15 POSTMODERNISM AND FICTION BARRY LEWIS From the vantage point of the new millennium, it is clear that the dominant mode of literature in the second half of the twentieth century was postmodernist writing. The fiction later to be classified under this rubric emerged at around the time of the erection of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s. By 1989, with the Wall demolished and the Cold War almost over, postmodernism had established itself as the dominant paradigm for the culture. After this point, the concept saturated the media and academia to such an extent that the term became prob- lematic as an explanatory force due to its all-embracingness. It came to apply to virtually anything that mixed modes in a knowing manner. It would seem, then, that the epistemic break that occurred around 1990 concerns two understandings of the concept of postmodernism in relation to literature. Before that date, it referred to an overlapping set of characteristics that applied to a particular set of novelists, bound together by their simulta- neous acceptance/rejection of earlier traditions of fiction. These writers particu- larly contested the representational claims of realist writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy, whose novels were positioned as unproblematic mirrors of society. Also contested were the subjective, totalizing tendencies of the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and the distinctions they made between low and high culture. Inspired by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin – particularly the concepts of dialo- gism, heteroglossia, polyphony, the chronotope and the carnivalesque1 – and later theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, the texts of the postmodernists were self-reflexive, playful and exceedingly aware of the medium of language in an attempt to revivify the novel form. Several commentators intuited that the ‘literature of exhaustion’ (John Barth’s phrase for the last-gasp attempt of the novel to achieve pre-eminence in the electronic global village)2 itself became exhausted around 1990. De Villo Sloan, in his essay ‘The Decline of American Postmodernism’ (1987), wrote: ‘Post modernism as a literary movement … is now in its final phase of deca- dence.’3 Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland, in their sweeping survey From Puritan ism to Postmodernism (1991), asserted: ‘Postmodernism now looks like a stylistic phase that ran from the 1960s to the 1980s.’4 If we take these statements seriously, it follows that the texts published between 1960 and 1990 constitute the ‘first wave’ of postmodernist writing and a large proportion of writing published after 1990 is part of what we might call its ‘second wave’. What 169 BARRY LEWIS distinguishes the two is that postmodernism mushroomed into the widest of catch-all terms in western culture after the global shifts initiated by the collapse of Communism, the exponential spread of the media and the ubiquity of the computer. In literary terms, postmodernist fiction itself became perceptible as a kind of ‘style’ and its characteristic techniques and themes came to be adopted without the same sense of breaking new ground. It is as if the ‘avant-garde’ had become the mainstream. Bradbury did much to chart the territory and promulgate the perception of the writing between 1960 and 1990 as a self-contained period. He admitted that the problems of mapping contemporary literature are considerable, and that its diversity presents problems for the would-be cartographer. Postmodernism was, of course, only part of the total landscape, but like a mountain range it loomed over everything else, and plodding over its peaks and valleys is no easy task. Luckily other intrepid guides have explored its contours and reliefs. The most useful textbooks are Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction, Larry McCaffery’s Post- modern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction, Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory and Brian Nicol’s The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernist Fiction.5 Postmodernist fiction was an international phenomenon, with major repre- sentatives from all over the world: Günter Grass and Peter Handke (Germany); Georges Perec and Monique Wittig (France); Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino (Italy); Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie (Britain); Stanislaw Lem (Poland); Milan Kundera (former Czechoslovakia); Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru); Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia); J. M. Coetzee (South Africa); and Peter Carey (Australia). Yet, despite this cosmopolitanism, Malcolm Bradbury quipped that ‘When something called postmodernism came along everyone thought it was American – even though its writers had names like Borges, Nabokov, Calvino and Eco’.6 This is because the number of Stateside writers who published post- modernist fiction was large. Here are twenty names usually included in such lists: Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Steve Katz, Jerzy Kosinski, Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick, Kurt Vonnegut. A similar list for the post-1990 or ‘second wave’ of American postmodernist writers would probably include: Sherman Alexie, Mark Amerika, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Douglas Coupland, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Mark Z. Danielewski, William Gibson, Lyn Hejinian, Harold Jaffe, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Leyner, Richard Powers, Joanna Russ, Joanna Scott, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lynne Tillman, Gerald Vizenor, William T. Vollman, David Foster Wallace. Raymond Federman states in ‘Self-Reflexive Fiction’ that ‘it cannot be said that these [postmod- ernist] writers ... formed a unified movement for which a coherent theory could be formulated’.7 It is difficult to disagree with this, as the novels and short stories of both sets of authors vary a great deal. However, the ‘first wave’ of postmod- ernist writers have more of a common end and means than the ‘second wave’. 170 POSTMODERNISM AND FICTION Some of the dominant features of both waves of postmodernist fiction include: temporal disorder; the erosion of the sense of time; a pervasive and pointless use of pastiche; a foregrounding of words as fragmenting material signs; the loose association of ideas; paranoia; and vicious circles, or a loss of distinction between logically separate levels of discourse. Traits such as these are encountered time and time again in the bare, bewildering landscapes of the orig- inal postmodernists. John W. Aldridge puts it like this: In the fiction of [postmodernist writers] ... virtually everything and everyone exists in such a radical state of distortion and aberration that there is no way of deter- mining from which conditions in the real world they have been derived or from what standard of sanity they may be said to depart. The conventions of verisimili- tude and sanity have been nullified. Characters inhabit a dimension of structure- less being in which their behaviour becomes inexplicably arbitrary and unjudgeable because the fiction itself stands as a metaphor of a derangement that is seemingly without provocation and beyond measurement.8 Although Aldridge’s statement could also be applied to the ‘second wave’ of postmodernist writers who made their impact after 1990, it should be noted that their use of these techniques is more routine than radical, as the experimentation of their predecessors became deeply absorbed into the general culture. The following brief survey will therefore concentrate mainly on the characteristic derangements of the writers who belong to the pre-1990 dispensation. It will also focus primarily on the novel. Postmodernism has, of course, infiltrated all literary forms. The paradoxes and perplexities of John Ashbery and Susan Howe, and the word games of the Language poets such as Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, are well documented. In drama, David Mamet, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepherd and Tony Kushner exhibit a postmodern sensibility. Yet it is within the genre of the novel that postmodernism has had the most impact. For this reason, I will focus on postmodernist fiction, although it is possible to find many of the features it discerns in other types of contemporary writing. TEMPORAL DISORDER Postmodernism, according to Linda Hutcheon is a ‘contradictory enterprise: its art forms ... use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention ... [in] their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past’.9 She argues further that post- modernist writing is best represented by those works of ‘historiographic metafic- tion’ which self -consciously distort history. This can be accomplished by several means, as Brian McHale notes in the study mentioned earlier: apocryphal history, anachronism or the blending of history and fantasy. Apocryphal history involves bogus accounts of famous events. Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, for instance, implies that its two eponymous heroes were aware that their famous line, dividing Maryland from Pennsylvania, would 171 BARRY LEWIS eventually lead to civil war.10 Anachronism disrupts temporal order by flaunting glaring inconsistencies of detail or setting. In Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed, Abraham Lincoln uses a telephone, and his assassination is reported on televi- sion.11 Tom Crick, a schoolteacher in Graham Swift’s Waterland, blurs history and fantasy by combining his account of the French Revolution with personal reminiscences and unsubstantiated anecdotes about