universe of Pale Fire. The problem then becomes where to draw the line. Under this suspicious scrutiny, the entire world of Pale Fire begins to collapse into unreality, so completely that it is also impossible to maintain that there is a 'real' commentator within the text who is responsible for all this fabulation. It becomes impossible, that is, to maintain the concept of 'fictional reality' as opposed to 'fictional fiction.'
Yet Pale Fire continues to hold up its various unsustainable readings as lures, promises of coherence and significance that demand to be followed out even when following them out leads in a circle. In this novel, as in the subsequent Ada (1969), Nabokov plays with the expectation of discovery by manipulating ontological levels so that the ground or source of all the fabulation seems continually about to be revealed. Pale Fire not only engages this quest but also parodies it, in that the narrator searches industriously but never quite stumbles on the origin of the quotation giving the poem, and thus the book itself, its name. And as in Ada, one ontological level being manipulated is outside the fictional universe of the novel: Pale Fire is to a degree a roman à clef, in its advancing and withholding of autobiographical information. At the close of the commentary, the narrator surmises that his future will involve 'other disguises,' and adds, 'I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art.' The parallels between the expatriate professor Kinbote and the expatriate professor Nabokov move into prominence at this moment, within a novel about the obsessive need to inscribe one's own life story in the pages of another text. But the parallels present another metafictional loop, for it is ultimately the reader looking for traces of Nabokov's own personal history in Pale Fire who is reenacting the monomaniacal quest of the narrator, and thus the critical activity of locating what the novel is -708- 'really' about repeats the reading that is in so many palpable respects a 'reading into.'
This final implication of the reader in the questionable strategies of the protagonist is an instance of the kind of mastery that the postmodern novel characteristically exercises. Characteristically, too, Pale Fire anticipates the gendered nature of the struggle in the way the masterful reader is constructed to be pitted against a narrator who in sexual terms is the dominant culture's embodiment of subordination. The narrator is clearly homosexual; moreover, his homosexuality is presented as one of the mores of an alien nation that has already been overmastered by a superpower. A reading that exposes his commentary on the poem as the pitiful attempt to assert, without the requisite author-ity, superseded and debased values would reinforce the values of the dominant culture. Pale Fire invites such a reading, only to betray it. Like the quasi-Soviet agents who search in vain for the crown jewels of Zembla, such a reader quests after the kernel of reality presumed to be behind all the masquerades of art. And like these agents, who tear apart a trompe-l'oeil nut box inset in a painting to find 'nothing…except the broken bits of a nutshell,' such a reader finds this quest forever compromised. In this book of nested embeddings, art and reality are on an equal footing, and the inside is the outside.
Like Nabokov, John Hawkes is fascinated by the convention of the unreliable narrator and prone to align narrative unreliability with what the dominant culture identifies as social and especially sexual degradation. Much of his work invites the reader to perceive deficiencies in a narrator and to attempt to ascertain the 'real story' from evident contradictions and lacunae, but in Second Skin (1963) the narrator is so literally ungrounded that no basis exists for the reader to judge this narrator's account as deluded, deceptive, or otherwise mistaken. This narrator is a widowed ex-Navy officer named Skipper, a character who by his own testimony is a cuckold and a rape victim, someone the people around him regard as gullible, cowardly, and impotent. Yet his story by his accounts is a triumph that shows him to be 'a man of love' and 'a man of courage as well.' The discrepancy between the violence and sordidness of the events of his story and the interpretation he claims for this story invites readers -709- to master Skipper just as he seems continually to be mastered by everyone else. The contradictions and anomalies in the facts he details invite the reader to naturalize the text by finding deficiencies in the narrating subject — to find psychological reasons for aspects of the account that do not fit into the reader's own interpretation.
But the ground from which such a reader can make this judgment has been pulled out: Skipper claims to be telling his tale of betrayal and death in retrospect from the vantage of a floating island, a determinedly irrealistic setting shot through with allusions to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Here Skipper is reigning magician, and if he says he has triumphed, his say-so is the only thing the reader can go on. The premise of this romantically untethered scene of narration seriously undermines the apparent contrast between the self- justifying and doggedly optimistic cast of Skipper's interpretation and the sordid details of the events he narrates. The line between fictional 'facts' and fictional 'fiction' (or false interpretation) is impossible to maintain given the irrealism of the scene of narration, which can be located only through allusion and symbolism. Skipper's island has existence only in a literary universe, with respect to the Shakespearean landscape it evokes and the unnamed New England island it 'doubles,' to use Hawkes's own term.
Skipper's story thus cannot be identified as being something other than the 'real story,' because it is impossible to ground Skipper's story in Skipper's own motivation and/or mental condition. While Humbert in Lolita narrates from prison — a fact that allows readers to assess his reliability given his evident motives for self-exoneration and confession — Skipper cannot be presumed to narrate, say, from a mental institution and simply claim to be on a floating island, because nothing in the novel warrants seeing a mental institution as more intrinsically real than a floating island. The question 'What's the real story here?' is a means to mastering an unreliable narration by dividing its elements into various ontological levels and thus putting them in their place in a coherent, hierarchically organized story. But this story — as in Pale Fire, a story of emasculation — ultimately resists such mastery and overmasters the attempted reading because it refuses to give readers a stable ground from which to make judgments.
John Barth first wrote about postmodernism in the influential essay 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' where he argued that postmod-710- ern innovation derives from the 'used-upness' of all the available plots. His own innovations seem to have arisen, like Nabokov's and Hawkes's, from earlier works that pushed at the boundaries of certain existing narrative conventions. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) are experiments with the genre of the philosophical novel, or novel of ideas, in which characters are fundamentally concerned with the nature of reality and the self. In both books, however, the protagonists find themselves involved in enterprises analogous to the making of fiction. Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera erects a series of provisional plots to bring order to an apparently chaotic reality. Jacob Horner in The End of the Road is engaged in Mythotherapy, an existential version of psychoanalysis that aims to compensate for the fundamental nonexistence of the subject by helping the analysand invent the self as an arbitrary but consistent character. The metafictional component grows more emphatic in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), which plays with the boundaries separating historical 'fact' from fiction and is explicitly concerned with its own status: 'the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.'
With Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966), the metafictional turn becomes a characteristic Barthian tendency to expose the artificiality of narrative while at the same time maintaining a certain emotional investment in narrative outcomes. In this encyclopedic novel, Barth explores the structure and functions of myth, manipulating the paradigms of the heroic quest and the founding religious document: he has referred to this work as a 'souped-up bible.' An inflated allegory, Giles Goat- Boy plays out the consequences of seeing the (American) university as the world. Barth's next major work, the collection Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968), is the fictional complement to 'The Literature of Exhaustion' in that it self-consciously reveals various kinds of fictional strategy by foregrounding conventions and techniques to the point where these supplant the traditional priorities of character, plot, and setting. The individual fictions include a story in which the story itself is the narrator, a protean first-person account that dramatizes the convention of embedding, and a story that enters into a dialogue with a series of writing-workshop observations about the making of fiction. In Lost in the Funhouse, Barth also initiates the -711- process, continued in Chimera (1972), of reinscribing existing myths, in illustration of his contention that the apparent exhaustion of new stories can be interpreted as a motive for rewriting those stories by emphasizing their hitherto hidden aspects, in the process 'transcending artifice by insisting on it,' as he remarked in a 1968 interview.
Barth's next novel, the long and demanding Letters (1979), uses the epistolary
