want to read — a stricture that may be intensified when the author in question belongs to a 'spiritual' race as well as a 'spiritual' gender, as bell hooks's experience demonstrates:
[The] creative writing I do which I consider to be most reflective of a postmodern oppositional sensibility — work that is abstract, fragmented, nonlinear narrative — is constantly rejected by editors and publishers who tell me it does not conform to the type of writing they think black women should be doing or the type of writing they believe will sell.
In sum, the literary marketplace is, for better or worse, the most reliable indicator of how we value literature. Literary taste, literary status, and literary production are all determined to a significant extent by the economics of that market and, in turn, by the hierarchy of values that are expressed in those economics. In the postmodern era, publishing has become part of a multinational and multimedia marketplace for narrative, and therefore it competes with movies, television, and even 'nonfictional' formats such as TV news, which increasingly adopts the trappings of narrative to attract its viewers. In this environment, the most profitable type of novel is that which can be easily translated into other media, namely, the realist narrative. The best-paid authors of such narrative are disproportionately male, as are those who manage the mass market for narrative, but the product is, especially in the case of the novel, marketed to women — often on the basis of essentialist stereotypes of the proclivities and -695- desires of that gendered market. 'Serious' fiction that is nonrealist in its aesthetic orientation is prestigious but unprofitable, and those who write it tend to be men confined to the academy, which is the only place that their professionalism does have a market value. In addition to reflecting our hierarchy of gender, the literary marketplace reflects our presuppositions about race and our predispositions toward class, not so much in who gets published as in what gets published and what gets preserved — and it is the difference between these last two that may tell us most about how literary value is determined.
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Postmodern Fiction
The 'post' in 'postmodernism' signifies both a temporal condition (postmodernism is a period after modernism and thus in certain respects an evolution from it) and an attitude of resistance (postmodernism is a turn away from modernism and thus in certain respects a radical break with it). Postmodernism is thus both a late modernism and an antimodernism. Although this definition seems peculiarly oxymoronic, literary history offers precedents, one of them being modernism itself. 'Modernism,' as the word is used to define the major avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century, is both a continuation of and a radical break from the dominant literary modes of the nineteenth century — in the case of prose fiction, the modes of realism and naturalism. Although as a descriptive term 'postmodern' seems particularly vulnerable to commonsense cavils (how could anything be after, or more modern than, the modern?), 'the postmodern novel' has in critical usage a relatively clear range of reference, denoting a group of works and foregrounding the themes and narrative strategies that these works share.
Like the modernist novel, the postmodern novel can be described as an avant-garde tendency within a literary period, in this case
The 'mainstream' character of postmodern fictional innovation has other implications. The American postmodern novel is widely perceived — and criticized — as a white male genre. It is significant that the two writers mentioned above as the only major novelists in the canon to have published a substantial part of their work with small presses are also the only two women novelists. Some feminist critics have gone on to claim that the postmodern novel is essentially masculinist or misogynist, inasmuch as a number of the most famous works, especially those produced in the 1950s and 1960s, are preoccupied with aggressive, often violent male sexual behavior and the denigration of female characters. It seems unlikely, however, that instances of identifiable sexism are necessarily connected with postmodern experimentation per se, especially given the fact that other kinds of novels produced by male writers in the early contemporary period also celebrate aggressive male sexuality and present denigrating images of women. Nor is the relative scarcity of women in the American postmodern canon by itself evidence that American women are not writing postmodern novels — much less that they are 'not interested' in stylistic and structural innovation; it is only evidence that such novels are not getting the publication and publicity given to the male postmodernists — and, for that matter, to female writers of realist fiction. Furthermore, postmodernism is to some extent a matter of packaging. When in his 1979 essay 'The Literature of Replenishment' John Barth drew up a list of international postmodern fiction writers, he included twenty-three men and only one woman, the -698- French 'new novelist' Nathalie Sarraute. But Barth's tentative catalog primarily reflects his own affinities and range of reading, in that it includes only those works already identified with high culture. It mentions no 'genre' novels, for example, although some of the most exciting experimentation of the period was going on within the field of science fiction: Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany (one of only two African American writers in the canon — the other is Ishmael Reed) are science fiction writers whose work has 'crossed over' into the more reputable category of postmodernism. A number of experimental novels by women are also explicitly aligned with the feminist critique of ideology and published in feminist series, usually by small presses: Russ's
As Cornel West has suggested, postmodern culture is by definition multinational. English-language postmodern fiction, however, is a phenomenon most often associated with the United States, where it appears inevitably engaged with the question of what it might mean to be American in an epoch variously summed up in the paradigms of the global village, the cybernetic revolution, postindustrial capitalism, the triumph of kitsch, the reign of media-ocrity, and the new populism. Such American novels at the center of the postmodern canon as Vonnegut's
The American postmodern novel is thus not in any obvious respects the disengaged, aestheticist, and ultimately narcissistic project denounced by such detractors as Charles Newman and the late John Gardner, nor is it fundamentally ahistorical and superficial, as Fredric Jameson has suggested. The continuing controversy over whether postmodern fiction can have moral or political implications revolves around the question of whether only certain conventions of -699- representation — realist or, on occasion, modernist conventions — are capable of evoking 'real world' concerns. The defining condition of postmodernist textual strategies is of course that they disrupt precisely these conventions.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, theorists of the postmodern like Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers argued
