Provide a close reading of the following paragraph and how it relates to the novel theme of postmodernism. "And as for coincidences in books—there is something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can’t help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack. That troubadour who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers. I once disparaged this lazy stratagem to a poet I met, a man presumably skilled in the coincidences of rhyme. 'Perhaps,' he replied, with a genial loftiness, 'you have too prosaic a mind?' 'But surely,' I came back, rather pleased with myself, 'a prosaic mind is the best judge of prose?' I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fictions. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. . . . One way of legitimizing coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence."

This passage is about the way in which art is artificial and cannot capture the reality of life, which is messy, does not follow a neat pattern, and cannot be organized by the devices used in literature. As the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, says, "Words came easily to Flaubert, but he also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word" (page 19). Postmodernism involves questioning the reality of art and recognizing its artifice.
In this passage, the narrator says that literary devices and coincidences in novels are "artificially gimcrack," which refers to something that is just for show and that is essentially contrived and fake. He refers to several examples of fake conventions in literature, including the troubadour who rescues a girl, the saviors that surface suddenly in Dickens, and a shipwreck that unites people. He mentions speaking to a poet about these falsities in literature, and the poet responds that the narrator might have a prosaic mind, meaning one that is dull and pedestrian. In a play on words, the narrator asks if a prosaic mind is best for understanding prose (writing that is not poetry). In other words, novels are best understood by people schooled in the messiness and disorder of real life. The narrator says that coincidences only belong in picaresque fiction, an early form of fiction that is exaggerated in its plot and characters. He says that the literati justify coincidences by utilizing irony, but they still amount to novelistic tricks.
This passage relates to the narrator's attempt to find order in real life that can only be found in fiction. Just as the narrator cannot figure out which parrot really belonged to Flaubert, neither can he really understand his deceased wife. He rails against the neatness of fiction and the way it deals with the complexities of life. In the end, he finds literature and art deceptively simple and artificial in many ways.