Chapter I - RDU - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

6can understand the cracks of the conservative and traditional social order of early XXthcentury Britain. The possibility is there to read Billy Prior’s conflicts as the expressionof darker and hidden undercurrents that will intensify as the century goes by until weget to our own present times. 21.2 Modernity, Modernism, Postmodernity andPostmodernismPat Barker writes the three novels of her trilogy in the 1990’s but they are set inthe first decade of the XXth century during the First World War. The culturalenvironments of both these periods are Postmodernism and Modernism respectively. Onthe one hand, the novels are written during a historical time whose ethos, in the wordsof Terry Eagleton, is one of disbelief in the “classical notions of truth, reason, identityand objectivity”, an epoch that sees the world as “contingent, ungrounded, diverse,unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures and interpretations which breed adegree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness ofnatures and the coherence of identities.” (Eagleton vii) On the other hand, they are set ata time when the spirit was that of Modernity. Anthony Giddens in his bookConversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (1998) definesModernity as:...a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial civilization. Portrayed in moredetail, it is associated with a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of theworld as open to transformation by human intervention; a complex of economicinstitutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; a certain rangeof political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. (94)Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and sociologist, in his essay“Modernity – an Incomplete Project” from 1980 describes Modernity as follows: “Theproject of Modernity formulated in the eighteenth century by the philosophers of theEnlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal moralityand law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic.” (Brooker 132). Barker’s2 There is a fourth author who devoted a lot of his research effort to the topic of heroes. It is JosephCampbell, the American mythologist. In his book, El héroe de las mil caras, psicoanálisis del mito (1949)he speaks of the monomythic unit which includes the three stages of the hero’s journey: a) departure b)initiation and c) return. (35) The unit is subdivided in sixteen mythemes that decribe the various eventsthe hero has to confront during his journey. (40-41) We have not included Campbell’s concepts in ourthesis because of the mythological orientation he gives to the issue of the hero and somehow this is notexactly pertinent to our discussion which is focused on the confrontation of different social discourses(modern and postmodern) on the fall of the traditional and heroic values closely linked to the times of thenovels and on how they are challenged by the circumstances and the characters of the trilogy.