The Columbia History of the American Novel

science fiction. Unlike Vonnegut (but like Samuel R. Delany), she has always used science fiction to explore alternative constructions of sexual difference, beginning with the relatively straightforward adventure novel Picnic on Paradise (1968), whose hero continues in the collections Alyx (1976) and The Adventures of Alyx (1986). The Female Man (1975) takes off from Russ's Nebula Award-winning short story When It Changed (1972), using that story's premise of an all-female planet called Whileaway to provide an origin for Janet, one of the four protagonists. The other protagonists, Jeannine, Jael, and Joanna, are, with Janet, clearly variants of a single person — who is clearly Joanna Russ — produced in 'Garden of Forking Paths' — style parallel universes but brought together by the convention of time-travel — a situation that, according to the text, is also impossible. The narrative voice is distributed among the main characters; in addition, there is a third-person omniscient narrator who occasionally steps up a level and assumes the function of author (the women emerge 'into a recreation center called The Trench or The Prick or The Crotch or The Knife. I haven't decided on a name yet') and occasionally literalizes the conventions of omniscient narration into another science fiction realm of fantastic being (having located the four J's in an elevator, this narrator advises, 'Think of me in my usual portable form'). The parallel-universes arrangement allows various points of view on various possible sex- gender arrangements. The resulting confusions and observation are politically pointed and often uproariously funny. The Two of Them (1978) forgoes time-travel in presenting a meeting of two women from two radically different cultures but retains the frame-breaking narrator.

Samuel R. Delany uses the premises of science fiction to explore and unsettle a number of thematic and structural oppositions: free-724- dom and slavery, inside and outside, familiar and alien, center and margin, fiction and criticism. His alternative universes are populous urban landscapes informed by myth, contemporary social theory, and poststructuralist literary and linguistic theory, where characters who are outsiders to the dominant culture work out their complicated relations to desire and power. Although all Delany'are set in the future, they are concerned with the recovery, or invention, of a submerged past, a narrative that can be called history but remains irreducibly multiple. Dhalgren (1975), probably the most radically experimental of Delany's works to date, plays with a present that is similarly plural, a 'real story' that exists as a number of irreconcilable versions.

Like many of the postmoderns, Delany is fascinated with the possibilities of reinscription, to the point where many of this stories are revisions of his earlier stories or allude, often with frame-breaking effect, to his preceding writings, both fictional and nonfictional. His later novels have theoretical essays embedded in them or appended to them, but these essays in turn have fictional elements. For instance, the Appendix to Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) acknowledges that the stories are based on inscriptions of the famous Culhar' fragment, recently translated by the African American mathematician Leslie K. Steiner. Steiner is invoked repeatedly through the course of the Nevèrÿon tetralogy (1979-85) and has recently appeared in a volume that Delany edited, as author of several critical essays on Delany. She is, of course, a Delany character, although she never appears in avowedly fictional narratives. Similarly, the lecture on the Modular Calculus by Ashima Slade, which forms the appendix to Triton (1976), credits a real essay by Delany himself (a twentieth-century 'writer of light, popular fictions') as the inspiration for one aspect of the scientific paradigm being developed. Delany thus becomes the historical antecedent for elements of his own fictions. The interpenetrations of text and commentary, fact and fiction, not only unsettle genre categories within the books but have recently redefined Delany as a public figuree: he has been featured at several recent academic conferences as a poststructuralist theorist.

Molly Hite

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The Avant-Garde

The avant-garde has been much discussed and debated, its triumphs certified, its aporias cataloged. In the United States especially it has been relegated to the status of a historical phenomenon. The term of preference for 'advanced' or 'experimental' work produced since World War II is 'postmodern.' For reasons that will become apparent in what follows, I have thought to write of a contemporary avant-garde and thereby to avoid much of the confusion and sterile theorizing that too often accompany academic discussions of postmodern literature. If my decision to proceed in this way is valid, it will have to be justified by the insights into a variety of American writers who enjoy something like vanguard status in the late years of the twentieth century.

One further note. For reasons having to do with space and predilection, I have avoided anything resembling a historical survey of American avant-garde writing. Gertrude Stein is but a passing reference here. I argue that there is an avant-garde presently operating in the United States, and that it is possible to understand and to evaluate what it has accomplished. Though some may think it naive, I proceed from the assumption that there is something for which to be grateful in a genuine avant-garde, though it is important to distinguish the real thing from the meretricious. Though this chapter treats a variety of writers, it does not purport to be exhaustive or even to take on every famous vanguard novelist. Probably the most controversial omission is Thomas Pynchon, whose work has been much praised and much studied. Does it make sense to speak at some lenght of an -726- American avant-garde without taking him on? I think it does, and I believe that his work is best understood outside the framework established in the pages that follow.

The avant-garde novel in the United States is as elusive and various as the creations of vanguard artists in other media and countries. Often it seems not much more than a species of provocation, a foolishness tricked out in the fancy dress of scandal or chic obscurantism. At other times it offers a plausible defiance of ordinary novelistic conventions while managing at the same time to be impeccably dull, polemical, and repetitious. More rarely, it embodies its resistance to convention while also refusing the easy rewards of polemic and phony candor, unreflective disassociation and undifferentiated irony. If there are few really satisfying American avant-garde novels, the fact obviously has much to do with limitations of talent and seriousness, but here the consideration of such limitations is complicated by one's sense that avant-garde novels are not supposed to satisfy. Though few novelists will wish to be driven from the auditorium by outraged spectators during tha course of a public reading, many are clearly bent on denying precisely the satisfactions promised by more accommodating writers. To dismiss an avant- garde novel by convicting it of 'meaninglessness' or 'randomness' when its very substance depends upon those qualities is, shall we say, a difficult business. Here, as elsewhere, readers and critics are well advised to know what they are dealing with before they open their mouths or compose eulogistic treatises on the death of this form or that.

One way of avoiding difficult issues is to deny that they exist. So the avant-garde may not seem so elusive if it is defined, simply, as anything that attracts few adherents, or aims to offend middlebrow sensibilities. Not long ago, at least in some circles, such qualities were routinely thought to be the only essential characteristics of avantgarde works. A novel largely without anecdotal content and on that score alone without appeal for ordinary readers was taken to be an advanced work. A novel — say, by Gertrude Stein — offensive by virtue of its stubborn commitment to abstractness, repetition, and prolixity, would also seem impressive for its stubborn refusal to be ingratiating or interesting. In such terms it is possible to know more or less securely what does and does not constitute 'advanced' fiction. Other -727- kinds of demanding fiction might then be categorized as 'academic' or 'formalistic' or 'fabulistic,' the special merit associated with a really bracing vanguardism reserved for a relative handful of writers.

The critic Leslie Fiedler, in his introduction to John Hawkes's novel The Lime Twig (1961), makes much of his man' 'lonely' eccentricity, his distinction as 'the least read novelist of substantial merit in the United States,' his brave 'experimentalism' and addiction to material that seems unpromising for the purposes of serious fiction. He also locates Hawke's avant-gardism in his refusal to subscribe to 'yesterday's avant garde,' or to echo 'other men's revolts.' Hawkes may be an unpopular novelist, and proud of it, but he is not the sort of 'esoteric' writer we associate with an earlier avant-garde. A downright original who refuses the 'treacherous lucidity' of realist fiction, Hawkes denies us the narrative continuity and specious thematic coherence other novels condition us to anticipate. In sum, Fiedler's Hawkes is an avant-garde writer not because he offends, or refuses to