Thoughts on Postmodernism

Lately, I've been noticing all the subtle ways Paper-Soul Theater takes after Alice in Wonderland, a surreal-humor book about a young Victorian girl who runs off to a place of confusion and dystopia and discovers that grass in such a place is not greener.

The book as a whole plays out neither as a counterargument to Postmodernism nor as a celebration, but it maintains some very important lessons for a modern reader. First of all, Alice, like both Generation X and the Baby Boomers, has no direction and saw it fit to let her intuition guide her. The Cheshire Cat, by contrast, is a master at predicting the future to the full extent any person could reasonably be, and it is enabled by its precaution of the future to find a path for itself that it likes. The grinning cat perhaps grins because it has the world figured out, which allows it to trick everyone that passes it by, even the king. Yes, it tricks most people because they are Modernists, but that doesn't mean the cat itself is a Postmodernist, because that would imply it's an equal with the mad hatter, whom it is wiser than. The mad hatter is a postmodernist who things making shit up and living life in anarchy will satisfy all his needs, when in reality he is blissfully unaware of the way this repels others from being his acquaintance and has trapped him.

Ever since the Beatniks, many people have fallen into the trap of trying to live like mad hatters: on their own terms with little regard for reason, established morals, or progress made in the past. I am hopeful that people of the Digital Age take after the Cheshire Cat, who has access to more options than ever before yet found the strength to pick a path rather than drift on the wind.

The problem is, Postmodernism as a mainstream norm refuses to go away and allow for the response to Postmodernism to take its place. Both my generation and Gen Z are in danger of falling into the same trap of choosing doublespeak over established order, of choosing no direction over any sort of plan, of having no backbone to reject what they think is wrong at the cost of stepping on someone's way of life. What I find maddening is that Postmodernism has become conservative, and a sort of Neo-Modernism (Digitalism as I call it) has become progressive.

With Paper-Soul Theater, I aim to demonstrate how Postmodern thinking can destroy a person's life and limit them much like modernism once did in a completely different way. The Cheshire Cat is content because he found direction in life in such a way that is neither rigid nor uncareful but instead nuanced.