49, presents irresolvable counter-stories in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, explodes the convention of embedding in the last chapter of Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, and ultimately dissolves the science fiction convention of time-travel in Russ's The Female Man.
Postmodern novels characteristically violate conventions of genre and decorum as well, and violate both inasmuch as they fuzz the border between high and low culture. For example, poetry can invade the narrative prose without explanation, as in the blank-verse reinscriptions of public documents in The Public Burning, or the invasion may be explained in ways that seem flagrantly inadequate or inappropriate: Pynchon's characters, for instance, regularly burst into song. Nonfictional texts may be embedded in the fiction with apparent haphazardness, like the extracts from histories and memoirs in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, or may take the form of disruptive direct address, as when, in the middle of Donald Barthelme's Snow White, the reader encounters a questionnaire that begins, '1. Do you like the story so far? Yes () No ().' Ostensible fictions may carry their own commentaries: for example, Delany's novels have long appendixes, which occupy up to a third of the pages in the book and which link elements of the story to issues in anthropological and linguistic theory.
Postmodern novels also tend to violate conventions of decorum in their use of allusion and documentation. Mythic and literary allusions occur in deflating contexts (Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow compares himself with the questing hero Tannhaüser but promptly appends the epithet 'the Singing Nincompoop'; John Henry Waugh in The Universal Baseball Association initiates a new covenant by vomiting a -704- rainbow of partially digested pizza over his beer-flooded game) or are dragged in with hyperbolic gratuitousness (one of the dwarfs in Snow White smokes a cigar 'that stretches from Mont St. Michel and Chartres to under the volcano'). The range of allusion embraces the texts of mass culture as well as high culture. Postmodern novels may quote or allude to popular magazines, newspapers, advertising slogans and jingles, brand names, radio and television programs, movies, and computer games. The massing of allusions often occurs as part of a tendency to parade the apparatus of research rather than subordinating documentary evidence as background or setting. One of the most extreme manifestations of this tendency is the catalog, in which data of varying degrees of relevance and importance are simply listed. Less radically, a number of postmodern novels are encyclopedic, in the sense of comprehending and schematizing the knowledge that defines the period in which they are written. For instance, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and DeLillo's Ratner's Star make extensive use of scientific and mathematical information; Delany's Nevèrÿon series puts mathematics together with semiotics; novels by Reed, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Barth, Coover, and Pynchon are explicitly concerned with historiography as well as history. In their amassing of information and theories as to how this information is organized, as well as in other respects, postmodern novels may represent the flowering of the tradition of Menippean satire, which began in late antiquity. According to narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Menippean satire is a seriocomic genre that mixes modes and comprehends multiple styles and voices. It deals with the 'ultimate questions' of philosophy, involves radical structural and stylistic experiment, and incorporates improprieties and contemporary satire. Bakhtin's analysis places the postmodern novel in a long tradition, paradoxically establishing its continuity through literary history precisely because of disruptiveness.
In general, the postmodern novel emphasizes plot rather than character. Postmodern plots tend to be labyrinthine, difficult (even impossible) to follow, contrived, often entrapping. In a number of works this emphasis on plot seems to entail a corresponding diminution or flattening of character. Characters are often stereotypes and can be drawn from other high or low cultural narratives, as is the case with Coover's Cat in the Hat, Barth's Menelaus, Proteus, and -705- Theseus, Barthelme's Snow White, Acker's Don Quixote, and Reed's Minnie the Moocher. Conversely, they can be taken from the documents of 'real' history, as is the case with Coover's Rosenbergs and Richard Nixon, Pynchon's Walther Rathenau and Mickey Rooney, Reed's Warren G. Harding and Abraham Lincoln, and DeLillo's Lee Harvey Oswald. Or they can be allegorical figures, like Pynchon's quester Oedipa or Susan Sontag's Diddy (Did He?) in the novel Death Kit (1967). When characters are more developed, the effect of depth or psychological reality tends to be undercut by the satiric or implausible nature of the fictional universes they inhabit — cases in point are John Hawkes's Skipper in Second Skin, Nabokov's Humbert, Kinbote, and Van, and DeLillo's John Gladney, the professor of Hitler Studies in White Noise.
Characters in postmodern novels are also likely to be fragmented or multiple: Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow is described as disintegrating, and in the fourth section of the novel becomes less a character than a sort of thematic trace; the four main characters of The Female Man seem to be possible versions of a single authorial persona; John Henry Waugh dissolves into a hitherto secondary level of the fictional universe in the last chapter of The Universal Baseball Association. Rarely agents of their own destinies, postmodern protagonists tend to be passive, manipulated by a plot they perceive as already inscribed in their fictional universes. This passivity is consonant both with the self-referential theme of a world that comes to acculturated subjects already textualized and with the more overtly political exploration of what it means to be American in a period where power is increasingly global in its scope and diffused in its manifestations.
These structural features may have analogues on the level of style. In the fiction of Donald Barthelme, syntax is often wrenched to the point of noncommunication, or into a kind of sublime clunkiness. In the works of Pynchon, DeLillo, Acker, and Coover, narrative voices are permeated by period and class-coded slang or the catchphrases of media cliché, and there can be enormous tonal shifts within a single narrator's account. Perhaps because postmodernists tend not to separate the aesthetic from other kinds of discourse, there is less markedly 'fine writing' in postmodern novels than in the corresponding modernist novels. There are exceptions, however: Nabokov and -706- Hawkes are both acclaimed as superb prose stylists, Pynchon's menu of stylistic techniques in Gravity's Rainbow produces some of the most brilliant and moving passages in American literature, and DeLillo's remarkable ear for arcane vocabularies and the cadences of spoken syntax effectively redefines the whole idea of narrative style.
Born and raised in prerevolutionary Russia, Vladimir Nabokov alludes to his expatriate status throughout his work, making the idea of national and cultural homelessness increasingly the basis for the games that unground and destabilize his narratives. In Lolita (1955), he builds on the modernist convention of the unreliable narrator, presenting Humbert Humbert's retrospective account as at once prurient, sentimental, and satiric. The resulting mix is difficult to interpret, especially given the pervasive wordplay, in that the reader is not given unequivocal cues about how to take this story, but there does seem to be a story, albeit an unsettled and unsettling one.
In Pale Fire (1962), however, the unreliable narrator goes over the edge, and the novel becomes a wholly unreliable text. As a consequence of this postmodern turn, the question 'What's the real story here?' becomes both pressing and inapplicable. Pale Fire is metafictionally about the question of the 'real story,' dramatized as a quest for the correct reading. The novel takes the form of a text plus critical commentary. It consists of a long conversational poem by the recently murdered poet John Shade, followed by a purported explication that immediately acquires a life of its own, situating the poem as an allegorically veiled account of the past of the commentator himself, the expatriate professor Charles Kinbote. The question becomes how to read the reading — that is, how to evaluate the reading strategies that reflect on the reader's own reading strategies. Evaluation takes the form of discriminating between ontological levels of the text, that is, deciding what is 'real' in terms of the fictional universe of the novel and what, within this universe, is 'unreal' — fantasized, fictionalized, hallucinated, mistaken, and so on.
But the activity of reading as a process of discriminating the 'real' story from superadded accretions turns out to be impossible. If the details of Shade's poem seem wholly unamenable to the interpretation that makes them an allegory for the history of the deposed King of Zembla, then it seems likely that Kinbote has 'read into' his text, -707- turning it into his own story. But the wordplay that gives Kinbote his opposite and equal reflection in the character Botkin, that folds anagrams of the name of the assassin Gradus through the poem as well as the commentary, and opposes the fictitious New England college town of Arcady to an equally fictitious, if curiously refractive Kingdom of Zembla (as in 'semblance') suggests that 'Kinbote' himself is a fiction within the fictional
