DeLillo specializes in this sort of first-person account. His narrative voices assimilate a variety of influences — the stridency and hype of a saturating media, the specialized vocabularies of international business, the sciences, technology, and the information industry, and the anxious cadences of solitary individuals brooding over crime, cabals, terrorism, and their own inevitable deaths — into an intricate and nuanced prose that reflects and elaborates on his thematic preoccupation with language. The startling and sometimes shocking precision of this language makes him one of the foremost postmodern stylists.
Another groundbreaking stylist, Donald Barthelme, has been one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of the short story. His two novels, Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1977), share with the short fiction an intensely experimental quality deriving from a characteristic emphasis on visual effects and graphic play. Both, for instance, consist of short, apparently disjointed sections in a variety of typefaces, some of them first-person disquisitions, others brief scenes with patches of dialogue, still others made up of lists whose individual members seem arbitrarily related, both to each other and to the rest of the book.
But the novels also sustain a story line over a period of time, and for this reason constantly allude to, even as they do not realize, such traditional narrative effects as suspense, sympathy, and a sense of -720- experiential depth. Far more than most of the stories, which attain a kind of immediacy from the way 'unlike things are stuck together to make…a new reality,' as Barthelme explained in a 1974 interview, the novels tend to be about fiction: about what narrative does or is supposed to do and about the problematic nature of the contract a text makes with its reader. 'We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of 'sense' of what is going on,' says one of the dwarfs in Snow White, and this explanation has bearing not only on the appeal of Snow White itself but on the use of detail for 'reality effect' in the most meticulously realist novels. Both Snow White and the subsequent The Dead Father construct their situations around well-known, nearly archetypal stories, and both divest archetype of its seriousness, throwing the ideological implications into sharp relief. In a sense, Barthelme has decomposed cultural myths and recomposed them entirely of dreck: the result is at once deflating and curiously satisfying.
Like Pynchon, Coover in The Public Burning, and DeLillo in Libra, Ishmael Reed writes experimental novels that reinscribe United States history as a record of conspiracy. The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) sets up the terms of an opposition that recurs in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), and Flight to Canada (1976), in which a repressive white power structure attempts to put down a polytheistic and multicultural counter-society. Reed marshals impressive documentation in support of this vision of postindustrial America as the end product of a series of suppressions, managed by the dominant Western culture because of this culture's ascetic rationalism, commitment to the technologies of annihilation, and envy of people able to enjoy themselves. The presentation of evidence is ebullient in its frame-breaking: fiction and nonfiction mix promiscuously, as do past and present. For example, Mumbo Jumbo, set in the 1920s, is full of both period and anachronistic photographs (the Oakland Black Panthers and members of Nixon's cabinet cohabit in these pages with Louis Armstrong's band), footnotes (documenting, among other things, the African American lineage of President Warren G. Harding), and quotions from popular media and scholarly sources; the book concludes with a 104-item 'Partial Bibliography.' Reed sees his -721- fictional technique as deriving from his commitment to a variety of media, and he locates his experimentation in the rich non-Western tradition it celebrates, in which artistic creation has always incorporated a variety of elements that in the West have been rigidly separated into genres.
Kurt Vonnegut, one of the most prolific of the postmodern novelists, arrived at his own brand of ontologically unsettling narrative experiment through popular of science fiction. Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959) are witty but generally conventional science fiction novels; Mother Night (1961) adds autobiographical elements that have become Vonnegut trademarks; Cat's Cradle (1963) turns the science fiction components to metafictional ends, making a mise-en-abîme of the Bokononist religion it describes, which like the
In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Vonnegut brings the autobiographical, the science fictional, and the metafictional together, using irreconcilable versions of a single story to show the impossibility of assimilating the horror of a World War II experience that is in significant respects Vonnegut's own experience. In making 'Kurt Vonnegut' a character within the novel, Vonnegut dramatizes his own difficulty in dealing with the subject and makes the central narrative, about the experiences of the passive and uncomprehending Billy Pilgrim, a digression from or displacement of his own story. The science fiction component, provided by the intervention of extraterrestrials called Tralfamadorians, insists that the perception of human being 'stuck in time' is partial and distorted, but the Trafalmadorian viewpoint is unavailable to the human characters and the reader alike. The Tralfamadorians become part of the metafictional apparatus inasmuch as their simultaneous vision of all time rules out the suspense created by narrative teleology, and in particular rules out climax. Slaughterhouse- Five similarly evades coming to any satisfying or revelatory conclusion. Its quietistic maxim 'So it goes' becomes the model of Vonnegut's revisionist history. Such subsequent novels as Slapstick (1976), Deadeye Dick (1982), and Galapagos (1985) also incorporate autobiographical elements and authorial personae, revise official history, and engage readers in dialogue by playing with the self-reflexive possibilities of fiction about fiction.
One of the most violent postmodernist assaults on narrative con-722- ventions and bourgeois norms of decorum comes from Kathy Acker, whose writing is a volatile mix of autobiography, plagiarism, pornography, parody, poststructuralist theorizing, and Marxist and feminist analysis. Her literary productions are in many respects aligned with contemporary work in the visual arts, in particular with the 'image appropriation' of feminist painters and photographers that exactly reproduces a 'masterpiece' of the dominant, masculine culture, but she is also repeating the colonizing and decentering gesture of French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, who made one chapter of her book on the phallocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition a word-for-word transcription of part of Plotinus's Enneads. In a mise-en-abîme in Don Quixote (1986) — the title is a case in point — Acker associates her own work with the practice of 'the Arabs,' whom she presciently identifies as the 'other' of Western civilization: 'They write by cutting chunks out of all-ready written texts and in other ways defacing traditions: changing important names into silly ones, making dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us, such as nuclear war.'Such strategies are for her means of short-circuiting a society whose control extends into the most apparently personal and intimate areas of everyday life. Like her pornography, which starts 'with the physical body, the place of shitting, eating, etc.' in order 'to break through our opinions and false education,' this plagiarism aims to evade the tyranny imposed by habitual modes of representation.
For Acker, any such evasion can only be temporary, however, because thre is nothing outside the already- existing symbolic order. Her strategies accordingly emphasize disruption: narrative are a pastiche of fragments in a variety of modes; characters change names, sexes, and sometimes species; in particular, the apparently autobiographizing 'author' is also an effect of the writing and is represented as such in titles like The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1975), The Adult Life of Henri Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1978), Hello I'm Erica Jong (1982), and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1987). In a 1984 essay, Acker explains these destabilizing tactics in terms of an aesthetics of immediacy, which opposes art to description: 'If art's to be more than craft, more than decorations for the people in power, it's this want, this existence…. Only the cry, art, rather than the description -723- or criticism, is primary. The cry is stupid; it has no mirror; it communicates.' The constant in her work is this 'cry' of desire, but while the desire is always female it is never manifested as the expression of an essentialized woman-in-general, or even as the utterance of a unitary subject. Acker's work is relentlessly particular, another circumvention of a social control that imposes universals in order to regiment and commodify experience.
Like Vonnegut, Joanna Russ developed her structural innovations through manipulating the conventions of
