The Columbia History of the American Novel

that the undermining of established narrative conventions is not only formally but also politically subversive or even revolutionary. The reason, they maintained, is that conventions of representation are inextricably linked to ideology, so that to disturb accepted and seemingly natural modes of writing is to raise questions about whether accepted and seemingly natural ideas — for instance, about the fundamental sameness of 'human' experience and nature — are not similarly arbitrary and culturebound. Although few critics now hold that formally disruptive writing is by definition politically disruptive writing, this analysis helps clarify how formal disruption can be aligned with ideological critique and why the consequent 'difficulty' of certain politically engaged postmodern novels is not necessarily willful obscurantism.

These observations suggest that postmodern fiction has a certain amount in common with the various poststructuralist theories of the contemporary period. Both postmodern fictional practice and poststructuralist critical theory tend to question a commonsense view of language as simply the vehicle that relays the world to the mind, or as an ideally transparent medium guaranteeing the unequivocal presence of meaning in efficacious discourse. Both postmodernism and poststructuralism treat literary language as inseparable from the discourses of praxis and power and deny that literary language — or any language — can be disinterested and value-neutral. Both assert a fundamental continuity between text and world, not because texts reflect or imitate reality but because reality is inevitably experienced as textualized — that is, as already-interpreted within a social and cultural construction of what the world is and how it works. Indeed, one of the great themes of postmodern fiction is the world as text, as a system of codes already constructed by shadowy others for unguessable purposes. In such fiction, the experience of characters trying to interpret the text in which they are enmeshed replicates the experience of the reader, who is trying to interpret the text in which these characters appear. -700-

Such metafictional loops, in which readers enact — and are similarly entrapped within — searches undertaken by characters, are among the most distinctive structural features of the postmodern novel. They indicate how in the postmodern novel structural features are characteristically wound up with thematic features. They also epitomize one of the primary effects of postmodern writing, an effect partly implied by the notion of a convention-breaking genre. This is the effect of textual mastery. To read a postmodern novel is to be surprised and frequently to be overwhelmed; it is to have expectations thwarted and strategies of interpretation anticipated, attacked, parodied, or simply taken on as topics of discussion within the fiction. Although postmodern novels are not invulnerable to critical mastery, they do actively resist those modes of criticism that aim to get the better of a work, to expose its latent and by implication inadvertent presuppositions. In opposition to the premise that a strong reading can master a novel, postmodern novels tend to initiate the agonistic struggle with their implied audiences, inviting tactics that will lead to narrative impasses and cognitive confusion.

Literary categories rarely have essential definitions — that is, definitions identifying the one quality that makes the mode or genre what it is and separates it from every other mode or genre. For example, the judgment that a given work is realist or modernist is largely a matter of degree and emphasis; moreover, it is based on 'family resemblances' within the genre, in which, as in the case of biological relatives, each member of a given category possesses some but not all of the family features. There is thus nothing anomalous in the fact that no one structural or stylistic feature is present in all postmodern novels and absent from all novels that are not postmodern. The metafictional loop noted above, in which the activity of the reader interpreting a novel doubles the interpreting activities of characters within the novel, is an example. This kind of effect, in which an aspect of the fiction is represented on some embedded level within the fiction, occurs frequently in postmodern novels but is not limited to them (Patricia Waugh cites Cervantes's Don Quixote as an early instance of metafiction), nor do all postmodern novels have conspicuous metafictional components: the works of John Hawkes, Ishmael - 701- Ishmael, and Joanna Russ, for example, are not in any obvious respects about writing or reading.

But although metafictional strategies do not define the postmodern novel, they are very pronounced in much of the writing usually identified as postmodern. One of the most extreme manifestations of the metafictional tendency is the mise-en-abîme, in which a recognizable image of the primary text is embedded within that text. Nabokov's Pale Fire, which incorporates within a text-and- commentary format a long poem called Pale Fire, and Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, in which the main character obsessively develops and documents an imaginary system called the Universal Baseball Association, are particularly interesting examples, which will be discussed at some length in the next section. Such strategies of embedding lead en abîme, 'into the abyss,' both because they are recursive — Nabokov's Kinbote (or Botkin) and Coover's John Henry Waugh are reflecting quasi-parodically the reader's efforts to make sense of the works in which they occur — and because they have the potential for infinite regress — Kinbote indicates at the close of Pale Fire that he might well disguise himself as Nabokov and write novels, among them, presumably, this one; in the last chapter of The Universal Baseball Association Waugh's imaginary baseball players begin to write competing histories of the Universal Baseball Association.

Postmodern metafictional situations tend to differ from modernist metafictional situations in emphasizing the reading rather than the writing of fiction. The distinction suggests a fundamentally altered view of the artist and of literary creation. In postmodern fiction, even when a protagonist is engaged in producing a text, this writing is represented not as original creation but as a kind of rereading. John Barth maintained in 'The Literature of Exhaustion' (1967) that the writer in the contemporary period is confronted with the 'usedupness' of all the viable stories, but such 'exhaustion' becomes in the terms proposed by this argument an impetus to write selfconsciously postmodern fiction; indeed, much of Barth's own fiction dramatizes the process or product of reinscription and raises the mechanics and motivations of narrative to central importance. Moreover, if to write is invariably to replicate what one has read and thus to reread, to read is also to rewrite. A recurring dilemma in Thomas Pynchon's novels is that to read history for its meaning is also to -702- postulate connections among events in order to make them mean something. Characters are constantly faced with the question of whether they are reading a historical script that preexists their critical endeavors or whether they have in important respects constructed this script through their desire to read it and their expectation that it will prove readable. In Pynchon's fictional universes, the distinction between reading and writing is both wholly untenable and wholly necessary.

Another metafictional strategy not restricted to postmodern novels but prominent within them is the introduction of a figure who is not only a persona of the author but a persona of the author of this book: in John Barth's Chimera, 'John Barth' time-travels to talk with Scheherazade about the used-upness of all the viable stories; a minor character in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is suddenly identified as Vonnegut himself: 'That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.' This kind of strategy is in Brian McHale's words 'frame-breaking,' in that it intrudes a heretofore 'factual' being into a 'fictional' landscape. Like the postmodernist use of the mise-en-abîme, this postmodernist use of the authorial persona disrupts both realist and modernist strategies of reading, in that it resists the reader's desire to assign a textual phenomenon to a particular ontological level, such as the level of real-world fact, fictional 'fact,' or fictional 'fiction.'

To break narrative frames by allowing one ontological level of the plot to intrude on another ontological level is to introduce radical instability into a work of fiction. Inasmuch as this kind of framebreaking is one of the most important features of postmodern writing, it aligns the postmodern novel with a kind of radical undecidability, a suspicion that the question 'What's the real story here?' cannot be answered in any satisfying way — satisfying, that is, in terms of the sorts of expectations bred by realist and modernist fiction. The 'real story' is unavailable in the face of contradictions or divergent accounts, not simply because it is unknowable (in which case there is a real story, but readers don't have access to it — a familiar situation in such modernist fiction as William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!), but because there is no single 'real' in the story, no sanctioned reality with reference to which other stories can situate themselves as distorted, fictionalized, partial, biased, hallucinated, or -703- simply lying. To put it another way, discrepancies in a postmodern story resist being naturalized as functions of a perceiver — 'the' world of the fiction itself is irreducibly multiple. The character Stephen Albert, in Jorge Luis Borges's influential ficcione 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1945), describes a situation in which multiple possibilities are realized simultaneously: '[The writer] thus creates various figures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradiction in the novel.' The intimation of such parallel realities leads to the impasse at the conclusion of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot