a society where ‘the glocal’ emerged long before the 21st century.
Atwood’s dystopia The Heart Goes Last (2015) epitomizes the difficulty to accomplish a shift of socio-cultural paradigms. Consequently, the text fails to become a Transmodern narrative representation. This fictional ‘model for the future’ rather reflects the recent past. In the act of creating it, however, the mirror of the imaginative text overcomes closed spaces of traditional conceptualization.
