Bernard Cohen’s Snowdome: somewhere in a postmodern time

Abstract

Occidental societies, according to certain visions of a postmodern future as reflected in literature and arts, are heading towards a dystopian decadent world order. It is inside this perspective that I place the following essay with the aim to analyse the representation of Postmodernism and Postmodernity in Bernard Cohen’s experimental work, Snowdome. This novel can be conceived as a complex portrayal of contemporary existence and life in the city. By means of three different narrations and two stories separated by the unstable boundary of time, Cohen depicts contemporary Sidney from a nightmarish present of noise that leads to the complete isolation of the subject in a near future. The novel emphasises the multiplicity of information in contemporary society and the way in which that information becomes a constant noise flooding the city. The individual is unable to grasp a bit of that “pure reality” outside the simulacrum offered by the media and by the terrifying museum. Sidney and Australia become, in Cohen’s work, a prolongation of contemporary North-American invasive culture, based on the power of the TV screen and the falsehood of simulacrum, whereas individuals are plunged into a new time-space dimension which is placed somewhere in a postmodern time.