The Columbia History of the American Novel

Introduction

Readers who glance at the titles of the chapters in this section cannot help noticing that, for the authors of these chapters, the idea of "American" literature has undergone significant change in the latter part of this century. The crucial questions surrounding the canon, national and class boundaries, race, personal identity, genre, gender, the scene and nature of writing, and history are reflected in the proliferations of the "American" novel over the last forty years. One could only call the development of the novel in this period "rhizomic," in the sense of French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conception of the "rhizome" as a weedy growth, like crabgrass, with multiple crossings and branchings, growing everywhere.

To write an impossibly comprehensive or total history of the American novel in this (or any) period would be a contradiction in terms, for not only is the period itself open-ended and dynamic, but also many of the intellectual currents that have risen out of the novels written during this time are at odds with each other as they render problematic, for example, the relation between fiction and history, the relation of "major" to "minor" literature, the constitution of the author and the constituencies of the readership, the nature of representation, or the nature of writing itself. How, then, to write a representative history — as literary histories have been traditionally conceived — of the major authors and works of a determined place and period? Rather than chase after that illusory and highly questionable goal, the writers in this section (indeed, throughout this His--513- tory) have chosen to take local and specific points of departure that might be seen as incursions or interventions into the inconceivable totality of the American novel in the late twentieth century. Together, the chapters in this section might be seen as a mosaic in process, unfinished, with indefinite frame and border, yet conveying a colorful impression of the liveliness and utter heterogeneity of the literature of this period. In fact, it is this very openness, this sense of "presentness," that forms one of the most attractive features of the contemporary American novel that challenges the "the," the "contemporary," the "American," and the "novel" as the defining limits of its exfoliations.

The reader of these incursionary chapters, then, may or may not find her or his favorite author mentioned in these pages; scholars of contemporary American fiction may or may not find discussed in detail those authors they deem most important or "major." We have not attempted, here, to be either exhaustive or canonical since, as I have suggested, exhaustiveness and canonicity are two of the many issues the contemporary American novel puts into question. But the writers of these chapters have attempted to be historical in their collective sense of history — including literary history-as a collage of proliferating movements and subjects interacting in ways seen and unseen, neither wholly determined by some larger plan or system, nor wholly indeterminate within the intertwined matrices of event and inscription. It is this sense of "history" that pervades the discussion of authors and works in these chapters. With this in mind, the reader is invited to roam across the capacious, worldly, bordering yet borderless country of the contemporary American novel, therein to discover the vitality and power of this writing, along with its faults and its fragility, its resistances and complicities, its indelible being there.

Patrick O'Donnell

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Postmodern Culture

What do we mean by "postmodern culture?" Does this vague phrase refer to crucial features of contemporary life? Or is it a categorical device deployed by critics and artists to further their own projects? Has the term "postmodern" become such a buzz word that it means anything, refers to everything — hence signifies nothing?

These questions exemplify the degree to which the debate about what does or does not constitute "postmodern culture" is not a mere disagreement about the use or misuse of a phrase but rather a raging battle over how we define and conceive of the role of culture in American society (as well as those abroad). More pointedly, it highlights how we interpret the current crisis in our society and best muster resources from the past and present to alleviate this crisis. Any interpretation of this crisis that alludes to "postmodern culture" presupposes some notions of the modern, modernity, modernization, and modernism — when they began, when they peaked, when they declined, when they ended, what was good and bad about them, and why the advent of "postmodern culture" has emerged. And any use of these notions bears directly and indirectly on how one conceives of what is worth preserving and changing in the present. In this regard the way in which one characterizes "postmodern culture" reflects one's anxieties, frustrations, allegiances, and visions as a critic. In short, one's very intellectual vocation is at stake in one's conception of "postmodern culture."

Because of the promiscuous uses of the adjective "postmodern" -515- in conjunction with philosophy, literature, et al. - and the various reductions of "postmodern culture" to a variety of "postmodernisms" — we must be clear as to the level on which our inquiry proceeds. We are not proceeding at the level of the popular mind that usually associates "postmodern culture" with a set of styles, forms, and figures — be it the historical eclecticism of buildingmaking as in the decorative and ornamental references to older styles in the architecture of Michael Graves, Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, and Robert A. M. Stern, the desequentializing music of John Cage, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass, the denarrativizing literature of Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, and John Barth, or the defamiliarizing photography of Barbara Kruger and the early Martha Rosler.

Nor are we proceeding at the level of the academic mind that often views "postmodern culture" as a product of the recent French occupation of the American intellectual landscape — be it Jean-François Lyotard's claim about the increasing incredulity toward master narratives (for example, Marxism, Enlightenment rationalism, or Whiggish liberalism), Jean Baudrillard's reflections about the saturation of simulacra and simulations in consumer-driven America, or poststructuralists' (Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault) pronouncements about decentered, fragmented subjects caught in a labyrinthine world of no escape.

The popular and academic minds tend to be fixated on symptomatic emblems of "postmodern culture," yet we must probe deeper if we are to grapple seriously with our present moment — the moment of postmodern culture. On the one hand, the popular mind is right to see that discourses about postmodernism — especially in architecture, literature, and the arts — were initiated in the United States as a kind of revolt against domesticated modernisms of the academy, museum, and galleries during the Cold War period (1945-89). Since European artists and critics tended to link modernisms with transgression and revolt against authority, their critiques of domesticated modernisms were usually put forward in the name of more radical modernisms. On the other hand, the academic mind is right to note that French post-Marxist issues of difference, otherness, alterity, and marginality are central to "postmodern culture." Ironically, the waning of Marxist influence on the Left Bank of Paris, along with trans-516- gressive revolts against homogenizing Communist parties and expanding French bureaucracies, seized the imagination of world-weary ex-New Left academics in the United States caught offguard by feminist, black, brown, red, gay, and lesbian challenges in the name of identity and community. Yet neither the popular nor the academic mind — given the relative lack of a historical sense of both — fully grasp the major determinants of postmodern culture: the unprecedented impact of market forces on everyday life, including the academy and the art world, the displacement of Europe by America in regard to global cultural influence (and imitation), and the increase of political polarization in cultural affairs by national, racial, gender, and sexual orientation, especially within the highly bureaucratized world of ideas and opinions.

These determinants of postmodern culture are inseparable, interdependent, yet not identical. If there is a common denominator, it is the inability of a market-driven American civilization — the world power after 1945 — to constitute a culture appropriate for its new international (and imperial) status given its vast mass culture, its heterogeneous population, and its frustrated (often alienated) cultural elites of the right and left. Hence, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies abound. The leading Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, and an exemplary conservative critic, Hilton Kramer, both view the commodification of culture and the commercialization of the arts as major culprits of our moment, while both are suspicious of liberal cultural administrators who promote these market processes in the name of diversity, pluralism, or multiculturalism. On this matter, the left postmodern journal October joins the revivified spirit of T. S. Eliot echoed in the right, modernist periodical The New Criterion. Similarly, the uncritical patriotism from above — or, more pointedly, the atavistic and jingoistic mutterings of the cultural right — is paralleled by the uncritical tribalism from below of many of the proponents of multiculturalism, even as both accuse the other of their lack of cosmopolitanism or internationalism. And cultural wars of the canon erupt over bureaucratic turf — managerial positions, tenure jobs, and curriculum offerings — alongside an already multicultural mass culture (especially in popular music), with little public opposition to hi-tech military cannons of mass destruction targeted at tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the most massive air attack in human his-517- tory. In this crude sense, postmodern culture is what we get when a unique capitalist civilization — still grappling with a recent memory of cultural inferiority anxieties toward a decimated and divided Europe — with an unwieldy mass culture of hybridity and heterogeneity and a careerist professional class of museum managers and academic professors tries to create consensus and sustain some semblance of a common culture as a new political and military imperium. These efforts — on behalf of the left, right, and middle — are bold in intent yet often pathetic in consequence. They are bold in that they are unashamedly utopian. Conservative Eurocentrists, liberal pluralists, moderate multiculturalists, and radical feminists or leftists all assume that their grand designs for cultural citizenship in American civilization can be implemented in the face of market forces, bureaucratic demands, and political expediencies in American society. Yet, for the most part, this assumption proves to be false. Instead their efforts tend to be pathetic, that is, they frustrate both themselves and their foes by not only reinforcing dissensus but also undermining the very conditions to debate the nature of the dissensus and the points of radical disagreement. This occurs principally owing to the larger de facto segregation by political persuasion, race, and subculture in a balkanized society; it is sustained by suspicion of common vocabularies or bridge-building nomenclatures that facilitate such debate. The collapse of a civic culture, once undergirded by left subgroupings (now gone) and liberal enclaves (now in disarray), contributes greatly to this tribal state of cultural affairs. Conservative ideologies promote a patriotic fervor to replace this collapse-as witnessed in William Buckley's recent call for national service or the melodramatic flagwaving to unify the nation. Yet market forces promote the proliferation of differentiated consumers, with distinct identities, desires, and pleasures to be sold and satisfied, especially in peacetime periods.

But what are these mysterious, seemingly omnipotent "market forces"? Are they not a kind of deus ex machina in my formulations? Are they not under human control? If so, whose control? My basic claim is that Hilton Kramer and Fredric Jameson are right: commodification of culture and commercialization of the arts are the major factors in postmodern culture. These powerful social processes can be characterized roughly by a complex interplay between profit-driven -518- corporations and pleasure-hungry consumers in cultural affairs. T. S. Eliot rightly noted decades ago that American society is a deritualized one, with deracinated and denuded individuals "distracted from distraction by distraction" — that is, addicted to stimulation, in part, to evade the boredom and horror Baudelaire saw as the distinctive features of modern life. And in a society and culture that evolves more and more around the buying and selling of commodities for stimulatory pleasures — be it bodily, psychic, or intellectual — people find counsel, consolation, and captivity in mobs, be that mob well-fed or ill-fed, well-housed or homeless, well-clad or ill-clad. And such mobs are easily seduced by fashionable ideas, fashionable clothes, or fashionable xenophobias. This Eliotic insight turns Lyotard's conception of postmodern culture on its head. There is not an increasing incredulity toward master narratives. Instead, the fashionable narratives — not just in the United States but around the world — are nationalist ones, usually xenophobic with strong religious, racial, patriarchal, and homophobic overtones. And Eliot's major followers in postmodern culture chime in quite loudly with this chauvinistic chorus. Yet, many multiculturalists who oppose this chorus simply dance a jingoistic jig to a slightly different tune. In this sense, postmodern culture looks more and more like a rehash of old-style American pluralism with fancy French theories that legitimate racial, gender, and sexual orientational entrée into the new marketplace of power, privilege, and pleasure.

But is this entrée so bad? Is it not the American way now played out in new circumstances and new conditions? Does it not democratize and pluralize the academy, museums, and galleries in a desirable manner? This entrée is not simply desirable, it is imperative. The past exclusion of nonwhite and nonmale intellectual and artistic talent from validation and recognition is a moral abomination. And it is the American way — at its best — to correct exclusion with inclusion, to democratize the falsely meritocratic, and to pluralize the rigidly monolithic. Yet it is easy to fall prey to two illusions: first, the notion that inclusion guarantees higher quality and the idea that entrée signifies a significant redistribution of cultural benefits. Inclusion indeed yields new perspectives, critical orientations, and questions. It makes possible new dialogues, frameworks, and outworks. Yet only discipline, energy, and talent can produce quality. And market forces mit-519- igate against intellectual and artistic quality — for the reasons put forward by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and W. E. B. Du Bois, William Morris and Virginia Woolf. Second, entrée of new talent is salutary yet it benefits principally those included. Despite the hoopla about group consciousness and role models, class structures — across racial and gender lines — are reinforced and legitimated, not broken down or loosened, by inclusion. And this indeed is the American way — to promote and encourage the myth of classlessness, especially among those guilt-ridden about their upward social mobility or ashamed of their class origins. The relative absence of substantive reflections — not just ritualistic gestures — about class in postmodern culture is continuous with silences and blindnesses in the American past.

These silences and blindnesses hide and conceal an undeniable feature of postmodern culture: the pervasive violence (psychic and physical) and fear of it among all sectors of the population. Critics and theorists usually say little of this matter. Yet in the literary works of contemporary masters like Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, or Thomas Pynchon, violence of various sorts looms large in a sophisticated and subtle manner. And most of this violence — with the exception of police treatment of African American males — is citizen against citizen. The hidden injuries of class, intraracial hostilities, the machismo identity taken out on women, and the intolerance of gay and lesbian orientations generate deep anxieties and frustrations that often take violent forms. These violent acts — random, unpredictable, sometimes quite brutal — make fear and fright daily companions with life in postmodern culture. The marvels of the technological breakthroughs in communications and information stand side by side with the primitive sense of being haunted by anonymous criminals who have yet to strike. In fact, the dominant element in the imagination of dwellers in postmodern culture may well be this ironic sense of being anesthetized by victims of violence, given its frequent occurrence, and of being perennially aware that you may be next. In this way, postmodern culture is continuous with Eliot's modernist wasteland of futility and anarchy and Poe's modern chamber of horrors.

Cornel West

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Postmodern Realism

While we do not need yet another definition of what the postmodern really is, it seems clear to me that the panAmerican narratives by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Arturo Islas, Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Helena María Viramontes, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone, E. L. Doctorow, and others are emphatically implicated in any attempt to map out the specificity of postcontemporary culture and literature in the Americas and thus to gauge this transnational culture's distance from what might be called "high modernism." Whether or not one uses the term postmodernism, there can be no doubt about the fact that the position of women and men of color, Jews, gays and lesbians, and so on in postcontemporary society and their effect on our hemisphere is fundamentally different from what it used to be in the period of high modernism and the historical avant-garde. Put differently, postmodern theory ought never to be viewed as a homogeneous phenomenon (Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas) but rather as one in which political contestation is central. As Cornel West suggests, postmodernism illuminates "the ragged edges of the Real, of Necessity, not being able to eat, not having health care, all this is something that one cannot not know."

Seen in this light, postmodernism is an attempt to negotiate "the ragged edges of the Real," and to think historically; it either expresses what Fredric Jameson calls "some deeper irrepressible historical impulse" (in however "derealized" a fashion as writers from the -521- Americas might have it) or unsuccessfully represses or avoids history, like a bad dream, full of displacements, representations, condensations, and secondary revisions. Linda Hutcheon, moreover, suggests that postmodernist narratives are closely related to "historiographic metafiction," and includes texts that are "intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages." Hutcheon's position in effect links postmodernism with Louis Althusser's late Marxism and its rejection of the postulates of realism and Judith Butler's feminist deconstruction of the real.

Like many postmodern realists, Althusser reminds us that "realism" is not a style that gives us an undistorted reflection of the world. Realism, in his formulation, represents the ideologically hegemonic way of conceiving and expressing our relationship to the natural and social worlds around us. In other words, as Althusser suggested in his classic essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1969), realism functions ideologically: it offers itself as a neutral reflection of the world when it is but one way of imagining a world. More recently, Judith Butler in her essay "Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess" (1990) argues that fantasy is not to be equated with what is not real but rather "with what is not yet real, or what belongs to a different version of the real." In any case, this chapter is not a survey of the postmodern realist writers from the Americas, for the postmodern condition cannot account without strain for all the literary productions that follow. Rather, I have merely tried to explore postmodern realism as a space of affinities and alliances among diverse histories.

It is generally accepted that the (postmodernist) magic realist movement in the Americas led by Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, and, more recently, Isabel Allende has had a powerful influence on a diverse group of postcontemporary United States writers of color: Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon; Arturo Islas's The Rain God and Migrant Souls; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey; Helena María Viramontes's The Moths and Other Stories; and Alberto Ríos's The Iguana Killer. While the works of these United States writers of color have been widely praised for their oppositional, feminist, gay, and minority discourse poetics, and for their powerful supernatural lyricism, their use of (postmodern) -522- magic realism has received little attention in our largely Anglophonic Departments of Literature, owing to an inadequate understanding of a vast and rich literary and cultural movement in the Americas that began over forty years ago.

To be sure, the concept of (postmodern) magic realism raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I will not retrace the rich polemical debate among Latin American and United States scholars over the concept "magic realism," for Fernando Alegría, Roberto González Echevarría, and Amaryll Beatrice Chanady have written the most cogent and useful critical surveys of the debate. Instead, my task is to make the very demanding argument about (postmodern) magic realism available to readers in the United States who have heard about its importance but so far have been baffled by it. To simplify matters and to save some space, I will focus only on Alejo Carpentier's "Prologue" to his revolutionary novel The Kingdom of This World (1949) — arguably, the first magic realist text in the Americas — and on Gabriel García Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth (1990) — perhaps the latest exemplary postmodern realist novel.

For many scholars, magic realism as a concept appears in three different moments in the twentieth century. The first appears during the avant-garde years in Europe when the term was used by Franz Roh in his Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (1925), and when André Breton proclaimed the marvelous an aesthetic concept and as part of everyday life. The second moment was in the late 1940s when the related concepts el realismo mágico (magic realism) and lo real maravilloso (marvelous realism) traveled, as they say, from Europe to the Americas and were appropriated by Arturo Uslar Pietri and Alejo Carpentier as a yardstick to measure, compare, and evaluate indigenous cultural art forms in the American grain. Whereas Pietri adopted Roh's term "magic realism," Carpentier, the more influential novelist and theorist, used Breton's version of le merveilleux and theorized in the "Prologue" to The Kingdom of This World his famous concept of "marvelous American reality."

A third period of (postmodern) magic realism can be said to have begun in 1955 when Angel Flores published his influential essay "Magic Realism in Spanish American Fiction." This third phase, as Roberto González Echevarría suggests, continues through the 1960s -523- "when criticism searches for the Latin roots of some of the novels produced during the 'boom' and attempts to justify their experimental nature." As we shall see, there is a fourth phase or "crack" as Toni Morrison, Arturo Islas, Maxine Hong Kingston, among others, expand the magic realist tradition in postmodernist and often "signifyin[g]" ways.

Flores had argued that what distinguishes magic realism from other realisms is that it attempts to transform "the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal." Moreover, Flores emphasized the connections between magic realism and examples of European modernist aesthetics practiced by Franz Kafka in his novels and Giorgio de Chirico in his paintings. In 1967 Luis Leal joined the growing debates by refuting Flores's essay. In "El realismo mágico en la literatura hispanoamericana," he argued that magic realism was an exclusively New World literary movement. Included in his school of magic realist writers were Arturo Uslar Pietri, Miguel Angel Asturias, Felix Pita Rodríguez, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, and Nicolás Guillén. According to Leal, the basic difference among the competing schools of "magic realism," "realism," and "surrealism" is the following: "The magic realist does not attempt to copy (like the realists) or make the real vulnerable (like the surrealists), but attempts to capture the mystery which palpitates in things." But Leal's essay ignores the profound impact European surrealism, modernism, and ethnography had on the generation of writers he analyzed, especially Alejo Carpentier.

Born and raised in Cuba, Alejo Carpentier made these connections in his "Prologue" to his African Caribbean novel The Kingdom of This World. In the rhetorical question "What is the history of the Americas but the chronicle of lo real maravilloso?" Carpentier suggests the ideology that lies at the center of his magic realist narrative: how to write in a European language — with its Western systems of thought — about realities and thought-structures never before seen in Europe. Carpentier asks for the first time in 1949 the following questions, which would influence generations of writers from the Americas: What is the African, Amerindian, and mestizola heritage of the Americas, and how can it function as a stylistics, an ideology, and a point of view? Years later, Robert Coover would note that the nueva-524- narrativa from Latin America "was for a moment the region's headiest and most dangerous export."

While Carpentier learned much from the Surrealists' experiments to explore a kind of second reality hidden within the world of dreams, the unconscious, political tensions that arose among the Surrealists themselves caused him to break away from them. Carpentier probably also went his own way because, as González Echevarría emphasized, European surrealism clashed with the Cuban's "Spenglerian conception of man and history he had absorbed through avant-garde journals like the Revista de Occidente."

Thus, in spite of his early fascination with surrealism, Carpentier never became a committed disciple of Breton. Unlike Breton and his followers, Carpentier argued in The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Years (1953), and Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) that the "second reality" the Surrealists explored in automatic writing is merely part of everyday life in America. Furthermore, as a follower of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (in Spengler's universal history there is no fixed "center"), Carpentier eschewed the Surrealists' Eurocentric doctrine of the marvelous and argued that all things of a truly magical nature are, in fact, found within the reality of the Americas — not the "boring" cities of Europe. According to Carpentier, the "discovery," conquest, and colonization of the New World are magical events in themselves: "Open Bernal Díaz del Castillo's great chronicle [True History of the Conquest of New Spain (1552)] and one will encounter the only real and authentic book of chivalry ever written: a book of dust and grime chivalry where the genies who cast evil spells were the visible and palpable teules, where the unknown beasts were real, where one actually gazed on unimagined cities and saw dragons in their native rivers and strange mountains swirling with snow and smoke." For Carpentier, then, Bernal Díaz del Castillo's chronicle of the Spanish conquest of Mexico is an exemplary magic realist narrative because Díaz (unwittingly) had written about the clash of cultures — Old World and New World — and had described in thick detail the superposition of one layer of reality upon another.

Forming a background for Carpentier's theory and thematized in The Kingdom of This World is what he sees as the "fecundity" of the -525- New World landscape. Carpentier's concept of lo real maravilloso can, therefore, be summarized in the author's own words: "due to the untouched nature of its landscape, its ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the Black, the revelation inherent in the continent's recent discovery and the fruitful cross-breeding this discovery engendered, America is still very far from exhausting its wealth of mythologies. Indeed, what is the history of America if not the chronicle of the marvelous of the real?"

In short, Carpentier set up an antithesis between surrealism, on the one hand, and lo real maravilloso, on the other. As is clear from the "Prologue" to The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier unfavorably compares Surrealism with a privileged New World aesthetic grounded in a reality that is inherently magical (voodoo, santería, and so on). To be sure, Carpentier's thesis rests on the claims that New World artists and people experience the marvelous in their everyday lives — what Raymond Williams called in a different context "structures of feeling" — and therefore have no need to invent a domain of fantasy. Thus on the basis of local New World privilege, Carpentier rejects surrealism as sterile, and legitimizes, in near postmodern realist fashion, the mode of writing he elects: a "chronicle of the marvelous of the real." Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World is, therefore, emblematic of the kind of narrative experimentation we now take for granted in postmodernist American fiction: historical events move in reverse; characters die before they are born; and "green" tropical winds blow away the New World landscape.

Although Gabriel García Márquez's use of magic realism includes Carpentier's familiar tropes of the supernatural — one of the foundation concepts of magic realism-his version differs from Carpentier's and inaugurates the rise of (postmodern) magic realism globally. As is well known, García Márquez's concept of postmodern (magic) realism in Leafstorm (1955), "Big Mama's Funeral" (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976) presupposes an identification by the narrator with the oral expression of popular cultures in the Latin American pueblo. In other words, as I argued in The Dialectics of Our America (1991), García Márquez's thematization of (postmodern) magic realism and the politics of the possible are usually expressed in his early stories about the rise and fall of Macondo through a collective voice, inverting, in a -526- jesting manner, the values of the official Latin American culture. More recently, García Márquez has written a postmodern realist novel, The General in His Labyrinth, that reverses his past attempts as a novelist to transform the ordinary into the mythical and magical, for in this controversial text he takes on the saintly image of Simón Bolívar, the Great Liberator of the Americas, by rendering this national hero as a man of ordinary, even crude, attributes.

In The General in His Labyrinth the postmodern real is at the center: it focuses on a real historical personage, Simón Bolívar, and is based, according to the author, on two years of "sinking into the quicksand of voluminous, contradictory, and often uncertain documentation." In other words, if Bolívar went out at night prowling the mean streets of Bogotá when the moon was full, then we can be assured that García Márquez, along with the assistance of the Cuban geographer Gladstone Oliva and the astronomer Jorge Doval, had made an inventory of nights when there was "a full moon during the first 30 years of the last century."

Of course, García Márquez avoids, like the plague, a conventional chronological narrative of Bolívar's life. Rather, in postmodernist fashion, he begins his narrative in medias res when Bolívar is forty-six years old, shrunken by an unnamed illness that will surely kill him. Rejected as president by the elite and the lumpen of Colombia — the new country he helped liberate — Bolívar leaves Bogotá for a wild, whirling journey by boat down the Magdalena River, eventually hoping to sail to London.

But the General never gets "out of this labyrinth." In the fierce light of death's shadows, Bolívar is defeated by the backwater elements, by the chicanery of his enemies (especially General Santander), by the rancor of his ambitious colleagues, by his "persistent constipation" or by his "farting stony, foul-smelling gas," and by his own solitary nostalgia for his former revolutionary self. Embarking with his noisy retinue from port to port, city to city, safe house to safe house, the General endures either celebrations and fiestas in his honor or is hounded by an army of widows who follow him everywhere, hoping to hear his "proclamations of consolation."

While Simón Bolívar had "wrested" from the Spanish colonists an empire five times more vast than all of Europe, and while he had led twenty years of war "to keep it free and united," he is at the end of -527- his life a solitary man, praying for the right moment when he might make a political comeback.

Like the labyrinthine journey down the Magdalena River, the structure of the novel is postmodernist and serpentine. Deconstructing its own "return to storytelling," The General in His Labyrinth twists and disrupts historical time and space until not only Bolívar but the reader cannot tell where he is. Like the postmodern arts of memory themselves, full of traumas and resistances of all sorts, are scenes from the General's earlier triumphant life: his utopian proposal to turn the huge continent "into the most immense, or most extraordinary, or most invincible league of nations the world had ever seen"; his eternal temptations "by the enigma" of beautiful women; his latent homoerotic desires for the Baron Alexander von Humboldt who had "astonished" him in Paris by the "splendor of his beauty the likes of which he had never seen in any woman."

Just before he dies in December 1830, Bolívar proclaims that America is "ungovernable," for "this nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants." He prophesies, moreover, the postcontemporary perils of what Andre Gunder Frank called "the development of underdevelopment": "I warned Santander that whatever good we had done for the nation would be worthless if we took on debt because we would go on paying interest till the end of time." In any case, the United States, in Bolívar's eyes, is "omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all."

Arguably the most important of American writers, Gabriel García Márquez takes up the slack of Carpentier's lo real maravilloso and the traditional historical novel in his postmodern realism, and combines them into a genuine postcontemporary dialectical aesthetic. In The General in His Labyrinth, García Márquez presents the reader with a semblance of historical verisimilitude and shatters it into alternative, dizzying patterns, as though the form of historiography was retained (at least in its traditional versions) but now for some reason seems to offer him a remarkable movement of invention.

If it makes sense to evoke a certain "return to storytelling" in the postmodern period, the return can be found in the wild genealogies and speculative texts of Toni Morrison, Arturo Islas, and Maxine -528- Maxine. In their novels and experimental memoirs, they shuffle, like Petra Cotes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, historical figures and names like so many cards from a finite deck. Recovering alternative American histories in the unwritten texts of history (songs, cuentos, and talk story), these postmodernist realists' texts resemble the dynastic annals of "small-power kingdoms," as Jameson puts it, and realms very far removed from the traditional whitemale American novel.

Toni Morrison's Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), like most of the postmodern narratives under discussion, are embedded in the historical. For example, no mild apocalypse is the total destruction of the black neighborhood at the beginning of Sula: "In that place, where they tore the neighborhood and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf course, there was once a neighborhood." The Bottom's segregated history in Ohio-cut across, contested, and obliterated-is written in a single sentence whose content extends from the dialectics of underdevelopment to the glossy, postmodern projects of urban renewal. Thus the "blackberry patches" — Morrison's imagery of nature — have to be "uprooted" to make way for what Marx referred to as capitalism's modernization.

After describing the leveling of the Bottom, Morrison focuses on the other hurts wrought by capitalism's (late) modernizations: Shadrack's unforgettable imagined bodily deformation as a part of the posttraumatic stress disorder resulting from his World War I experience and Eva Peace's radical act of self-mutilation. Abandoned by her husband Boy Boy around 1921, Eva sets out to keep her family together and financially sound: "Eighteen months later, she swept down from a wagon with two crutches, a new black pocketbook, and one leg." Eva's self-mutilation allows her then to build a new life and an African American feminist architecture on 7 Carpenter Road.

As in the case of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Morrison's Sula is a signifyin[g] chronicle of lo real maravilloso with a difference, but is entirely accessible to the reader since there are no real boundaries created by difficult narrative techniques. Moreover, like the chronicles of Carpentier and García Márquez, Sula covers the Bottom's history (which seems to move in reverse), from its apocalyptic endings to its rich beginnings. The sense of de-529- reality in Sula has nothing to do with language games; it is created by events, by what Morrison says happens. We may have doubts about the probability of what happens (Eva's self-mutilations, Plum's attempt to return to his mother's womb, the plague of robins announcing Sula's return to the Bottom, and Ajax's command of yellow butterflies) but there is never any doubt about what the narrator says.

Song of Solomon — a magical travel story about returning to one's local and global roots — won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was the first African American novel since Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) to be included for selection by the Book-of-theMonth Club. As Morrison suggests, Milkman Dead has "to pay attention to signs and landmarks" in order to discover "the real names" and with these the author allows her black middle-class protagonist to piece together his fantastic genealogical history all the way back to Africa. "How many dead lives and fading memories," Morrison writes, "were buried in and beneath the names of the places."

Arturo Islas is fascinated in his work by the liminal United States — Mexico borderlands, a postcontemporary "laboratory" where we can see culture of the First World imploding its postmodernist strategies into the Third World. Planned as a trilogy about the Angel family, The Rain God (1984) and Migrant Souls (1990), read collectively, are sprawling narratives, with genealogical trees as convoluted as Faulkner's and García Márquez's. Islas's last installment, however, was never completed, for the author died from complications of AIDS in February 1991.

The first novel, The Rain God, was published by Alexandrian, a small, Silicon Valley press of Palo Alto, California. Although rejected and censored by over twenty mainstream presses and editors in New York (who decide what counts as culture for the rest of the United States), The Rain God was named one of the three best novels of 1984 by the California Bay Area Reviewers' Association. Telling his story from the point of view of a Faulknerian Quentin-like narrator with a radical difference — "I don't hate Mexicans! I don't hate Anglos! I don't hate Gays! I don't hate the Third World!" — Miguel Chico is a bookish English professor living the epistemologies of the closet in San Francisco. A two-toned narrative, written at times in the pan-American styles of James, Faulkner, Rulfo, and García Márquez, The Rain God covers three generations of Angels — from just before -530- the Mexican Revolution (1910-17) to the 1980s — who migrated north from Mexico.

Despite this large chronotope, imaginative geography, and complex genealogy, The Rain God is a high minimalist novel of subtlety and psychological nuance: "He, Miguel Chico, was the family analyst, interested in the past for psychological, not historical, reasons. Like Mama Chona, he preferred to ignore facts in favor of motives, which were always and endlessly open to question and interpretation." Islas's postmodern "open text" thus offers the reader a poetic landscape that, like the borderlands themselves, is both overdetermined and profound. The narrative, too, moves in electric telenovela chapters from one family crisis to another: Miguel Chico visits the cemetery on the Day of the Dead; Mama Chona, the family matriarch, puritanically controls her family's values; Miguel Grande cannot resist the soap opera passions of Lola, his wife's best friend; Miguel Chico's uncle, Felix Angel (the Rain Dancer), is murdered in the desert by a white, homophobic soldier.

If one of the most significant features of postmodern narratives is their attempt to negotiate forms of high art with certain forms and genres of mass culture and the cultural practices of everyday life, Islas's second installment, Migrant Souls, exploits this postcontemporary impulse by bringing together the impact of the classic Puritan rhetoric upon our culture, what Clifford Geertz, among others, calls the shaping influence of religious or quasi-religious symbols of society (Book 1 is appropriately entitled "Flight from Egypt"), with references to the 1950s through the mambo, doo-wop, Elvis, and mass cultural magazines such as Popular Romance.

More significantly, Islas reconceives in Migrant Souls literary and cultural practices. What happens, Islas asks, when American culture and literature are understood in terms of "migration," not immigration? How is the imagined community of the nation — to use Benedict Anderson's term — disrupted by hybrid, mestizo/a borderland subjectivities? Caught between the postcolonial border zones of past and present, Spanish and Indian cultures (Doña Marina's tamales and Miguel Chico's "Tlaloc"), Josie Salazar and her cousin Miguel Chico attempt to cross over the borderland contradictions of their everyday lives in Del Sapo, Texas. Like Ernesto Galarza in Barrio Boy (1972), Islas in Book 1 of Migrant Souls allows us to witness the Angel -531- family's migration, north from Mexico. This change from one culture to another corresponds to the actual course of travel the founding Angel clan undertakes: "The Rio Grande — shallow, muddy, ugly in those places where the bridges spanned it — was a constant disappointment and hardly a symbol of the promised land to families like Mama Chona's. They had not sailed across an ocean or ridden in wagons and trains across half a continent in search of a new life. They were migrant, not immigrant, souls."

Within this simple form, however, are subsumed the postmodern themes of transformation, hybridity, and multiple subject positions — what feminist Gloria Anzaldúa in her border-defying writing Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) called the "new mestiza/o consciousness." If Islas's narrative had focused exclusively on this literal border-crossing story, he would have written, perhaps, a fairly conventional ethnic tale about acculturation and immigration. But he did not. Instead, Islas also examines the border zones of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. In fact, Islas's only other bordercrossing tale in Book 1 is the hilarious scene of Josie's father smuggling an illegal turkey across the United States-Mexico border (after he had made it clear that he prefers enchiladas for Thanksgiving dinner). After a humiliating border check at the International Del Sapo bridge, he treats his family to menudo and homemade tortillas.

Just as the founding Angels crossed the "bloody river" in search of their city upon a hill, the younger Angel generation migrates to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and California. Book 2, entitled "Feliz Navidad," thus looks ahead to Vietnam and the Chicano Student Movement, where Miguel Chico's cousin Rudy appropriates and recodifies the term Chicano from borderland oral culture and unsettles all of the conservative Hispanic identities conferred on the Angel family by Mama Chona. More important, "Feliz Navidad" looks ahead to the publication of Miguel Chico's first novel, Tlaloc [The Rain God]: "Miguel Chico's novel had been written during a sabbatical leave when he decided to make fiction instead of criticize it. A modest semi-autobiographical work, it was published by a small California press that quickly went out of business. Tlaloc was an academic, if not commercial success and its author became known as an ethnic writer." For Islas, the point is not to declare that The Rain God and Migrant Souls are postmodern ethnic texts and stop there, -532- but to show in hybrid perspectives how it was that ethnicity was invented and with what consequences.

Such nontraditional and critical views of acculturation and the polyethnic United States are readily apparent in the blurred genre works of Maxine Hong Kingston. In The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), Kingston's texts are developed as postmodern fragments of traditional "talk story," myths, and the draconian rules imposed by Chinese parents. "No Name Woman," a talk story about the father's sister who is forced to have an illegitimate child in the pigsty, and who then commits suicide, is used by MaMa to caution the author from transgressing the family's rigid sexual codes. "Shaman," another talk story written by the author, exemplifies MaMa's attempts to tell her children "chilling" ghost stories to cool off the unbearable heat in the family's Stockton laundry. In both cases these oral tales are powerful stories of survival migrant cultures used by the Chinese Americans to fight the discriminatory United States government policies against Asians.

When Kingston declares that China Men is a book about "claiming America," her declaration characterizes the mood of a new generation of United States postmodern realist writers of color. Like Carpentier's and García Márquez's speculative chronicles, China Men (at times, also written in the oppositional poetic style of William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain) is a highly inventive history of Gold Mountain (U.S.A.). Kingston's earliest episodes begin in fact where Williams's leave off — around 1850 — and the book ends with visions of American violence and the Vietnam war. At the same time, Kingston documents in fragmentary pieces the California Gold Rush and describes in excruciating detail the various racist Exclusion Acts the United States government passed against Asians.

Against the American grain, Kingston's China Men not only challenges whitemale constructions of American history but also aligns itself with the discovery by the professional historians that "all is fiction" and that there can never be a correct version of history. Because the narrator's father does not talk story — only the women do ("You say with few words and the silences") — Kingston invents dif- ferent versions of the father's migration from China to America. In one of her most speculative and magical versions, the author describes how, perhaps, he sailed first to Cuba, where the sky drops -533- rain the size of long squash, or to Hawaii, where papayas grow to the size of jack-o'-lanterns. Another version imagines how a smuggler brought him to New York by ship, locked in a crate, and how he rocked and dozed in the dark, feeling "the ocean's variety — the peaked waves that must have looked like pines; the rolling waves, round like shrubs, the occasional icy mountains; and for stretches, lulling grasslands." Still another version has BaBa coming to America, not illegally, but "legally" — he arrives in San Francisco to endure incarceration at the Immigration and Naturalization Service prison on Angel Island.

The ultimate goal of Kingston's China Men is thus to elaborate a logic of postmodern possibility, divergence, and the politics of the possible through a rhetoric of speculative historiography. Like Islas, Kingston explores the dialectics of the differential in order to emphasize cross-cultural interpenetration and transculturation rather than assimilation. In other words, Kingston offers alternatives to mythologies predicated on the lingering white supremacist "master narratives" of Anglocentric cultural centrality.

In sum, all the precursors fall into place in our new postmodern realist genealogy: the writers of the "Boom," like Carpentier and García Márquez, and their heirs, the United States writers of color, recover alternative histories in the unrecorded texts of history (songs, cuentos, and talk story) at the very moment when historical alternatives are in the process of being systemically expunged — CIA and FBI archives notwithstanding. Unlike the historical fantasies of other epochs, the postmodern narratives by these writers do not seek to diminish the historical event by celebrating the so-called death of the referent or of the subject, nor do they wish to lighten the burden of historical fact and necessity by transforming it into what Jameson calls "a costumed charade and misty revels without consequences and without irrevocability."

Their postmodern narratives, however, can be seen as entertaining a more active relationship to resistance and the politics of the possible, for they construct a speculative history that is simply their substitute for the making of the real kind. Postmodern cuento, fabulation, or talk story is no doubt the reaction to social and historical bankruptcy, to the blocking of possibilities that leaves — as Jameson stresses — "little option but the imaginary." Their very invention and -534- contagious inventiveness, however, privileges a creative politics by the sheer act of multiplying events they cannot control. Postmodern realist invention thus by way of its very speculation becomes the figure of a larger politics of the possible and of resistance.

Another form of postmodern realism in the United States is in some ways more quotidian than the previous ones. Here a new K Mart/mass cultural realism, minimalized and self-examining, has grown up in the various writings of Raymond Carver, Helena María Viramontes, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone, and others. If, as Malcolm Bradbury noted, there has been for our postcontemporary generation "warfare in the Empire of Signs, there is also every sign…that the Empire can indeed strike back." While these writers hardly share a homogeneous ideological sensibility, they do share a common sense that a crisis in representation is clearly at hand. Our old-fashioned and socially constructed American realism (Howells, Dreiser, and Norris) is now increasingly combined with a minimalism that deals with the new underclass of silenced peoples in our cities of quartz (workers, women, and so-called ethnic minorities) who typically feel adrift, or who feel that their histories have been systematically erased by urban planners and Immigration and Naturalization Service death squads, or who feel "controlled" by their access to controlled substances.

Raymond Carver, for example, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) addresses the local, urban vernaculars and blends them by focusing on slight plots and elliptically structured dramatic conflicts. Minimalist in form, perhaps symptomatic of the reading public's dwindling attention span, Carver's texts, as John Barth suggests in A Few Words About Minimalism (1986), dramatize "the most impressive phenomenon of the current (North American, especially the United States) literary scene (the gringo equivalent of el boom in the Latin American novel): the new flowering of the (North American) short story." While Barth's comments on the "flowering" of the postcontemporary short-story scene are on target, I am distressed by his Anglophonic mapping of the hemisphere. Like that of many United States mainstream writers, Barth's criticism remains largely confined to well-established and long-standing disciplinary and geopolitical borders, with the result that our American (using the adjective in its genuine, hemispheric sense) literary history -535- remains largely provincial. For Barth, there is no real dialogue between Latin American writers and "gringo" postmodern minimalists. In any case, America, for him, becomes a synonym for the United States.

In a more pertinent and global essay entitled The Short Story: The Long and Short of It (1981), Mary Louise Pratt suggests that the formal marginality of short story cycles enables them to become arenas for the development of alternative visions and resistances, and often introduces women and children as protagonists. Marginal genres such as the short story thus are often the site of political, geographical, and cultural contestation. Likewise, Renato Rosaldo in his postmodernist essay, Fables of the Fallen Guy (1991), on the minimalist short story cycles of Alberto Ríos's The Iguana Killer (1984), Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1985), and Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), argues that these writers' worlds are "fraught with unpredictability and dangers, and yet their central figures have enormous capacities for responding to the unexpected." Deconstructing disciplinary and generic borders of all sorts (unlike Barth and the INS), these Chicana/o writers collectively move toward liminal terrains and border zones that readily include newly arrived migrant workers from south of the border, Anglos, African Americans, and heterogeneous neighborhoods.

Similarly, Helena María Viramontes's short-story cycle The Moths and Other Stories (1985) focuses on the internal and external urban borders that often disrupt the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. These borders, Viramontes suggests, are reproduced in our ethnic neighborhoods by urban planners who provide us with the maps for the hegemonic discourse of boundaries. Such glossy, postmodern designs, from Portman's Westin Bonaventure hotel to the sprawling freeways, thus serve to erase and displace the old, ethnic neighborhoods. In "Neighbors," for example, postmodern urban planners destroy the Chicano barrios in East Los Angeles: "the neighborhood had slowly metamorphosed into a graveyard…. As a result, the children gathered near in small groups to drink, to lose themselves in the abyss of defeat, to find temporary solace among each other."

Although a prolific novelist, poet, and essayist, Joyce Carol Oates may be best known for her "neorealist" short stories, which are frequently exercises in postmodernist experimentation. Like Carver and -536- Viramontes, she focuses on ordinary characters whose lives are vulnerable to powerful threats from a (patriarchal) society. Influenced by the mass cultural songs of the 1960s, Oates in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? transforms the traditional, young adult "coming-of-age" story. Written in 1967 and dedicated, as the title suggests, to Bob Dylan, the story poses crucial questions about female sexuality and gender inequalities in the relatively "safe" suburbs of upper-state New York, and, at the same time, gives us a powerful critique of our electronically mass-mediated cultural songs.

The story begins by describing Connie, a young woman dreamily at ease in the world of adolescent romance culture: fan magazines, platonic high school crushes, and so on. Her sense of sexual desire, however, has been shaped by whitemale "light" rock music and the movies. Connie, indeed, has learned everything from "the way it was in the movies and promised in songs." Like the rest of her white, middle-class peers, she is destined, or so it seems, to a solid bourgeois existence. But Oates radically undermines Connie's security by showing us how many women are seduced by the romantic "promises" in our pop songs: her young protagonist in fact becomes a victim of Arnold Friend, who, in the end, is not very friendly at all. Oates's short story is, therefore, fascinated with male violence (both psychological and physical) against women, for, as she says about her prodigious work in general, "I sense it around me, both the fear and the desire, and perhaps I simply have appropriated it from other people."

Like Islas's and Viramontes's narratives, Robert Stone's work, which we may call postmodernist meditative realism, concentrates on stories that are already embedded in an inter-American, hemispheric, and global dimension. Dog Soldiers (1975), a novel about heroin and drug dealers, for instance, travels globally between Saigon, San Francisco, and a middle-class retreat near the United States-Mexico borderlands. Stone's hard-nosed language and lurid scenes of sexual violence bring him clearly within the orbits of K Mart realism. A Flag for Sunrise (1981), however, places itself at the intersection between North and Central America. Stone's archaeology of the Americas allegorizes for us the persistence of an antithetical geographical space in the New World landscape. His novel, indeed, uncovers many layers of American identity by demonstrating how the United States government tries constantly to project its structures outward, creating -537- and recreating its North-South dichotomy in order to render the South as "primitive" and victim.

Frank Holliwell, a burned-out anthropologist, at the request of his Vietnam army friends who are now running the C.I.A., travels to the mythical Central American country Tenecan to spy on a Catholic liberation theologian, Justin Feeney, who is suspected of Marxist revolutionary activities. Our postmodern ethnographer soon becomes a double-agent who falls madly in love with a nun, and who is caught in Stone's postcontemporary dialectics of romance: Marxist revolutionaries are depicted as "children of light" and the Central American death squads are described as being farted out of the devil's ass. At worst, Stone's postmodern romance appropriates Central America by turning it into a sexual and religious playground for the hip norteamericanos; at best, he can be seen, through the wondrous dialectical transformation of romance, to be breaking hold of a "Real" that seems unshakably set in place.

In contrast, E. L. Doctorow's narratives — from his award-winning Book of Daniel (1971) to his most recent novel, Billy Bathgate (1989) — in some ways do the inverse of what I have been arguing above. More precisely, the "ragged edges of Real" have entirely disappeared. Doctorow's work thus reveals a new spatial historiography that has unique things to tell us about what has happened to the postmodern sense of history.

Read collectively, Doctorow's major novels map out generational "moments" in the epic of American history: Ragtime (1975), in its collagelike production of real-life characters and events among whom appear imaginary WASP and ethnic characters (Morgan, Ford, Younger Brother, Coalhouse Walker, and so on), sets itself, like World's Fair (1985), in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Billy Bathgate, like Loon Lake (1980), reconstructs the Great Depression, while The Book of Daniel juxtaposes, without apologies, the Old and New Left Marxisms in America — thirties communism and sixties student radicalism.

In a blistering review of Doctorow's American "epic," in his influential essay Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984), Fredric Jameson argues that the author's novels not only resist our political interpretations but also are precisely organized to "short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpre-538- tation which [they] perpetually hold out and withdraw." Jameson is, of course, absolutely right in his reading of Doctorow's simple, declarative sentences (especially in Ragtime), for unlike, say, the dialectical sentences of Gabriel García Márquez or Maxine Hong Kingston, he only allows himself to write in the digestible, best-seller style. While Doctorow's novels are splendid in their own right, and, perhaps, the author has merely decided to convey his great theme — the disappearance of our homemade radical past — formally, through the glossy surface style of the postmodern itself, the sharp edges of the Real have entirely disappeared, substituted by pop images and the simulacra of that history.

One of the most hybrid interventions in our postcontemporary narrative traditions comes from Jaime and Gilbert Hernández, whose fotonovela realist Chicano writings are a postmodern blend of comic books, science fiction, southern Californiacholola (Chicano youth culture), signifyin[g] magic realist storytelling, and subaltern theorizing. In the late 1970s the Hernández brothers became deeply involved in the musical signifiers of punk, and this postmodern phenomenon opened their eyes to the possibilities of expressing themselves in the fotonovela realist novel. Their literary productions are in many ways aligned with the incorporation of habits of "futurology" into our everyday life and the magic realism of García Márquez's Macondo, but they also repeat the deterritorializing gestures of borderland theorists such as Renato Rosaldo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Néstor García Canclini, who see in their postmodern ethnographies and feminist theories of the United States-Mexico border a laboratory for the postmodern condition, where migrant workers smuggle into their new baroque homelands regional art and medicinal herbs from the South and send back from the North contraband VCRs and CD players.

In their Love and Rockets (1982 — present) fotonovela, Jaime and Gilbert Hernández extend the borderlands to Los Angeles by interspersing in their work tongue-in-cheek science fiction stories (the "Mechanics" series) with postmodern realist tales set in a barrio they call "Hoppers 13." More recently, Gilbert Hernández, like Robert Stone, has moved his texts in utopian directions by creating a series of stories based in the mythical Central American town of Palomar.

Love and Rockets was the first United Statesfotonovela to adopt -539- the European method of "album collection" after magazine serialization. Despite representation in a West Coast bimonthly magazine of relatively modest circulation (it sells between 18,000 and 19,000 copies), the Hernández brothers are arguably the most widely read Chicano writers in America today. Since 1982, the Hernández brothers have produced thirty issues of the regular magazine and several album collections of their work: Music for Mechanics (Book 1); Chelo's Burden (Book 2); Las Mujeres Perdidas (Book 3); House of Raging Women (Book 4); Heartbreak Soup (Book 5); The Reticent Heart (Book 6); and Locas (Book 7). Their texts, read collectively, are a dizzying mix of polyglot love comics and super-hero, reckless adventure; their virtuoso drawings, moreover, represent derealized characters of intelligence, wit, and human frailty.

For Jaime and Gilbert Hernández, whitemale superiority has had its chance, and they now see their postmodern narratives as engaged with the dynamics of the articulate ascendance of others. These new dynamics may be what many commentators mean when they speak about a "crisis" in the humanities, but as Houston Baker notes, "one man's crisis can always be an-Other's fields of dream, ladder of ascent, or moment of ethical recognition and ethnic identification."

To conclude on a personal note, when I recently asked my literature students at the University of California, Santa Cruz what the phrase "narrative for the next society" meant, many of them said that the fotonovelas of Jaime and Gilbert Hernández are the narratives for the next society. My students' thinking about these postmodern f otonovela historiographies seems characteristic of the turn-of-thecentury human moments when we seek new definitions and utopian designs to resist the despair of things on many of our contested college campuses.

What their answer suggests to me is that many students in California (the Baudrillardean site of the postmodern) believe the function of narrative belongs to a fotonovela, popular space in which an extended global borderland audience interacts with visual and performative artists. If Rap, as Houston Baker says, is "the form of auditions in our present era that utterly refuses to sing anthems of, say, whitemale hegemony," the borderland fotonovelas of Jaime and Gilbert Hernández may be the new heterogeneous and heteroglot -540- form articulating the hurts wrought by and before the emergence of the "State Line," which always constructs and preserves homogeneity.

José David Saldívar

-541-

Constructing Gender

Today, when literary types talk about "constructing gender," more often than not what we're really talking about is "deconstructing gender." That is, we're attempting to call attention to the social and historical contingency of the ways people make sense out of the embodied experiences we come to "know" as "sexual." Now, as the troubled syntax of this last sentence suggests, the effort involved in making this attempt is anything but "natural." Indeed, to many of its critics, this counterintuitive and somewhat abstract undertaking seems a silly ("academic") endeavor at best, unnecessarily complicating what should certainly be the most natural thing in the world. As Cole Porter put it, "birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it," so why can't we do "it," without all the fuss? Part of the problem, which the "fuss" of deconstructing gender seeks to explore, lies in what we mean by "it" and who we mean by "we" here. For some of us, like lesbians and gay men, whose experiences of sexuality have been historically castigated as "unnatural," or women, whose supposed "sexual nature" has been used to legitimate their social, economic, and political subjugation, or the many others whose "eccentric" forms of pleasure have subjected them to religious, legal, medical, and moral censure, "sexuality" has never been such a "natural" phenomenon. Indeed, the attempt to "deconstruct gender" is an attempt both to destabilize the systems of meaning that establish -542- certain forms of ("sexual") desire and behavior as "natural" or "normal" and simultaneously to create a context of affirmation in which new forms of relationship and pleasure can emerge. Thus, when we speak about "constructing gender," part of the project is precisely to call into question something — perhaps the very thing — that many people take most for granted about their lives in order to see if it is possible to begin to live our lives otherwise.

But of course this is only part of the project. For after the calling into question of the taken for granted has begun, there is the larger problem of how we start to imagine, let alone create, such "otherwise" ways to live our lives. In order to understand what this kind of creativity might mean or how it might happen, it is important to consider the powerful effects of imagining generally and, for the purposes of this chapter, imagining-as-reading or reading-as-imagining specifically. I'm choosing to focus on reading here, not because I believe that it is unique among imaginative practices, but rather because, on the contrary, it is so common. For, although in our century reading has been eclipsed as a cultural activity by television watching, it still popularly functions as a (per)formative experience that shapes the ways we learn to make sense of our everyday lives. Ironically, we might argue that precisely because reading has been displaced from the cultural centrality it commanded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — where in its ubiquity it performed much of what Mary Poovey calls the "work of ideology" — reading now takes on a more highly charged valence as "purely imaginative" work. And the contemporary significance of such work should not be underestimated. For despite our years of TV viewing, many of us have still had the experience of reading a book that we "knew" to be fictional, and yet that seemed so "real" to us it opened up new possibilities for how we see the world. Indeed, for some of us, the reality of such possibilities was so critical that at times it — and it alone — has kept us alive. The existence of those imaginary worlds in which we could "live" unfettered by the constraints that imprisoned us emotionally, physically, intellectually, politically, or spiritually, even if such worlds existed only in those moments when our eyes traced across pages bound between the covers of a few books, provided enough inspiration to continue to struggle with and through the painful difficulties of our daily experience.

In writing these sentences I am struck by how much they recall to -543- me my own experiences of growing up. For as a sensitive, intellectual, myopic child born to displaced second-generation, urban Jews, residing in the emphatically non-Jewish, emphatically nonintellectual, suburbanizing countryside of northern Maryland, books were the only place I felt at home. Spending hours of each day curled up on the couch in my parents' living room reading indiscriminately through classics, mysteries, romances, sci-fi, historical adventures, and lots of just plain schlock, I repeatedly fled the unarticulable pain of my own life to "live" in the imaginary realms of literature. Yet more than my own cultural, religious, or temperamental alienation, there was an even more profound experience of aloneness — one for which I had at the time no name or concept — that drove me to seek my companions in the leaves of those tomes I pulled from the library's shelves. Retrospectively I would describe this isolation as the experience of a male child who has since become a gay man but who was then growing up in a world in which such a possibility was not only unspeakable but quite literally unimaginable. At the time, however, I could neither say nor imagine any of this and so I simply checked out more books.

It is one of the truisms of gay and lesbian self-help literature — which does not make it any less "true" — that we often experience a kind of emotional dissociation that results from never having some of our most poignant feelings mirrored back to us by the worlds in which we live. Indeed, it often seems as if the very feelings that make us feel most alive are the same feelings that make us feel most alone: an unbearable paradox at best, a mutilating reality at worst. Unlike most other children in our culture who grow up with others who are in socially recognizable ways "like" them (though of course not without excruciating differences), children who emerge later in life as "gay" or "lesbian" grow up in contexts where almost everyone — and most emphatically their parents — is not "like" them. While in the twenty years since I was a child there has (thankfully) been some significant change in this regard, by and large it is still the case that most people who denominate themselves as gay or lesbian come to maturity in a social and historical context in which there are few affirmations of their emotional or affectional experiences. And if this is true in "reality," it is more true in the "imaginary" — if we can differentiate between these realms. Thus, it is of both material and-544- psychological significance that the structuring stories we commonly use in order to make sense of our daily lives provide us with very few plots that do not emplot us in normative versions of gender and sexuality. Whether we think of television, movies, magazines, books, radio, video, records, or newspapers, the narratives that most of us regularly draw upon in order to give telling shape to our lives do so by privileging certain limited sets of acts, behaviors, feelings, relationships, styles, and appearances as "acceptable," "proper," "normal," or "desirable." These limitations have important consequences for all of us in the sense that they mark out a range of possibilities within which we are largely constrained to represent — both to ourselves and to each other — the parameters of our movements. However, they have special consequences for those of us whose movements appear to transgress the possibilities of such acceptable representations, effectively rendering us "unrepresentable." As Adrienne Rich has remarked:

Here Rich suggests that the condition of "invisibility" must be understood as at once a collective and a personal one. As such it has devolved in "our" American culture onto the many individuals and groups whose presence is perceived and represented primarily as an absence — an absence of those particular qualities that are asserted as necessary, normal, or natural for all human beings. Yet, as the challenges posed by the Civil Rights, Women's, and Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movements, among others, have taught us, such normative descriptions are in fact contingent and conventional, fabricated by some human beings in order to legitimate the valuing of particular forms of experience and expression over others. It is in the slippage -545- between the desire to fix certain qualities as eternal, unalterable, or pregiven (by God, by Law, by Custom) and the complex movements that mark out our everyday lives that many of us seem to "disappear."

Living through the profound pain of such an absent presence as a sexually confused adolescent, my disappearance seemed almost complete to me. Not only in the suburbanizing small-town culture in which I was reared but also in my regular circuits of the public library's shelves, where I found few texts that would act as my mirror. The two to which I was repeatedly drawn, Dr. Rubin's (homophobic) pop-psychology best-seller Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask) and Kinsey's soberly scientific Sexual Behavior in the Human Male did provide some comfort inasmuch as they informed me that there existed other males like me — though a statistical minority to be sure — who had had fantasies about, or perhaps had even engaged in, sexual acts with other men. Yet, while these texts provoked something like a flash of selfrecognition, they were hardly untarnished mirrors since they failed to provide me with any of the stories for which I longed: stories that would have helped me give shape to the confusing jumble of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and sensations that characterized my life. So, instead, I read novels — or more accurately, devoured them — in the vain hope of fitting my feelings into their plots. From the time I was nine until I was in my mid-twenties, there was rarely a moment when I was not in the middle of some novel or another. And as soon as one was completed there was always another waiting to be begun. Today when I reflect on this period in my life, I am astounded by the range and compulsiveness of my reading. I indiscriminately wended my way through most of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert, Stendhal, Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Isaac Asimov, among many, many others, and except for a few books by Ursula LeGuin and Rex Stout, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and a passionate episode with Willa Cather, all of the hundreds of thousands of pages I turned seemed inevitably to return me to the same basic plot: boy meets girl, boy wants girl (albeit with frustrating complications), boy gets — or alternatively, but rarely, does not get — girl. Now in saying this I am not trying to claim that there is only one -546- story that Anglo-American and European literatures tell over and over. Rather I'd simply like to recognize that, whether or not that basic plot initiates the unfolding/enfolding action of the text, the dynamics of gender difference very frequently provide the "knot" that the novel's denouement unravels, thereby explicitly or implicitly organizing the novelistic narrative as a temporal resolution of a structural opposition between "male" and "female." A limited and limiting structure in any event and especially so for those of us whose knot is not tied in this way.

It wasn't until I got to college that I began to find both the books and the people who could begin to help me unravel the feelings that had knotted themselves in my intestines and not in my stories. (I mean this quite literally, since from the age of thirteen on I had been plagued by a serious inflammatory bowel disease that kept me moving between toilets and hospitals in an unconscious attempt to give material form to the emotional pain that flowed through me. Thus, what Adrienne Rich calls the "psychic disequilibrium" of being unmirrored took on for me the somatic force of an earthquake zone where the movements of unseen tectonic plates repeatedly shook me to the edge between life and death. Now, admittedly, I'm what some might call a drama queen, so I tend to take things to their extremes and perhaps this case is no different from many others in my life, but I'm including this anecdote here in order to help you understand why the effects engendered by certain books affect me as they do.) The first "gay" book I remember reading was James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956), which I discovered when I was about eighteen. In reflecting back on this seminal reading experience, I am struck by what I remember distinctly about it: it wasn't the mirroring of the desire for another man that was so moving for me, nor the possibility of giving aesthetic form to my sexual desires, but rather it was the searing emotional pain that pervaded the book's imaginary world that deeply touched my sense of self. The claustrophobia induced by Giovanni's eponymous room metonymically evoked for me the cramped subcultural space in which circuits of male desire were routed around the male/female divide, circling back onto and into men who desire each other. In Baldwin's text, this space of male same-sex eroticism marks out the edge of imprisonment where pleasure and pain elide into an experience from which there is no escape. -547-

Baldwin's narrator crystallizes this dilemma when he describes his first visit to Giovanni's room: "He locked the door behind us, and then for a moment, in the gloom, we simply stared at each otherwith dismay, with relief, and breathing hard. I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan." The ambiguity of the narrator's sound — the moan of pleasure, the moan of pain — articulates the tension that the narrative resolves only in the book's final pages when Giovanni has exchanged his room for a prison cell and the narrator, anticipating Giovanni's execution, looks into the mirror in his own room in order to "see" Giovanni's last moments. In this final instance of mirroring the two men become one (at least for the narrator) in the face of pain and death:

After Giovanni's Room, this bifurcated experience of delight and despair recurred frequently as I dived into the "gay" novels that were available to me. I was fortunate in this regard since the late 1970s, unlike any other earlier historical period, witnessed the appearance in the United States of many popular and sometimes mass-market paperbacks that sought explicitly to depict the lives and loves of (predominantly white, largely middle-class) gay American men. Books that quickly became cult classics like Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Larry Kramer's Faggots (1978) devoted themselves to chronicling the developments in the urban gay male subcultures that thrived on "the coasts" throughout the seventies. Assuming the sexual ethos of a post-Stonewall "liberation," such books self-consciously set out to mirror the subcultures from which they emerged. Thus, they situated themselves within the complex networks of human relationships organized by a developing sexual community in which human contacts were often mediated by physical experiences whose longevity or intensity could not be defined or depicted solely in terms of the traditional emplotments provided by novelistic conventions. Instead, these novels fragmented their narrative developments between characters who moved in parallel directions so that the texts themselves often became pastiches of anecdotes, vignettes of sexual conquest or defeat. To some extent, then, these novels took as their protagonists a community, or at least an urban network, whose collective sexual practices seemed to position them outside both "straight" culture and the stories it told about men. In this way, they sought to articulate what could be seen as a transformation in male sexual ethics and activities by transforming the very structure of the stories they told about the sexual subculture with which they enthusiastically (if critically) identified.

While I gratefully consumed such books, thankful for the glimpse they gave me onto a world I was still too young and too timid to claim for my own, I was also disturbed by implications they had for how sexuality takes shape in contemporary American society. It -549- seemed to me then and it certainly seems to me now that these late 1970s depictions of gay male sexuality were implicated in the (re)production of a certain kind of male sexuality that was predicated upon the objectification of (male) bodies as the sources of both aesthetic and erotic pleasure. Now don't get me wrong: with the right body a little objectification can go a long way toward pleasing the senses, as well as the soul. Moreover, in the political and historical moment in which they appeared, such texts certainly interrupted the totalizing force of the dominant narratives that sought to emplot sexual behavior within the dynamics of (heterosexual) love and marriage. But what seemed/seems hard for me to comprehend (maybe because I grew up reading too many nineteenth-century novels and watching too many 1940s movies) was how the dynamics of this new expression of male desire created either texts or contexts within which one could explore the ways overdetermined objectifications of (male) bodies engendered different kinds of male subjects, whether "gay" or "straight."

Even as beautiful and erotic a text as Renaud Camus's Tricks (1981) provides an excellent example of this dilemma. In the "25 encounters" that Camus narrates in the course of his text we are regaled with the compelling details of sexual adventure as they border on the banality of everyday life. In the italicized commentary that follows the account of each encounter, the narrator reframes the poignancy of sexual passion within the moment of retelling the adventure, so that these retrospective reflections come to foreground the erotics of narration as well as the narratives of the erotic. Indeed, it is precisely this "erotic" dynamic between the telling and the tale that the text would seem to ask us to consider: within the course of the book, the book's own writing becomes part of the narrative and even part of the narrator's sexual experiences, so that the distinction between the stories of sexual activities and "the sexual itself" loses its definition. And perhaps this is the book's "trick." In the twenty-five episodes that structure the text, the same elements of cruising, seduction, sucking, penetration, coming, exhaustion, and relief are reiterated, in almost exactly the same order, over and over again. What makes them appear as different moments seems to depend not upon the sexual acts or actors but upon the effects of narration itself: the details that give the stories their "character," the nuances that pro-550- duce the frisson of singularity. Yet belying this particularity is the iterability and substitutability of the "tricks" themselves. While it is this lack of distinction that the book seems to celebrate as if in righteous — and joyful — defiance of the traditional novelistic emplotments that "properly" situate sexuality within the narratives of romance and marriage, the recognition of the necessary intercourse between sexuality and narration fails to produce the sense that such an imaginary relation might enable us to reimagine "the sexual" or "the male" per se. Instead, Tricks offers a limited (if fairly exhilarating) repertoire of sexual acts as the telling shape that such stories take, thereby eliding the question of how such shapings create the understanding that who gay men "are" derives from what they "do" with and to each other — and just as important, what they say about "it" afterwards.

While such an elision might seem to subsume the representations of a "gay" male gender easily within the representations of gay male sexuality, the prominence with which the relations among sexual acts, sexual identities, and sexual narratives appeared in the gay male novels written during the early 1980s suggests that it took a fair amount of literary work to keep this "imaginary" constellation together. In the first few years of the decade, a spate of gay men's "coming-of-age" stories appeared, inaugurating the development of what we might call a "gay" Bildungsroman. Ranging from Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story (1982), to Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir (1983), to John Fox's The Boys on the Rock (1984), to David Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), to Larry Duplechan's Blackbird (1987), these novels constitute an emergent narrative genre whose definition is itself predicated on a narratively produced gender. That is, they are all novels that depict a central character's development through or against the structure of a story we colloquially call "coming out." Since the late 1960s, "coming out" has served as a rubric for the processes of self-affirmation and self-definition through which men and women begin to denominate themselves as "gay men" and "lesbians" in their relations with themselves, their families, friends, loved ones, and communitiesprocesses that have been central to the creation of both gay and lesbian identities and gay and lesbian collectivities. But more than just processes of emergence and identification, "coming out" is also a way -551- of telling a life story. Indeed, to some extent the "coming out story" becomes the basis for the production of an identity to which the narrating individual lays claim precisely by pronouncing this story to be his or her own. Schematically, the coming out tale is often described as depicting a passage from the darkness, ignorance, and repression of the non-self-affirming "closet" to the colorful, illuminated, self-affirming freedom of gay/lesbian "identity." A recent Keith Haring graphic designed to advertise National Coming Out Day makes the implications of this movement clear: in the center of the drawing is a large black rectangle (which symbolically doubles as both the closet and the grave) from which a typically dynamic Haring figure emerges into the boldly colored, vividly alive world of queer identity. Sort of like what happens to Dorothy when she lands in Oz and suddenly the movie goes into Technicolor. The significance of this imaginary movement from darkness into color, however, is not simply one of "enlightenment" or "liberation," for the most profound force of the coming out story is not prospective but retrospective. That is, the effective dynamic of the narrative structure gives shape not just to the landscape into which the figure steps but more prominently to the black box from which the figure has emerged, now retroactively defined both as having a (safe) regular shape and as being (safely) confined to the past.

To a large extent, gay coming-of-age novels necessarily partake of such a retrospective perspective: these narratives attempt to give meaning and form to a variety of experiences both sexual and nonsexual that prior to the moments of gender redefinition often seem disparate, unconnected, and confusing, but which after the fact of coming out — either explicitly or implicitly — seem to have been leading inevitably up to such a conclusion all along. The preternaturally aware narrator of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story provides perhaps the most explicit example of this imbrication between identity and narrative when he attempts to describe his decision to enter psychoanalysis:

As this slippage between the "now" of the first paragraph and the "now" of the second paragraph suggests, the narrator here is awkwardly positioned in time. Simultaneously evoking the boy who seeks psychoanalytic "understanding" and the adult man who comprehends that "what I wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be a homosexual," the narrative "I" holds both the "boy's" prospective yearning and the "man's" retrospective awareness in tension. This divided articulation constitutes the character's "identity" neither as disguised man-child who fears being frozen into the death mask of "the Homosexual," nor as the mature consciousness of the man who has moved beyond pathology to selfaffirmation, but rather as the discrepancy between these two positions that is reconciled only through the implied transformation of the character's coming out. Although this transitional moment is not "in" the novel itself (appearing as a narrative event only in the sequel The Beautiful Room Is Empty [1988]), the logic of this retroactively narrativized identity is so embedded and emplotted in the novel's unfolding that the narrator's professed lack of self-knowledge ("The confusion and fear and pain that beset me…had translated me into a code that no one could read, I least of all…") makes sense precisely because he has become the adept cryptographer who can read meaning backwards into his earlier opacity. It is this opacity, then, that the novel reiterates even as it consistently affirms its interpretability in order to offer the reader a perspective of understanding, a -553- perspective that (if adopted) positions the reader to make sense of the protagonist's struggles through the knowledge that there is meaning to the unknowing character's struggles: the knowledge that he is gay.

While such a perspective might implicitly indicate that gender is "constructed" through acts of knowing, or perhaps even more radically suggest that the reading of such "gay" narratives might be an act of gender construction itself, the fixing of this gender as an effect of knowledge, as a quality that can be "known," undermines the possibilities for imagining gender as a continual process of "constructing." Since it's impossible for me to begin to discuss here the limitations that claims to identity impose upon ec-centric gender/ sexual practices, I will instead offer by way of example a text that makes no such claims to identity, Samuel Delany's brilliant Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). Appearing two years after White's autobiographical novel, Delany's book does not fit any of the rubrics devised to assimilate contemporary fiction into "knowable" gender categories. Instead Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is the first volume in an as yet unfinished science fiction diptych that addresses the political struggle between two rival groups whose competing cosmologies-/epistemologies set them at odds for the control of an interstellar network of life worlds. In this extraterrestrial con(text), Delany explores the problematic relations between gender and sexuality as critical elements in the constitution of an imaginary dynamic that organizes both the narrative's unfolding and the development of coherent characters within this unfolding. Narratively, the novel weaves between the dead world of Rat Korga, an industrial slave who was the only survivor of his planet's destruction, and the complex galactic network of Marq Dyeth, an industrial diplomat from a venerable "nurture stream" on the planet Velm, which combines humans and nonhumans. Rescued from his world's holocaust by "The Web," a shadowy organization that controls the flows of information between worlds, Korga is paired by them with Dyeth because, as Japril, a Web operative, explains to Dyeth, "Korga happens to be your perfect erotic object — out to about seven decimal places…. More to the point…out to about nine decimal places, you happen to be Rat's." The novel's larger depiction of a contest for political control, then, hinges on the statistical perfectibility of this erotic preference between two human males whose coupling in turn -554- threatens to undermine the stability of interworld systems. By the end of the volume the two men have been separated by the Web when Rat's popularity on Dyeth's home planet gives rise to massive demonstrations and cultural chaos and we are left to await their reunion (?) in the sequel.

More than just the centrality of the sexual bonding between the male protagonists, however, the novel's thematization of sexual pleasures across and between sexes and species structures the very possibilities of telling the tale itself. While much of the narrative description is devoted to exploring the permutations of erotic practices on a variety of worlds, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand reads not so much as a chronicle of sexual activities as an inquiry into the ways the movements of and between bodies mark out — or indeed create — the distinctions we come to know as character, identity, and relationship. In part the force of this intricately structured questioning derives from a challenging innovation that Delany employs in order to reorient our habituated patterns of reading. By shifting the expected correspondence between the gender of pronouns and the anatomical sex of their antecedents, Delany's text foregrounds the "unnatural" articulations of gender and sexuality embedded in our "normal" grammatical usages. In other words, the reader of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand finds that rather than "he" designating a biological male of whatever species and "she" designating a biological female of whatever species, with the former serving as a generic indicator of "speciesness," "she" serves here as the universal generic pronoun and "he" refers specifically to individuals of either biological sex of whatever species with whom one has had or with whom one desires to have sexual encounters. The text thus works against the reader to expose the usually ignored "imaginary work" that engenders meaning as gendered: not only the transformation in the expected gender correspondence between pronouns and referents but also the new erotic significance attributed to pronoun usage itself invests the reading process with an unexpected element of decoding that continually causes the reader to resist ingrained patterns of attributing gender to markers of sexuality — a disorienting resistance for even the most astutely "deconstructive" of readers. More than a "gay" science fiction novel, then, Delany's book invites us as readers to consider and to learn to overcome some of the "imaginary" lim-555- itations that circumscribe how we conceptually attempt to encompass the wide-ranging practices and pleasures available to us as embodied beings.

In his autobiographical memoir, The Motion of Light in Water (1988), Delany reflects on what he has learned as an African American male writer who lived through the bohemian years of the East Village in the 1960s, who is sexually attracted to other men, and who for many years was married and still remains close to the poet Marilyn Hacker. Commenting upon the significance of his self-reflexive undertaking, Delany remarks:

In meditating upon his autobiographical motivation, Delany underscores the significance that "fiction" has for him both as an individual and as a social activity. His utopian impulse leads him to conjecture that in the wake of the current historical conjuncture — in which the epistemological and epidemiological "truth" of AIDS has problematized the elision between sexuality and gender for most gay men, as well as for many others — there will be a revolutionary era in which sexuality will flourish as an aesthetic, ethical, personal, and political expression. Yet the impetus for such a radical transformation, he suggests, will derive not from the spontaneous "liberation" of previously (currently) repressed sexual energies but rather from "the infiltration of clear and articulate language into the marginal areas of human sexual exploration." Here Delany foregrounds the connection between imaginative and embodied experience that I have argued above constitutes a necessary element in creating an affirmative sense of "constructing gender" as the engendering of new possibilities for how we move through, transform, and enjoy our life worlds. Indeed, much of my own autobiographical impulse in this -556- chapter derives, like Delany's, from the belief that in the processes of narrating our experiences for ourselves and for each other, we materially engage in processes of (re)producing realities that both reiterate the past and give new shape to the future.

In these few pages, I have somewhat arbitrarily chosen to focus on recent texts written by American gay male authors because these texts have provided seminal reading experiences for me as well as for many other gay men of my gen(d)eration. Yet these are by no means the only texts that have had this effect: indeed, for me, many contemporary novels written by American women of color — with their relentless questioning of the historical articulations of gender and race — have been equally inspiring. If I focus now on the former rather than the latter, it is because I know that in a volume like this one it is likely that the works of women of many races and ethnicities will have been addressed heretofore, while the works of men who are exploring the possibilities for sexual and emotional intimacies with other men will most probably remain eccentric. Thus, in many ways this chapter, like the texts I describe in it, is a "fiction" that constructs gender, a "fiction" that attempts to fabricate other possibilities for imagining forms of relationship and pleasure both in our writings and in our lives. Yet this is not to say that there is no "truth" in what I say; rather it is to remark that the processes of producing the stories through which we represent our truths to ourselves and to each other are part of the processes through which we (re)produce our "selves." And so we are "constructing gender" even now: I, as I write, and you, as you read. And so we keep (t)reading for our lives.

Ed Cohen

-557-

Canada in Fiction

The North American novel begins, of course, in Canada. Although The History of Emily Montague was written by Frances Brooke, a British woman of letters, and was published in London in 1769, this first New World fiction is both record and product of the coming into being of what will be Canada. Brooke had sailed from England in 1763 to join her husband, who was the chaplain of the British garrison recently stationed in Quebec City. On the basis of five years' residence, she vividly contrasted the newly victorious English and the just defeated French, the Christian settlers and the "savage" Indians, the European paradigms whereby her main characters perceive the new (to them) country and the different reality of the land itself. Moreover, the author's marriage plot (another metaphor for "settling") is effectively at odds with her most intriguing character, Arabella, who capably coquettes her way through the work and who, at one point, can even contemplate that she might "marry a savage, and turn squaw" because of the liberty Indians allow their wives but who just as precipitously decides not to because of the liberty they do not allow their daughters. The juxtaposition of such balances and imbalances anticipates more the Canadian national myth of the mosaic than the American myth of the melting pot, even though America too, as the thirteen colonies with their own political and social problems, is also present in the discourse of the novel. Brooke's History is, admittedly, more a historically interesting document than a major work of literature. Nevertheless, Canadians can take pride in this first novel and in the novels that followed it, just -558- as they can also take a certain pride in how well the American novel has done despite branching away from its Canadian beginning.

If the foregoing paragraph seems a belated and dubious Canadian attempt to claim credit for the form, I would here stress that Americans have long been claiming just about everything else: texts, titles, readerships, and publication rights. In this context, the case of Major John Richardson's Wacousta; or, The Prophecy: A Tale of the Canadas (3 vols., 1832) is particularly relevant. The author, of United Empire Loyalist and perhaps Indian ancestry, was the first novelist to be born in Canada. He had grown up in frontier posts where his father, a British Army medical officer, had been stationed. Richardson himself had served in the War of 1812, had fought with Tecumseh, and had been captured following Tecumseh's defeat to be held for a year as a prisoner-of-war in Ohio and Kentucky. Those experiences provided much of the basis for his best book, Wacousta, a high gothic tale of an earlier episode of white/Indian frontier warfare, the 1763 Pontiac uprising, and an account in which the implacably savage leader of the Indians, Wacousta, turns out to be an Englishman in disguise but is still no worse than his former rival in love and present rival in war, Colonel De Haldimar, the ostensible representative and defender of "civilization." Everything in this novel is doubled, undone, inverted, and reversed, including the usual sexual implications of imperial conquest. "Instead of Mother Nature versus a paternalistic military establishment," Gaile McGregor argues, "Wacousta seems to pit a feminine garrison against a masculine gothic landscape." McGregor is so struck by the different "theoretical wilderness/civilization dichotomy" set forth in this novel as compared to "the American wilderness romance" (particularly the novels of James Fenimore Cooper) that she titles her massive study of language and landscape in Canadian literature The Wacousta Syndrome. Yet even though Wacousta is a founding text of Canadian literature, until very recently the novel was available in Canada only in the condensed edition early published in the United States, a version that suppressed almost all the explicitly anti-American passages.

Canada has long contended with what might be termed the Wacousta problem. Throughout the nineteenth century and until well into the twentieth century, a relatively small population spread over the vast expanse of the country made difficult the support of any -559- substantial indigenous publishing industry. Books were commonly obtained from England or the United States, as, indeed, they still mostly are. Canadian authors wrote to be published in those countries as well as at home, and foreign audiences were not always particularly interested in things Canadian. According to an early movie mogul, if a boy meets a girl in New York City you have a story, but — to quote the Hugh MacLennan essay title taken from this American observation — "Boy Meets Girl in Winnipeg: Who Cares?" Care, however, might be generated by sounding New York, and numerous Canadian novels of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century are curiously placeless. Nor has the success of the last few decades completely dispelled old "branch plant" views of Canadian letters. For example, Alice Munro's American publisher objected to her title Who Do You Think You Are? (1978). Americans presumably know who they are and are not troubled by questions of identity. The American edition was titled The Beggar Maid. Yet that very substitution of a fairy-tale designation for a Canadian one merely gives another reference and relevance to the original title.

Canadian wry, it was early discovered, was one major way to achieve more than local notice. Humor was an effective way of subverting perceived second-class status and was also eminently marketable in England and the United States as well as in Canada. Indeed, Canada's first best-selling author was Thomas C. Haliburton, whose Sam Slick sketches collected into the three series of The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville (1836, 1838, 1840) went through some one hundred printings in the nineteenth century. Their main appeal was the ambivalently portrayed comic protagonist, Sam Slick, a Yankee peddler in rural Nova Scotia whose verbal facility contributed such expressions as "upper crust," "conniption fit," and "stick-in-the-mud" to North American English. Are the literary Yankee, American humor, and even, perhaps, Uncle Sam all, like the New World novel, Canadian inventions? Stephen Leacock similarly achieved great popularity with Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), his comic exploration of the private and public foibles of life in provincial Ontario.

Admittedly, The Clockmaker and Sunshine Sketches seem more collections of stories or sketches than novels. But Canadian writers frequently blur the distinction between the two forms. In Clark -560- Blaise's A North American Education (1973), for example, separate stories of loss and dislocation add up to an appropriately disjointed anti-Bildungsroman. Or, conversely, in Alden Nowlan's Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien (also published in 1973), what at first seems a novel reconstitutes itself through the refracturing of the protagonist into a series of short stories. Similarly, Canadian women writers have long conjoined stories and novel — as exemplified by Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971) — in a feminist querying of both artistic and social categories. In view of this tradition and in the spirit of claiming that so far characterizes this chapter, I here claim The Clockmaker and Sunshine Sketches as Canadian novels and as the beginning of a comic fictional form that will later include such works as Ray Smith's wry, experimental, subtly interconnected Lord Nelson Tavern (1974).

Another way to broad appeal for the Canadian writer was through the documentation of place. A naming of parts — and Canada, starting with Upper and Lower Canada, has always seen itself as constituted of parts — could attract a regional, a national, and sometimes even an international readership. For example, Prince Edward Island, surely one of the least exotic islands in the world, becomes one of the best-known island settings thanks to Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its sequels. Of course, the character of Anne has much to do with these novels' huge success but, I would suggest, so does the setting, portrayed as both comfortably distant and comfortably familiar, whether the reader is British, American, or Japanese (and Montgomery's novels well might be the most widely read Western fiction in all Japan).

All regions of Canada have contributed substantially to the country's fiction. But rather than assess in any detail David Adams Richards's stark portrayal of poverty in the rural Miramichi area of New Brunswick in Blood Ties (1976) and Road to the Stilt House (1985), or Matt Cohen's Southern Gothics — Southern Ontario, that is — such as The Disinherited (1974), or numerous other possible writers and works, in the interests of brevity I will consider only two areas, French Quebec and the far West. Each has particularly appealed to English Canadian writers, perhaps because, in each case, regional narratives can also be seen (in a modest Canadian way) as national epics, and in the case of the West often, in fact, they are. -561-

In the case of Quebec, however, the many novels of New France written in English during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are too obviously intended primarily for English readers. Thus Roanna Leprohon's Antoinette de Mirecourt; or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing, a Canadian Tale (1864) sees the secret marriage between the French Canadian protagonist and an English officer whose "royal standard" had recently "replaced the fleurs-de-lys of France" as the hope and pattern for Canada; or William Kirby's The Golden Dog (1877), a historical novel in the high romantic fashion, posits Old World villainy in New France to be countered by Providence and the English, who thereby deserve the fidelity of the not conquered but liberated French. Admittedly, Francis Grey's more convincing study of the complicity of church and state in turn-ofthe-century Quebec, The Curé of St. Philippe (1899), does acknowledge the problem of "two nations — no other word is adequate — separated, not only by race and creed, but by language as well." Most of these novels, however, are much more about English Canadian attitudes and aspirations than French Canadian actualities and, as such, erase difference rather than record it.

Another difference was differently inscribed in the case of the Canadian West, which looms large in the country's literature precisely because it is Canadian (that is, non-American). The standard trappings of American frontier fiction are excluded from the start, as when Ralph Connors, in best-selling missionary Westerns such as The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills (1899), casts the preacher's sermons, not the sheriff's pistols, as the way to civilization. Dick Harrison, in Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Prairie Fiction, argues at length that a different Western history in which the frontier was largely missing precluded in Canada the male-centered dichotomies of good and bad endlessly adumbrated in the American Western — cowboys and rustlers, cavalry and Indians, lawmen and outlaws. Canadians could consequently write different versions of their different West against the pervasive American version that regularly threatened to incorporate Canada into its imaginative space.

Writing the Canadian West foregrounded more the processes of narrative than the product of the West and the Western, which is to say that there is a distinct metafictional element in much of this Canadian fiction. Thus Howard O'Hagan's Tay John (1939) begins -562- with the problem of naming the protagonist. The title is the English version of the French version, Tête Jaune, of the blond Indian protagonist's original Shushwap name, which also meant "yellow head." Poised between Indian and white names, Indian and white mythologies, this ambiguously mythic hero only sporadically inhabits his novel and finally walks, apparently, back into the earth from which he was miraculously born to inscribe on that earth and in the text a circle of problematic emptiness. The novel itself is mostly the telling of not telling his story: "Indeed, to tell a story is to leave most of it untold," Jack Denham, the main narrator of Tay John, finally admits before he turns the novel over to another who does no better. "You have the feeling you have not reached the story itself, but have merely assaulted the surrounding solitude."

As Tay John suggests, a different dialectic between white and Indian characterizes the Canadian Western as compared to the American. The American vision of Manifest Destiny necessarily casts Native American people as the savage "other" who must be defeated, supplanted. In Canada, however, and perhaps as a reflection of Canada's own sense of marginality, the Indian is more often portrayed as an alternative than as an enemy. In W. O. Mitchell's The Vanishing Point (1973), for example, a teacher at a reserve school sets out to civilize his prize pupil but she ends up Indianizing him. Or in Robert Kroetsch's Gone Indian (1973), the protagonist, a United States graduate student, finally finds — after the pattern of Grey Owl (alias Archibald Bellaney) — his real life as a fake Indian in the Canadian north. Or in a rather different vein Rudy Wiebe can "doubt the official given history" of the Canadian West. To tell "another" and "maybe even truer" side of the story, he writes novels such as The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) that radically deconstruct the official history and the Western form on which they are based. Much the same deconstructive enterprise also informs Peter Such's Riverrun (1973), Canada's most Eastern Western and a powerful account of the extermination of the Beothuk in Newfoundland when the natural cycle of their existence (one of the Joycean references of Such's title) was broken by intruding whites. Or, again in a comic vein, George Bowering in Burning Water (1980) and Caprice (1987) portrays impossibly contemporary, ironically postmodern Indians (but no more unlikely, it must be stressed, than any other depiction), whereas -563- Philip Kreiner's Contact Prints (1987) emphasizes the imposture implicit in any white rendering of Native life and art.

In other ways, too, novels of the Canadian West contravene the American Western. Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel (1964) portrays an old woman, not a young man, who is searching for a Western escape from the limitations that circumscribe her life. Moreover, this search takes, in part, the odd form of lighting out from the retirement home, not for the frontier. Laurence, in her first Canadian novel, graphically reverses the phallic-thrust teleology of the American Western, the celebration of the conquering of a new land as the simultaneous claiming of a future of boundless possibility. Hagar Shipley, Laurence's protagonist, has most of her life behind her. But she still has to come home to that life, to admit what it has been, to come to terms with it, to reinvent herself as the product of a particular Canadian West (instead of inventing the West as an expression of the id's unbridled desire — male desire, of course).

When the protagonist in The Stone Angel came home, so, too, did the author. After living in and writing of Africa, Laurence returned imaginatively to the small town in Manitoba where she grew up, renamed it Manawaka, and began a series of fictions that soon established her as one of Canada's most respected authors. Both the Manawaka novels and the writing of those novels illustrate another distinguishing feature of Canadian fiction. In contradistinction to the Thomas Wolfe claim that "you can't go home again," Canadian writers insist that you can and you must. Or differently put, if the American dream is a dream of the future, a vision of what the country (and/or the representative citizen) might be when it has become all that it should be, the Canadian dream is, in Robert Kroetsch's evocative wording, "a dream of origins." Where you originally come from is more important than where you are finally going, which is, after all, as The Stone Angel points out even with its graveyard title, only to death. In her Manawaka novels, Laurence especially asserts claims of place and past, claims that are regularly gendered female instead of male — and this too is typical of much Canadian fiction.

The Canadian West has produced some of the country's best realistic fiction — works such as Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh (1925) or Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel (1954) — It has also -564- produced some of Canada's best historiographic metafiction (Linda Hutcheon's useful term). Sheila Watson's The Double Hook (1959) crosses the story of an isolated and perhaps Indian community with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and then poises the account between Christianity and Coyote, the Native trickster deity. Or in Robert Harlow's Scann (1972) the telling of a self-serving mythopoeic history of a British Columbia town self-destructs (the manuscript is burnt) at the end and yet remains as the novel. Or Jack Hodgin's west-coast magic realism conjoins Vancouver Island and Ireland in a fantastic Invention of the World (1977) as both the establishing of a fraudulent religious community and the subsequent attempts to counter and recount that story. Similarly, Bowering, in Burning Water, intersperses the history of George Vancouver's heroic mapping of the British Columbia coast with the account of another George (Bowering himself) recounting it and thereby flaunts the problematic narrativity of both "stories," while Daphne Marlatt, in Ana Historic (1988), shows that Ana /woman is not without history/story at all, either in the present or in the past.

Another avenue to effective fiction, and one seen in both Canadian Westerns and "Easterns," was to make novels out of the very impediments to their production — a limited audience, a "colonial cringe" mentality that denigrated anything Canadian, traditions (both English and French) of distrusting and/or censoring literature. Moreover, the paradigmatic story of the country well might be its reluctance to sanction any official story. "Canadian literature," Kroetsch has claimed, "is the autobiography of a culture that insists it will not tell its story." Or as Sam Solecki has observed, "No other established literature treats national identity as a question." No wonder a number of novels are oblique and paradoxical narratives that tell of not telling, or that "the paralyzed artist" — one of Margaret Atwood's chapter titles in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature — is a common Canadian protagonist. In Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House (1949), for example, Philip Bentley's failure to be an artist is so pervasive that even the recounting of it must be turned over to his wife. Or David Canaan in Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley (1952) does not live up to either of his biblical names. Instead of going to the mountain top to write his story -565- and the story of his people, he dies early, and they are left bookless, still in the valley of artlessness, with no redeeming vision of themselves. Yet that story and that vision constitute the novel itself.

Such works represent the novel "written under erasure." They also illustrate Canadian deference and deferral with a vengeance — the great Canadian novel as the novel that best avoids advancing any claims to greatness. In this context, Ross is the premier eraser, and his As For Me and My House has been put forward as Canada's "paradigmatic text." Philip Bentley's failings as an artist and then as a minister and a husband are rendered in his wife's highly problematic account of an unhappy year the couple spends in what seems (everything in this novel is questionable) a narrow and restrictive small prairie town aptly misnamed Horizon. That calculated misnomer situates both place and promise elsewhere even as it also denies the difference between center and circumference, situation and defining circumstances. And the novel itself similarly becomes what Kroetsch terms "the missing text," an "unwritten novel" implicit in Mrs. Bentley's diary entries addressed to a fiction that is not there.

After the late sixties, however, and through the seventies and the eighties, fiction, unquestionably, is there. Margaret Atwood has recently observed that, if she were now redoing Survival, she would downplay "The Paralyzed Artist" chapter. Canadian authors began, in the sixties, to write in unprecedented number, and they did so for a number of reasons: the stocktaking engendered by the country's centennial, a sense of national pride in opposing United States policy in Vietnam, a desire to be (in Canada as well as in Quebec) "masters in our own house," the fact that the Canada Council had begun to fund substantially writers and publishers, and a growing demand, especially in the schools, for Canadian texts. Canadian writers also began to produce works of unprecedented quality. Indeed, the variety and the scope of the novels written during the last twenty-five years preclude any substantial assessment of types and trends or even of major authors. So I will not try to come up with rubrics that might contain, say, Hugh Hood's ongoing twelve-volume roman fleuve documentation of twentieth-century Canada collectively titled The New Age (1975-) and Susan Kerslake's brief, lyric, intensely poetic and almost impenetrable Penumbra (1984); Timothy Findley's exuberant reimagining of the story of Noah in Not Wanted on the Voyage-566- (1984) and Aritha van Herk's rereading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the far north in Places Far from Ellesmere (1990). Instead I will merely name a few authors (in addition to those already noted) whom anyone seriously interested in English Canadian fiction should read: Robertson Davies, Mavis Gallant, Janette Turner Hospital, Joy Kogawa, Michael Ondaatje, Leon Rooke, Audrey Thomas. But most of all I would here rename Atwood herself. From Surfacing (1972), early hailed as a feminist classic, to the dystopian warning of The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and the reprising in Cat's Eye (1988) of her major fictional and feminist concerns, Atwood has been a protean novelist, engaged and challenging. She especially exemplifies the accomplishment of recent English Canadian fiction on both the national and an international level. There is even a newsletter and an official society devoted to the study of her work, and a writer can hardly be more established than that.

For French Canada the story of narrative coming into being is, if anything, even more impressive. The Durham Report of 1840 described the French Canadians as a poor people, without history and without literature, and saw them as destined to be soon swallowed up by English Canada. They themselves had other ideas, one of which was the "revenge of the cradle." Huge farm families would ensure that the habitant survived. Literature could also prove Lord Durham wrong. The first French Canadian novel, L'Influence d'un livre by Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé, had appeared in 1837, the same year as the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada that led to the Durham Report. A melodramatic account of an alchemist's adventures, including his search for a main de gloire, the dried hand of a hanged murderer, this first novel was followed by other romantic fictions, some of which were soon given a more historic cast. Coincidentally, one of the best of the historical romances is Les Anciens Canadiens (1863; Canadians of Old, 1974) by Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé, Philippe-Ignace's father, who published his own first novel when he was well into his seventies.

Novels such as Les Anciens Canadiens, set in the Seven Years War and after, grounded French Canadian life in history and in surmounting the setbacks of that history. Another fictional development grounded the continuation of that life in remaining on the land. What -567- has been called le roman de la terre made its appearance in 1846 with Patrice Lacombe's La terre paternelle, a celebration of French Canadian heritage passed from father to son and centered in the family farm. In these novels, British Canada was not the only force that had to be resisted. In Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine (1916; English translation, 1921), one of the best of the novels of the land, the female protagonist must choose between two suitors, one offering her escape to the wealth and ease of industrial New England and the other only the harsh country life that she has always known. Continuing that life of, among other things, female sacrifice in the service of patriarchal order, Maria marries the second of the two, a decision vindicated in the novel by the "voices" of the land. Their directive is to "stay in the province where our fathers have stayed, and live as they have lived, to obey the silent command which formed in their hearts and which passed to ours, and which we must pass on to our numerous children: In the country of Quebec nothing must die and nothing must change."

Change comes nonetheless, and one measure of that change is Felix-Antoine Savard's Menaud, maître-draveur (1937; Master of the River, 1976), a masterful reprising of Maria Chapdelaine in which a logger attempts to heed the warning sounded by the voices in the land in Hémon's novel but succeeds only in driving himself insane to repeat endlessly a tag phrase from the same crucial passage that had earlier inspired him to action. A poetic study of self-sacrifice is transmuted into a psychological study of self-disintegration; the prophetic warning that "strangers have come" to take "almost all the power…almost all the money" gives way to the flat assertion that "Strangers came! Strangers came!…," which, in its mad reiteration, suggests mostly that they will go on coming to further the victimization of Menaud and his people. Yet the darker implications of the latter novel are not, it should be noted, entirely missing from the earlier one. Maria makes her crucial decision only because the choice she would have much preferred has already been precluded by the death of her fiancé, François Paradis (Paradise lost?), in the frozen north.

Although Maria's life is movingly portrayed, the contemporary reader, especially if of an anticlerical and/or feminist bent, is apt to question the heavy constraints under which she acquiescently labors. -568-

Other novels more explicitly countered the ethos of le roman de la terre and particularly the idea that the twentieth century could be faced on the basis of a nineteenth-century reinscription of eighteenthcentury French ideals about country living and landownership. Albert Laberge's La Scouine (1918; Bitter Bread, 1977), for example, is a sustained indictment of a brutal rural existence represented not so much by the work of the harvester as by the work of the gelder. Or Ringuet's (Philippe Panneton's) Trente arpents (1938; Thirty Acres, 1960) describes how old Euchariste Moisan is tricked out of his thirty acres by one son and sent to visit another in the United States where he remains in permanent exile and cultural isolation, unable to speak to even his own grandchildren. Euchariste ends up a nightwatchman in an American factory, a total reversal of the day work he earlier did on his Canadian farm and the very fate from which the farm should have saved him. Still more recently, Marie-Claire Blais, in novels such as Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965; A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, 1966) can comically transmogrify the whole pastoral/ Catholic tradition of the earlier fiction with such telling details as brutalized children in a large farm family who are regularly identified only by number or the religious daughter who passes from the convent to the brothel barely noticing the change, with, indeed, "tears in her eyes" that there were "so many strangers who needed her."

Laberge's La Scouine and Ringuet's Trente arpents anticipate the massive social and literary changes that Quebec experienced in the post-World War II era. More and more the province went in exactly the directions earlier works had warned against, and the novel, in documenting those transgressions, changed too. The enduring truths of the family farm gave way to tales of disordered city living such as Roger Lemelin's best-selling novel of urban poverty and crime, Au pied de la pente douce (1944; The Town Below, 1948), or Gabrielle Roy's landmark novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945; The Tin Flute, 1947), which studies the case of the Lacasse family as they try in ways both heroic and tawdry to transcend poverty. Early recognized as one of Quebec's and Canada's major novels, Bonheur d'occasion especially situates fiction firmly in the city. Dreams of Arcadia can still persist, but as dreams, not as recipes. When, in Roy's subsequent Alexandre Chenevert (1954; The Cashier, 1955), Alexandre at one point imagines living in the country, he does so as one measure of the -569- many limitations of his city life, not as the author's career advice to bank clerks.

Urbanization and industrialization led, as feared, to a deemphasizing of religion. One sign of this change was the precipitous decline of the provincial birthrate, which went, following World War II, from one of the highest to one of the lowest in the world. Another sign was the increasingly anticlerical tone of much of the fiction. In Gerard Bessette's Le Libraire (1960; Not for Every Eye, 1977), for example, a Bartleby of a book clerk prefers nor to sell (discreetly and for a high price, of course) works on the Index. The hypocrisy of both the book and the religion business justifies the clerk's final theft of the texts in question and his selling them cheaply on a more open — and honest — market.

Other changes also followed the move from the family farm to the nation's factories. One does not work in the latter in the same way and to the same end as on the former, especially during a depression. The consideration that the Great Depression was not countered in Canada by any government measures such as the New Deal prompted French Canadians to begin asking just what kind of deal they were getting from their national government and whether a number of contracts did not require negotiation. World War II and Canada's reluctance to come to the aid of France as opposed to how much the country was willing to sacrifice for the sake of England furthered this process that culminated in the "Quiet Revolution," the radical shift in Quebec values witnessed after the war.

The Quiet Revolution was accompanied by a not-so-quiet literary revolution. As in the nineteenth century, literature was deemed a force of paramount social significance. Fiction could both express and create the new identities, individual and collective, that were coming into being. Thus Jacques Ferron advocates and allegorizes Quebec's need for political independence in La Nuit (1965; Quince Jam, 1977), an account of an ordinary man mysteriously called from slumber to a night of portentous violence. Still more explicitly, Jacques Godbout's Le Couteau sur la table (1965; The Knife on the Table, 1968) conjoins the violence of World War II with the first bombs of the FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec), and the knife of the title is finally raised against the Québécois narrator's former English Canadian mistress, Patricia, and the rule of her people. Or in -570- another novel from the same year, Hubert Aquin's Prochain épisode (1965; English translation, 1972), the author, arrested as a suspected terrorist, creates a narrator similarly arrested who, to pass the time while he is incarcerated and to hold suicide at bay, sets out to write a novel that is itself another doubled and displaced version of the author's/narrator's predicament. The result is an intricately crafted parable of revolution both demanded and deferred as well as an early expression of Aquin's genius for ambivalence and angst. And as Aquin's first novel also illustrates, in much of this fiction of rebellion, form, too, is revolutionized. Linear narratives charting a way to some rural Bildungsroman fulfillment are replaced by inventive and experimental fictions (often metafictions) celebrating breaks, bits and pieces, fits and starts. Literary effect is also fractured. For example, in Roch Carrier's La guerre, Yes Sir! (1968; English translation, 1970) when a young man cuts off his hand to avoid being drafted into a war that seems to have little to do with him, we have a telling example of how a Québécois must mutilate himself in order to maintain his own identity, but when the dismembered part is subsequently used as a hockey puck, political parable suddenly shifts to total black humor farce.

Another feature of recent Québécois fiction is the use of joaul, a French dialect that takes its name from its pronunciation of cheval (horse). This dialect was spoken in rural Quebec but more and more became in modified form (incorporating Anglicisms and English words) the language of the lower classes in Montreal. It was also long regarded as proof of second-class status and as quite unsuitable for any literary purpose other than marking such status. But starting with Jacques Renaud's Le cassé (1964) and Claude Jasmin's Pleure pas, Germaine (1965), novelists exploited the literary possibilities of joaul (its different pronunciation, fractured syntax, graphic obscenities) and made it, appropriately, the main vehicle for explorations of alienated proletarian life. One of the best of these novels is Godbout's Salut Galarneau! (1967; Hail Galarneau!, 1970), the "memoirs and reflections" of a hot-dog vendor rendered in a joaul of Rabelaisian verve. Marie-Claire Blais's Un Joualonais, sa Joualonie (1973; St. Lawrence Blues, 1974) soon parodies the excessive and inauthentic use of joaul (intellectuals discuss language while workers die), but its literary credentials had already been fully established. -571-

The literary credentials of French Canadian fiction are also, by this time, fully established thanks to the writers already noted (or to be noted) and many others, only some of whom I will here name: Yves Beauchemin, Jacques Benoit, Monique Bosco, Réjean Ducharme, Diane Giquère, Suzanne Paradis, Jacques Poulin, Michel Tremblay. And I use the adjective French Canadian rather than Québécois because two of Canada's major Francophone writers come from outside Quebec. Gabrielle Roy was born and raised in Manitoba and sets some of her fiction there, for example, La Petite Pouled'eau (1950; Where Nests the Water Hen, 1970), a poetic account of the small heroisms whereby a French family survives in the isolated north of that province. Antonine Maillet is Acadian and writes of the French in or scattered from the Maritime settlements, as with Pélagie-La-Charrett (1979; Pelagie, 1982), probably her best novel and a mythic account of an indomitable late eighteenth-century Acadian woman gathering together a group of her people in the southern United States and conducting them, "by the back door," to history, story, and home — in short, back to Nova Scotia, which was, we tend to forget, also New France.

That conjunction of Nova Scotia and New France suggests a large question about the novels hitherto discussed. How do the English fictions and the French interrelate? Do we see mostly accidental resemblances (the result of two European traditions being transplanted to and developing in roughly the same broad expanse of northern North America over the same historical period) or the expression of some larger unity (the ways shared geography and shared history have shaped literature)? By and large, English critics (such as Ronald Sutherland in Second Image) have argued the latter, and French critics (for example, Jean-Charles Falardeau in Notre société et son roman) have assumed the former, thereby replicating the different way Canadians and Americans tend to view one another across the 49th parallel, one asserting essential difference and the other largely denying it.

In All the Polarities, an aptly titled comparison of the English Canadian novel and le roman québécois, Philip Stratford maintains that differences still outweigh similarities. He sees the English novel as grounded in historical realism and the documentation of both place and protagonist and as inviting moral evaluation more than -572- psychological understanding, whereas le roman québécois is little concerned with particulars of time and place or the minutiae of individual lives but instead sets forth a highly symbolic rendering of the protagonist's psyche in both its conscious and subconscious manifestations and invites the reader to share in that experience rather than to judge it. Stratford thereby suggests that the comparison provided over a century ago by Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, an early novelist who was also Quebec's first prime minister, still holds true. Chauveau argued that the two literatures resembled the famous double-spiral staircase of the Château de Chambord, a staircase that two people could climb without meeting until they reached the top. Except, of course, that fictional traditions, as opposed to staircases, have no tops, just as they can also twine together in more complicated forms than the double spiral.

As Barbara Godard, in "The Discourse of the Other: Canadian Literature and the Question of Ethnicity," has recently emphasized, "definitions of Canadian literature have developed on a binary model," and that model of an English-French interface "mirroring the official bilingual policy of the country…has precluded the discussion of writing by ethnic writers." The hyphen separating French or English from Canada situates each literature as a dislocation, a writing into being of difference. But, Godard continues, "what began as a thematic representation of difference in the nineteenth century, a difference between Quebec and Canadian literatures and those of the mother countries, has become in contemporary Canadian and Quebec literatures, a difference within, linguistically inscribed." In short, it is easy to stay on that double-spiraled staircase, caught in what E. D. Blodgett has termed "the bind of binarism." It is easy, too, not to see how much this metaphor of double defining differences precludes noticing still other differences. Is there, for example, an Icelandic or, say, a West Indian turn anywhere in all that twisting? And do not Native people have anything to say of, to, or in the literary structures that are being erected on what was, after all, originally their land?

Joy Kogawa has observed that "a Canadian is a hyphen and… we're diplomats by birth." The hyphen in ethnic-Canadian leaves considerable room for negotiation and might even in the absence of any "codified Canadian-ness to which one could even credibly pre-573- tend" (Robert Schwartzwald's formulation) take precedence over the two connected terms and particularly the second one, leaving for the ethnic-Canadian novelist the task of writing the hypen, the conjoining disjunction, the break that is also in part a bridge. No recent writer has done this better than Kogawa herself in Obasan (1981). Yet, paradoxically, her novel about Canada's brutal refusal to allow Japanese Canadians to be Canadians during and after World War II is itself essentially Canadian and comes out of a long tradition. "We are all immigrants even if we were born here," Margaret Atwood has Susanna Moodie observe in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), and to choose to remain is to choose "a violent duality." As a character in Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) notes of the killing of a white woman that is part of this intricately structured chronicle of four generations of life in Vancouver's Chinatown: "Under the strain of bigotry, they were outlaws. Chinamen didn't make the law of the land, so they would always live outside of it. In fact, it was a crime just for them to be here."

Immigrant and ethnic novelists such as Naim Kattan, John Marlyn, Alice (Poznanska) Parizeau, Josef Škvorecký, W. D. Valgardson, Adele Wiseman, and others have charted the violence and duality of negotiating the divide between something else and Canada. For example, Final Decree (1982) by George Jonas tells of a protagonist who comes in his twenties (as did the author) from Hungary to Canada; who marries a woman of partial Hungarian descent but cannot cope with her New World values, especially as they are shaped by contemporary feminism to be totally at odds with his Old World ways, just as he cannot reconcile memories of his European past with his ongoing Canadian present. Neither can he cope with divorce and the prospect of losing his wife and their two children. During protracted legal proceedings, he shoots her lawyer, and the novel ends with him awaiting a final decree on a charge of murder, a trial in which he is doing no better than he earlier did in divorce court.

Of course not all ethnic protagonists fare as disastrously as does Jonas's Kazmer Harcsa. In Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1977) Canada could not possibly live up to Ginger's Irish dreams. Nevertheless, this character retains his integrity and survives his numerous setbacks by finally saying, graphically, "piss on this." During the course of his subsequent trial for public indecency Ginger even -574- manages to win his wife back. But most of the characters in immigrant and ethnic novels are ambivalently poised between paradigms of defeat and possibilities of victory or at least survival. Thus Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) ends with Duddy well on the way toward the wealth he has so avidly pursued even though he is again temporarily short of funds. To reach this uncertain position, he has trampled over various other characters, particularly Yvette, his French Canadian girlfriend who has shared in his aspirations and efforts but who, by the novel's end, cannot countenance all his means. So it is hard to say which best finally defines Duddy — what he is in the process of gaining or what he has already lost. An ambiguous dialectic of dream and disaster also characterizes Austin Clarke's novels about Caribbean immigrants in Toronto, such as Storm of Fortune (1971), while a slightly different reading of that dialectic is seen in Harold Sonny Ladoo's Yesterdays (1974) when a Trinidadian Hindu decides that his mission should be to go forth to convert and subjugate the Canadians. Or to run that Canadian/ Caribbean connection and journey the other way, both Clarke with The Prime Minister (1977) and Neil Bissoondath in A Casual Brutality (1988) show that in the hyphenated Canadian context, as opposed to a plain Canadian one, Thomas Wolfe was right in positing you can't go home (to "home" in the old sense) again, for the attempt to do so only demonstrates how much the hyphen has become home. But Obasan especially charts the life of dislocation in between, as it positions the protagonist, Naomi Nakane, between her two aunts, Aunt Emily, "a word warrior" who strives for justice and for some acknowledgment of the wrongs done to her and her people, and Obasan (the Japanese word for "aunt"), who tries, just as unsuccessfully, to remain silently Japanese in the face of inflicted disasters. By gradually recovering and remembering her own story, Naomi speaks (Aunt Emily) the silence (Obasan) at the heart of this novel and in the process gives the lie to the country's claim of a mosaic ideal and its view of itself as a kinder, gentler North American nation.

Native writers are also more and more giving the novelistic lie to other (read white) renderings of Native life. Admittedly, much of this other rendering is, as already noted, sympathetic. But there is still a crucial difference between the depiction of harsh arctic survival in -575- Yves Theriault's Agaguk (1958; English translation, 1976) as compared to Markoosie's Harpoon of the Hunter (1970). Theriault, although of partly Native ancestry, necessarily writes from outside Inuit experience. Markoosie writes from within that radically changing experience and that makes a difference. Agaguk ends with the heroic hunter-protagonist allowing his infant daughter, born in a difficult time, to live (she would have traditionally been put to death). Harpoon ends with its heroic hunter refusing to be rescued, drifting on an ice pan out to sea and to death. Each conclusion is presented as a parable of still more change to come. Theriault sees promise in that process; Markoosie, only further desolation.

Numerous other novels, such as Maria Campbell's Halfbreed (1973) and Beatrice Cullerton's In Search of April Raintree (1983), present firsthand accounts of the fracturing of Native or Métis culture (especially as seen in the partial breakdown of the family and the forced separation of parents and children) and document the contradictions inherent in the ideal of total assimilation (such as the fact that white society refuses to countenance the very assimilation that it demands of Natives), as well as how those contradictions are endured (partly through the survival of the traditional family and particularly the grandmother). As Margery Fee has recently pointed out, In Search of April Raintree and Jeannette C. Armstrong's Slash (1985) especially "debunk the 'choices' that white acculturation has forced on Native peoples in Canada." Similarly, in Joan Crates's Breathing Water (1990), a young Métis wife has to discover her own "voices" from her past, which she cannot do in her marriage to her wealthy white former employer. Or in Thomas King's Medicine River (1990) the male protagonist comes back from a successful career in Toronto to Medicine River (obviously based on Lethbridge, Alberta) and partly comes to terms with his own dispossessed childhood by standing in as the father for a child not his own. The novel slyly advocates self-determination (the vacillating protagonist, named Will, does come to merit that name) and self-portrayal (Will as a photographer refutes the convenient white hypothesis about Native apprehensions regarding representation).

Perhaps the best book on the whole difficult question of rendering Native experience in white forms is The Book of Jessica (1989), a novel/memoir/script/trial transcript about authoring and acting a play -576- based on Maria Campbell's painful life as a Métis woman and an account that records the additional pain of having that experience appropriated and romanticized by the very people who inflicted it. Written jointly by Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths, the white author/actress who "represented" her, The Book of Jessica powerfully records both sides of an extended case of cross-cultural artistic negotiation/theft. Of course, one solution to this problem of expropriation is to make the whole process of writing and publishing mostly Native, as with Jeannette Armstrong's En'Owkin Writing Center (from an Okanagan word meaning, roughly, "a challenge and incentive given through discussing and thinking together to provide the best possible answer to any question") along with its associated publishing house, Theytus ("preserving for the purpose of handing down") Books in Penticton, British Columbia, or Fifth House Publishing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The Native novel as one product of the country's most recent literary "explosion" should feel right at home, for one of the most obvious features of Canadian fiction is its recent flourishing. The Canadian Renaissance, so far as the novel is concerned, is right now, the present generation, from, roughly, the sixties forward. There is something exhilarating about the fact that the best writers are not, mostly, safely dead but very much alive and writing. One can study the kaleidoscopic interplay of texts, as a major literature comes into being (and the unique opportunity that the Canadian novel allows in this respect has not yet been adequately apprised). One can also study unfolding careers (and here the opportunity has been seized, especially with respect to Atwood). One can study, too, the ways in which a new literature has been institutionalized and canonized in a partly postfeminist and even postcanonical time.

As late as 1965, Northrop Frye could maintain that any "rigorous" attempt to ascertain the "genuine classics [of] Canadian literature would become only a debunking project leaving it a poor naked alouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity." Fortunately, there are now many texts for the picking, and the Canadian novel has been canonized even as it was coming into its own. Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, for example, sets forth both the top ten Canadian novels and the top one hundred, as voted on by "teachers and critics across the country." The top ten, -577- incidentally, are Laurence's The Stone Angel, Robertson Davies's Fifth Business (1970), Ross's As For Me and My House, Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley, Roy's Bonheur d'occasion, Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Watson's The Double Hook, Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), and Laurence's The Diviners (1974). There is, of course, something dubious in any such listing. The inclusion of only one Francophone text, for example, is particularly suspect, nor do any enunciated criteria justify placing MacLennan and Mitchell ahead of, say, Aquin or Anne Hébert (and it is hard to imagine what such criteria might be). But, as one of the participants in Taking Stock pointed out, the first Nobel Prize for literature awarded in 1901 while Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hardy were all alive was given to the French poet René-FrançoisArmand Sully-Prudhomme — a fact of literary history that anyone assessing the relative merits of different writers would do well to remember. Still, canonization has consolidated the recently achieved status of the novel, as is attested by a whole new industry of publishing, teaching, and writing on Canadian texts. Scholarly editions are available (at last a Canadian Wacousta instead of the American one), while series such as McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Library make literally hundreds of works available for public school and university courses. (I would here parenthetically note that Canadians of my generation typically did not read a single Canadian novel during the course of their public schooling — a situation that has now radically changed.)

Robert Lecker has recently maintained that the Canadian "canon is the conservative product of the conservative [academic] institution that brought it to life." Concerned with nationalism and with naming, "the canonizers" exhibit "a preoccupation with history and historical placement; an interest in topicality, mimesis, verisimilitude, and documentary presentation; a bias in favor of the native over the cosmopolitan; a concern with traditional over innovative forms; a pursuit of the created before the uncreated." All in all, they prefer "texts that are ordered, orderable, safe." Lecker's argument with the canon as so far conceived brings me to another major point, the observation that conservative novels tend to be valued more than experimental ones, and consequently Canadian fiction is generally -578- perceived as being formalistically old-fashioned. The only structurally idiosyncratic novel in Taking Stock's "top ten" is The Double Hook, and its textual experiments derive from Eliot and early modernism. Conversely, Robertson Davies, despite his deployment of Jungian archetypes and esoteric learning, has been aptly described as the twentieth century's "oldest living Victorian novelist," yet he writes the second "most important" novel, whereas Ann Rosenberg's wonderfully inventive assessment of "beeing" and humanness, The Bee Book (1981), has been little noted and is now out of print.

Experimentation, particularly in English Canadian fiction, tends to be modest and modernist instead of a radical postmodern fracturing of language and form. Language does occasionally play with the breakdown of meaning as when Audrey Thomas "sees the 'other' in 'mother,'" as one critic notes, or Nicole Brossard conjoins both the sea ("la mer") and the bitterness ("l'amer") of the sea with mother ("la mère") in her L'Amèr, ou le chapitre effrité (1977; These Our Mothers; or, The Disintegrating Chapter, 1983), which is itself a merging of poetry and fiction. And experiments with form do tend to be more the kind of generic blurring seen in L'Amèr rather than radical fracturings of the text. Michael Ondaatje, for example, similarly merges poetry and the novel in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) or autobiography and the novel in Running in the Family (1982). Or forms can be used to new ends as when Atwood creates her intriguing Lady Oracle (1977) out of the formulaic gothic romance, or André Major in his "deserteurs" trilogy uses the detective novel for a sustained symbolic assessment of Quebec during the 1970s.

The preponderance of women's novels in Canadian fiction is also obvious and deserves note. In contrast to the American 7 percent solution (the proportion of women writers in textbooks and anthologies that, according to Joanna Russ and others, a primarily male literary traffic will bear), the Canadian novel can show a 50 percent solution (Taking Stock's top ten) or even a 70 percent solution (the top ten when the readers of a national literary magazine and not mostly male academics do the voting). But for whatever reasons — a "deconstructionist urge to displace traditional authority," the conjunctions of "colonial space" (in Dennis Lee's usage) and feminine space, the absence of the frontier and its attendant male-centered

— 579-

myths, a national case of penis envy ("to be from the Canadas," a character in Susan Swan's 1983 novel, Biggest Modern Woman of the World, observes, "is to feel as women feel, cut off from the base of power") — Canadian fiction is strikingly feminine not just in the prevalence of women writers but also in the way in which women's experience and/or writing is regularly validated and sexual polarity is downplayed. Thus the Canadian Kiinstlerroman is typically a portrait of the artist, or the future artist, as a young woman, as in Laurence's A Bird in the House (1970), Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), or Audrey Thomas's Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island (1971), two novellas published as one novel and contrasting Munchmeyer's and Miranda Archer's different (as even their names suggest) ways toward different careers as writers. I would also here note that male Canadian writers regularly center novels on female characters and affirm female experience. Kroetsch, for example, in Badlands undoes a father's search for origins by having it both doubled and reversed by the daughter's subsequent search, which concludes with her renouncing his record and his rules. Or Aquin concludes Neige noire (1974; Hamlet's Twin, 1979) by affirming a lesbian love affair (lovers here portrayed as doing much better than the heterosexual partners in Aquin's earlier novels who generally managed to drive one or the other to murder or suicide).

But the main consequence of this writing in the feminine is a whole body of major works, only some of which I have previously noted, that give to Canadian fiction much of its force and effect. Angéline de Montbrun (1884; English translation, 1974) by Laure Conan (Marie-Louise-Félicité Angers), for example, tells of a young woman who, after the death of her father and a disfiguring facial injury, renounces her fiancé and immures herself in a convent where, in tortured diary entries, she voices her partly self-inflicted loss. It is a problematic fate that has been read differently by succeeding generations — most recently as "the huis clos of the patriarchal world" — yet the novel remains as a classic of nineteenth-century Quebec fiction. And my choice for the great twentieth-century Quebec novel would be Anne Hébert's Kamouraska (1970; English translation, 1982), a historic tale of nineteenth-century Quebec marriage and murder both gone very much awry, and, like Angéline, another example of the Canadian proclivity for the gothic. I would also here -580- note that a number of Quebec women writers have envisioned fiction through the lens of French feminism (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva) to produce experimental works that radically critique both patriarchal language and linear master narratives based on the epistemologies of the father. Thus Louky Bersianik's Le Piquenique sur l'Acropole: Cahiers d'Ancyl (1979) replaces Plato's Symposium with a more physical and feminist one and in the process situates the conscious murder of Iphigenia by her father, not Oedipus's unconscious killing of his father, as "the story at the heart of Western culture," and, on a more contemporary note, makes Lacan subject to "Lacanadienne." Or Jovette Marchessault, a radical lesbian of Native American descent, seeks, in novels such as La Mèredes herbes (1980; Mother of the Grass, 1989), to conjoin "the ecstatic vision of the shaman to the heightened consciousness of the contemporary feminist," thereby to establish a Native and matrilineal language and myth. Or Nicole Brossard's Le Désert Mauve (1987; Mauve Deser t, 1990), as a feminist text incorporating its own intertextuality, is a novel, a reading of that novel, and a translation of the novel. Like the desert in which it is set, the work, too, "is indescribable" (try visualizing a file folder in the middle of the text — the reader simply must see for him/herself). But if this novel shows just how successfully experimental Canadian fiction, especially in its Québécois manifestations, can sometimes be, it also shows those experiments as thoroughly tied to tradition. The author of the first "Mauve Desert" in Mauve Desert is Laure Angstelle; the translator of Angstelle's "novel" is Maude Laures; both names obviously evoke Laure Conan whose Angéline de Montbrun has here been transposed to a starker and more vivid setting (a mauve desert rather than a brown mountain) and has been thus incorporated into a different text that especially dramatizes differences in the text.

Another feature of the contemporary Canadian novel is its cosmopolitan maturity. It can, as Mauve Desert demonstrates, confidently claim a place on the same stage as its American cousin instead of trying to pass off, say, a Winnipeg "Love Story" as a New York one (indeed, with the lesbian love stories of Mauve Desert we have come a long way from boy meets girl in Winnipeg or New York). Or Thomas Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982), to take another example, has even been called "a great [contemporary] American novel" for its -581- idyllic portrayal of the power of dreams and of baseball. If Canadians are finally competing again (for we do have that first entry) in the Great American Novel Sweepstakes, other likely candidates are Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), with its vision of religious America run amok to produce the nightmare that has always haunted the dream of a new and perfect life in the new land, or Victor-Lévy Beaulieu's three-volume novel/biography Monsieur Melville (1978; On the Eve of Moby-Dick, When Moby-Dick Blows, and After Moby-Dick; or, The Reign of Poetry, 1984) in which Beaulieu as Melville pursues Melville as Moby-Dick. Moreover, and as Atwood's updating of The Scarlet Letter or Beaulieu's researching for Melville/ Moby-Dick each suggests, the Canadian novel also claims the right to rewrite and reread a whole range of other master texts. Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), for example, reenvisions the biblical flood to counter the patriarchal narratives of Noah and of God, while Bersianik's L'Euguelionne (1976; English translation, 1981), as a French-Canadian feminist anti-Bible, totally subverts God's story of man, and Freud's and Lacan's accounts too. Or in Famous Last Words (1981) Findley has Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley write on a bare wall (a wall is all that is left to him) his account of what his fascist "age demanded" — which is hardly authenticity, biblical (that writing on the wall) or otherwise: "All I have written here," Mauberley can finally claim, "is true; except the lies." Still more intricately, Aquin, in his last great novel Neige noire, redoes Hamlet as an attempt to make a snuff movie version of a television production of the play. In this Hamlet with a difference two Ophelias survive by rescripting their part and falling passionately in love with each other. Or — another recasting of Shakespeare — Leon Rooke's Shakespeare's Dog (1983) is a "woof-woof and arf-arf damn you all" directed at Elizabethan England as well as a canine account of the Bard's beginnings. Still different workings of intertextuality are van Herk's Places Far from Ellesmere (1990), which conjoins setting and text, the work in hand and the work read in that work (Tolstoy's Anna Karenina) as all "geografictions" and ultimately "unpossessible" ("Oh Anna," Places ends, freeing Tolstoy's protagonist from his death sentencing), or Kroetsch's Badlands (1975), as a search for source turns on an archaeological textual layering of virtually every quest narrative in Western literature, from Gilgamesh to-582- Atwood's Surfacing (1972). As all of the novels just noted attest, "parody and irony" have "become major forms of both formal and ideological critique in Canadian fiction" — so much so that Linda Hutcheon's Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (her subtitle) is conducted almost entirely in terms of those tropes of retextualization.

Claims of prominence, however, sometimes still ring a little hollow, like the earlier political promise that the twentieth century would belong to Canada, and Canadian novels frequently display a certain anxiety of influence especially as they try to write the United States into its place as other, elsewhere, and different. Consider, in this context, Atwood's opening sentence in Surfacing noting "the disease…spreading up from the south" or, later, the fact that the callous killers of the heron, taken first to be Americans, turn out to be Canadians, but are "still Americans," and "what's in store for us [other Canadians], what we are turning into" (unless, like the narrator, we can turn into something more mythically elemental than the "astronaut finish" of these "Americans"). Similarly, in Susan Swan's Biggest Modern Woman, after the protagonist Anna Swan (who is based on an actual nineteenth-century Nova Scotia giantess) joins the circus and marries "the Kentucky Giant," Martin van Buren Bates, she soon finds that she has dwindled from a giantess into a wife and that this transformation especially mirrors Canadian/American contrasts. As she at one point writes to her mother, she must now play the "wifely manipulator whose sole purpose is moderating the behavior of her husband," and in so doing she is "acting out America's relationship to the Canadas. Martin is the imperial ogre while I play the role of the genteel mate who believes that if everyone is wellmannered, we can inhabit a peaceable kingdom. That is the national dream of the Canadas, isn't it? A civilized garden where lions lie down with the doves." The irony cuts both ways, undermining each dream by opposing them (note that the "national dream of the Canadas" is presented as a question), but not erasing their differences. And her husband's different dream of a world of giants (he advocates a eugenics program to that end — the American dream of the world as "me") is a dream of no difference, even though as a giant he is different. The paradoxes of differences proliferate to deny the sameness that would subsume Anna (Canada) into this marriage. Never-583- theless, Anna still married Martin even though there was a preferable and authentically Canadian male giant back home. Circuses have their necessities too.

At a time when the United States is flooding the globe and especially Canada with its pop-products, Canadian assertions of distinct difference and achieved postcolonial status are not totally convincing. The chronological implications of the term "postcolonial" serve to place any history of cultural subservience safely in the past, yet rampant American neoimperialism hardly warrants such placing. This combination of postcolonial aspirations and more colonial apprehensions constitutes what I would term the "paracolonial perplex" that characterizes much of the Canadian fiction asserting — and doubting — national identity, as evidenced, for example, by the two novels noted in the previous paragraph. I would also suggest that this same "paracolonial perplex" partly explains a Canadian proclivity to set novels in Africa. There is a whole body of work — what W. H. New has called "Africanadiana" — that both explores and distances colonialism, some of the best examples of which are Dave Godfrey's The New Ancestors (1972), Audrey Thomas's Blown Figures (1974), or the early works of Margaret Laurence. The West Indies has also provided a setting that serves much the same paracolonial project, as is seen in such novels as Atwood's Bodily Harm (1981), Kreiner's Heartlands (1984), and Bissoondath's A Casual Brutality.

Francophone and Anglophone; Eurocentric and Native American; oldest and newest; conservative and experimental; conservative and feminist; colonial, postcolonial, and paracolonial — this excess of adjectives does not bring the subject into clearer focus, and "The Novel in Canada" necessarily remains itself a fiction, a narration of narrations produced in a place that is as much a narrative entity as a geographical or a historical one. Or perhaps not so much a narrative entity as a discordance of different narratives; as Robert Kroetsch has recently claimed, the "very falling apart of our story is what holds our story — and us — together." Yet the French stories are different enough from the English stories, the western from the eastern, the immigrants' from the Native peoples', that we regularly wonder (as with the recent failure of Canada's Meech Lake accord) if this very excess of stories might not eventually undo the country itself. Moreover, the governing questions of which "Canada" to tell and what -584- novels to select for that telling constitute from the outset a kind of ouroboros trickster conjunction, a snake with its tale in its mouth, that tale being the recounting into existence of this particular snake. "Our fictions make us real," Kroetsch also asserts. One must pick one's fictions carefully, realizing that any picking is both an impossible and an enabling fiction.

Fortunately, Canadian fiction can sustain many pickings, many realities, and so exceeds any summary assessment such as the one here provided. As for all the authors and works I have overlooked, I can only acknowledge that their different stories are as valid as this account that leaves them out, which is to say that the master narrative of the Canadian novel might well be its resistance to master narratives, first to those imposed from Britain and the United States and then, following such training, to ones formulated in Canada as well. There is more to Canadian fiction than The Bush Garden or Butterfly on Rock or Patterns of Isolation or Sex and Violence or Survival or being Between Europe and America. The very divergences of these larger readings (and more could be provided, including A Due Sense of Differences) suggest, as Linda Hutcheon has recently observed in another context, that a postmodern "valuing of difference…makes particular sense in Canada." In this sense, the Canadian novel is especially Canadian in the very way in which it persistently unwrites and rewrites that problematic adjective, "Canadian."

Arnold E. Davidson

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Caribbean Fiction

Many contemporary writers and critics subscribe to the idea of the Caribbean as a distinct cultural as well as geographical entity with a coherent regional ethos beyond divisive national and linguistic premises. This view recontextualizes the literary history of the English-speaking Caribbean, which was defined historically as West Indian in recognition of the formative nature of its colonial relationship to Great Britain. An all-inclusive Pan-Caribbean approach to the literary history of the region reconceives the literature and culture of the English-speaking Caribbean as a New World phenomenon with a cultural validity that is distinct from the ideological values of Pan-Africanism and Commonwealth literature, which privilege Africa and Britain as ancestral landscapes. This historical inversion is a significant rerooting of literary and cultural history in the English-speaking Caribbean. An all-inclusive PanCaribbean approach privileges geographical locality and the affiliative relationships that derive from locality as formative factors in the postcolonial Caribbean.

The use of both West Indian and Caribbean to identify native space, and the interchangeability of these designations by so many writers and critics, attests to the fluidity of historical and cultural perspectives in the now independent nations of the English-speaking Caribbean. The perception of overlap suggests that identity in the region is tied to the historical process of change and development as a process of emergence, and calls attention to the conflation of the -586- political and the literary in the regional novel. This chapter deals with the development of the novel of the English-speaking Caribbean and the shifting hierarchies of identity construction that coexist within the integrative vision of an all-inclusive Caribbean community. Under this rubric, the ideological values of Commonwealth literature and the literatures of the African and Indian diasporas are contextualized as facets of the region's cultural diversity.

The identification of the Caribbean as an all-inclusive native space overarches but does not erase linguistic and national boundaries in the region. One may speak legitimately of the Dutch-, French-, Spanish-, and English-speaking Caribbean, and there are further subdivisions dictated by peculiarities of politics and government, race and ethnicity. Yet, many writers and scholars of the English-speaking Caribbean view the literature of the entire region collectively. Writers as various as Wilson Harris, Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and V. S. Naipaul speak and write of the Caribbean as a coherent cultural entity. This rubric provides a context for self-definition validated by the writers themselves.

In describing the cultural context out of which he writes, the poet Derek Walcott describes West Indian and Caribbean as interchangeable: "I think you can also trace through the entire archipelago a sort of circle of experience which can be called the ' Caribbean Experience.'…the whole historical and, to a degree, racial experience is a totality in the Caribbean. I wouldn't confine West Indian literature to literature written in English." Caribbean interconnectedness is also a recurring theme in the public lectures and novels of George Lamming. In his address to the St. Lucia Labor Party's 37th annual convention in 1987, Lamming urged his audience "to forget all this nonsense about the English-speaking and French-speaking Caribbean….we in the Caribbean have no idea what an enormous capacity we have for the creation of a unique civilisation, when we come to know our region freely, from territory to territory." Barbadian poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite has made the material and spiritual basis for Caribbean interconnectedness a core theme in his work. In "Caribbean Man in Space and Time," he defines Caribbean society as fragmented but rooted in a common sociocultural matrix that is geographically and historically determined: -587-

However the inner structure of the Caribbean is defined, however it is resolved in time and space, these writers all envision the entire Caribbean as the cultural community in which their works are embedded.

This affiliation across language and national barriers, as opposed to an older, historically imposed filiation to the cultural centers of Europe, and, more recently, to the cultural centers of North America, attests to the development of significant cultural relationships within the "postcolonial" Caribbean. The idea of a culturally distinct Caribbean rests on a perception of organic connectedness in the region that is based on a common historical and racial experience and a common passion to define this experience in terms that distinguish it culturally and ideologically from the metropolitan centers of Europe and North America. The novel in the English-speaking Caribbean is characterized by a distinctive sense of the Caribbean as a cultural entity original to itself, whether the writer's relationship to the developing Caribbean ethos is celebratory, elegiac, or even hostile, as is sometimes the case with V. S. Naipaul. It is preoccupied characteristically with self-discovery and self-definition, with redefining ancestry, community, and kinship through the restoration of an evolving indigenous culture devalued by a Eurocentric view of the world.

Despite the paradox of continuing dependence on the patronage and support of publishing houses and reading audiences in Europe and North America, the novel serves a self-authenticating, selfvalidating function in a region battered by a Kurtz-like extermination of the islands' original inhabitants, hundreds of years of authoritarian/colonial rule, and the menace of North American hegemony. It confirms the existence of a cultural community in a region of the world where political and economic stability is, more often -588- than not, a vision of the future. Novelists as different as George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Sam Selvon, and V. S. Naipaul write about the Caribbean experience in terms that are geographically and culturally distinct; terms that foster the idea of a regional consciousness and a regional identity. In one of the best-known novels of the region, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), George Lamming projects his native island of Barbados as a representative Caribbean island, so that cultural identity is constructed in regional as well as insular terms. Subsequently, he uses the device of a fictive Caribbean island, San Cristobal, which is a composite of many Caribbean territories, to facilitate his vision of a comprehensive Caribbean sharing essential conditions.

The cultural ideology posited by creative writers and intellectuals in the region advances the notion of a cultural community unified by the common experience of slavery, colonialism, and ensuing cultural diversity. Present reality suggests that art may achieve a unity and coherence that is unlikely, perhaps impossible, on a political level. The creativity of the region seems energized to an extraordinary degree by the rapid and profound political changes occurring throughout the region. The disparity that exists between artistic vision and historical climate in many parts of the Caribbean suggests a dramatic struggle to consolidate a sense of regional identity that runs counter to divisive linguistic and national boundaries.

The emergence of the novel in the English-speaking Caribbean is a twentieth-century phenomenon. It begins tentatively and develops independently in Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad until the 1940s when unprecedented interterritorial cultural exchange promoted a new awareness of the West Indies as a collective community. The idea of a collective West Indian identity as a national framework for development became entrenched in the press toward democratization and independence following World War II. It gained legitimacy with plans for a British West Indian Federation in 1947 and the establishment of the University College of the West Indies in 1949. The West Indian Federation was established in 1958 and collapsed in 1962, but the sense of collective identity as West Indian endures in the popular imagination and in institutions like the University of the West Indies and West Indian cricket, even as the more inclusive mul-589- tinational collective Caribbean identity in regional and extraregional discourse gains currency.

Despite the fluidity implicit in the changing values attached to collective identity, the development of the novel in the region is intimately bound up with the rise of national consciousness. The depiction of native space and an indigenous reality, its unavoidable specificity and concreteness, generated expanding levels of selfawareness — geographic, economic, sociopolitical, and quotidian. Over time, the novel generated a sense of native land with its own organizing center for seeing and depicting that was quite distinct from the colonizing values that shaped the ideology of the British West Indies.

Production of the indigenous novel in the British colonies of the Caribbean begins in Jamaica, not as a regional enterprise but as an insular and colonial undertaking. The architects of this enterprise were two white Jamaicans, Thomas MacDermot t (1870–1933) and Herbert G. de Lisser (1878–1944), who had no moral or intellectual commitment to an independent Jamaica. MacDermott used his influence as editor of the Jamaica Times to establish "The All Jamaica Library" in 1904. He intended to publish and market poetry, fiction, history, and essays that dealt "directly with Jamaica and Jamaicans." Two of MacDermott's novels were published by "The All Jamaica Library" under the pseudonym of Tom Redcam: Becka's Buckra Baby (1904) and One Brown Girl and — : A Jamaican Story (1909). Despite his intimacy with Jamaican life there is a pronounced sense of otherness in MacDermott's relationship to his African-Jamaican subjects that reflects a colonial Jamaica divided by race, class, and ethnicity.

Herbert G. de Lisser, editor of the Gleaner, shared MacDermott's interest in Jamaica's cultural distinctiveness within the constraints of a "Jamaica directly owing allegiance to the mother-country." He published ten novels altogether, three of which were published in Jamaica. "The All Jamaica Library" was not financially viable, but de Lisser was committed to the idea of providing Jamaican literature to a Jamaican audience at an affordable price. Five of de Lisser's novels were historical romances, the most famous of which is The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), a sensational account of Jamaica's brutal history. Three of his novels dealt with the Jamaican middle and upper -590- classes, and two with the Jamaican working poor. Given the subsequent preoccupation of West Indian novelists with the region's African and Indian majority, the most interesting of these is his first, Jane's Career (1914), or Jane: A Story of Jamaica, which was published locally in 1913. The central character is a young black Jamaican who goes to Kingston to work as a domestic and eventually finds the happiness and security she seeks in marriage. However, despite de Lisser's passionate interest in Jamaica and Jamaicans, the sympathy he extends to his heroine is qualified by his condescending and, at times, contemptuous treatment of the poor and black. His other novel about the Jamaican working class, Susan Proudleigh (1915), is set in Panama where Jamaican laborers work under terrible conditions. It is interesting as the first West Indian novel of expatriation and is similarly disfigured by a racist stereotyping of the black working class.

Claude McKay is the first of the major novelists of the Englishspeaking Caribbean to emigrate and achieve international recognition as a writer. McKay immigrated to the United States in 1912 and never returned. He wrote three novels celebrating black life and culture, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). The first is set in Harlem and the second in Marseilles. In Banjo, black characters from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa meet to discover and appreciate their cultural difference. The central characters are men on the move, however, expatriates who are either unable or unwilling to commit themselves to family and community.

Banana Bottom posits different values. Major tropes of the Caribbean novel are drawn here with an exemplary specificity and concreteness. This is a novel of departure and repatriation, in which the Jamaican heroine, Bita Plant, educated away from her peasant origins by a well-intentioned Jamaican minister and his English wife, is restored to her family and community. The organizing center of value in the novel is the language, belief systems, the ethics and mores of the Jamaican peasantry. Unlike MacDermott and de Lisser, McKay recognizes and affirms the syncretic character of Jamaican culture as fundamentally African. McKay's Jamaican idyll is an expatriate affair; it is shaped by a memory of home, travel in the United States, Europe, Russia, and North Africa. There is no sense of collective -591- Caribbean identity here, though there is a pan-Africanist evocation of Africa as the cornerstone of Jamaican life and culture that is fundamentally anticolonial and anticapitalist.

Within the British West Indian colonies, a cultural nationalism of a different sort was being forged by communities of writers and intellectuals who chafed under the humiliations of British colonial rule. In Trinidad, two short-lived antiestablishment reviews, The Beacon (1931-33, 1939) and Trinidad (1929-30), provided a forum for young writers like C. L. R. James, Alfred H. Mendes, and Ralph de Boissiere. These were political as well as literary reviews; they were anticolonial, anti-imperial, anticapitalist, and, reflective of their wideranging interests, they published articles on local and world politics, on African and Indian history and culture, as well as short fiction and poetry. They made an explicit connection between aesthetics and national politics. They insisted on specificity and concreteness; they demanded authenticity in West Indian settings, speech, characters, and situations, and inspired fiction rooted in an indigenous reality. Writing out of these values, Mendes and James pioneered the novel of the barrack-yard, described by James in his story "Triumph" as a type of slum dwelling with "a narrow gateway, leading into a fairly big yard, on either side of which run long low buildings, consisting of anything from four to eighteen rooms, each about twelve feet square." The novel of the yard would be taken to new heights by the Jamaican novelists Roger Mais and Orlando Patterson, and the Trinidadian Earl Lovelace. The social realism of James's Minty Alley (1936) and Mendes's Pitch Lake (1934) and Black Fauns (1935) deepened the representation of native space as fundamentally poor and black though they were themselves middle class by birth and education. They depicted the pain and squalor of the everyday life of the urban working poor — domestic servants, carters, porters, prostitutes, and washerwomen — and were obsessed with its vitality and intensity when compared with the predictability and safety of their own lives. They wrote out of an awareness that what they depicted was representative of the larger Caribbean, but what they depicted was characterized in the specifics of their native island.

Both James and Mendes left Trinidad in 1932. James went to England to become a major black intellectual of our time. He wrote extensively on culture and politics, and had a foundational influence -592- on cultural production in the Caribbean. He stated the case for selfgovernment in The Case for West Indian Self-Government (1933). In his groundbreaking The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), he linked the genesis of the West Indian personality to the economic and cultural complexities of the Haitian revolution. Minty Alley was his only novel. Mendes went to the United States. Ralph de Boissiere immigrated to Australia in 1948, where he published two novels about life in Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s, Crown Jewel (1952) and a sequel, Rum and Coca Cola (1956). De Boissiere's novels are broader in scope than those of James and Mendes. They deal with class and racial conflict, with social unrest and the growing militancy of the labor movement in Trinidad. His indictment of the middle class is harsh and uncompromising; his sympathies are with a resistant militant working class.

The emigration of these writers with their highly defined insular depictions of native space would become the norm for the West Indian writer in search of an audience and a publisher. There were no publishers in the British West Indies that could support them and a very limited audience for their work. The majority of novelists of the next generation would go to England and, ironically, their sense of exile would strengthen the idea of a collective West Indian community. For all of them, expatriation would be a process of reeducation interwoven with the withdrawal of the British Empire and the restructuring of life in a politically independent Federated West Indies. Interisland cultural exchange prompted new levels of self-awareness at home and in the United Kingdom. Reviews like The Beacon, Kykover-al (1945-61) in Guyana, Bim (1942-) in Barbados, Focus (1943, 1948, 1956, 1960) in Jamaica, and the British Broadcasting Service's weekly edition of "Caribbean Voices" had helped to shape and define the literature of the region as both a regional and national as well as a territorial enterprise, as West Indian as well as Jamaican or Trinidadian or Barbadian or Guyanese. Communities of writers congregated around the editing and publication of these reviews. Jamaican novelists like Vic Reid, John Hearne, and Roger Mais all published in Focus. Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris published in Kyk-over-al, and Bim drew contributions from all over the British West Indies. In The West Indian Novel and Its Background (1970), Kenneth Ramchand notes that between 1949 and 1959, fifty-five -593- novels by twenty-five different writers from the British West Indies were published, almost all of them in the United Kingdom.

Some of the novelists to emerge in the decades following World War II are George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Edgar Mittelholzer, Roger Mais, John Hearne, Vic Reid, Orlando Patterson, Jan Carew, Garth St. Omer, and Andrew Salkey. With the exception of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Sylvia Wynter, and the "repatriated" Jean Rhys, this was a distinctly male enterprise. Even in the works of major novelists such as Lamming, Harris, Selvon, and Naipaul the position of women as subjects of history is marginal to national and racial identification. Their novels reflect a preoccupation with the structure and values of colonial societies, with social and political change and its attendant crises, with race, class, and ethnic conflicts, with identity and the alienation from native space wrought by colonialism, with recovering the obscured cultural roots of the African majority, and with the role of the writer in charting national consciousness. The overlap of thematic concerns did not mean ideological or stylistic uniformity, however. Each of the major writers has a distinctive stylistic approach to the novel, drawing freely both from the literate traditions of Europe and America and from the linguistic and social modes of indigenous oral traditions peculiar to the region.

The novelist who dominates the literary scene at first is George Lamming from Barbados. Between 1953 and 1972, he published six novels: In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1970), Water with Berries (1971), and Natives of My Person (1972). Lamming writes out of a deep moral and intellectual commitment to the collective Caribbean community, to "the shaping of national consciousness," and to "giving alternate directions to society." Each of his novels deals with some aspect of the colonial experience, which provides the framework for a fully articulated vision of the Caribbean emerging in national-historical time. Chief among his themes are alienation and exile as facets of the colonial experience and the restructuring of Caribbean societies around the needs of its peasant and working-class majority. Major tropes of the Caribbean novel are drawn here in full self-consciousness of the dynamics of decolonization and the specific cultural constitutions of Caribbean personhood, among them: the -594- dissolution of colonialism, expatriation, repatriation, and national reconstruction.

The most widely read of Lamming's novels are In the Castle of My Skin and Season of Adventure. In the Castle is a foundational autobiographical novel about childhood in a colonial society. Its seminal value is easily seen when read in conjunction with fictional novels about childhood such as Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando (1965), Ian McDonald's The Hummingbird Tree (1969), Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (1970), Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1985). Season of Adventure is a much-celebrated novel of emergence interwoven with the breakdown of postcolonial society and the process of psychic and social reconstruction. Lamming's central character is a strong heroine in the tradition of McKay's Bita Plant, but Lamming's highly refined sense of historical process is quite distinct from McKay's cyclicity. Lamming's heroine is actively engaged in the political process of national reconstruction.

The Emigrants and Water with Berries are novels of emigration and exile. In The Emigrants Lamming delineates the cultural dynamics of the massive West Indian immigration to Great Britain after World War II. In Water with Berries he examines the immigration of three West Indian artists to London and the effect this has on their development as men and as artists. Lamming's novels of expatriation stand in sharp contrast to the elegiac tones of V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and the satiric humor of Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967). Lamming views immigration to the "mother country" as fundamentally destructive to the Caribbean psyche, and Water with Berries has a distinctly apocalyptic tone. Lamming's last novels are allegorical in design. Natives of My Person is a historical novel that characterizes the genesis of colonialism in the New World in an allegorical reconstruction of a sixteenth-century voyage that ends in mutiny. Lamming describes it as "the whole etiology of In the Castle of My Skin, The Emigrants, and Season of Adventure."

Lamming's collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960), is one of the first attempts to chart the intellectual and cultural history of the new West Indian literature. He delineates the outlines of national consciousness in contexts as varied as The Tempest and Othello, C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, his own experience of -595- Haitian religious rituals, and his extended visit to Africa. He provides a theoretical framework for reading the syncretic character of the West Indian novel. "The education of all these writers is more or less middle-class Western culture. But the substance of their books, the general motives and directions, are peasant." Lamming now speaks and writes out of a more inclusive collective identity, about the Caribbean novel rather than the West Indian novel, but his observations about the contours of colonial and postcolonial consciousness in Pleasures remain an authoritative, insightful approach to the literature and culture of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.

Austin Clarke, also from Barbados, creates a different discursive space in his novels of expatriation. In his Toronto trilogy, The Meeting Point (1967), A Storm of Fortune (1973), The Bigger Light (1975), he explores with humor and insight cultural and racial conflict and the psychological stress of life in Toronto among workingclass immigrants from the Caribbean. Expatriation has a different level of intensity in Clarke's novels. This is also true of Sam Selvon's novels of expatriation: The Lonely Londoners (1956), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983). Selvon's comic vision changes perceptibly from sympathy to vicious satire as his West Indian subject reconstructs a parasitic identity that is superficially Black British.

Wilson Harris brings an entirely new dimension to the novel with his extravagant use of the vast Guyanese landscape as a metaphor for the obscured roots of community in the New World, his fluid characters, his fantastic reality, and his mythological approach to time. His themes are not so different — identity, memory, history, ancestry, community, cultural conflict, violence, greed, and exploitation — but his approach to the novel is far removed from the social realism of Mendes and James, from McKay's agricultural idyll, and from Lamming's increasingly allegorical conception of the past as prehistory. In Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (1967), Harris rejected outright "the conventional mould" of the West Indian novel of persuasion "in which the author persuades you to ally yourself with situation and character." He invented a form that would project the fluidity of the West Indian personality and situation as a potential for growth and change. Harris was concerned from the outset with the -596- role of the creative imagination in engendering a new civilization and a new literary tradition in the Caribbean.

Harris has published sixteen novels to date, and all but five of them use a Guyanese setting. His first four novels, Palace of the Peacock (1960), Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963), are known as the Guiana Quartet. Harris's obsession with the drama of consciousness as "an infinite movement" and "a ceaseless task of the psyche" is fully articulated in these early novels about the people, the landscape, the history, and the legends of Guyana. In the five novels that follow, Heartland (1964), Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), The Waiting Room (1967), Tumatumari (1968), and Ascent to Omai (1970), the impact of the Guyanese heartland on the subjective imagination deepens into elaborate explorations of memory and identity. The novels that follow are set in Edinburgh, London, India, and Mexico. Black Marsden (1972), Companions of the Day and Night (1975), Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns (1977), The Tree of the Sun (1978), and The Angel at the Gate (1982) share common images and characters, all variations of Harris's exploration of the human capacity for growth and development in different cultural contexts. Carnival (1985) and The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) are "spiritual biography" and "fictional autobiography" respectively. Set in Guyana and in the United Kingdom, they are an elaborate deconstruction of the ambiguities and deceptions that attend any attempt to apportion fixed value to human consciousness.

Harris's four books of criticism are helpful in sorting out the stylistic and linguistic theories that shape his fiction in such a distinctive way. The first of these, Tradition, the Writer and Society, provides an invaluable theoretical frame of reference for Caribbean literature as a whole. Fossil and Psyche (1974) and Explorations (1981) are collections of his essays and lectures. In The Womb of Space: The CrossCultural Imagination (1983), Harris examines cultural heterogeneity as a value in the creative imaginations of writers as different as Ralph Ellison, Jean Rhys, and Patrick White.

Three other Guyanese novelists of note are Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew, and Denis Williams. Edgar Mittelholzer was the first of his generation to immigrate to the United Kingdom with the intention of earning his living as a writer. He wanted to become "rich and famous -597- by writing books for the people of Britain to read." He was a prolific novelist and published twenty-two novels altogether. Mittelholzer recognized no particular responsibility to a collective West Indian community, which he felt was doomed by virtue of its heterogeneity. His novels are obsessed with sex and violence as facets of miscegenation. His racially mixed characters suffer from recurring, destructive crises of identity that have their root in a split sensibility. Like those of Harris and Carew, Mittelholzer's vast and primitive landscapes are richly evoked as a source of wonder and terror in his Guyanese settings. Mittelholzer's better novels are the early works set in Guyana, Corentyne Thunder (1941), Shadows Move Among Them (1951), and his Kaywana trilogy — Children of Kaywana (1952), The Harrowing of Hubertus (1954), and Kaywana Blood (1958). The books in the Kaywana trilogy are sensationally written historical novels about Guyana's brutal history of slavery and colonial settlement to the mid-twentieth century. Mittelholzer makes it seem inevitable that these narratives become mired in sex, violence, and death. A Morning at the Office (1950) is an interesting contrast to Mittelholzer's rural settings in Guyana. Set in Port of Spain, Trinidad, this is a well-made novel about the tedium and stasis of colonial society with its elaborate hierarchies of race, color, and ethnicity.

Jan Carew and Denis Williams bring a different sensibility to the Guyanese novel. Jan Carew published two novels of adventure, Black Midas (1958) and The Wild Coast (1959). Carew's novels are highly conventional adventure stories of frontier life in Guyana. The impact of the vast continental landscape dominates these novels as does the varied racial and ethnic composition of Guyanese society. Carew's undoing, if it can be so described, lies in an uncritical and often indulgent use of racial stereotypes. Denis Williams is a painter and archaeologist as well as a novelist. His Other Leopards (1963) is set in the Sudan where Williams lived for five years. This novel is usefully compared with Vic Reid's The Leopard (1958), about the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Both novels are essential to any study of the impact of Africa on the modern Caribbean sensibility.

The Jamaican novelists Vic Reid, Roger Mais, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey, and Orlando Patterson bring a distinct sense of their island's geographical, social, and cultural particularity to the Jamaican novel. Vic Reid's best-known work is New Day (1949), a his-598- torical novel celebrating Jamaica's new constitution in 1944. National and historical consciousness is embodied in the history of one family's participation in resistance against colonial oppression beginning with the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. The novel is written in a modified dialect and represents an early attempt to shape the language of narration in the novel to the rhythms of a rich oral storytelling tradition.

Roger Mais wrote a different kind of fiction altogether. In The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), he transforms the social realism of the barrack-yard novel of James and Mendes into an unqualified denunciation of "the dreadful conditions of the working classes" in "the real Jamaica." With great effect, he conceptualizes the occupants of the Kingston yard collectively as the center of consciousness in this novel. In his second yard novel, Brother Man (1954), Mais takes a sympathetic look at Rastafarianism as a transformative value in the lives of the poor and oppressed. Mais's novels are full of energy and passion in part because he is willing, like Lamming and Harris and Reid and Selvon, to experiment freely with literary forms and language. His third novel, Black Lightning (1955), is a moving portrait of the relationship between the artist as blacksmith and sculptor and his community.

Orlando Patterson's The Children of Sisyphus (1964) is usefully compared with the yard novels of Mais. Patterson builds his representation of the dreadful conditions of Kingston's poor around the Dungle, a community of misery formed on the site of the city's garbage dump. This is a bleak novel that records the failure of the island community to nurture and sustain its own. Patterson wrote two other novels, An Absence of Ruins (1967) and Die the Long Day (1972), a well-researched historical novel about slave culture in Jamaica in the late eighteenth century.

The substance of John Hearne's novels is the Jamaican middle class, their ethics and values and their relationship to the vast majority of Jamaicans who are poor, uneducated, and black. The most impressive of these is Voices under the Window (1955), which examines the efforts of a middle-class Jamaican politician to provide leadership to a society in the throes of violent social upheaval. Hearne has published five other novels: Stranger at the Gate (1956), The Faces of Love (1957), Autumn Equinox (1959), Land of the-599- Living (1961), and The Sure Salvation (1981). In all of these Hearne examines the personal choices available to a middle class that is finally unable or unwilling to restructure its relationship to the needs of the society as a whole.

Andrew Salkey also writes about the Jamaican middle class but his best novel is not about this class at all. A Quality of Violence (1959) is set in a rural parish in Jamaica during a devastating drought that leaves the community weak and vulnerable to hysteria. Salkey sets peasants who believe in Pocomania, an African-Christian religious cult, against a brown, Bible-fearing minority of small landowners. This is a well-made novel about Jamaica in a state of physical and spiritual crisis. The novel is usefully compared with McKay's Banana Bottom and Mais's Brother Man.

Trinidadian writers like Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, Michael Anthony, Earl Lovelace, and Ismith Khan widened the scope of the Caribbean novel even further. Sam Selvon was the first of these to publish. He left Trinidad for the United Kingdom with George Lamming in 1950, and has lived abroad ever since, first in the United Kingdom and then in Canada. Selvon's accomplishments are many; he writes both about an indigenous reality specific to Trinidad and about the West Indian immigrant experience in the United Kingdom. Selvon's Trinidad novels add a new dimension to the Caribbean novel with his sympathetic depiction of a transplanted Indian peasantry in the process of creolization. A Brighter Sun (1952) and its sequel Turn Again Tiger (1958) are peasant novels that employ different modes of looking at roughly the same world of the Indian peasant emerging from the feudal structure of the sugar-cane estate or plantation. A Brighter Sun is a novel of emergence, or Bildungsroman, in which a newly married, young Indian couple painfully adjust to the possibilities of life in the creolized space of a suburban village beyond the conservative ethnicity and humiliations of Indian life in a sugar estate village. Selvon represents creolization as a necessary prelude to individual growth and fulfillment in multiracial, multiethnic Trinidad. Turn Again Tiger replaces this compositional design with a version of McKay's agricultural idyll. Tiger and his family return to the sugar estate for a year, from planting to harvest time, and, in the process, cyclic time is reestablished as a stable, restorative framework for growth and fulfillment. -600- Selvon's London novels reveal the same imaginative approach to fictional composition. His Moses trilogy — The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending, and Moses Migrating — displays innovative approaches to the representation of immigrant life in the United Kingdom. The most accomplished of the trio are The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending, where West Indian otherness is savored and emphasized in linguistic experiments and comic representations of the West Indian immigrant as misfit, clown, fool, and clever rogue in an alien landscape.

V. S. Naipaul's relationship to his Indian ancestry and creolization is very different from Selvon's. Selvon continues to affirm the syncretic character of Caribbean life and culture. Living in the Caribbean, he explains, "You become Creolized, you not Indian, you not Black, you not even White, you assimilate all these cultures and you turn out to be a different man who is the Caribbean Man." On the face of it, V. S. Naipaul finds nothing in the prospect of Caribbean Man to celebrate: "History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies." This much-quoted statement in The Middle Passage (1962) has generated a discourse of its own within the Caribbean on history, on culture and mimicry, and on "nothing," in the works of writers as accomplished as Walcott, Brathwaite, Rhys, and Lamming. However, Naipaul's extravagant success as a novelist and travel writer with British and North American audiences is independent of controversy within the Caribbean, and his contribution to the Caribbean novel stands regardless of the controversy that surrounds his pronouncements about the bankruptcy of Caribbean society. He has published nine novels to date and seven of these are recreations of Caribbean life: The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), The Mimic Men, Guerrillas (1975), and The Enigma of Arrival. Naipaul's fiction suggests that the discourse of Naipaul the travel writer and essayist is distinct from that of Naipaul the novelist. There is a great deal of fun and laughter in The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas. The comic element in these early novels is not a rejection of native space so much as a celebration of its otherness. The quality of Naipaul's humor is not that different from Selvon's in the Moses trilogy; it turns on a self-conscious ritualized delight in -601- observed details and incongruities. Naipaul's humor, when it depends most viciously on satire and vulgarity, is not dissimilar to the folk humor of the calypso and ritual forms of insult-trading popular in Trinidad.

The adventures of Pundit Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur, Mr. Harbans in The Suffrage of Elvira, and Mr. Biswas all describe the identity-altering process of Indian immigrants settling into a new cultural landscape. Of these, A House for Mr. Biswas is by far the most accomplished. It is more than an adventure novel of everyday life, it is a novel of Caribbean emergence frozen in epic time by a skillfully engineered prologue and epilogue of endurance and continuance. Mr. Biswas emerges as everyman and as a man of the people; an East Indian becomes a representative West Indian and occupies a "native" space of his own. Second only to Biswas, Naipaul's The Mimic Men is a brilliantly irreverent study of "the complete colonial," a recurring figure in Caribbean literature. The portrait is rendered with energy and humor as the autobiography of a neurotic, untrustworthy, failed colonial politician. The Mimic Men critiques autobiography as a genre and mocks the proliferation of fictive autobiographies in contemporary Caribbean literature. Guerrillas and The Enigma of Arrival are very different in tone. In Guerrillas the journalist in Naipaul takes the upper hand in a fictive account of sensational murders in Trinidad. The Enigma of Arrival is a novel of rejection and withdrawal to an ideal English landscape. A Bend in the River (1979) reiterates Naipaul's disaffection with the social and political vagaries of postcoloniality and multiculturalism in an African setting.

Other Trinidadians of Indian descent have written authoritatively and well about Indian immigrants settling into the colonial Caribbean. Naipaul's brother, Shiva Naipaul, published two novels, The Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973). In The Jumbie Bird (1961) by Ismith Khan, the theme of generations is characterized by a general striving ahead and engagement with multiracial, multiethnic Trinidad. Khan's second novel, The Obeah Man (1964), reflects the author's wide-ranging engagement with national consciousness. Like Selvon, Khan embraces all aspects of Trinidad's culture as facets of his creative vision.

The novels of Trinidad's Michael Anthony and Earl Lovelace have a different relationship to Trinidad as native space. The sense of -602- native country in these writers of African descent is well established. Though Michael Anthony has published several histories of Trinidad and Tobago, he shuns national-historical discourse in his best fiction. He has published six novels, among them The Games Were Coming (1963), The Year in San Fernando, and Green Days by the River (1967). The most outstanding of these is The Year in San Fernando, which is about one year in the life of a twelve-year-old boy living away from home. Anthony uses the innocence and naiveté of his protagonist to great advantage in this classic Caribbean novel of adventure and everyday life in the limited environment of a small town in Trinidad. Growth and development are limited by a cycle of return marked by the passage of the school year, by seasonal changes, and by the agricultural cycle of planting and harvest.

Earl Lovelace writes about the rural and urban poor in Trinidad, their coping mechanisms, their strategies for survival, their struggle to maintain a sense of identity and community in a rapidly changing environment. National identity is delineated in the competing claims of Trinidad's "multi-ethnic many ancestored" community. His most accomplished novels are The Dragon Can't Dance (1979) and The Wine of Astonishment (1984). In The Wine of Astonishment, enduring conflicts of race, class, and ethnicity are concrete and are localized in the historic struggle of Trinidad's Spiritual Baptists for legitimacy. In The Dragon Can't Dance, Carnival and Calypso are stripped of their exoticism as facets of urban poverty and underdevelopment.

The publication of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) called attention to the fact that there were few novels written by women from the English-speaking Caribbean. Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House (1953) anticipated some of the issues raised by Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea about what it means to be a white West Indian woman in the regional press toward democratization and independence. Sylvia Wynter's The Hills of Hebron (1962) was conceived in the nationalist mold; her emphasis was on the transformation of Jamaican society as a whole, not on the liberation of women as a distinct social category. Clara Rosa De Lima and Rosa Guy, both born in Trinidad, also published first novels in the mid-1960s though neither is set in the Caribbean. De Lima's Tomorrow Will Always Come (1965) is set in Brazil and Guy's Bird at My Window (1966) -603- is set in New York. Rhys's Voyage in the Dark appeared in 1934 but the significance of her West Indian heroine's ethnicity — "I'm a real West Indian, I'm in the fifth generation on my mother's side" — was not appreciated at the time. Through the novel's female characters, Wide Sargasso Sea made a dramatic statement about the victimization and silencing of women in the Caribbean. Antoinette's fortune is stolen, her affections are scorned, and she is imprisoned in an attic in a strange land. Amelie is seduced by her master and paid off for her trouble; she leaves to start a new life in Guiana. Politically aware and resistant Christophene challenges Edward with her insight into his cultural chauvinism, sexism, and greed, and he silences her with threats of imprisonment and the confiscation of her property.

Since the publication of Rhys's novel women have been writing and publishing at an unprecedented pace. The Caribbean novel in English is no longer a male enterprise. Issues of female difference and discrimination have altered the terms of national, racial, and cultural identities in the novel and in critical theory. Certain overarching issues, however, remain the same, among them the postulation of an all-inclusive Caribbean identity, the migration of the writer, the restoration of indigenous culture, the need to break with a Eurocentric bias, a preoccupation with the poor and the disadvantaged, education and alienation, expatriation and return, childhood and adolescence as paradigms of the national experience, and concrete geographical localization. With few exceptions feminist consciousness in the new Caribbean writing does not occupy a discursive space beyond the ethnicity and nationalism typical of the literature as a whole. The female subject is embedded in the dynamics of nationally and regionally drawn economic and cultural processes. Two critical anthologies published recently underscore this: Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990), edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, and Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (1990), edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe.

The women other than Rhys who have received most critical attention in recent years are Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid. Though both write out of the specific cultural constraints of a Caribbean identity, feminist consciousness has a different value in the novels of each writer. In both of Brodber's novels, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Myal (1988), the liberation of women -604- from attitudes of containment is embedded in issues of national reconstruction. National identity does not have the same value in Kincaid's work. In her Annie John (1985), an island nation is a mother from whom one must escape in order to have a life of one's own. The gendered space of Kincaid's Annie John redefines the parameters of the Caribbean novel of childhood and adolescence. In Kincaid's Lucy (1990), expatriation is a necessary prelude to emergence. Kincaid's novels make a feminist argument beyond ethnicity and nationalism on behalf of the psyche of the New World black woman who would write her own script.

Issues affecting women specifically and Caribbean societies generally are being refashioned by novelists as different as Michelle Cliff, Marion Patrick Jones, Janice Shinebourne, Clara Rosa De Lima, Rosa Guy, Valerie Belgrave, Merle Hodge, Sybil Seaforth, Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, and Zee Edgell. Rosa Guy and Clara Rosa De Lima are well-established writers now. Guy has published six novels to date and De Lima has published five. In the 1970s Merle Hodge published Crick Crack Monkey (1970), and Marion Patrick Jones published Pan Beat (1973) and Jouvert Morning (1976). To Merle Hodge from Trinidad, fiction is a national enterprise: "Caribbean fiction can help to strengthen our self-image, our resistance to foreign domination, our sense of the oneness of the Caribbean and our willingness to put our energies into the building of the Caribbean nation." To Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, writing fiction is an attempt "to draw together everything I am and have been, both Caliban and Ariel and a liberated synthesized version of each." In the last decade she has published four novels: Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980), Abeng (1984), The Land of Look Behind (1985), and No Telephone to Heaven (1987).

Until the emergence of modern Caribbean literature, literate traditions of the English-speaking Caribbean were largely dictated by the interests of European imperialism. The achievement of the Caribbean writer has been to dislodge the tyrannical subordination of indigenous cultural expression without surrendering rights of access to cultural traditions that are rooted in Europe as well as in Africa, Asia, and an Amerindian past. Right now there is a dominant sense of new beginnings among writers who are laying the groundwork for a cultural community that eschews linguistic and national boundaries -605- and celebrates the unity and diversity of Caribbean life. A critical view of the novel of the Caribbean that cuts across the barriers of language, politics, space, and time to comparison with Dutch-, French-, and Spanish-speaking counterparts and contemporaries is a logical extension of the multinational contours of the West Indian novel discussed here. Issues of filiation and affiliation are complex in the multiracial, polyglot societies of the Caribbean, where cultural identity is fluid and tradition has value as preamble rather than as main text. The novel of the Caribbean is enlarged rather than diminished by complementary discursive rubrics that provide a basis for comparison with other New World literatures and with African and Indian diasporan perspectives.

Sandra Pouchet Paquet

-606-

Latin American Fiction

A number of years ago the Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman published a slim volume entitled The Invention of America. Columbus did not discover America in 1492, he argued; rather, "America," and the idea that it was "discovered," are much later inventions, projected interweavings of desire and imagination that find their typical form in the "chronicles" and histories of writer/explorers like Bernal Díaz de Castillo (Verdadera historia de los sucesos de la conquista de la nueva España), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de la Vaca (Naufragios), Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Historia de las Indias), or Hernàn Cortés (Cartas de Relación). In his reevaluation of such records, or such dreams, O'Gorman sounds the call for an ontological understanding of history. It will be necessary, he says, "to reconstruct the history, not of the discovery of America, but rather of the idea that Americawas discovered." This radical reevaluation of history has taken on increasing prominence, and it is, perhaps, time to extend O'Gorman's interrogation to the terrain of literary studies as well, that is, "as a process producing historical entities and no longer, as has been the tradition, as a process that takes as given the existence of such entities."

From the side of Latin America, the necessity for such a questioning seems painfully obvious, as it is painfully obvious that the concept of "Latin America" is itself a slippery one, suggesting a cultural unity among approximately twenty-five countries with different histories, different traditions, different political systems, different geographies, different languages. Paradoxically, for many of these countries' best -607- thinkers, it is the search for this unremediably absent definition that marks the essential unity of "Latin American" cultural identity. As E. Mayz Valenilla puts it, American Latinity constitutes itself around a sense of "forever-not-yet-being," a sense of permanent disequilibrium intensified by an often defensive inferiority complex toward the cultural productions of the United States and Europe, as well as an unbalancing conviction of the Latin American's anachronism not only on the world scene but within the local geographies as well. One result of such questioning is that Latin American literature often addresses the impossibility for Latin Americans of situating themselves in a specific historical moment, and reminds them of the inescapability of living simultaneously and of bridging all historical periods from the Stone Age to the Space Age. One of the most persistent dreams of Latin American literature is a longing to escape this trap and to construct a time corresponding to the Latin American space; one of the most notable effects of Latin American literature is to deconstruct that dream and that longing.

At the same time, Latin America — unproblematically defined — has come in recent years to be "put on the map" — rediscovered or reinvented once again — for United States-European consciousness. It has been reinvented politically as Nicaragua, Colombia, El Salvador, Chile, Mexico take on new reality in our nightly news, and, with a continually renewed, strikingly anachronistic astonishment, reinvented poetically as well. The source of this baroque superabundance of superb creative work can be, for us citizens of the United States used to referring to ourselves simply as "Americans" with a kind of unconscious superiority complex, disconcertingly exotic; the Great American Novels are arriving as an import, in translation, from that other, intermittently forgotten, America, and the names of their authors stumble hesitatingly off our monolingual tongues: Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, José Lezama Lima, João Guimarães Rosa, Domitila Barrios de Chungara (a first elemental hesitation: which is a particular author's last name, after all?), Pablo Neruda, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Julio Cortázar, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Luis Borges, Rigoberta Menchú, Alejo Carpentier, Clarice Lispector, José Donoso, Luisa Valenzuela, Octavio Paz, Manuel Puig…

I planted the words "baroque" and "exotic" deliberately in the -608- previous paragraph; they are two of the key terms that echo most insistently in the North American reception of these masterpieces by the other Americans. William Gass, writing in 1980, compares the contemporary reaction to the phenomenon of the Latin American novel with the intellectually overwhelming effect of the Russian novel on the British reading public a century earlier: "They were long, those damn books; they were full of strange unpronounceable names: loving names, childhood names, nicknames, patronyms; there were kinship relations which one can imagine disconcerting Lévi-Strauss; there was a considerable fuss made concerning the life, sorrows, and status of the peasants, the oblige of the noblesse; and about God, truth, and the meaning of life there was even more; moods came and went like clouds, and characters went mad with dismal regularity…. Must we do that again?" The answer, clearly, is "yes." Once again we are asked to deal with strange names, settings as mysterious and exotic as the Russian steppe, a style that, even in translation, suggests the breathtaking grandeur of the original and hints at a use of language so innovative it expands the boundaries of the possible. Notably, however, even in such a knowledgeable critic as Gass, the question is posed in anachronistic terms, a reading of late twentiethcentury fiction that reduplicates a nineteenth-century literary experience. The sense of temporal disjunction persists on other levels as well. Borges, whose most significant production is from the 1940s, continues to be read as an author of the 1970s. Alejo Carpentier (1950s) is reinvented as a contemporary, rather than a precursor, of Miguel Barnet (1980s).

The question that exercises me, a Latinamericanist transplanted into a volume on American literature largely oriented toward the United States, is that of which Latin America to invent in these pages. Should I invent a single entity analogous to the United States? Should I follow the now well-established lines of a comparatist practice of putting together García Márquez and Faulkner, Marechal and Joyce, Borges and Hawthorne, Gámbaro and Beckett, Paz and Stevens, Sarmiento and Cooper? Should I reinvent Latin America, that land of poets (three of Latin America's five Nobel Prizes have been given to poets: Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz), as a continent dominated by narrative, with just a footnote given to its most pervasive form of expression — Afro-Hispanic: Nicolás Guillén, -609- Nancy Morejón; revolutionary: Giaconda Belli, Ernesto Cárdenal; feminist: Rosario Castellanos, Julia de Burgos? Should I outline a traditional literary historical progression: costumbrismo, nineteenthcentury realism, modernismo, telluric novel, avant-garde, "Boom," post-Boom? How do I contextualize the fact that John Douglas edits both Avon's fantasy series and its Latin American translation series?

In 1967 John Barth published an article inspired by his love for the Argentine poet and short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion," in which he set the Argentine master into a more general context that included references to works by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka. It is not necessary at this point to review the history of the readings and rereadings and misreadings of Barth's article, the appreciative reception that turned "literature of exhaustion" into a critical commonplace. I would like to note two rather interesting consequences, however. First of all, while Borges was well known and much appreciated in Latin America in his own right and as a precursor of the Boom writers, for many inhabitants of North America Barth's article was a revelation of a startling new talent on the world literary scene. Borges was, through Barth, reinvented as an American author, becoming, achronologically for Barth's readers, if not for Barth himself, the contemporary of United States fiction writers like John Hawkes, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth himself. Indeed, in a later reflection on his famous exhaustion article entitled "The Literature of Replenishment," John Barth becomes, unconsciously perhaps, seduced by this now-pervasive writing of contemporary literary history, and puts Borges into the group of postmodernists along with such writers as those listed above, including as well Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (the quintessential Boom author) and Italian Italo Calvino as his contemporaries.

The second point I wish to make is that this curious violation of chronology in the conflation of two or three generations of writers is bizarrely appropriate, and both reflects and respects the implicit aesthetics of much recent Latin American literature. Just so Borges himself often violates temporal schemes in order to have books converse with each other across the shelves of a library; in one instance among many, to bring alive once again Borges's precursor, Leopoldo -610- Lugones (1874–1938), as a commentator on his miscellaneous volume of short sketches and poetry (El hacedor [1960]).

Even for a continent characterized by anachronism, the novelistic production of the early part of this century seems particularly out of step. Roberto González Echevarría's study of Rómulo Gallegos's Doña Barbara (1929; English translation, 1931), the best known of the "telluric novels," emphasizes just this point. The novela de la tierra, he says, suffers from a "double anachronism" in both its writers and its critics: at the same time that the High Modernists were changing the shape of Euro-American fiction, these novels were praised and promoted for launching realist narrative in Latin America. Doña Barbara and its counterparts display a third anachronism as well; in a period of rapid urbanization, all of these novels are relentlessly rural. Doña Barbara, as the title indicates, is an allegorical tale of the conflict between civilization and barbarity set in the Venezuelan llanos (plains), a conflict worked out not so much between the two main characters, Doña Barbara and Santos Luzardo, as between the forces of Man (used advisedly) and Nature. The other great narrative tendency of the period, the indigenista novel (which is not indigenous, but pro-Indian), develops along similar lines, but with a more strongly marked element of concrete political commitment. Thus, Clorinda Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido (1889; Birds without a Nest) and later novels of this tendency expose the miserable conditions obtaining in the remote, often non-Spanish-speaking, Indian villages controlled by a creole landowner, and denounce the system that undergirds and sustains such exploitation. As is the case in Gallegos's novel, individual characters revert to position holders for a politically charged description of elemental conflict set against a realist landscape. Nevertheless, despite their anachronism, such works can and should be seen as the foundation of modern Latin American narrative. They draw a specifically Latin American landscape, populate it with characters drawn from local customs, and commit themselves to an identifiable sociopolitical program.

It is in this context of the preoccupation with specifically Latin American landscapes that we can understand the comments of Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist and precursor of the Boom generation. He suggests that the widely perceived baroque quality of Latin -611- American fiction reflects not a love of fussy ornament but a necessary response to near-universal incomprehension of the most mundane details: "Heinrich Heine speaks to us, suddenly, of a pine and a palm tree…. The word 'pine' suffices to show us the pine; the word 'palm' is enough to define, paint, show, the palm. But the word 'ceiba'…" And here Carpentier must pause, in a baroque gesture, to define his terms, to paint a picture of a natural phenomenon equally unfamiliar to inhabitants of the lands of palm as to the lands of pine, to discover (or recover) an unacknowledged reality not only for the Eurocentric literary establishment but also for fellow Latin Americans, for fellow Cubans, and, in some essential sense, for himself. "The word 'ceiba,'" says Carpentier, " — the name of an American tree called by Black Cubans 'the mother of all trees' — is insufficient for people of other latitudes to see the aspect of rostrate column of this gigantic, austere, and solitary tree, as if drawn forth from another age, sacred by virtue of its lineage, whose horizontal branches, almost parallel with the earth, offer to the wind a few handfuls of leaves as unreachable to the human being as they are incapable of any movement. There it is, high on a hillside, alone, silent, immobile, with no birds living in its branches, breaking apart the earth with its enormous scaly roots…. At a distance of hundreds of meters (because the ceiba is neither a tree of association nor of company) grow some papayos, plants erupted from the first swamps of creation, with their white bodies, covered with grey medallions, their leaves open like beggars' hands, their udder-fruits hanging from their necks." The ceiba is placed by reference to the papayo, which also requires definition, and, potentially, so on in infinite regress. Carpentier concludes, "These trees exist…. But they do not have the good fortune of being named 'pine' nor 'palm tree' nor 'oak' nor 'chestnut' nor 'birch.' Saint Louis of France never sat in their shade, nor did Pushkin ever dedicate them a line of verse…. We must not fear the baroque, our art, born of our trees….a baroque created out of the need to name things, even though with it we distance ourselves from other fashionable techniques."

What Carpentier sees as a culturally necessary neobaroque style distinguishes the Latin American effort from the more aesthetically motivated formal games of the seventeenth-century European tradition. Rather than a superabundance, the baroque style that typifies -612- these novels is reflected in, and derivative of, an order of experience that represents the near opposite of that excess traditionally associated with the baroque, by a need to assign names to each animal and plant, establishing its reality for a translocal audience.

More contemporary authors, writing after Carpentier, have also been deeply concerned with the issues involved in inscribing a Latin American identity for (or against) a supposedly "universal" audience. Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes defines the linguistic challenge succinctly by reference to "la palabra enemiga" — ambiguously, "the word enemy" or "the enemy word" — with all the gravity of that phrase's implicit linguistic, cultural, and political density. Fernández Retamar's Calibán eloquently explores the issue of linguistic alienation not only in relation to the Spanish-speaking Latin American's relation to indigenous and other minority peoples but also in terms of a vexed consciousness of the overriding effects of cultural imperialism. In Juan Marinello's famous formulation, "Somos a través de un lenguaje que es nuestro siendo extranjero" [We are through (are traversed by) a language that is ours despite its foreignness (is our foreign be-ing)], Latin American literature, as an entity, is continually in crisis, continually reinventing itself, continually questioning its very existence. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to belabor the point that Latin America's most exportable literary products can be identified with the narratives of the 1950s and 1960s, where the very label applied to the group — the Boom — is an English word hinting at stock market fluctuations and atomic bomb capabilities, for many critics a marker of cultural imperialism at its worst.

Literary critics like Fernández Retamar with a particular commitment to postcolonial thought find the tracks and scars of cultural imperialism throughout Boom writing. There is no doubt that focusing, as Carpentier does, on the dynamics of narrative exchange value offers critics a justifiable method of analysis, one with premiums of its own on the literary-critical market. But Fernández Retamar would argue that such writers and critics are themselves "commodified" by the resources of their respective choices of literary code, by the analytical traditions they so ably manipulate. He uncovers the extent to which the implied value system recommodifies the native subject into yet another version of the stereotypical object of a Westernized gaze, an unreconstructed Shakespearean Caliban, in this case one in which -613- a non-Western author inserts himself into a system that many other non-Westerners have, with good reason, found to be peripheral, if not totally alien, to their own traditional views. Thus, suspiciously, the adulated Third World writer or critic can be neatly inserted into a (white) critical discourse through the distortional, patronizing mythologies of the quaintly exotic. Furthermore, Fernández Retamar adds, the valued indigenous tradition is itself produced and reified, in very concrete ways, by European thinkers and their postcolonial heirs.

Writing in Latin America is often carried out under dismal conditions either at home or in exile, under the pressure of long days spent in other work, against the instituted situations of subtle or overt censorship, sometimes with the risk of imprisonment, torture, disappearance. Critics and authors of fiction alike have recognized as one of their prime responsibilities the obligation to commit themselves to the "mad" struggle over the history of meanings, not only to reveal the ways in which rhetorical concerns discursively construct reality, but also to intervene into and counter these processes of reality-construction. Fiction politicized is often not enough; the reading public demands more concrete manifestations of commitment. Furthermore, as Trinh Minh-ha reminds us in Woman, Native, Other, "It is almost impossible for [writers] (and especially those bound up with the Third World) to engage in writing as an occupation without letting themselves be consumed by a deep and pervasive sense of guilt." And she continues later with the wry observation that while committed writing, on the one hand, helps alleviate this guilt, on the other hand, it involves a simple displacement: "Committed writers are the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience. Bound to one another by an awareness of their guilt, writer and reader…[carry] their weight into the weight of their communities, the weight of the world. Such a definition naturally places the committed writers on the side of Power." A similar statement might be, and often is, made in reference to fictional works in Latin America, where the tangled lines of power and commitment are peculiarly complex, where favored authors are frequently awarded political appointments of some power, and authors in disfavor face exile or death.

Along other lines, feminist literary critics, too, have been reexam-614- ining these now-classic texts. The Boom writers who engaged in the deconstruction and resemanticization of so many of the meaning systems of official mythology seem oblivious to the degree to which they reaffirm the hoary myth of the maternal body as equivalent to a state of nature and of maternal "nature" as an unproblematic concept. This institutionalization of the figure of the feminine as a natural, primordial, but containable and manageable, element is evident even in the works of Latin America's most internationally well-known female writer, the openly feminist Chilean novelist, Isabel Allende, who has arrived belatedly on the Boom scene, twenty years after its vogue, but with the same assumptions intact. In her works, as in older Boom novels written a generation earlier, the maternal body may be a utopian site, but the mother's lack of access to subjectivity is a nonnegotiable given.

Correspondingly, the fictional existence of women — and I am thinking particularly of the much-lauded sensitivity to the feminine, indeed, the "feminization" of the prose, of Boom writers like Gabriel García Márquez in Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) or José Donoso in El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970; The Obscene Bird of Night, 1979) — though real, is interpolated into the fiction in such a way as to highlight for the sensitive reader the insistent, and unquestioned, assumptions of an unproblematized, masculinist discursive base. Ursula Buendía, the strong mother figure of One Hundred Years of Solitude, is frequently cited by approving critics as a particularly fine example of García Márquez's sensitivity to female subjectivity. I would argue, though I do not have the space to do so here, that the case is very nearly exactly the opposite, that in Ursula the figure of the woman is displaced twice over. Masquerading as subject, as the dominant figure within the home and as the figure of sanity, she is taken informally, and more pervasively, if subtly, as object: the metaphorized discourse of woman as, problematically, constitutive of the impersonated, explicitly displaced but implicitly reconstituted, discourse of man. The case is even more obvious in Donoso's novel, where the male narrator is straightforwardly feminized (that is, castrated), turned into a woman, by the strange old hags inhabiting the convent, and reduced to a sightless, deaf — but fortunately not speechless — "imbunche." Donoso's character not only speaks for but as a woman, as the outcast -615- male vision of the virgin-mother-child, feminized in the impersonation of a criminal grotesque, while symbolically on his way to transformation into the ultimate phallic symbol: the "imbunche" as transcendental signifier. In both works, significantly, the language of women's desire only enters the enclosure of the created fictional space as monstrous, and productive of monsters. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the birth of the incestuous infant with the pig's tail precipitates apocalypse; in Donoso, the grotesquely deformed "Boy" anticipates the same function.

Jorge Luis Borges and the Colombian novelist, scriptwriter, and journalist Gabriel García Márquez represent the two archetypal figures of the Boom. Borges's Ficciones (1944; English translation, 1962) and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, though from two different generations, remain the Boom's most typical and most enduring products. Curiously, it would be difficult to imagine two writers more different in personality, politics, enduring obsessions, or literary style. García Márquez represents the Boom's search for a "total" novel, those long, long books; Borges is the Boom's minimalist. García Márquez's narratives derive from oral storytelling and mass media; Borges's metaphysical fables ignore such influences. García Márquez rewrites Colombian history, Borges extends the implications of European idealist philosophy; García Márquez is associated with magic realism, Borges with fantasy; García Márquez's political leanings are strongly leftist, Borges's superficial apoliticism is paired to a reactionary political commitment. Yet, together they define the parameters of what the Boom has come to mean in classical literary studies.

Borges is a master of what we might call a desperate comedy of inaccessibility, marked and defined by an adamant insistence on a few, intensely imaged symbols: the dreams, the labyrinths, the mirrors, and the tigers so familiar to his readers. Likewise, he relies heavily on a few insistently reiterated metaphors. In his works we are drawn into the temptations and unrealities of mathematics, and especially the physical sciences. In Borges, as John Updike notes, "we move…beyond psychology, beyond the human, and confront…the world atomized and vacant. Perhaps not since Lucretius has a poet so definitely felt men as incidents in space." Thus, Borges's tenuously imagined librarians, his dreamers within the dream, his -616- immortals, and his metaphysical gauchos are so comically overdetermined, so full of meaning that they are atomized and exploded by their very richness.

Such relativization and negation reach into all levels of these confections. Carefully constructed and firmly established plot lines are demolished at a stroke through infection by impossibly corrupt, or undeniably fictitious, elements. Even at the micro-level of the noun clause the author gives us nothing firm and resistant, without also suggesting the irrational fault lines running through its architecture; he pairs abstract nouns to concrete modifiers and the reverse: "innumerable contrition," "rigorously strange," "the interminable fragrance," "that equivocal and languid past," "the almost infinite Chinese wall," or makes statements like "he retired to a figurative palace," and "our destiny…is horrifying because it is irreversible and of iron." In a similar manner, Borges's dreamer who dreams a real man in his story "The Circular Ruins" reminds the reader of the singularly corrupt copy of Borges's 1917 edition of The AngloAmerican Cyclopaedia testifying to the existence of Tlön in the story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," and parallels the frustrated searches of any number of Borgesian librarians who hypothesize the existence of a Book of Books in the infinite stacks of the library of Babel, or the philosophers who attempt to discover the name of God written in the stripes of a tiger.

Certainly, Borges's dramas of dazzling combinatorics and differential decay respond to the pre-posthum(or)ous dissection of the postmodern condition, the wary, weary recognition that the search for eternal verities — God, Science, a Center — are inevitably conditioned and contaminated by the seeking mind, that the unrealities of existence militate against the very possibility of the search, much less its successful conclusion. The disturbing and seductive corollary for fiction is clear. No longer is the fictional universe bounded by classical rules of verisimilitude and plausibility; instead, it is conceived, in a fictional parallel to quantum physics, as a self-contained game with the sole responsibility of maintaining consistency to its own implicit rules. For Borges the rules are deceptively simple; in the words that Borges puts in the mouth of his character Herbert Quain in Ficciones, "I revindicate for this work the essential elements of every game: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium." -617- Borges is a writer's writer. García Márquez is a cult. He has said many times that his role is to transcribe ordinary Colombian reality; the manner of this transcription, however, represents the enduring enchantment of his confections. Chilean José Zalaquett says of García Márquez that "his One Hundred Years of Solitude hit Latin American readers much as St. Paul was struck on his way to Damascus." Zalaquett is not far off; García Márquez's variation on marvelous realism ran through Latin America like a conversion experience. What is particularly powerful in García Márquez's hybridization of folk culture and high art is that it reflects a new, highly improvisational, cognitive mode that both emerges from Colombian history and engages with it critically, while at the same time transforming that history and that fiction into a new way of seeing.

The reader's struggle to create a historical narrative against the grain of García Márquez's texts responds to the appeal of the rhetorical mode of history as a meaningful ordering system in modern life. Frequently, García Márquez's narrator tantalizes this desire for order in the readers by providing just a few of the dates and references that Morse Peckham calls "indicators of pastness" in historical narrative. At the same time, the undermining of such indicators, which becomes a covert structural imperative in the text, responds to the narrator's recognition that, in Peckham's words, "such indicators — historically authentic details — are not only symptoms of the rhetorical overdetermination of history. They can also become ends in themselves." García Márquez's indicators are underdetermined; no matter how our rage for order compels us to rearrange the scattered facts, the result is inevitably a recognition of discontinuity. Clearly, time itself is deformed by irony; the sequence that can be derived from the story reveals no law, no access to meaning, no culmination of a teleological historical endeavor. In the retelling of the episode of the massacre of the banana workers, for example, One Hundred Years of Solitude develops this theme. The omniscient narrator's tacit support for the unofficial versions of the massacre represented in the stories told by José Arcadio Segundo and the unnamed child makes the question of oral history unproblematic in outline, though often unreliable in specific detail — for example, in the discrepancy about the number of dead carried by the hallucinatory train. Curiously, García Márquez's fictional account has historically served -618- as an impetus to permit the unwritten episode to be recognized and reinserted into the offical history of Colombia.

The inhabitants of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the lonely old dictator eking out his waning years in El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), the bitter exsoldier in El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1974; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968), the half-forgotten hero in El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labryinth, 1990), all suffer from the same loneliness, from the same plague of forgetfulness. In Autumn, the dictator's mother tries to reveal the "true" story of his conception and birth to her inattentive son, a story that diverges radically from the accepted historical version of his immaculate conception and miraculous birth. Significantly, it is the essential that is ignored in this episode: Bendición Alvarado "tried to reveal to her son the family secrets that she did not want to carry to the grave, she told him how they threw her placenta to the pigs, Sir, how she could never determine which of so many fugitives had been your father, she tried to tell him for the historical record that she had conceived him standing up…,but he did not pay her any attention."

The contagious plague of forgetfulness spreads throughout the village of Macondo, throughout the entire country, throughout the world, and even reaches past the pages of the text to affect us, its readers. We tend to forget how much of the story we owe to the manipulations of the various narrative agents. The storyteller, who filters the whole of the work through his perception and controls it with his imaginative recreation, is at the same time in García Márquez a curiously reticent figure. Despite his eagerness to define his position in traditional storytelling terms, despite the fact that we are often given the narrator's name — most famously, the Cervantine Melquiades, in the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude — the narrator remains unidentifiable. This ruse, for we must see it as such, of choosing a site and then refusing efforts at situation, defines the storyteller's art, which ostensibly chooses one site (even in the most concrete sense: the room in the Buendía house, or the stool set out in front of a store) while mediating (or occupying simultaneously) two places: that of history and that of myth. It is a position the storyteller/ narrator cannot maintain easily; in fact, he could not maintain it at all without the readers' forgetfulness, our unconscious complicity in -619- his ostensibly overt placement of the story's center and in his devious usurpation of that place.

Mexican Carlos Fuentes's work includes several of the misshapen masterpieces described by Gass, attesting to his own profound engagement with the problem of a language that does not always do justice to indigenous reality; astonishingly innovative and rewarding works like his La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964), about the twelve hours of dying, and seventyodd years of life, of an unsavory post-Mexican Revolutionary opportunist named Artemio Cruz, a spurned illegitimate peon offspring of a mulatto woman and the local landowner. Or Terra Nostra (1975; English translation, 1976), a mythic-philosophical-historical recreation of four hundred years of combined Spanish and Spanish American relations, a novel in which the reader may soon come to the conclusion that not only has Fuentes read absolutely everything ever written but that it all, somehow, has found a way into this vast book.

The problem of how language structures reality is also central to his Cristóbal Nonato (1987; Christopher Unborn, 1989), a postpunk, Laurence Sternian, dystopic projection of a 1992 Mexico City in which inhabitants speak a stylized Spanglish and worship a governmentally created concoction of myth and media hype named "Mamadoc." Sterne, and particularly Balzac, are acknowledged influences on Carlos Fuentes, and the last month of the first trimester of the novel, "It's a Wonderful Life" (the Spanish original calls the same section "Una vida padre"), contains a delicate and specific homage to Fuentes's forerunners in his Shandyian placement of prologue and epigraph at page 132 and his adornment of that passage with a graphic representation of the sperm/serpent, Shandyian in basic shape, that also, with ironic wink, reminds the reader, should she choose to be reminded, of the snakes inherited by Balzac through fortune and typesetters' creativity, allusions that Fuentes complicates with a host of tributes to other texts including, of course, those everpresent masters, Vico and Joyce, who peek in on its "vicogenesis."

At issue is no longer a matter of rational understanding of the truth or of any truth-claims whatsoever, but another enabling/ disabling condition: that which forces us to recognize the world as the world of the text, whose only significance lies precisely in its existence as text. And furthermore, to recognize the subterfuge of -620- languages as well: one of the overriding concerns in this stubbornly, playfully polyglot novel. "La lengua," that fleshy, material thing, becomes a word, a multilingual pun, a fragile verbal arabesque delicately framed between figurative quotation marks, an unreadable — if undeniably aesthetic — cipher, a zero-degree artifact of writing. As in Sterne's novel, and even more consistently so, the narration of Fuentes's work is from the point of view of a first-person voice, given overridingly to a narrator who, by traditional standards, should be an eyewitness to the events described, but who, in both books, is clearly in no condition to witness anything at all. The novel begins as Cristóbal's future parents conceive him in an ecstatic union on Acapulco's beaches, and ends, congruently, with his birth.

The shape of Fuentes's tale, however, as befits the man Suzanne Ruta has called "our leading North American political satirist," is more solid, darker, and more socially committed than that of his eighteenth-century precursor, more closely aligned with Fuentes's stated aims to create a Latin American counterpart to Balzac's massive "Comédie humaine" than with the antic satires of Sterne. The arabesque snake curve takes on another signification, as the whipping tail of the sperm-snake becomes the whip — "a black whiplash in his mind": grammatically bi-generic in Spanish, physically transsexual. Its political referents are likewise double and ambiguous: the symbol of the master's authority or the torturer's tool, the whipping curve becomes, at the same time, the liberating arabesque of graffiti on oppression's pristine wall. One reading of Fuentes would align him with the lash of that master's whip, another with the helplessness of the whipped child; one with the potent snake, another with the undigested, indigestible meal, one with the "Elector," brother to Cortázar's "lector complice" (the complicitous reader, from Rayuela [1963; Hopscotch, 1966]) who freely picks and chooses among the allusive/elusive offerings, one with the unhappily coerced child, sister to Cortázar's despised "lector hembra" (female reader): "the most likely thing is that You are a poor adolescent girl from the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón forced to copy out…some classic passage from this novel."

Like Terra Nostra, to which it serves as counterpart and counterpoint, Cristóbal Nonato is a novel about discovery, and about the continuing drama of the encounter between cultures that began at the -621- Conquest. Not the least of its peculiarities, however, is that this is a novel set at angles to the more common Hispanic bias in Latin American historiography; in Cristóbal Nonato the perceptive filter is, shockingly, dominated by an Anglo-American and Northern European range of metaphors, and despite their revolutionary rejection of things gringo in their terrorist "acapulcolipsis," Angel and Angeles are, as a punning play on their names might suggest, more anglo than angel. "What distinguishes the Spanish conquest from that of other European peoples," says Octavio Paz, "is evangelization," and what distinguishes Fuentes from other quincentenary conquistadores is not evangelization but what might be called his insistent return to the Sternian/Lawrencian metaphor of a dangerous invaginalization.

Like Carlos Fuentes, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's complete works include a startling variety of styles, ranging from the hilarious send-up of military jargon as applied to a regularly scheduled Amazonian prostitution service for the benefit of soldiers in a distant outpost (Pantaleón y las visitadores [1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978]), to his politically freighted version of a detective novel in ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986; Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987). For Vargas Llosa, increasingly over recent years, the space of writing has become his field as well, and in all of his novels since Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), the writer and his writing take central roles in the unfolding narrative. Layers accumulate in the text as the reader observes the writer writing and the writer observing himself writing and reflecting on what has been written. Santiago Zavala in Conversación is a journalist, a mediocre one, who has intentionally chosen this mediocrity so as to avoid, by his resounding failure, the more banal mediocrity of conformity.

His masterpiece, La casa verde (1965; The Green House, 1968), is considered one of the very best from the outpouring of Latin American masterpieces, a worthy candidate for what Vargas Llosa calls "the impossible novel, the total novel," combining fantasy and realism, myth and psychological verisimilitude, simultaneously unfolding all of the potential manifestations of reality and history. A kind of tropical War and Peace, this weighty (in both senses of the word) novel carries the reader along with an imaginative force and intensity that is nothing less than mesmerizing. However, it would be a serious -622- mistake to read Vargas Llosa's call for a total fiction in terms of a simplistic or reductionist espousal of continuity, synthesis, or a single, sovereign form. The novel is impossible to summarize; it has no single plot in the conventional sense of the term. The field of action of this palimpsest, however, revolves around a bordello in Piura on the northern coast of Peru, and Santa Maria de Nieva, an underdeveloped provincial outpost of that underdeveloped country, virtually inaccessible by any but the most tortuous means. Its narrative trajectory involves three generations, thirty-five major characters, and five intricately interrelated major plots. "Literature," said Vargas Llosa in a famous formulation, "is fire; it signifies nonconformism and rebellion." For Vargas Llosa, a deeply moral author with a welldocumented concern for the problematics of the total fiction, the twinned issues of history and fiction, of fact and representation, of a past repeated, as Marx reminds us, as tragedy and as farce, signify more than the presence of a leitmotif in the work. Of such entanglements the web of the oeuvre is woven. Nevertheless, his works, as Luis Harss shrewdly writes, "within their more or less tortuous 'realism' are much better than they ought to be." There is a symmetry, Vargas Llosa notes, between literary and political fictions, a suspension of disbelief in the face of a systematic set of ideas. Since both are fundamentally fictions, neither can capture or organize reality in a logical, scientific fashion. Logically, then, his "historia/novela" reveals an attempt to use history parodically, as a weapon against itself, against reality, against recognition.

It is a truism of standard Latin American literary histories that Latin American women do not write, and certainly do not write narrative. What little they do write — poetry, mostly — deserves oblivion. What narrative they produce, straightforward neorealist domestic fiction, does not stand up to comparison with the great male writers of the Boom and after, and is mercifully relegated to a mere footnote. The occasional exceptions — Western-trained and European-oriented women like Maria Luisa Bombal in Chile, Elvira Orphée, Victoria and Silvina Ocampo in Argentina, the Puerto Ricans Rosario Ferré and Ana Lydia Vega, Mexican women like Elena Garro, Margo Glantz, Barbara Jacobs, and Elena Poniatowska (whose nonHispanic-sounding last names are almost too suggestive) — neatly demonstrate the point, but they represent something of a conundrum -623- in traditional literary histories. Certainly these women refuse to subscribe to the synthetic, neatly patterned style typical of traditional nineteenth-century realism, or to the other, recognizably constructed, pseudo-disconnected narratives of the Boom. Their works, like their lives, are fragmented, other-directed, marginally fictionalized. Yet these women are the privileged minority in society and in literary history. And even among privileged women, few are accorded the accolades of strength, lucidity, intelligence: the virile virtues begrudgingly handed out to the occasional and extraordinary Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Brazilian Clarice Lispector is the one contemporary woman writer always included in a survey of Latin American great writers, although with puzzlement because, while contemporaneous with the Boom, she does not fit any of the neat categories. Clarice Lispector was born in transit to Brazil, in the Ukraine, of parents who had already left their homeland, and she arrived in Brazil at the age of two months. This fact, a mere curiosity or accident of birth that Lispector considered meaningless, is generally mentioned by way of explanation for one facet or another of Lispector's astonishing talent. She is not, by implication, really Brazilian. An otherwise perceptive Rodríguez Monegal writes, for example, "Clarice was two months old when her parents settled in Alagoas. Because of this fact, this writer — one of the most important writers Brazil has produced — had to learn Portuguese as a foreign language"; Brazilian-born two-month-olds, by implication, would never have arrived at Lispector's markedly original deformations of Portuguese syntax. Neither is she typically Brazilian: according to Alceu Amoroso Lima, "No one writes like Clarice Lispector. And she doesn't write like anyone." She is not a feminist; and while her central concerns are ontological, she writes in neither an autobiographical nor psychoanalytic mode. She rejoices in a nonidentity: the Lispector /Specter evoked by Rodríguez Monegal, dressed up in the conventional, fashion-page terms for the mysteriously (mystery is the definition of the genre) attractive woman of society: "a beautiful woman, with deep and unfathomable eyes, high Slavic cheekbones, and a mouth like a painful sensual wound….a mysterious surface." This is the language typically used to describe the infinitely interchangeable and languishingly seductive femme fatale of B-movie and pulp novel fame. -624-

Clarice Lispector is the representative of a spectral life, the documenter of the way in which her society codes itself for confrontation — or avoidance of confrontation — with the feminine. "I perform incantations during the solstice," says a character in Agua viva (1974; The Stream of Life, 1989), "specter of an exorcised dragon." No mystic ecstasy here; Lispector's writing points to another style of approaching the unnameable, through the difficult, rock-hard process of coming to terms with the recognition of the specter as specter, in expecting little, and receiving that little as the only possible joy. Thus Lispector warns her potential readers of A paixão segundo G. H. (1964; The Passion According to G. H., 1988):

This difficult happiness is not unlike that contained in the enigmatic smile on the face of the smallest woman in the world or in the insane self-possession of Laura in the presence of the roses, both from stories in the collection Laços de família (1960; Family Ties, 1972): the fleeting happiness of transitory possession, of beauty ciphered in the minuscule, the evanescent, the happiness of minimal creature comfort, of not being devoured — yet.

All of these Boom (and post-Boom) narratives represent what González Echevarría calls "archival fictions," sealed into the hegemonic discourse of the masterstory. The time has come, and more than come, to historicize the Boom itself, to set ourselves at a distance from the masterstories that have dominated talk about Latin American narrative for thirty years. In his book The Voice of the Masters (1985), González Echevarría intends us to strip away the factitious complicity between language and authoritarianism, to deconstruct their unsalutary propping up and propping upon each other. He intends to achieve this object in two ways: both in the texts he studies and in the way he studies those texts. First, he says, such representatives of modern Latin American literature as Fuentes, Cortázar, and Cabrera Infante dismantle the link between authority and rhetoric -625- through the operations of their critical-literary works. Second, his own critical style, unlike the "authoritarian" criticism he deplores, is intentionally disconnected. Such authoritarian voices, he would argue, falsify what they attempt to explain. Therefore, he proposes, the examination of literary as well as political institutions should begin with a careful critique of the language used to support them. At the end of his 1990 book, Myth and Archive, González Echevarría goes one step further in his examination of these institutions. He asks, "Is there a narrative beyond the Archive?…[T]here seems to exist a desire to break out of the archive, one that is no longer merely part of the economy of the archive itself. Is a move beyond the Archive the end of narrative, or is it the beginning of another narrative? Could it be seen from within the Archive, or even from the subversions of the Archive?"

González Echevarría's Myth and Archive is very much imbued with the current academic identity crisis that has driven scholars in various fields to rethink the implications of the traditional objects of study and the accepted methodologies for studying them. As scholars like González Echevarría reflect on the limits of what he calls "the archive," so too do they come to an awareness of the limitations of a field of knowledge that more and more comes to seem provisionally situated. González Echevarría begins to write beyond the limits of his own text when he suggests, in a final footnote, that writers like Severo Sarduy (Cuba) and Manuel Puig (Argentina) seem to be plotting an escape from the archive in their post-Boom fictions: Sarduy, perhaps, through his commitment to French deconstructive theories; Puig in his obsession with popular art forms.

Manuel Puig is a particularly interesting case in point. Unlike the Boom novelists, his crucial referent is neither elitist high culture nor autochthonous reality. Instead, Puig's characters most commonly define themselves in terms of popular culture — the songs from the top 40, the "in" soap opera, the movies, generally Hollywood imports, that dominate the theater screens. Puig's gently ironic vision of his hapless small-town dwellers is both compassionate and comprehending. While he displays the emptiness of an existence defined by Tinseltown values, his works, including La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971), Boquitas pintadas (1972; Heartbreak Tango, 1973), and Pubis Angelical (1979; English trans-626- lation, 1986), also offer a sincere homage to the films of the 1930s and 1940s that are his particular resource.

Perhaps most well known of his novels in the United States is El beso de la mujer araña (1976; Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1979), a work released in a film version in 1985. This novel is told almost entirely through dialogue between two cellmates, one a political prisoner, one jailed for overt homosexual behavior (corruption of a minor). The story is essentially one of seduction — of seduction of each of the two apparently incompatible prisoners by the ideas of the other, a mutual seduction mediated by the romantic films the homosexual describes to escape mentally from the confines of prison and the even more stifling confines of a middle-class morality he paradoxically, yearningly espouses, a seduction that also implies that of the reader into the web of the text. The multiply negotiated kiss occupies a central symbolic role: the kiss of affection between friends, the passionate kiss of lovers, the fatal kiss of the panther woman that turns her into the assassin of the one she loves, the betrayer's kiss that sends the confederate to a horrible death. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the stereotypically lush movie settings contrast with the implicit barenness of the cell. Curiously, at the end of the novel the lavish romantic fantasies legitimated by Hollywood merge with the harshly murderous reality of the unnamed Latin American country as the homosexual, Molina, doubly seduced by movies and by politics, suffers either the romantic death of a movie heroine or/and the heroic martyrdom of a political activist. Or perhaps, cognizant of our own seduction by either of the two versions, we readers might glimpse another dimension in which Molina's death would become merely another in a frighteningly long line of meaningless disappearances, becoming in the Latin American context a metaphor for the violence authoritarian governments often exercise against their own citizens. Molina, the homosexual, has always been and still is part of a "disappeared" segment of Latin American society: the homosexual subculture that is alternately ignored and persecuted by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. In the United States context, Molina's senseless death by fiction can be taken as an allegorical tale of all such disappearances, social and political, including the mysterious disappearance, and equally mysterious reappearance, of the entire continent from our collective memories. -627- Manuel Puig's works epitomize an ill-defined area of literature that I call, borrowing the term from Mexican "cronista" Jose Joaquín Blanco, "la novela de la transa."[2] The "transa" (sting or con operation) is, as Blanco notes, also a "trenza" (a weaving together) of disparate elements of society, with the common ground of a "supervivencia ilusionada" (an illusionary survival) based on the con-artist's confidence in his own cleverness. Unlike the United States model of the confidence game, the Mexican "transa" is less focused on the individual doing the manipulating, more on the action as transaction between two individuals, each of whom knows that a "transa" is taking place, each of whom thinks he (it is usually a "he") has the advantage. "Transa" then, eventually involves "autotransa." It is a quintessentially urban phenomenon, powered by young people who derive their models from television and popular culture. These young people may not know English, and their superficial indifference to politics does not mask a deep historical resentment to United States policies, but they can sing along with the latest heavy-metal rock bands from the United States and are attentive to fashions coming out of New York. They are also aware of sexualities ignored/disguised by the bourgeoisie. For simplicity's sake, I will divide the "novela de la transa" into two dominant thematic tendencies, one emphasizing the social transaction, the second focusing on the sexual transaction. Clearly, however, most novels include both tendencies: Puig's works, for example, deal importantly with cultural imperialism, while also addressing areas of ambiguously negotiated sexualities. Likewise, Severo Sarduy's technically complex dramas, like Cobra (1972; English translation, 1975), highlight ambiguously trans-sexual characters such as Cobra/ Cadillac, the one castrated, the other endowed with a penis to cover her/his original lack.

The hormonal charge of a differently gendered discourse is nowise esoteric. It confronts directly an ingrained institutional history of seeing differently gendered literature as inherently limited when held up to a "universal" standard. Ethel Krauze, a young writer and critic from Mexico, responds to those who uncritically adopt variations on -628- heterosexist, masculinist assumptions when she sensibly argues that the historical positioning of the gendered self applies to all the products of the imagination:

What Krauze proposes is not the successive approximation of writing by women to a supposedly sexless, but inherently masculinist, model of "good" writing, but rather the development of that model's complementary other side(s). Krauze, furthermore, signals the impossibility of doing anything else, for she is both a woman and a writer, and not a transvestite man. Her work will of necessity be inflected by this historical, social, and sexual positioning, and it is, moreover, to her advantage to recognize the usefulness of exploring the potentialities in writing from different points of view. In so doing, writers outside the male heterosexist orientation will instigate what Sylvia Molloy calls "a new praxis of writing, subverting the authoritarian language that puts them 'in their place,' displacing themselves." And from this other place, such authors can complete an image of the world that has, inevitably, only been partially drawn.

Overtly homosexual/lesbian writing has a particularly powerful charge in this context. Reina Roffé's Monte de Venus (1976) was highly controversial in Argentina for its frankly portrayed lesbianism. The novel, in many ways a rehash of tired romantic clichés drawn from countless sentimental love stories, popular music, and banal cinema, was banned in that country alongside other works with the cast of a more overtly political denunciation. As David William Foster notes, for the authorities, "a novel that gives voice to an aggressive lesbian, whose inverted behavior threatens sacred institutions by -629- parodying them with notable fidelity, is clearly a new threshold in the allegedly mindless corruption of the national moral fiber." The censors are probably right; novels like Roffé's do indeed pose a challenge to the precariously maintained facade of bourgeois gentility.

The aggressive point-by-point homage to/parody of heterosexual mores appears in other works as well, and for clarification I take my example from Mexican Luis Zapata's second novel, En jirones (In Shreds), the journal of a much-vexed love affair. At one point in the novel, the (male) narrator explicitly describes his authorial stance in relation to his work. A severely edited version of this authorial positioning reads "like a man," that is, it flows along the traditional pathways of an archetypally conceived, heterosexually oriented male discourse: "Independently of the solicitudes, of the specifications, of the position-taking, and the detailing of desires and preferences, whose author or designated audience could be anyone, I discover a sentence in the Institute's bathroom that seems to address me specifically…." In Zapata's novel, however, this commonplace sentence is interrupted at each point by parenthetical remarks that prevent that kind of active misreading. When the parenthetical remarks are returned to the text, the authorial positioning becomes strikingly, shockingly unconventional, and still, in the Latin American context, largely unacceptable: "Independientemente de las solicitudes (busco verga), de las precisiones (19 años, la tengo grande y cabezona), o de las tomas de posición (soy puto) y la especificación de deseos y preferencias (me gusta mamar, soy pasivo), cuyo autor o destinatario puede ser cualquiera, descubro una frase en el baño del Instituto que parece concernirme directamente: 'Dame tiempo, papacito: llegará el momento en que me la retaques hasta el fondo'" ["Independently of the solicitudes (I'm looking for a prick), of the specifications (19 years old, I have a big one with a large head), of the position-taking (I'm a hustler), and the detailing of desires and preferences (I like to suck, I'm passive), whose author or designated audience could be anyone, I discover a sentence in the Institute's bathroom that seems to address me specifically: 'Just give me a little time, daddy-boy: the time will come when you'll really give it to me'"]. The reader, shaken from the comfortable pathologies of a "neuter" readerrelationship, is insistently gendered and redefined by sexual preference. Resistance too is subsumed in the prophetic phrase on the bath-630- room wall, a narration still framed, but now out of the closet, the seductive promise of a deferred penetration between men, between a forthright author and a coyly (self) deceptive reader, without the place-holding, face-saving symbolic exchange of women to mediate the act. Zapata's insistently marginalized discourse also intuits the potency of the fragmented fac-simile, the "transa" that is both otherdirected and profoundly self-critical, and the charge of his hormonal injection is disruptive of the pathologies of least resistance.

Already during the same period in which literary studies were dominated by references to the Boom novelists, the literature of social "transa" was inventing its place and its form. In Mexico, the literature of disaffected middle-class youth strung out on too much rock, too much sex, and too many drugs was called, at the end of the 1960s, "literatura de onda" (new-wave literature). The work of writers like José Agustin — De perfil (1966; Profile), Se está haciendo tarde (1973; It's Getting Late), Ciudades desiertas (1982; Deserted Cities); Gustavo Sainz — Gazapo (1965; Rabbitkin), Obsesivos días circulates (1969; Obsessive Circular Days), or the edited volume Corazón de palabras (1981; Heart of Words); Salvador Elizondo — Farabeuf; o, la crónica de un instante (1965; Farbeuf; or, The Chronicle of an Instant), and others has a hyper real quality that is very conscious of its interconnectedness with modern media and modern means of communication. Cars, telephones, televisions, tape recorders, and stereo systems are very much in evidence. Many of these fictions involve preposterously contorted multilingual plots and dashes of provocative metatelephonic analysis with the reader/ auditor, all written to a rhythm falling between the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan — set to mariachi music, of course. In José Agustín's story "Cuál es la onda" (What's Shaking/What Is the Wave), the group of disaffected youths speak to each other in lines from their favorite rock songs and television shows, and adopt/adapt Americanisms like the exclamations "Oh, Goshito," "buen grief," or "en la móder," call each other "darlita," and suggest meeting "a tu chez." The rebel-without-a-cause quality of the "onda" writers now seems a bit dated, but their lingering influence can be discerned in the vexed bilingualism of other writers who sprinkle their works with street slang that includes Anglicisms and loan blends like "gufeándose jevi" or "friquiao" or "fóquin," as well as in such overwhelmingly popular -631- confections as Guadalupe Loaeza's series of "chronicles" of high life in the capital. Clearly, we are meant to laugh at the foibles of Loaeza's society women, their concern for being comme il faut, their penchant for shopping (a word Loaeza always uses in English) in New York, their exclusive preoccupation with class (having it, and belonging to the right one), their interpretation of Mexican folklore: huitlacoche crepes, huipiles over Calvin Kleins. Loaeza represents, as she captures, the smug chic of those who find a certain cachet in the practice of épater le bourgeois.

Argentina's Enrique Medina's eloquent Strip-Tease (1976) exemplifies the counterpart and the reverse of such works as those of Agustín and Loaeza. It too enacts a social "transa," but his point of view is not that of the rich kid slumming with lower-class companions out of either boredom or political conviction; rather Medina takes as his charge that of defining those characters most traditionally associated with the underworld side of these negotiations. He is well positioned to do so. Medina, who has since the easing of censorship been Argentina's best-selling writer, is one of the few well-known Latin American writers from a lower-class background. His father was a boxer; Medina's first work, Las tumbas (197 2; The Tombs) is a "testimonio" of his life in a prison for adolescents; Strip-Tease is at least partially based on his own experience as a striptease show director and as a doorman in a house of prostitution. In this work, as in all his later works, Medina insists on what is alternately called "writing without concessions" or "contestatorial writing" as he writes in the violent street slang of his marginalized characters and deliberately refuses to prettify the gratuitous violence of their surroundings.

In Strip-Tease, Medina creates a fictional representation of the social pressures obtaining in Buenos Aires's underworld, and the premature adolescence of its youth, their disillusionment and boredom and hatred and impotence that leads them to second-rate striptease shows, dirty massage parlors, and rerun movie parlors. His characters move in a world where violence is the norm; it is his aggressive portrayal of those assaults and rapes, without concessions to dominant morality, that caused his long-term problems with Argentina's censors. This novel, like most of his other books, was banned in Argentina for many years. Like the more privileged characters of -632- Agustín et al., Medina's throwaway people are deeply imbued with Western mass-culture clichés; in their mouths, however, such clichés take on a frighteningly literal twist:

Strip-Tease is exceptionally powerful in depicting this world of hoodlums and hookers and minor-league criminals who draw from popular culture but deform/subvert it to their own ends.

Other "transas" with/of literary history have become increasingly common, if understudied: rewriting popular art forms, appropriating high art for alternative contexts, proposing new aesthetics of reading.

Rosario Castellanos, herself the author of two novels generally misread as indigenista, Balún Canán (1957; The Nine Guardians, 1959), and Oficio de Tinieblas (1962; Service at Dusk), recognizes and takes into account a tradition that marks women readers as superficial and morally deficient, but she realigns the terms to right the misappropriation of the reading woman as immoral, while reversing the negative charge on the accusation of superficiality:

Latin American women novelists seem to have discovered long before Robbe-Grillet and the theoreticians of the nouveau roman that the universe is surface. And if it is surface, let us polish it so that it does not present any roughnesses to the touch, no shock to the gaze. So that it shines, so that it sparkles, in order to make us forget that desire, that need, that mania, of looking for what is beyond, on the other side of the veil, behind the curtain.

Let us remain, therefore, with what has been given us: not the develop-633- ment of an intimate structure but the unenveloping of a series of transformations.

Castellanos here confronts directly the rhetorical tradition that defines good prose as clear, straightforward, masculine, and bad taste in prose as a fondness for the excessively ornamented, and therefore effeminate. In her challenge to this ingrained metaphor Castellanos intuits the startling possibilities of a feminine aesthetics as a radically different model for feminist politics. She rejects the meek, tidy housewife and evokes instead the unmistakable image of the bored upperclass woman, filing her nails (sharpening her claws?), slipping, menacingly, out of her Eve-snake skin, creating herself affirmatively in the appropriation of the polished, superficial, adjectival existence allotted her, making the fiction yet more impenetrably fictive until it glows as the revolutionary recognition of an amoral forgotten truth. The mirror is her talisman, a weapon for dispelling, as it creates, illusion: aesthetics and politics brought home, as it were, from their travels, made homey, personal, private, quotidian.

In Castellanos's metaphorical history of language as an instrument for domination, she writes, "La propiedad quizá se entendió, en un principio como corrección lingüística…. Hablar era una ocasión para exhibir los tesoros de los que se era propietario…. Pero se hablaba ¿a quién? ¿O con quién?" [Propriety/property was perhaps understood, in the beginning, as a linguistic correction…. To speak was an occasion to exhibit the treasures of which one was proprietor…. But to whom did one speak? Or with whom?]. To speak is to create a surface of propriety, of proprietary relationships that can be exploited in various directions. The works of these Latin American women novelists cited by Castellanos do not provide a model either to imitate or to appropriate nor do they provide a mimetic reflection to contemplate, but rather a polished surface to triangulate desire in which the apices of the triangle are (1) the adorned body of the text, (2) the implicitly male motivator and first recipient of this textual adornment, and (3) the female reader, a free space for self-invention. The cultivation of a polished superficiality suggests a willed, willful transvaluation of values that surpasses mere reversal. While leaving the surface of complacency available for the desiring eyes of those -634- whom Alicia Partnoy, based on her bitter experience as a disappeared poet in the "little houses" of Argentina's prisons, calls "el lector enemigo," the woman writer produces a layered look for the discriminating eye of her "lectora hembra" for whom the constructs of life as a staged aesthetic performance are not unfamiliar.

All of Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré's writings work explicitly with this conflict described by Castellanos, from her early stories and poems in Papeles de Pandora (1976; Pandora's Papers) to her more recent novella Maldito amor (1986; Sweet Diamond Dust, 1988). In the case of Rosario Ferré's short stories "Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres" ("When Women Love Men") and "I solda en el espejo" ("Isolda's Mirror"), the play of unreadability is posed in the text as a problem and as part of the project of the work, in which the issue of making-up for a particular audience becomes part of the message of the text. "When Women Love Men" ostensibly addresses itself to an absent seducer — "you, Ambrosio" — the man who oppresses the two women in his life, his wife and his mistress, in the most traditional and intimate ways. Now dead, Ambrosio in his will leaves his house to both women jointly, perhaps in revenge for unstated discomforts they have caused him, perhaps as a joke. Ultimately, elaborately, Isabel the wife and Isabel the mistress find their liberation from his presence and from his instructions in following his will (both senses) exactly, and thus subverting Ambrosio's intent. Rather than declaring war, the two women coalesce like two surfaces gliding over each other. The objective correlative for this process is, for each of them, a particular shade of violently red nail polish they both prefer, and this unexpected merging "was our most sublime act of love."

These women do resist, and they resist precisely at the textual level. By fixing the reading on the Cherries Jubilee nail polish (in "When Women Love Men") or the "Coty facial powder in the 'Alabaster' shade" (in "Isolda"), Ferré unbalances conventional expectations: the tension is not buried deep within the women but displayed prominently and unexpectedly on the surface. Nail polish and facial powder are not even symbols to be decoded; because their function is decisively literal they are all the more potent. Cosmetics, then, along with race, serve as the fundamental visual clues of social class. It is with cosmetics and — as Castellanos intuited — with lan-635- guage that the process of emancipation must begin, and if the stories represent Ferré's verbal praxis, it is through a revolutionary use of make-up that her characters in "When Women Love Men" and "Isolda" stage their rebellion. Instead of making themselves up for a man, they are making themselves up as a form of emancipation that, along the way, serves as a potent demystification of the myth of everlasting love in its conventional forms. Ostensibly, all the women in Ferré's stories are making themselves up "for" men. Ostensibly, the denunciation would be of a male power base that turns women into dolls and sensual playthings and mute works of art. That is part of it, of course. But the men in Ferré's stories are too defeated, too unmanned by other circumstances to bear the weight of a nuanced cultural critique. Her male characters, while seemingly prepotent, are curiously caricaturesque or easily discounted as forces of civic and political authority. The rum barons are drunken has-beens, Ambrosio is dead, Don Augusto is old and bankrupt. Likewise, while the Yankees loom on the horizon as the new masters of economic power, their power is still only distantly felt, and their impact on social interactions is minimal. We could even say that if the women are surfacing in these stories, the men are drowning. Evidently, too, Ferré's concern is as much with empowerment (of men as well as women) as with denunciation. It is in this respect that the author of these stories asks women to look at themselves, to see themselves making themselves up in the mirror of her text, to see their own complicity in and responsibility for their subjugation. It is here that the slipwise mediation of the male gaze (to use Jacques Lacan's term) allows the female reader to reflect upon the shifting dynamics of male-female relationships; it is in the mediation of the textualized male gaze that she is protected from a self-critique too devastating to be helpful. Rosario Castellanos suggests polishing the surface, making it shine, slipping in a space for an evolving, transformative self; Rosario Ferré offers a buffered (male-coded) space for mediation between the transformative surfaces of the female narrative and the constantly self-displacing, transforming surfaces of the female reader.

The particular form of this appropriative gesture has already been named, in the felicitous coinage of Clarice Lispector, a "fac-simile." "I write you," says the unnamed female artist of Agua viva to her lover, her interlocutor, her (male) literary audience, and implicitly the -636- gesture of homage is also a weapon of appropriation: I write (of myself) to you, and that which I write is constitutive of you. In writing — by definition "like a man" — she creates a likeness of the man and a self-likeness, consciously manipulating a style sanctioned by tradition and undermining its pathological assumptions (when I say this I have in mind Eve Sedgwick's definition of one of the functions of tradition as "to create a path-of-least-resistance (or at the last resort, a pathology-of-least-resistance)." Tradition can be most effectively subverted just along such welt-worn pathways. At first glance Lispector's narrator hints at an incomplete or distorted autobiographical account; at second, a kind of inept role-reversal Pygmalion to her sculpted lover: "I write you this fac-simile of a book, the book of one who does not know how to write." In fact, she is neither incomplete, distorted, nor inept. The appropriative gesture turns the knowledge of the other against the lover; she constitutes him as she deceptively inscribes a so-called constitution of the self. She appropriates, but with an injection of estrogen escapes the confinements of the model in her reconstituting of herself as a false copy, a simulacrum, the split simile, like and not like, that which affirms and negates the model in the same word. In so doing, Lispector — herself the author of a story with the resonant title of "The Fifth Story" — decries both mimesis and genealogy. The crucial question, perhaps, is not that of the origins of the gesture but the uses to which it may be put, and is continually being put: a way of being that is a way of speaking, or not speaking, or writing, but which always involves the informed interaction of the reader.

The novella "Fourth Version," from Argentine Luisa Valenzuela's Cambio de armas (1982; Other Weapons, 1985), enacts another version of this displacement. The narrator, a frustrated co-author and editor of Bella's scattered papers, organizes the fourth fac-simile of the story of the actress and the ambassador. At each step the attempt at a rational restructuralization of key elements fails. Materials at hand are scarce, key elements are silenced or lost, and what remains seems more appropriate for another genre. The editor, faced with the impossibility of constructing a traditional narrative according to conventional formal properties, eventually breaks down into a fac-simile of a critic: "The papers tell her story of love, not her story of death" — either an indecipherable code or, worse, an incomprehensi-637- ble reversal of priorities. Later, disgruntled, the editor-critic complains about the difficulty of assigning a genre to the papers: "Verbose Pedro, respecting a certain kind of silence which ended up spreading to Bella too, to the extent that her alleged indirect autobiography, her confessional novel, ended up deflating itself in certain parts," and, finally, acknowledges that her preferred reading of events stumbles against a lack of supporting materials: "I don't understand why the crucial information has been omitted regarding this key encounter." Each version — the internal author's, the fourth; the critic's, the fifth; this one, the sixth — carries its own preassumptions and presuppositions, each writes the text as a variation of self-writing (of the critic, not of either Bella or Pedro), each limns another portion of the appropriative field, works another inversion/subversion of the writing of the fac-simile.

In one such variation, "Fourth Version" reenacts in a fictional setting one of the critical moments of Valenzuela's own political activism during the Videla regime. It has as its counterpart the final story of the collection, the title story "Other Weapons," a story told from the point of view of one of those to whom the protective net did not extend. "Other Weapons," like "Fourth Version," projects the limit case of society's censorship of women through the unexpected metaphor of a traditional middle-class marriage. For "Other Weapons"'s "so-called Laura," all of her past life is an ellipsis. Nouns are particularly elusive: "the so-called anguish," "the so-called love," or "What might the prohibited (repressed) be?"; as are verbs: the meanings of verbs like "to love" and "to hate," "to make love" and "to torture," slip indistinguishably into each other. Her experience is conditional, hypothetical, based on a series of subordinate clauses responding to the main clause, the spoken orders of the man: her lover, her torturer, her one friend, the enemy she must assassinate. Her touchstone is her own wounded body — "una espalda azotada" (a wounded back) — which is continuous with her wounded mind, her aphasia: "la palabra azotada," in which the weight of reference falls not on the noun but on the adjective, "azotada." The nameless protagonist, for convenience "the so-called Laura," tastes the bittersweet of her blood in the slash on her back, the shattered words on her tongue; denied refuge, she has no place to treasure up her scattered bits, no force to bring them together out of their fragmentation. Her -638- story is that of a veiled and unspeakable pornography, rescued through the tentative workings of the subjunctive.

In "Other Weapons" the colonel reminds the so-called Laura, "I've got my weapons, too," and in "Fourth Version" the narrator muses: "And I, who am putting all of this back together now [Y yo, quien ahora esto arma], why do I try to find certain keys to the whole affair when those being handed to me are quite different keys?" "Armar" (to put together) is always a model for potential violence, intuitively pointing toward its opposite: the revolutionary blowing apart of a system or a text. Fellow Argentinian Julio Cortázar's novel 62: Modelo para armar (1971; 62: A Model Kit, 1972) stands as a precursor text for this double meaning of the verb. To write (rewrite) this story is to give it a particular construction, to appropriate its multiplicity for a single point of view, to aim the weapon in a particular direction: "There is no author [autor] and now I am the author [autora], appropriating this text that generates the desperation of writing." The too-easy slippage between masculine "autor" and feminine "autora" is in itself reason for despair, one of the reasons, perhaps, that this markedly feminine author insists upon the multiplicity of stories, as if the repeated reminder of the absence of a claim of authority and the admittedly incomplete nature of the editorial enterprise are enough to deflect the critical weapons that may be aimed at it. "Stop talking to me in capital letters," Bella complains to Pedro; the crystallization of role and function — the Ambassador, the Actress, the Messengers, the Great Writer — refracts in the multiple mirrors of the layered text as frivolously parodic emblems: arms perhaps, but either sinisterly distanced or singularly ineffective ones. To identify too closely with them would be to lose the freedom to escape behind the mask, to play with the roles while enacting a subtle "apropriamiento." What the "autora" fears is the danger of falling into the text, one of a chorus of "las mujeres escritoras" (note redundancy) to whom "they have sold the idea of transexuality," in the words of Monserrat Ordóñez. Most critically, she rejects the pompous and self-congratulatory "Great Writer," who arrives all unaware in the midst of an all-too-real revolution, only to find himself weaponless.

There is, we begin to suspect, an element of the theatrical in all of this emphasis on mirrors and masks and bodies that react with the -639- discipline of trained mimes. There is, particularly in Bella's repertoire of practiced gestures, the highly overdetermined artificiality of the woman often dismissed as merely decorative. Women, apparently, demonstrate naturalness through well-defined and highly conventionalized artifices of mock-spontaneity. Even more strikingly, this development is defined, albeit condescendingly, with a military metaphor: "her weapons, her arsenal." This is, of course, precisely the first image we have of Bella. The actress is depicted behind the scenes, "sharpening her weapons, her arsenal of grace," readying herself for the battle, practicing her lines, putting on her makeup for that night's performance on the stage, for the self-representation that is her personal/political weapon in the undeclared war on the streets, declaiming, "My role is to be alive" while "she made herself up carefully to go to the party." For Bella, maintenance of a superficial frivolity is a radical and rigorous form of work. It is, in fact, her life work, preserving her life to protect others. For Bella, the distance professionally enforced between representation and reality constitutes a shadowy revolutionary praxis. She knows all too well that at any moment the stage set could easily give way to the torture chamber, the theatrical gesture of faked beating might seamlessly merge with the drama of questioning and of pain maliciously inflicted, politically compromised roles could become political reality, the almost pain of self-erasing could slip into the unendurable pain of a reality that recreates the body in destroying it:

On the one hand, in her imagination, Bella's body will become her own on participating in real terror. Paradoxically, she also knows that she is only insofar as she represents, that her whole being is absorbed in a scene of torture/a drama about torture, that she is herself an embodiment of "torture on stage." To the degree that she enforces this perception she openly identifies herself as literary rather than corporeal. Thus, the fragmentation of her text enacts the scene -640- of physical dismemberment. On the other hand, like the so-called Laura, Bella knows that reality has at least two sides, that in leaping from imagination to the torture chamber she has only crossed the first of the border lines. Laura would remind her that the second door, the one with the peephole, represents the most ambiguous and dangerous transgression of all, and requires another arsenal of weapons to vanquish.

Still another variety of "transa" is involved in the appropriation of the traditional means of expression for nontraditional purposes. It is perhaps to be expected that much of contemporary Latin American writing specifically constitutes itself as a refusal of traditional restrictions and customary censorship. When Valenzuela in one of her essays speaks specifically of the need for women to engage in "a slow and tireless task of appropriation [apropriamiento] of transformation," she speaks of the important task of taking back the use of the language that uses them. She calls for an appropriation of language that not only asserts a woman's rights to an estranged linguistic property as her personal possession but is also involved in a makingone's-own of oneself, of realigning alienating categories, and of creating a new understanding of what is proper in the careful and intentional use of improprieties. "Apropriamiento" is the public assertion of rights to that personal and private space. It is to take that which has been assigned to another for her own, for the first time to take herself and take for herself the woman customarily appropriated by another as his property. "To take" and not "to take back": the original appropriation — of words, of bodies, of power — is credited to human nature. It is an insight that can be extended to other kinds of appropriation as well.

Thus, in Doris Sommer's words, referring to the politically active women of Bolivia's "Housewives' Committee," "These women who take up men's tools also use language in a way that doesn't fall into a 'visceral emptiness' [Elaine Marks's term] but rather adjusts and challenges the very codes they adopted from their admirable men." These are far too busy and far too committed to worry about emptiness other than the emptiness of their children's stomachs. Nevertheless, they provide a concrete instance of the practice taken up at more theoretical or abstract levels: traditionally marginalized writers take up both tools and language, and in so doing forge new instru-641- mentalities. In the Latin American context, as Valenzuela reminds us, a subtle transformation occurs with the appropriation of critical weapons — she calls it an injection of estrogen into dominant ideologies — so that when the sensitized readers — male or female — look again at canonical texts — male or female authored — they too begin to appropriate the texts differently. Texts like those of Luisa Valenzuela, Reina Roffé, or Manuel Puig that subtly employ heterosexist/masculinist assumptions against themselves require attentive gender-conscious readings with special urgency. It is this type of reading that they were prematurely born to elicit, and are in fact eliciting in the interstices of even the most traditional critical discourse, marginally undermined along the double-voiced fault lines of what is said to be, of what is called, of the preemptive "as if" of an incomparable, unexpected appropriation.

For Francine Masiello, Latin American writing at its best displays what she calls, following Bakhtin, a "double discourse," a hybrid language "that recognizes the structures of power at the same time that it offers an alternative." In Julieta Campos's work, the discourse is never solely double, never offers only one alternative. Then, too, her best work links the recognition of social and political structures of power to a forceful recognition of the equally significant rhetorical structures that are among power's essential building blocks. Furthermore, her reader is not complicitous but embattled, engaged in a struggle for control within the universe of the fiction. The novel, says Campos in her Función de la novela (1973; Function of the Novel), "is a reality created by the word and the fabula, a constant gestation of…an estar siendo, a gerundial universe where the author, the characters, and even the reader fight incessantly for life." The point here is precisely the unorthodox and untranslatable play between the two Spanish verbs of being, ser and estar. English uses the gerund "being" to represent the noun; in Spanish the infinitive is employed: "el ser" (never "el estar"). Campos's proposition of a gerundial form, "un estar siendo," brings together the two modes of being, both the gerundial and the infinitive — responding to cultural as well as linguistic imperatives — and brings together as well two nuances of existing, a peculiarly Spanish shade of meaning, one the shadow-dreamreflection of the other, and does so in a world that slips in and out -642- of conventional fictional illusions, or slides from the illusions of fiction to the illusions of "reality."

Deeply problematized in the rereading of the body's poetic topography is the role of the reader or viewing public. The audience's gaze upon these public/private spectacles is hypothetically voyeuristic, but the issue becomes more complicated because the circuit of exchange involves a recognition of the audience as voyeur looking upon a primal scene of narcissistic self-contemplation that is, nevertheless, a staged scene, meant to be overlooked. In the archetypal economy, the man (lover, writer, critic) reads (seduces/is seduced by, writes, interprets) woman (the mistress, the work of art, the text). But what happens where "you" is a female reader? Is the text unreadable? Does the reader automatically reposition herself as a transvestite? Is the female reader a she posing as a he posing as a she?

One of the most extended and concrete explorations of this problematic can be found in Julieta Campos's novel Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina (1974; She Has Red Hair and Her Name Is Sabina). In this novel, written almost entirely in the conditional tense and in the subjunctive mood for verbs (an observation already made by Alicia Rivero Potter), writers, critics, editors, readers, and commentators proliferate around a single character — a woman — and a single action — looking out to sea. One of the voices tells us that the only certainty in the novel is the one given in the title, that is, that the woman has red hair and her name is Sabina. Readers external to the text are inclined to believe this voice, if only because the assertion reappears in both French and Spanish and is reinserted on the cover and the title page of the book. There is, certainly, no other reason for accepting this assertion over any of the other contingent, inconsistent, and contradictory assertions made in the book about the woman, her present circumstances, and her past. My own inclination would be to discount the assertion "she has red hair and her name is Sabina," like all the other parallel assertions made in the text about the woman, her life, attitudes, genealogy, etc., as totally gratuitous. In fact, I would argue that the primary narrative node generating the text is not the title phrase but another also seemingly straightforward statement, also frequently reiterated, this one couched not in the third but in the first person: "I am a character that looks out to sea at four in -643- the afternoon…from a scenic overlook in Acapulco." This single assertion is the crucial starting point for the adventure of reading and writing, what Stephen Heath calls the "scriptural" of narrative in this text. From this statement depends, first of all, a nonsystematic sequence of relationships among the various agents of the verb: "I" refracts into "you" (both the informal "tú" and the formal "usted"), as well as into "he" and "she." "I," "you," "he," "she," and intermittent "we" and "they" in turn serve as nodes organizing a proliferation of other characters, or character-positions, some of whom carry on dialogues with each other, some of whom ignore each other's existence, some of whom contradict each other or logically cancel each other out, some of whom occupy the space of the subject in near-simultaneity: "The novel that she, I, you would write begins at last to displace the other, the one that he would be writing." Likewise, the concept of "character" itself serves as another nodal juncture. At one extreme, the reader could suggest that the novel has only one character, the woman who looks out to sea and whose entire fictional existence is consumed in that gaze; at the other, the various novelists, readers, critics, editors, and characters from other novels (by Campos, by other contemporary Latin American and European writers: the novel is to some extent a postmodern literary detective's delightful garden of allusive clues) impinge and infringe upon this space, gazing (voyeuristically) at her, defining and interpreting her look, situating her in a particular fictional construct that says more about the needs and desires of the narrator/reader/critic/literary canon than it does about the simple action of gazing out to sea. In the same manner, the sea becomes, at different moments, the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean; four o'clock in the afternoon indistinguishably fades into other times, "It's twenty to ten…. It is midnight and/or it is noon"; the overlook may be a dock, a hotel room window, or an imagined/remembered scene; Acapulco is Havana, New York, Venice, a movie backdrop.

For Campos, the operative metaphor for the surface/depth discussion can be found in her obsession with the sea. One could attempt to argue that the sea is both feminine and explicitly maternal in her work. Sabina, for example, is dedicated "to Terina de la Torre, my mother," and the dedication page is followed by an epigraph from Chateaubriand: "Je reposerai donc au bord de la mer que j'ai tant-644- aimée" [I will rest beside the sea I loved so much]. The juxtaposition of dedication and epigraph suggests the familiar and much-exploited play on "la mer" (sea) and "la mère" (mother). Such a reading is plausible, but requires nuancing. At this point, let me just say that while the images of the sea, repeated throughout Campos's work, are associated with the female characters, the sea itself, while beautiful and strangely compelling for Campos's female characters, is not itself particularly feminized. It is in no wise a metaphor for an imagined maternal depth, but rather a metaphor of the more generalized human need for surfacing from meaningless voids. The sea, simply, is the place where a human being must remain afloat to live, and the depths of the sea bring not enlightenment but death: "And it involves telling something it is because one supposes that things happen that do not explain themselves and that look for words in order to come to the surface [para salir a flote] like someone on the point of drowning looks for a piece of wood to grab onto and hold oneself up."

The reader, constantly, is called upon to respond to the experience of reading by the same chorus of contradictory voices that determine the labyrinthine structure of the self-conscious text. Clearly, this novel, like many contemporary "elite" novels with which it might be compared, highlights the process of a novel's creation: how to structure a beginning and an end, how to repress or emphasize stylistic quirks. It includes debates on the use of symbols and concerns itself about whether or not to leave in or take out all punctuation: "Take out the commas, the periods, the semicolons, all the signs of punctuation, of interrogation, of exclamation and allow the interior discourse to flow. Make the reader work a little. Forgive me…I think in periods and commas." At the same time, it plays with these postmodern obsessions, these eminently readable confections of a nowestablished, and highly stylized, tradition of unreadability, the contemporary novelist's verbal equivalent of the Conceptual artist's make-up. By insisting on this saturation of fictional techniques, this dizzying declension of narrative possibilities, Campos underlines the constitutive importance of the process of reading to the creation of the fiction, as well as the unretrievability — or ultimate irrelevance — of any kind of originary or founding statement.

One of the most exciting new developments in Latin American literature today is the attention paid to "testimonios." Partly, such -645- works respond to our recognition of a major lack in traditional literary studies that "indigenista" literature does not even begin to fill. The increasing critical attention to such works has raised a number of methodological and procedural problems, however. Black, mestizo, and Indian peoples tend to be poor and illiterate. To understand their "literature" it is generally necessary to go beyond books; poetry may be sung, rather than written, stories often pass from village to village in oral form. The extraordinary campesino, mine worker, or guerrilla fighter may, in extraordinary circumstances, dictate his/her testimonial to a more privileged, politically compromised poet, anthropologist, or novelist, but frequently in such cases the unlettered person is stripped of agency. Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal has made the striking observation that the Spanish edition of Rioberta Menchú's testimony — Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983; I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 1984) — is credited to Elizabeth Burgos, the ethnographer who took the Guatemalan woman's testimony and edited it with her; in contrast, the English edition lists Menchú as author and Burgos as editor, a telling shift. A similar displacement takes place in relation to Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 1968) where in the Spanish original Miguel Barnet is listed as the author, and in the English translation he is cited as the editor of Esteban Montejo's testimony. The shift in the title from "biography" to "autobiography" reflects this transformation, but also disguises Barnet's very real creative function in adapting Montejo's story to his narrative purposes.

Feal comments not only on the loss of agency implied in this cooption of authorship but also on the political significance of such power plays, which in effect counter the testifiers' appeal to immediacy and authenticity by screening their words with a veil of art: "To call the speakers subject or object denies the creative, autonomous act they perform when they recount their lives; to call them characters confines them to a fictive world." It is also significant that in English translation the reference to the revolutionary struggle, for Rigoberta Menchú the sole reason for providing her testimony, is muted in favor of a general ethnographic reference. Rigoberta Menchú's is not the only case of such, often well-meaning, appropriation; other examples include Domitila Barrios de Chungara's Si me permiten ha-646- blar…Testimonio de Domitila, una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (1976; Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, 1978), dictated to Moema Viezzer; Leonor Cortina's Lucia (1988; Mexico); Claribel Alegría's No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadoreña en la lucha (1983; They'll Never Take Me Alive, 1986) (El Salvador); Patricia Verdugo and Claudio Orrego's Detenidos-desaparecidos: Una herida abierta (1983; DetainedDisappeared: An Open Wound) (Chile); or Elena Poniatowska's nonfiction novel, Hasta no verte Jesúsmío (1969; Until We Meet Again, My Jesus), recreating the life of a Mexico City laundrywoman and ex-soldadera pseudonymously named Jesusa Palancares in (more or less) her own words.

Well-meaning ethnographers who appropriate authorship of the "testimonios" in effect reproduce a noxious class-gender system they consciously reject, even while deploying the rhetoric of liberation. Even worse: the use of the rhetoric of liberation sounds like bad faith. It is not surprising, then, that, from the other side of the power axis, the maids and factory workers look on such scholars with suspicion, as yet another imperialist weapon. One of the responses to this oppression is a violent rejection of all that privileged class members are, and all they represent. Thus, for example, Bolivian Domitila Barrios de Chungara, in a famous altercation, confronts the chair of the Mexican delegation to a "Tribuna del Año Internacional de la Mujer" (Steering Committee of the International Year of the Woman). Domitila's rejection of the privileged woman derives from a long history of silencing and oppression; of being spoken about and spoken for, as if her needs were subsumed in the demands of the upper-class women who oppress women like her. Their differences, says the Bolivian mine worker's wife, are so salient as to constitute almost another species; even to say both are "women" is a grave misnomer.

Despite these caveats and concerns, however, it is important to reiterate that all of these testimonios demonstrate a signal lucidity, all represent important contributions to the still nascent emergence of majority voices into the public forum, with all of the revisionary resonances implicit in the unstifling of radically different perspectives. Regardless of the in-fighting and the rejection of similarities between classes, and notwithstanding the real concerns raised, for example, in the problematic attribution of testimonial authorship, the greater at-647- tention given to literature of/by the oppressed majorities in Latin America has specific implications that are more than trite ones: (1) literature by Latin Americans involved in the revolutionary struggle (the main group of testimonios) can clearly not afford the luxurious autobiographical impulses besetting middle-aged Anglo-European men; the record that needs to be set straight is always a more than personal one; the threat, in countries where intellectuals regularly "disappear," is not existential angst or encroaching senility but government security forces; (2) for the critic, assertions made about these texts have to be accompanied by readings made cumbersome through the need to introduce, even to a knowledgeable audience, a group of works that barely circulate, even (or especially) within their own countries; (3) the critic feels an uneasy suspicion that s/he may be behaving, in her own context, in a way parallel to that Gayatri Spivak uses to describe Kipling in India as the unwitting, and therefore all the more culpable, participant in a questionable cultural translation from a colonial to a metropolitan context that enacts a literary structure of rape. Well-intentioned mistranslation or misapplication of theory, like the equally unintended misrepresentation or oversimplification of primary texts, is a specter that looms large in the minds of dedicated cultural critics.

Debra A. Castillo

-648-

Colonialism, Imperialism, and Imagined Homes

A historicized account of the movements of peoples from one geographical area to another as immigrants, expatriates, or exiles reveals that, in our contemporary world, writers' origins and locations are often at variance. The conditions of expatriation and exile carry particular configurations at different historical times. Our contemporary world has seen migrations of peoples on a scale as never before in human history. For colonized peoples, migrations by "choice" and/or by economic necessity are rooted within a colonial and postcolonial history and within continuing imperialist dominations today. Postcoloniality itself overdetermines the "choice" to migrate. In their journeyings as exiles and expatriates, postcolonial peoples embody a hyphenated condition of identity: for example, Indo-American, Jamaican-Canadian, Indo-PakistaniBritisher — the phenomenon of having too many roots, too many locations, both to belong to and to un-belong in, negotiating indigenous and Western languages. These predicaments necessitate a type of tightrope walking where, even as we travel with relative ease on supersonic jets, we cannot with as much ease step out of our skins and assume identities and kaleidoscopes of colors as we step off the plane into the humid air and tropical smells of Bombay, or into the brisk coolness of jetway corridors and the whitewashed efficiency of Heathrow or Kennedy.

In this chapter I will explore the complex terrain of the politics of representations of contemporary writers of different racial origins living in North America — United States citizens of different ethnici-649- ties, exiled and/or expatriated writers whose identities are mediated by a historically necessitated self-consciousness. Autobiography and autobiographical fictions dominate explorations of writers' own histories and those of their peoples. External colonizations, such as invasions by colonizing powers as well as continuing imperialist dominations, and internal, that is, mental colonizations, such as through education, are some of the historical factors that account for migrations. British colonizations and empire building resulting in Englishlanguage writers (the empire writing/striking back), as well as contemporary American imperialism and the unnamed American Empire, play crucial roles in the "chosen" language (English) and location (North America) of contemporary writers. I will also explore some metaphoric resonances of colonization — for instance, of women within patriarchal cultures, of "minority" groups who must struggle to make spaces for themselves within hegemonic white academic institutions and literary marketplaces.

In part, colonialism and imperialism historically account for migrations of peoples of color into the industrialized North. A multiethnic and polyglot cosmopolitanism pervades this new diaspora visible in contemporary London, New York, Toronto. Today, alliances between colonialist and imperialist forces ensure a continuing imbalance of power and hegemonic control of "third world" nations by covert colonizations in the guise of international aid agencies, as well as multinational capital, that transcend geographical boundaries and that make it increasingly difficult to hold any single entity accountable for perpetuating poverty in the "third world."

In general, material factors and, in particular, the conditions of cultural production — book production, publishing, audience, critical reception — vastly different in "first" and "third world" areas, often necessitate migrations. New configurations to the novel as a literary form emerge from this history of postcolonial writers who have moved to the United States or to Britain; who straddle continents, taking on half-year academic positions in United States universities and returning "home" to Trinidad, Barbados, or India for the other half. Andrew Gurr's analysis that "the normal role for the modern creative writer is to be an exile" ignores the particular conditions of cultural production that necessitate exile; for instance, neocolonial regimes like the present Kenyan government that threaten lives and -650- practice intellectual repression leave no choice but exile to a writer like Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Gurr also problematically merges the issues of home, identity, and history, as if the finding of "home" will automatically entail the discovery of "identity." These two categories are often in contestation — what one might have to consider "home" for economic reasons does not necessarily provide an unanguished sense of identity.

As with colonialism, external and internal, exile and expatriation may be experienced in metaphoric and in literal ways: metaphoric exile as undergone by marginal, minority communities, or by women within patriarchal cultures; literal exile for political reasons, as is common for writers from South Africa like Dennis Brutus who lives in the United States, Bessie Head who lived in Botswana until her recent death, Caeserina Kona Makhoere who lives in Britain; expatriation for willing or unwilling subjects, as with children of immigrant parents. Postcolonial writers of certain classes and educational levels who write in English [given a colonial(ist) educational system] experience different kinds of marginalization as cultural workers both inside their "home" environments and outside, in the economically privileged spaces of Britain and North America. They face conflictual realities of literal and metaphoric exile — inside "Western" spaces where they and their work are commodified in a marketplace eager, at certain times, to consume "third world" products; and outside that space, that is, within "third world" areas where United States domination is present in everyday realities of satellite communications bombarded into living rooms, of International Monetary Fund stranglehold on local economies forcing constant currency devaluations that foster and perpetuate poverty and economic crises. "Home" assumes a deromanticized and demystified harshness; these are societies deeply under stress where economic crises make daily survival a painful reality.

Postcolonial writers often enter a Western metropolis precisely to make their cultural productions possible. The reasons for migration are various and complex — material and intellectual resources, an audience and critical reception that may not be possible within their "homes" (places of origin) for political or other reasons. Joseph Brodsky, in an essay entitled "The Condition of Exile," remarks that a search for "home" is often a search for a negotiated physical and -651- mental space that brings a writer "closer to the seat of ideals that inspired him all along…. Displacement and misplacement are this century's commonplace." Brodsky perceives a contestation between exile as "a metaphysical condition" and the reality of exile wherein a writer is "constantly fighting and conspiring to restore his significance, his poignant role, his authority."

Writers' identities are negotiated along issues of race, gender, class, language, nationality, and, crucially for this group of writers, geography. When racial and ethnic origins differ from those of a majority population in a writer's "chosen" geographical location, and political and economic positions of power determine which ethnic groups are marginal and which are centered at particular times, writers are caught in the fluctuating and fluid borderlands between majority and minority populations in terms of the themes of their work (which often transport them "home"), their audience (often outside "home"), and their sense of belonging and identity.

The uses of the English language, of the novel form, of literary styles and cinematic techniques, demonstrate a blending, at times happy, at other times conflictual, of indigenous cultural memory with Western education and location. Brodsky's generalized remark that "an exiled writer is thrust, or retreats, into his mother tongue" is hardly true for postcolonial writers who come into the West, most of them inculcated in a colonial(ist) educational system and a Western literary tradition, and who write in English. Of course this reality is full of conflicts. Brodsky's exiled writer is "invariably homebound…excessively retrospective [and since s/he feels] doomed to a limited audience abroad, he cannot help pining for the multitudes, real or imagined, left behind." For postcolonial writers, the opposite is true — they often move away from "home" in order to find an audience.

Economic and political expediency at different historical times forcibly transported, or "welcomed," peoples of color — African, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Chicano, and, more recently, Caribbean, Vietnamese, South Asian — into North America. "Minority" groups range from United States citizens, African Americans, or thirdgeneration Japanese and Chinese Americans, to newer immigrants (noncitizens) of color driven to the United States for professional and economic reasons. In Britain, ex-colonials from Asia and Africa, after -652- fighting on the allied side during World War II, were "invited" into the Mother Country for labor. The struggles that these Black Britishers (as peoples from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, in solidarity, describe themselves), first-generation migrants or second-generation immigrants, face in creating spaces for themselves in contemporary Britain are explored by writers like Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi (of Indo-Pakistani origin), Joan Riley (Jamaican-British), Joan Cambridge and Beryl Gilroy (Guyana-British), and Merle Collins (Grenada-British), among others. In the United States, writers like the Filipino Bienvenido Santos undertake a personal and literary search for "home"; South Asian Meena Alexander, Padma Perera, and Bharati Mukherjee delve into the complex parameters of expatriateimmigrant-citizen; Japanese-Canadian Joy Kogawa uncovers the racism faced by her family and her people in Canada during World War II; Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston writes novels that blend autobiography and fiction in intergenerational explorations of identity between two cultures. Other writers who share this hyphenated identity are Tobagan-Canadian Marlene Nourbese Philip; Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua-United States); Barbadian-African American Paule Marshall; Michelle Cliff (Jamaica-United States); Opal Palmer Adisa (Jamaica-United States); and Trinidadian Earl Lovelace, who divides his time between the United States and Trinidad, as does St. Lucian Derek Walcott.

As these writers negotiate their own and their characters' identities on the borderlands among immigrant, expatriate, and citizen, they bring new dimensions to the contemporary novel in English through a genre that may be called the immigrant novel or the cosmopolitan novel. In speaking of the writer, it is important to note that one is leaving out other types of workers. The writer as cultural worker is more privileged certainly than a working-class population that crosses borders: for instance, Mexicans coming into the United States to work in kitchens and on farms, or Indians and Pakistanis "welcomed" into oil-rich Middle East countries for menial labor, or IndoUgandan-Britishers who when expelled from Uganda entered the M/Other Country.

Both in their novelistic explorations and in their personal histories, writers like Salman Rushdie whose racial origin and whose geographical location are at variance exemplify a paradoxical reality of be-653- longing and not-belonging (Rushdie's example, as he remains under British government protection, is particularly ironic and mediated), of a kind of self-colonization in their use of the colonizer's language, of a search for identity, audience, constituency. Their work has given new configurations to a literature of exile that has been a prominent part of twentieth-century English literature, for example, non-English writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Novels of postcolonial expatriates and exiles represent the conflictual realities of geography, location, and language, the myth and reality of a return "home," the search for intellectual spaces with their "chosen" exile and/or expatriate "homes."

Physical acts of conquest and aggression constitute only one aspect of colonial aspirations; mental colonizations perpetuated in a colonizer's language, education, and cultural values are often more devastating and resilient. One can trace a historical trajectory from the British Empire and its particular imperialist weapons like overt military force and more insidious ideological tools like the English language and British values, to American imperialism at free play in the world right now. In his 1955 text, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire sounded a warning about the growing aspirations of American imperialist expansionism, amply evident in recent years.

United States imperialism works to its economic advantage through multinational corporations, international aid agencies, exploitation of cheap labor (creating loss of jobs and poverty within the United States). United States imperialism is also manifested in the display of military muscle and overt invasions of Grenada and Panama in recent years, flaunting with bravado both international law and the often merely symbolic U.N. resolutions. It is doubly ironic that in the recent conflict with Iraq, the United States was the loudest proponent of U.N. Security Council measures against Iraq — it suited the United States this time around to wave aloft U.N. Security Council resolutions, notwithstanding its previous record of vetoing such measures, even blocking the will of an entire world against certain types of aggression. Historical amnesia is a widely prevalent disease in the United States and it is effectively propagated by media complicitous with the status quo.

Within the United States itself, forms of internal colonizations — of -654- "minorities" who may or may not be American citizens, "social exiles," and disenchanted populations on the margins of the "American dream" — are sustained in part by United States aggressions externally against peoples of color. Terry Eagleton's distinction between "literal expatriates" and "social exiles" illuminates these marginal minority conditions faced by peoples of color in the United States. Hence, in the same breath, one hears of racist attacks on minority students on a college campus that is also loudly proclaiming "cultural diversity," "multiculturism" in the curriculum, "civility" codes, and so on. Just as covert and insidious as United States cultural imperialism and its impact on peoples of color outside its borders is this covert alliance between a continuing racism and a loudly proclaimed need to eradicate it.

As with British colonial aggression, which consolidated itself with the chalk and the blackboard, the tools of American cultural imperialism are often more lasting and more devastating than physical acts of aggression. Several postcolonial writers testify to the lasting and devastating psychic fractures rooted in colonial(ist) educational systems. This history is significant in terms of understanding some of the causes of expatriation and exile. Mental colonizations result in states of exile — physical displacements and metaphoric exile within one's own culture, to which, given one's education, one un-belongs.

The English language is a shared legacy of British colonialism. Language, culture, and power are integrally related, especially within a colonial history that imposed the English language and British educational systems. The economic and psychological repercussions of English-language interventions as a language of power among colonized peoples who spoke other languages are part of postcolonial societies today. The type of English one is equipped to use often shapes one's position both inside postcolonial society and outside, as immigrant. English language/s exist in standard, creole, and other manifestations — what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls "nation language," an English that can imitate "the sound of the hurricane, wind, howl, waves"; or, what Honor Ford-Smith renames "patwah" to be distinguished from "patois." Issues of cultural domination, educational policies, the status of English studies, and the role that "English Literature" played in a liberal colonial enterprise are of -655- concern in postcolonial scholarship today. Even as colonies such as India and Kenya absorbed the imposition and institutionalization of English Literature into curricula, there were countermovements — for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's dramatic call for the abolition of the English Department from the University of Nairobi and its replacement by a Department of Literatures and Languages.

In her Introduction to She Tries Her Tongue: her silence softly breaks (1989), Marlene Nourbese Philip probes the complex dilemmas surrounding the use/s of the English language by writers like herself from the Caribbean and the difficult task of recovering the African aspects of their history that were often more effectively preserved in nonverbal forms like music rather than language. (Rex Nettleford's influential work is evident here, especially his concept that nonverbal forms like dance could, within the very body of the slave, preserve cultural memory in ways that language could not.) Nourbese Philip proposes that "fundamental to any art form is the image…. The process of giving tangible form to this i-mage may be called i-maging, or the i-magination. Use of unconventional orthography, i-mage in this instance, does not only represent the increasingly conventional deconstruction of certain words, but draws on the Rastafarian practice of privileging the 'I' in many words. 'I-mage' rather than 'image' is, in fact, a closer approximation of the concept under discussion in this essay." According to Nourbese Philip, since the English language has served to "den(y) the essential humanity" of African peoples, it needs to be changed fundamentally by those very people now. An enforced English simultaneously gave voice to and silenced the African in terms of expressing his/her own experience during slavery and forced re-locations. "That silence has had a profound effect upon the English-speaking African Caribbean writer working in the medium of words." For the Caribbean writer, the situation is particularized by the fact that there is no language to return to. "In the absence of any other language by which the past may be repossessed, reclaimed and its most painful aspects transcended, English in its broadest spectrum must be made to do the job…. It is in the continuum of expression from standard to Caribbean English that the veracity of experience lies." Nourbese Philip argues forcefully for a subversive English transformed from "Queenglish and Kinglish," an English that will "make nouns strang-656- ers to verbs," techniques that have, in fact, linguistic roots in different African languages.

During colonization, education became the key to assimilating the "new ex-slave society" to the norms of "a civilized community" acceptable to the colonizers. The Reverend J. Sterling justified the education of negroes in a report to the British government in 1835: the production of "a civilized community will depend entirely on the power over their minds." If they are not educated, "property will perish in the colonies." Education was devised further to create a civil servant class that would aid a colonial administration. This same class would continue to work for the colonizers' benefit even after their physical departure (Frantz Fanon's "black skin, white mask" phenomenon). Colonial educational policies and educational levels are also a part of the history of contemporary expatriate populations that consist of a growing number of the educated-unemployed. This class migrates to new "homes" for employment and economic reasons.

Color, class, and gender divisions often denied educational opportunities to women in the Caribbean region, evoking resonances of British colonial practices in other occupied territories of the so-called Empire. The colonial enterprise of educating the natives was both ideological and gendered. Female colonization carried the burden of patriarchal domination that most often not only predated colonialism but was reinforced by it. English education often contradicts "traditional" cultural expectations of female behavior; women, however "modernized" with an English education, must remain "traditional." For an educated woman to overstep the boundaries as codified within patriarchal control of female sexuality can be disastrous, as explored in Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions (1988). Nyasha, intellectually precocious, is uprooted from her home and taken to England at a young age. She returns "home," having "forgotten" her mother tongue, Shona, and generally alienated from both her Shona identity and her English education. She finds herself metaphorically homeless to the fatal extent that she cannot even belong within her female body, which becomes, in her anorexia and bulimia, the sad victim of her mental anguish. Nyasha's authoritarian father, Babamukuru, makes her "a victim of her femaleness," as the narrator, Tambu, notes. Babamukuru, who has been educated by -657- missionaries in their "wizardry," has internalized a colonial mentality of inferiority before whites, but superiority before his own people. Ironically his colonial, patriarchal education reinforces his male privileges in the family.

Even as an English education and a liberal enterprise served by English literature within the colonies fulfilled certain ideological goals in sustaining a colonial administration, the imperialist project within the colonizers' home-spaces was carried forward by a literature of imperialism embodied, for instance, in Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden." Kipling was only one among several popular writers in nineteenth-century England who dealt with imperialist matters. The very titles of some of these popular novels — like Love by an Indian River, A Mixed Marriage — tell the tale. Configurations of Empire in such works enable the sharing of a common consciousness by writers and readers mutually reinforcing stereotypes. The serious impact, conscious and subconscious, in terms of how visual and literary manifestations control the popular imagination of the British reading public (both in India and in Britain) is especially important when we historicize such images and bring them up to date, calcifying into racist manifestations that range from the subtle to the obvious.

Cultural productions in the West continue to sustain and validate such stereotypes — as exemplified by the vastly popular British renditions of the Raj in television extravaganzas like The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions, as well as in films like Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and David Lean's A Passage to India. These projects have serious ideological underpinnings even as one concedes that the British may need to look back upon their often inglorious work in colonies like India, and they may need to absolve their own relentless guilt about their imperialist adventures. However, from the colonized peoples' point of view, these projects once again make us, as Salman Rushdie puts it, "bit-players in [our] own history." If such shows as "the blackface minstrel-show of The Far Pavilions…and the grotesquely overpraised Jewel in the Crown" were anomalous productions, the situation would not be so serious. As such, they are "only the latest," notes Rushdie, "in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East." The situation is much more serious now than in the early part of the century, given the power of electronic media. -658-

Within a predominantly capitalist postcolonial world that remains, after "flag independences," stifled in poverty and dependence, extreme economic conditions often necessitate migrations. Further back, migrations of peoples of color from Africa and Asia into Britain were rooted within a colonial past that spanned nearly three centuries. More recently, colonized peoples, after fighting on the British side in World War II, were "invited" into the "M/Other Country." These migrants became part of a new working class in Britain, and as they struggle to make Britain their "home" they face new forms of racism, such as immigration policies, Paki-bashing, and other forms of harassment.

For writers in particular, such a history of migrations and of new racisms throws into relief issues of location and origin — where one lives and works, and where one may be transported without choice, as a child. This history presents new configurations to the mediated notions of identity and belonging, of audience and constituency. For Salman Rushdie, Indo-Pakistani-Britisher, for instance, one cannot simply assert that his audience is "Western" since there are 1.5 million Muslims who live in Britain itself. Or, for Hanif Kureishi, racially mixed (Pakistani father and English mother), who grew up in Britain culturally British and within a racist society, and who can be identified as a "Paki," the parameters of identity and belonging are extremely complex. What it means in the 1980s and 1990s to be a Black Britisher, living in Britain, and, equally significantly, what it means to be an indigenous, native Britisher are matters fraught with contradictions. Is citizenship one aspect of this troubled notion of identity? Is citizenship sentimental, symbolic, and also somewhat expedient, as Rushdie's continued protection by the British government testifies?

Migration and expatriation have given new meanings to the notion of "identity," which remains important within the field of postcolonial literature. Despite the tyranny of certain aspects of deconstruction and poststructuralism that cannot tolerate "old-fashioned" notions of identity and reality, I think that it is crucial to restore these terms, much in the spirit of recovering our own subjugated and subaltern histories. Of course, one is not asserting any single, monolithic notion of identity; rather, racial and cultural differences are themselves mediated along new parameters of language and geography. -659-

Fearful of an old-fashioned identity issue being replaced by "subjectpositions," one does not need to assume new and somewhat fashionable stances of "cosmopolitanism" and "internationalism." Rushdie's novels, for instance, are interpreted as "transnational" since they carry modernist and postmodernist echoes, playing with levels of fantasy and reality, fragmenting history, dis-placing so-called significant events in history by presenting various contesting versions. Does "transnational" somehow remove the disturbing vestiges of an oldfashioned nationalism? The term assumes more than what it can accomplish; moreover, it mystifies the really dangerous elements of nationalism, such as state fundamentalism, by pretending that they have somehow been trans-cended. State and religious fundamentalisms can call for the death of an author like Rushdie because his novel has "offended"; examples of fundamentalism proliferate, almost grotesquely, in so many parts of the world.

The novelistic representations of a mediated personal identity for writers like Rushdie amalgamate various worlds. In his novels, Rushdie returns to the source, so to speak, through memory, through historical re-creation of a time and place, such as India's independence in Midnight's Children (1980), Pakistan's military rulers in Shame (1983), and through an incorporation of the South Asian and British locales and transformations of identities necessitated by locales and by one's level of comfort and discomfort within a racist society in The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie's voice as a writer is significantly a part of this historical process in which "third world" peoples struggle for self-determination as Black British citizens. And amid the furor surrounding The Satanic Verses we might unfortunately fail to recognize how creatively Rushdie illuminates these shifting lines of allegiance determined along racial, class, gender, and ethnic lines, and how these issues create contradictory, often painful situations for his characters, and for himself as a writer.

As in his other novels, Rushdie explores these threads of identities — what happens to human beings when they are transported, transplanted, by choice or otherwise, into alien environments — even more openly in The Satanic Verses. The first line of the novel presents a kind of migration/reincarnation/ metamorphosis — the birth of a new self that must necessarily adapt to a new environment, and the death of an old self that belongs to a -660- different world: "'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" And a few pages into the novel, the narrator asks, "Is birth always a fall?"

Connected to the necessity of forming new identities is the need to assume a new voice, a new language. Saladin Chamcha (Chamcha, in Hindi, indicates a fawning attitude) is "The Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial…he was your very man. He made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas…. Once in a radio play for thirty-seven voices, he interpreted every single part under a variety of pseudonyms and nobody ever worked it out." When Saladin visits India, Zeenat tells him, "They pay you to imitate them, as long as they don't have to look at you…. You goddamn lettuce brain." The visit home disconcerts Saladin; he almost loses his acquired British "voice/identity," slips into distressing Indianisms, and decides to rush back to Britain. As John Leonard, reviewing the novel in The Nation, puts it: "History is out of control, and metamorphosis too. We've left home once too often. No more avatars of Vishnu. Instead of rising out of the ashes like a phoenix or resurrecting like a Christ, we are reborn, devolved into parody, bloody farce, false consciousness, bad faith…. Like Chamcha, we are on the run."

With the recent publication of Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), it is heartening to find that Rushdie has not been silenced. Living in hiding, he has created an enchanting tale, veiled as a children's story, but replete with dark echoes of silencing forces that constantly threaten Rashid Khalifa, the storyteller. In the land of "Guppees [storytellers] and Chupwallas [silence-enforcers]," Haroun, the son, tries to keep his father's storytelling talents alive. Although this seems like a thinly veiled allegory of Rushdie's personal life, wider resonances of different types of silence-imposing forces, selfand state-imposed, are evoked.

Hanif Kureishi belongs to the contemporary generation of Black Britishers. In an autobiographical essay, "The Rainbow Sign," he discusses his own origin and chronicles the racism he experienced growing up in London. His personal story is set within a broader context; for instance, he notes that "[he] was afraid to watch TV" because of the portrayal of Pakistanis as comics. Such images sanc-661- tioned "the enjoyed reduction of racial hatred to a joke…a celebration of contempt in millions of living rooms in England." Kureishi discusses a phenomenon like Enoch Powell, "a figurehead for racists, [one who] helped create racism in Britain." Kureishi felt "racially abused" since he was five, located in a socially enforced self-loathing: "Pakis…these loathed aliens. I found it impossible to answer questions about where I came from. The word 'Pakistani' had been made into an insult. It was a word I didn't want to use about myself. I couldn't tolerate being myself."

From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else. I read with understanding a story in a newspaper about a black boy who, when he noticed that burnt skin turned white, jumped into a bath of boiling water.

At school, one teacher always spoke to me in a " Peter Sellers" Indian accent. Another refused to call me by my name, calling me Pakistani Pete instead. So I refused to call the teacher by his name and used his nickname instead. This led to trouble; arguments, detentions, escapes from school over hedges, and eventually suspension.

Kureishi records his feelings of violence embedded in anger and fear that are documented commonly in racial situations. He discovers James Baldwin, the Panthers, identifies with race politics, with the working class, and through the African American parallel, Kureishi recognizes the futility of the myth of a return to Africa, or wherever one comes from. As an adolescent, he records rejecting Islam as a route to identity and he does not visit Pakistan until he is an adult.

In his father's home, Pakistan, he cannot identify with the class of "English-speaking international bourgeoisie…. Strangely, antiBritish remarks made [him] feel patriotic." His identity as a playwright means little in Pakistan — an important loss in terms of his identity. Kureishi recognizes the economics behind migrations: "thousands of Pakistani families depended on money sent from England." He also notes the psychological burdens placed on a society that was losing its people to the West and a further burden when these people returned, dissatisfied because "they had seen more, they wanted more…. Once more the society was being changed by outside forces, not by its own volition." The two societies, Pakistani and British, were both closely bound and miles apart; for instance, a -662- villager tells him that when his grandchildren visit him from Bradford he has to hire an interpreter in order to talk to them.

Kureishi's recent novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), explores the layered realities of race, class, gender, and geography in the protagonist Karim's search for identity and belonging. The opening of the novel presents his genealogy, an "Englishman" with a name like Karim Amir:

Karim's narrative frames other stories of immigrant lives in contemporary Britain — for example, Anwar and his daughter Jamila, a poignant portrait of a tradition-bound father who insists on his daughter Jamila, who has grown up in Britain, having an arranged marriage. Anwar, in the Gandhian tradition of passive resistance, goes on a hunger fast unto death unless his daughter agrees to abide by his wishes. "I won't eat. I will die. If Gandhi could shove out the English from India by not eating, I can get my family to obey me by exactly the same." Karim reflects on the "similarities between what was happening to Dad, with his discovery of Eastern philosophy [Karim's father is 'the buddha of suburbia'], and Anwar's last stand. Perhaps it was the immigrant condition living itself out through them. For years they were both happy to live like English-men…. Now, as they aged and seemed settled here, Anwar and Dad appeared to be returning internally to India, or at least to be resisting the English here. It was puzzling: neither of them expressed any desire actually to see their origins again."

When Anwar's self-destructive tactics are revealed to Karim's father he remarks, "We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India." The parents' inner conflicts often embroil their children tragically in a collision between a traditionally sanctioned authoritarianism and an independent life that the children have imbibed in their immigrant-citizen identities. For the parents' generation, British citizenship is merely symbolic and -663- convenient — spiritually and in terms of their values they belong more to India and Pakistan; their Britain-born children are citizens who have imbibed the values and lifestyles of a Western locale. The unfairness of the conflict comes down heavily on Jamila — should she risk losing her father, or should she "save" his life by marrying a man whom she has never met? Jamila gives in and then forges her own British-Indian path of resistance by refusing to have any sexual life with her husband, Changez. And even as Karim befriends Changez, Karim continues to be Jamila's lover.

When Karim, as part of his budding acting career, is asked to "create" a portrait of current immigrant life in Britain, he elects to tell the story of Anwar and Jamila, particularly the fact that Anwar's scheme had backfired: Changez, the son-in-law from whom Anwar expected a new "life-transfusion," had been a devastating disappointment. Anwar's life, running "Paradise Stores" in a fascist neighborhood where "racist graffiti appeared on the walls every time you removed it," has deteriorated. The ramifications of presenting a narrow-minded, dogmatic father to a predominantly white audience whose racist stereotypes would be validated by such an image are pointed out to Karim by Tracy, a black member of the group:

Karim is attacked as a reactionary. He bristles at this "censorship" and wants to "tell the truth." Although there is a need for genuine criticism of problems within one's own community, positions that are often thwarted by "race relations" — positions like Tracy's in this case — Karim has rather unselfconsciously stepped beyond the bounds of constructive criticism; he wishes to entertain a white audience at the expense of Anwar's humanity. Karim's self-awareness develops and he withdraws that story from a public vision not ready to cope with the interstices of race, class, and gender as they are played out for an expatriate-colored-citizenry that deals with prejudice in its -664- daily life. The issues of reception and audience bring us into the arena of markets, publishing, and financial resources — the means of production necessary for cultural production.

The above discussion on colonialism and educational policies and of continuing imperialist dominations, economic and cultural, in postcolonial societies traces some of the historicized reasons for writers' expatriation and/or exile into Britain and North America. As writers settle into these new "homes," what are the forces that confront them in a literary marketplace? Who publishes their work? Who reads their novels and why is the novel the most highly desired form? Who reviews them? Who is their audience and is it radically different from their constituencies at "home"? And can writers meet the challenge of making their audience into their constituencies?

In the West, the privileging of the novel as a form is problematic, particularly in terms of the market and publishing houses. This is hard to contest, given the prevalence of publishers and distributors of "third world" writers in the West. Recall, for instance, Chinua Achebe's most recent novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), hailed as Achebe breaking his silence of nearly thirty years since the publication in 1966 of A Man of the People. Such judgment falsely assumes Achebe's "silence," ignoring his work in his own Igbo language. Only by writing a novel, and writing it in English, can Achebe effectively break "silence." This demonstrates a Western hegemonic response appropriating the rest of the world into its own vocabulary, its literary forms where the novel and its critical evaluation is privileged.

Postcolonial novels that are published by Western houses get better distribution than the struggles of local publishing can woefully accomplish. Since the "West" may not even hear of writers published locally, we must not conclude that they do not exist. Hence, in our discussion of the novel we must bear in mind, very crucially, what we leave out — not only the local publications that may not be available in the West, and why that is so, but also the oral forms that do not get into print. These are particularly important for largely nonliterate societies.

A dialectic relationship between cultural and critical productions both creates and responds to economic and political factors control-665- ling a consumer marketplace. Marginality as a concept is useful in this discussion because "marginal" cultural productions are commodified in today's Western marketplace. The "marginal" is not a given; there is a complex process that leads to marginalization. Imagine, if you will, the literary marketplace as the many-handed god Shiva (who has both creative and destructive potential in Hindu cosmology). When marginality is commodified as a selling tactic, such modes of production have serious implications for expatriate postcolonial writers and critics — the dangers of a commodification that can change the very terms of what is written, and that can dictate what themes will sell. The marketplace is a key conditioning factor in producing and consolidating marginality. The commodification of "blackness" or of "third worldism" as items for sale in the marketplace, which includes affirmative action policies, publishing priorities, and conference topics as well, has serious consequences for the creative artist/worker. Complicitous in this profitable relationship are not only publishing houses but also, closer to our own lives, critics and scholars who enhance or challenge commodification in the types of theoretical production that they engage in.

However, the notion of marginality as a term in critical discourse has served to ghettoize certain literatures and "minority" fields in the academy. The terms "margin" and "center," along with their conceptual baggage, need to be contested, for they fail to account for the layers of cultural hegemony firmly in place despite challenges to a Western literary canon, as well as factors that shape who and what is "centered" in literary studies. The advocacy of one "common Western heritage" in texts like E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy (1987) enshrines a literary canon that is increasingly threatened by powerful non-Western cultural products making inroads, however peripherally, into curricula.

I would like to reclaim the term "marginal" in a very different sense from the commodification of "marginal voices" for commercial gain. For postcolonial writers, who may inhabit their "home" spaces, or who may inhabit expatriate and immigrant spaces, it is important to distinguish between "marginality" as a term in academic discourse and the actual conditions of marginality that sustain or disdain their very lives and create or destroy the very conditions of their artistic -666- work. Personal and political configurations within postcolonial writers' lives encompass various marginalities — by race and ethnicity; by geography (literal and metaphoric exile, expatriation, migration); by language (English-language interventions); by class and color (for creoles in the Caribbean); by education.

For postcolonial writers, there is a central contradiction between the modes of production available to them that commodify them in the "first" world as "minority," as "female," and their struggles against the actual conditions of marginality in their lives in the "first" or "third worlds." When "marginal" identities — for example, Lorna Goodison, Jamaican woman writer, and Ama Ata Aidoo, Ghanaian woman writer — are commodified, they set up rigid boundaries of what is expected by publishers, readers, and the market. An exotic enthusiasm for women writers blows hot and cold for reasons that have very little to do with their work. Such commodification can hardly be nurturing for a writer or for a literary field.

Our critical practice must recognize that cultural productionsoral, written — are also commodified in response to audience and literacy levels. Such issues as who makes it into print and what themes are profitable are further complicated because postcolonial societies have large nonliterate populations. The use of oral forms — street theater versus published drama — is strategic for nonliterate audiences. Our critical practice must stretch the boundaries of strictly "literary," printed forms (like the novel) and include oral cultural productions, and also put pressure on publishers to recognize and support new literary forms — for example, oral tradition of feminist songs in India, new forms of dance, street theater. This is important since oral forms — for instance, street theater, activist songs organized by women's groups like Saheli, the Lawyers' Collective in India, or the Sistren Collective in Jamaica — are more involved in struggles for social change than, say, the more easily available novels of Buchi Emecheta. A profit-oriented publishing industry capitalizes on the low literacy levels in postcolonial societies so that, ironically enough, even literate people in these societies cannot find or afford books by their own writers who are published in the West. For example, when the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986 was awarded to Wole Soyinka, his books were unavailable in his native Nigeria. In general, African -667- academics speak of a "book famine" in African countries. This scenario raises serious questions about the control and dissemination of knowledge and cultural productions.

If migrations are undertaken for economic reasons in general, there are also more particular reasons in terms of the realities of cultural productions that face writers within postcolonial societies, ranging from inhospitality to downright hostility, silencing, and various forms of censorship and self-censorship. In a recent essay entitled Twice-Bitten: The Fate of Africa's Culture Producers (1990), Wole Soyinka discusses a very serious condition faced by writers and intellectuals — what he terms "the internal brain drain," that is, writers who are silenced, imprisoned by their own governments, or who are forced into exile in order to continue their work. South African writers such as Dennis Brutus who are forced to leave because of the brutal apartheid regime may offer some obvious examples; however, a writer like Ngugi wa Thiong'o has had to live outside Kenya for political reasons, as has Nurrudin Farah of Somalia, Mongo Beti of Cameroon, and so on. This type of internal brain drain, actively supported by a hostile state, is very different from simply blaming the "West" for a brain drain of skilled workers lured from "third world" areas into highly paying Western hospitals and academic institutions. Characteristically, Soyinka takes a searing look at the very conditions within African societies, and draws attention to the fact that these regimes have to be accountable and to take responsibility for silencing writers and intellectuals.

For Caribbean writers as well, on the surface, those who struggle to work in extremely difficult conditions of cultural production have a more difficult time than those who leave and migrate to the everbeckoning North, projected via satellite communication as the desirable reality in which one can be transmogrified literally or in fantasy. The entrance of international aid agencies and at times their patronizing of "the arts" creates a visibility for the artist, ironically supported by neocolonial tendencies that await validation of one's own writers from the outside. As Honor Ford-Smith of the Sistren Collective has noted, there are complicated levels of dependency that have effects on the kinds of cultural work that are allowed with particular types of aid. For example, aid agencies sometimes raise the -668- question of whether the arts, particularly those aimed at education, can be truly "productive." Aid agencies are also totally productoriented. At the end of a specified time frame, the product has to be delivered and all responsibility toward the group ends. Such commodification of cultural products leads to their value being judged solely on their marketability.

In historicizing the diverse representations of "American minorities" in contemporary times, a chronological view is a useful vantage point from which to examine the experiences of internal colonizations and metaphoric exile of so-called American citizens — Native Americans, Africans involuntarily transported into the New World, Chinese, Japanese, Chicanos. Since the 1950s, the ravages of United States wars have brought in Filipino, Vietnamese, and Central American peoples, and, most recently, "voluntary" migrations for economic and professional reasons have allowed entry to South Asian, Caribbean, and African peoples. First-, second-, and third-generation "minorities" must still struggle on the borderlands of literal and metaphoric exile, of the myth and reality of a return "home," of fluctuating identities as immigrant-expatriate-citizen — from Ellis Island to J. F. Kennedy airport, as well as other ports of entry, not to mention "illegal" border crossings.

Within these ethnically diverse groups, the exclusion in this chapter of non-English-language writers among recent immigrants into the United States and a focus on the novel form with its high profile and public promotion circumscribe this study even as it speaks volumes for the hegemony of academic and publishing institutions. One must acknowledge that the oral transmission of cultural memory through song, dance, festival, that is, through nonprint media, is extremely significant — often these forms are more resonant in preserving ethnicity and in giving participants a sense of belonging. The essential communal nature of activities is distinctly different from the isolated production and consumption of a novel.

Race, ethnicity, and difference, along with broad commonalities of a search for belonging, mark the novelistic production of writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Paule Marshall, Maxine Hong Kingston, among others noted earlier. Apart from the significant linguistic and formal contributions to the contemporary novel in Eng-669- lish, the work of these writers is instructive in the critical reception accorded to them within the United States marketplace, eager to commodify "third world" bodies and products. In looking at expatriated identities such as Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua-United States), Michelle Cliff (Jamaica-United States), or Marlene Nourbese Philip (TobagoCanada), and their insider/outsider positionings, one gets an illuminating perspective on, say, American-born writers like Paule Marshall (who grew up in the Barbadian community of New York) or Audre Lorde (Grenada-New York). Lorde, in moving from New York to St. Croix, has made a reverse move geographically from the majority of writers dealt with here.

Paule Marshall recreates a vivid Caribbean world from the vantage point of her New York upbringing. Personal and collective histories unfolding within particular cultural contexts guide her work. Her autobiographical novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), portrays a memorable story of girlhood and adolescence caught in the parameters of American dreams and Caribbean values strongly held by recently immigrated parents. In an essay, Shaping the World of My Art, Marshall acknowledges the influence of women of her mother's generation on her own linguistic and artistic sensibility — what she learned from "the wordshop of the kitchen." Although the novel was reviewed favorably, it "was a commercial failure," notes Barbara Christian, a commentary perhaps on the times. The novel was relegated to the juvenile shelf, a fate that also befell Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) — novels that American society found too uncomfortable. None of Marshall's other novels, such as Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), and Praisesong for the Widow (1983), have been commercial successes, partly because she does not write stories about overt racism and violence as expected by a marketplace that commodities "black women writers." She deals with themes of black community, old age, the struggles to integrate experiences from different cultures into the "home" spaces of the West. As Avey in Praisesong for the Widow rediscovers her ancestry and her name, Avatara, she touches the depths of her own history.

The writing of India-born Bharati Mukherjee and Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid, both first-generation immigrants (Mukherjee passionately embraces her "naturalized" status as American citizen since -670-), is revelatory as much in terms of their explorations of identities as in the critical receptions that they have received. In 1989, Mukherjee's novel Jasmine and Kincaid's Lucy were critically acclaimed. Both authors' personal trajectories that locate them now in the United States encompass some uncanny connections thematically and formally; both female protagonists (after whom the novels are titled) have served as au pairs, as "caregivers," Asian and Caribbean nannies to white middle-class families in New York City — a twentieth-century version of governessing, of being situated in the heart of mainstream American families, in unique positions to observe, assimilate, and report. "Lucy is not a roman à clef of New York literary society," remarks the Boston Globe's Louise Kennedy, who cannot resist the temptation of noting the black-women-raceclass issue, "just as it is not the sociopolitical examination of race and class in America that some reviewers seem to think a black woman should be writing."

Kincaid, columnist for The New Yorker, author of Annie John (1985), her first novel, was puzzling to her American reviewers. The novel explores an intense love-hate relationship between mother and daughter, expressed in a metaphoric, surreal style. The daughter struggles to assert her individuality from the mother's domination; even a final "escape" into England is prefaced by the mother's words, "It doesn't matter what you do or where you go. I'll always be your mother and this will always be your home." Kincaid's works can be described as encompassing different explorations of the history of self-discovery and self-location in various "homes" near and far from the Caribbean.

The bold experimentation of form in her collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), was received as "irritatingly difficult [and] pretentious." As a "Caribbean" writer, she was stepping out of her skin a bit too much, treading uncomfortably to rhythms that Western sensibilities were not used to hearing from a Caribbean writer. Why didn't Kincaid write like a typical Caribbean? A similar reception was given to South African-Botswanan Bessie Head's A Question of Power (1973) when it was first published — for example, Arthur Ravenscroft's assertion that "the topography of madness" is familiar to the "West," but that it is unexpected, perhaps too unnerving, to deal with "nervous breakdowns" from "third world" -671- writers. They should stay within the boundaries of what is expected from them — stories about community, colonialism, local tradition.

In her next work, A Small Place (1988), Kincaid, with the full talent of her sarcasm, launches a "telling like it is" story of "the ugly tourist" who eagerly and irresponsibly consumes the sun, sea, and sand of the Caribbean, "in harmony with nature and backward in that charming way." Kincaid has a remarkable and disarmingly lucid ability to reveal the most blinding truths, and to force accountability where it belongs, because as the narrator states, one "cannot forget the past, cannot forgive, and cannot forget." By evoking slavery and the painful reality that slaves could not hold their slave traders accountable for their inhuman actions, Kincaid draws lessons from that past for this present, such as the Antiguan neocolonial regime where "all the ministers in government go overseas for medical treatment. All the ministers have 'green cards' [United States Alien Residency]"; in Antigua there is no decent health care for the majority. New colonizations have taken the place of the old ones: "Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way."

"Lucy is about a girl who lives on an island and goes to a continent," remarked Kincaid on one of her book-promotion tours. Lucy was serially published in The New Yorker, though only its publication in novel form has drawn critical attention. Even as Lucy needs the distance from her home to be able to write about it, her words are suffused in the Caribbean reality. As Kincaid remarks about herself, "I don't know how to live there [in Antigua], but I don't know how to live without there."

Whereas Jamaica Kincaid] recognizes this contradiction of being "here" and "there" simultaneously in imaginative space, both for herself as writer and for her characters, South Asian Bharati Mukherjee, in personal statements, embraces the "here" and celebrates her sense of belonging as an American citizen. This sense of unanguished belonging is not always true for Mukherjee's fictional characters, though she asserts this belonging for herself personally. In an essay that prefaces her collection of short stories, Darkness (1985), Mukherjee discusses the advantages of moving from a racist Canada (where she lived from 1966 to 1980) into a United States where she feels more culturally integrated. In Canada, as an outsider, she adopted an "expatriate" identity: "In my Canadian experience, 'im-672- migrants' were lost souls, put upon and pathetic. Expatriates, on the other hand, knew all too well who and what they were, and what foul fate had befallen them. Like V. S. Naipaul, in whom I imagined a model, I tried to explore state-of-the-art expatriation." Expatriation was made painfully real in a racist Canada. A change of locale to the United States was transformative in positive aspects for Mukherjee's creativity, "a movement away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the exuberance of immigration." Mukherjee records with some bitterness her personal history in Canada:

Mukherjee's adoption of an immigrant as opposed to an expatriate identity has been profoundly enabling for her writing. In her own words, she has "joined imaginative forces with an anonymous, driven, underclass of semi-assimilated Indians with sentimental attachments to a distant homeland but no real desire for permanent return."

Indianness is now a metaphor, a particular way of partially comprehending the world. Though the characters in these stories [in Darkness] are, or were, "Indian," I see most of these as stories of broken identities and discarded languages, and the will to bond oneself to a new community, against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal.

Further, Mukherjee does not see her "Indianness" as an isolated configuration that can only be at "home" with other Indian people: "instead of seeing my Indianness as a fragile identity to be preserved against obliteration (or worse, a 'visible' disfigurement to be hidden), I see it now as a set of fluid identities to be celebrated." Mukherjee takes this further, and relates her personal identity to that of her identity as a writer; she "sees [herself] as an American writer in the tradition of other American writers whose parents or grandparents -673- had passed through Ellis Island." Darkness is dedicated to Bernard Malamud.

Mukherjee's novels The Tiger's Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975) trace a trajectory of an upper-class female protagonist, traditional and modern, socialized within Brahmin (the highest caste) religious and social codes, and equipped with an English-language education. In Jasmine (1989), her most recent novel, the protagonist is variously named Jyoti at birth, Jasmine by a nontraditional Indian husband, Jase by an American New York suitor, Jane by an American Iowa banker. Her multiple identities embody the physical and mental spaces that she traverses between the village of Hasnapur in India and the United States, fleeing immigration authorities and murderous ghosts from her past, seeking a belonging amidst the anguished thorns of various identities that struggle for integration. The confident tone of this novel reflects the protagonist's boldness, her search to escape the fate of widowhood and exile foretold by an astrologer at the beginning of the text. Mukherjee's previous novels do not present women like Jasmine, who is ready by the end of the novel to "re-position the stars…greedy with wants and reckless from hope."

In The Tiger's Daughter, Tara, an upper-class Bengali woman, enters the United States for an undergraduate degree at Vassar. A familiar trajectory of the immigrant experience is explored — higher education and research facilities beckon one into the United States. Often, the qualifications acquired may disqualify one from finding a job in India, hence, the straddling of continents. Tara marries an American, and the novel traces her conflicts of belonging as she returns "home," familiar and strange, and gets to know the "David [her husband] of aerogrammes…a figure standing in shadows, or a foreigner with an accent on television. 'I miss you very much. But I understand you have to work this out. I just hope you get it over with quickly…. Remember the unseen dangers of India. Tell your parents to cable me if you get sick.'" "A foreignness of spirit" takes over Tara's consciousness as she struggles through a sense of exile both in her childhood "home" and in the newly acquired "home" of the United States. Mukherjee's explorations of the personal dimensions of female identity and belonging within marriage, an integral part of traditional Indian socialization for females, now resonates in a new -674- key as Tara's husband belongs "elsewhere," and so her home "should" be with him, even though that space is not yet "home."

In Wife, Dimple Dasgupta fantasizes that "marriage would bring her love…her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads…. She thought of premarital life as a dress rehearsal for actual living." As she fetishizes marriage, Dimple exemplifies the dangerous hold of subconscious socialization patterns of female submissiveness and suffering, enshrined in Hindu legend and myth, and validated by a patriarchal culture: "Sita, the ideal wife of Hindu legends, who had walked through fire at her husband's request. Such pain, such loyalty seemed reserved for married women." Dimple cannot easily shed these notions after she moves geographically into the United States. With the actual marriage, the predictable disillusion sets in. Her husband decides to change her name from Dimple to Nandini. Names are one type of personal markers of identity; when named by others, Mukherjee's female protagonists in Jasmine (as noted above) have certain identities thrust upon them. Dimple's socialization has not prepared her for the isolation of a wifely homebound existence in the United States. Her predicament is like that of newly brought over wives, sometimes by husbands who travel home for a couple of weeks, "interview" several prospective brides, and select one. The realities of life here — isolation, winter, loss of community — hit much later. An independent lifestyle here, the fact that one's family does not have a say in one's every decision, also entails a bitterly lonely self-reliance. "Losing" one's family's control also entails losing their warmth and love. Dimple becomes suicidal, thinking about where to die, in Calcutta, or in New York. Mukherjee's narrative does not allow her protagonist much interaction with the "natives" within her immigrant locale. America hardly exists except as a backdrop, a physical location where Dimple finds herself geographically. Her mental space is in turmoil; she is not really at home anywhere, desperately needing help but unable even to articulate her needs.

Mukherjee grows in confidence in presenting Americans and American life. In Jasmine, her depictions of Iowa, and of the tragedies of small farmers unable to make their bank payments, ring with truth and poignancy. Ironically, Mukherjee's depictions of India are trapped in exoticism and a self-exoticism of her "foreign" female -675- protagonists. Mukherjee's vision seems at times to be frozen in time. Her depictions of certain regressive customs like sati (widowburning), of child-marriage, and of widowhood are not mediated by changes and challenges to these traditions in contemporary India. The boundaries of what Mukherjee often presents as sacrosanct and fixed traditions are shifting, however slowly.

Mukherjee's success as a short-story writer is noteworthy. Her first collection, Darkness, documents the struggles of newly arrived South Asians, their experiences of alienation and racism as they try to find their "place" in American society. Their personal and professional lives within mainstream America often carry severe psychological costs. Mukherjee explores different ways of coping between first- and second-generation immigrants, and the often tragic colliding of values, particularly between father and daughter. For instance, in "The Father," a daughter's decision to do something as "artificial" as to reject marriage and get herself artificially inseminated results in her father's violent physical attack. Not only is the father alienated from a mainstream American culture where he works as a lonely, petty salesman (echoes of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman), but he is equally distant from his daughter, who has adopted some of the values of her locale. Similar experiences are echoed in personal stories and testimonies of Black Britishers in Amrit Wilson's Finding a Voice (1978). Horrendous conflicts between fathers and daughters constitute a sad refrain. Controls over female sexuality and clashes of traditional versus a freer, Western behavior nearly always make the fathers more authoritarian, dogmatic, and destructive. (Recall the discussion of Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions mentioned earlier in this chapter.) In the interest of saving the family izzat (honor), fathers will destroy their daughters' lives.

In her latest collection of stories, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Mukherjee "has vastly enlarged her geographical and social range," remarks Jonathan Raban in the New York Times Book Review; "the immigrants in her new book come fresh to America from Vietnam, the Caribbean, the Levant, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Italy and Sri Lanka as well as from India." According to Raban, Mukherjee in this collection -676- hijacks the whole tradition of Jewish-American writing [the immigrant experience being classically recorded in Jewish-American fiction] and flies it off to a destination undreamed of by its original practitioners.

Her characters…see the surfaces of America with the bug-eyed hangover clarity of the greenhorn afloat in a gaudy new world. Yet they're not tired, huddled or even poor: they own motels, work scams, teach in colleges, breeze through on private funds. Their diaspora is a haphazard, pepperpot dispersal. They have been shaken out, singly, over a huge territory, from Toronto in the North down to a steamy Central American republic. They're in Ann Arbor, Cedar Rocks, Flushing, Manhattan, suburban New Jersey, Atlanta, Florida.

What Raban does not note (typical of New York Times reviewers) is Mukherjee's own upper-class background, and the classist and somewhat elitist tone in the stories. She overtly endorses the melting-pot concept and regards American society as the most welcoming of any in the world toward the "other." Even when racism is part of her exploration and critique, there is no attempt to place that racism within larger political systems of exploitation and inequality in the United States. Mukherjee gets a lot of mileage out of contrasting her own experiences in Canada, which were more overtly racist than in the United States, and endorses American society as "safer" for peoples of color than almost any other in the world. In an interview she remarks:

Mukherjee ignores the fact that, for peoples of color of lower class and educational background than hers, America is not always welcoming. In Mukherjee's work, the power mechanisms behind systematic oppressions of particular racial groups remain ultimately marginal. In Jasmine, she attempts to engage with the larger systems of domination that sustain racism through her portrayal of Bud and Jane's adopted Vietnamese son, Du. "This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing," notes the narrator as she, in her various selves as Jasmine, Jane, Jase, relates to the outsider/insider -677- status that she shares with Du. Du adopts a hyphenated identity, Vietnamese-American; the narrator wants to shed her past, even use violence if necessary to create a new self: "There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of dreams." This denial of a past is as problematic as an exoticizing of the same past that lingers in her memory. In general, Mukherjee stays within a safe "political" space with regard to the politics of race in the United States. This partly accounts for the type of applause that a Western readership and critical establishment gives her.

In conclusion, the realities of expatriation and immigration, of literal and metaphoric exile, of external colonization and imperialism, along with the internal colonization of mental and psychological states, are played out in our contemporary world as never before in history. In a conversation with Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie speaks aptly about the predicament of "the migrant": "This is, after all, the century of the migrant…there have never been so many people who ended up elsewhere than where they began, whether by choice or by necessity." This chapter has explored some of the complexities facing postcolonial writers — multiplicities of identities that are necessarily negotiated in terms of "choices" of language or of location, the search for belonging and for an audience. For contemporary writers who have lived through, who almost embody, colonial histories, external and internal colonizations, literal and metaphoric exiles, the politics of representations are mediated partly within market forces, that is, within radically different conditions of cultural production for those who continue to live and work inside their postcolonial societies and for those living outside.

Ketu H. Katrak

-678-

The Book Marketplace II

The literary marketplace has always had three essential elements: authorship, publishing, and audience. Each of these has been shaped by market forces from the very beginning, and each in its own way has mirrored the successive phases of Western capitalism — preindustrial/premodern, industrial/modern, and, in the last fifty years, postindustrial and postmodern. Our immediate concern is with the literary marketplace in the last of these phases, but as we consider how that market has changed since World War II, it will be important to keep in mind that at least some of its features are perennial.

The postmodern period of capitalism has been characterized by rapid technological development, mass production, inflation, and consumerism — factors that, according to Marxist cultural critics from Theodor Adorno onward, have altered the way in which all goods, including cultural goods, are produced, distributed, and consumed. Magalia Larson has suggested that, because postmodern capitalism is a technocracy, it values and rewards expertise, which results in the rise of professionalism in intellectual life. Fredric Jameson argues that in the age of multinational oligopolies, free-market rhetoric is used to discourage the social planning of production, while the "free choice" of consumers is effectively limited to selecting standardized goods on the basis of superficial differences. Per Gedin, a Swedish socialist critic, has concluded that because postmodern capitalism is fundamentally inflationary, it requires growth and therefore inculcates the consumption of quantity rather than quality. -679-

Seen from this point of view, the consequence of postmodern capitalism for the author is that s/he now competes for survival in an environment that is economically demotic but intellectually hieratic. The increasing distance between the popular and the respectable means that although literacy is widespread and many people do still read during their leisure time, the writer who aims for intellectual prestige, formal originality, or artistic merit is likely to have a day job. As for publishing, the foregoing account of the general economy of the postmodern era can easily be adapted to explain those features most frequently cited in discussions of the current state of that industry in America — the emphasis on essentially interchangeable bestsellers, the precarious position of independent bookstores, the declining fortunes of "serious" literature, and the amalgamation of the novel with television and film.

Some in publishing have argued that many of these "changes" are really nothing new: highbrow literature has rarely paid well in its own day because readers have always preferred a more easily digestible fare, and publishers have distributed their resources accordingly. Moreover, the "blockbuster complex," which Thomas Whiteside describes as characteristic of the direction publishing has taken in the last decades of the twentieth century, may in fact have been with us well before the advent of the cause (conglomerate ownership of publishing houses) to which he attributes it. As Gedin himself notes, in 1901 "Publisher's Weekly maintained that of the 1,900 titles published during the preceding year, a maximum of 100 had sold more than 10,000 copies. Profits, and in some cases they could be huge, were thus earned on vast printings of a very few books."

A classically trained economist, looking at what Whiteside and others see as new and negative developments in the publishing industry, might see only a demonstration of the well-established capital asset pricing model, which holds that people like to be compensated for risk. The fixed costs for printing a book are relatively high, and the profitability of any one book is extremely uncertain: this generates publishers (since authors cannot afford to print their own books), and it encourages those publishers to diversify their risk across many books. Since any one author needs a publisher more than that publisher needs any one author — unless the author in question is one of the few whose novels always sell well — the author is in -680- a weak bargaining position and will be likely to sign a contract that gives the publisher most of the rights to future profits in exchange for a relatively meager payment up front. If the novel is a success, the conglomerate — which may well own not only the hardcover house that published the book but also the paperback company, the film company, and the television network to which subsidiary rights will have been sold — will reap the reward; if the novel is a failure, the conglomerate will be able to absorb the loss, which is likely to be small in relation to its total assets.

These economic "truths" of publishing may be altered significantly in the near future by desktop publishing and other forms of computer-mediated text dissemination. The fixed costs for these forms of publishing can be very low, which means that authors can afford to become their own publishers: that many have already done so is demonstrated by a look at FactSheet Five, a monthly catalog that lists thousands of limited-circulation alternative and underground magazines, many of them devoted to poetry and fiction. The barriers to alternative publishing have always had as much to do with status as with costs, though, and it remains to be seen whether such desktop literary productions will be regarded as anything but another form of "vanity" publishing. On the other hand, the electronic dissemination of text by academic and scientific publishers (proprietary and nonprofit alike) has already begun, and a number of commercial publishing houses have begun to experiment with using computers to tailor textbooks to the requirements of individual instructors and even to deliver books on-line through commercial database services where one can read part of the book, punch in a credit card number, and download the full text. Assessments of the impact that computers and electronic text will have on authorship, reading, and publishing vary from extreme optimism to extreme pessimism, according to whether the person making the assessment feels that this new technology will necessarily overturn or inevitably reinforce the monopolization of information.

One of the things that has not changed very much over the last two hundred years is the fact that most writers have not been able to subsist on what they earn from writing. In 1986, Paul W. Kingston and Jonathan R. Cole published a book-length study entitled The Wages of Writing, based on the results of a 1980 survey of 2241 -681- American authors ("authors" being defined only as those who had published at least one book). According to this survey, in 1979 the median annual income for an author — including book royalties, movie and television work, and payments for newspaper and magazine publication — was $4,775. "Median income" means that 50 percent of all the authors surveyed earned less than that amount; fully 25 percent earned less than $1,000 from writing during this year, and only 10 percent had incomes of $45,000 or more. Not surprisingly, almost half of the writers surveyed had other jobs: of these, 36 percent taught at colleges or universities, 20 percent were employed in other professions (as lawyers, doctors, computer programmers, etc.), and 11 percent were editors or publishers. Among those who wrote full time, the median income was only $7,500 (or slightly less than fifty cents per hour). Genre fiction was the most profitable type of writing, with 20 percent of its authors earning more than $50,000 a year — about three times the income enjoyed by authors of adult nonfiction, the next most profitable type of writing.

Kingston and Cole's survey also brings to light some interesting information about race, class, and gender as it correlates with income from writing. According to the data they gathered, race and class were not significant factors in predicting a writer's income, nor was it important where an author lived or even whether the author had a college education. On the other hand, there was a noticeable difference between the income of men and that of women: the median income for male writers was 20 percent higher than that of female writers, and men were almost twice as likely as women to be among the highest-paid authors (that 10 percent who made more than $45,000 a year from writing).

Authors of both genders continue to pursue their craft in spite of the odds against success because they are willing to sacrifice income for the privilege of doing what they enjoy (something economists call "self-exploitation"), and also because unknown authors do sometimes stumble into stardom. Stories of overnight success are common in publishing, even though their significance is more psychological than statistical. One such story is that of Judith Guest, whose novel Ordinary People (1976) was submitted to Viking Press, where it was published after a young assistant pulled it out of the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts. Guest's novel became a best-seller and was -682- made into a profitable motion picture by a major studio. At the time that this happened, Viking Press was receiving about fifty unsolicited manuscripts every week, or 2600 a year; Ordinary People was the first unsolicited manuscript they had published in ten years — odds of approximately 26,000 to 1. Arthur Kadushin, Lewis A. Coser, and William W. Powell, who tell this story in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (1982), cite a New York Times Book Review article that calculated the odds against the publication of unsolicited novels at almost 30,000 to 1. Sixty percent of the trade publishers interviewed by Kadushin, Coser, and Powell said they received over one thousand unsolicited manuscripts every year; the president of one of the larger general trade houses, Doubleday, estimated that his firm receives "an average of ten thousand unsolicited manuscripts a year, out of which three or four may be chosen for publication."

Most literary fiction is not plucked from the slush pile: editors rely on agents, friends, and even other editors to help them find publishable work. But even though an inside connection of some sort may be a necessary condition of publication, it is not a sufficient one. Once a work of fiction finds its way into an editor's hands, what determines its fate? One obvious answer would be, "the editor's taste." Kadushin, Coser, and Powell found that the average editor was white, Protestant, male, and middlebrow in cultural orientation. Although the editors in their sample read a great deal, they also went to the movies often and attended sporting events: the authors' conclusion was that "the needs of the market, not personal preference, seem to rule" where an editor's taste is concerned.

Referring taste to "the needs of the market" only means that one needs to know how editors determine those needs. The answers editors themselves give to this question tend to be somewhat contradictory. Those I have spoken to about the publishing of literary fiction tended to describe themselves as seeking to publish "quality" work, and as being unconcerned with profit: one editor went so far as to express the opinion that no writers of quality go unpublished. According to these editors, literary fiction always loses money, and is routinely subsidized by commercially successful publications. Asked about advertising and market research, an editor I interviewed remarked that "one of the strange things about publishing is that one -683- doesn't have a very good sense for most books of who the audience really is…. We don't do any research on it"; another responded by reciting one of the basic credos of publishing, that "the problem with market research in publishing is that every book is a different product: it's not like toothpaste, where once you have a certain brand, every tube is the same as every other tube." In place of planning, editors cite the mysterious exercise of free choice by the audience as the major factor in determining the success or failure of a book.

None of these claims accords very well with the known facts of the publishing industry, though: the profit from best-sellers is at least as likely to be absorbed by the huge advance for the next best-seller as it is to subsidize "serious" but commercially unsuccessful works of fiction, and commercial considerations do enter very directly into all aspects of editorial decision making. According to the survey by Kadushin, Coser, and Powell, decision-making meetings at major publishing houses were attended by the editor in chief (85 percent of the time), publisher (75 percent), sales staff (63 percent), president (58 percent), managing editor (50 percent), marketing staff (46 percent), production staff (27 percent), assistant editors (24 percent), and, last, representatives of the parent corporation (16 percent). Sales and marketing people tend to take a less mystified view of what they do, and there is ample evidence that, in many cases, it is these people who cast the deciding votes.

The pressure to consider sales has always been part of publishing, but there are indications that it now enters into the process much earlier than it once did: Roger Straus III explains that, whereas traditionally the decision to publish came first and questions about how to find the audience for that book came later, now marketing considerations are likely to determine whether the book will be published at all. Editors themselves are not immune from these pressures, especially since in many houses editorial "productivity" is now a condition of employment. As Morton Janklow candidly observed, "For good or ill, the old style of editor and publisher is slowly passing from the scene. Now there's a much more energetic, more driving — and, I must say, more profit-oriented — publisher arising."

It should be added, though, that prestige has its own market value, and the prestigious author may be worth publishing even if his or her books are unlikely to sell many copies or be made into movies. Ka-684- Ka-, Coser, and Powell found that 70 percent of the editors they interviewed listed the prestige of an author as either "critical" or "very important" in deciding whether to publish. Publishing authors of certified literary merit has both personal and professional value for an editor: personally, it helps to justify the time spent on other, less estimable projects; professionally, it benefits the editor's reputation with authors and other editors. This value may be intangible, but it can be indirectly profitable, since authors who are themselves commercially viable may be more inclined to publish with a house that lists a number of artistically renowned authors among its clientele.

Deciding what to publish is only half the battle: getting that book to the reader is the other half. The major problem facing the novel has always been to identify and reach its audience, and in America this problem has been exacerbated by the historical lack of an adequate distribution system. The size of this country, the dispersion of its population, and the practical difficulties of transporting goods across long distances at reasonable costs have always posed a problem for American publishers. In the nineteenth century, the advent of a railroad system began to solve some of these problems, but even then a nationwide marketing system did not develop.

As James L. W. West points out in his American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (1988), the absence of such a system was a determining factor in the success of "two of the most important innovations in book distribution during this century — paperbacks and book clubs." Both of these methods of "recycling" the texts originally produced by trade publishing houses took hold during the twenties and thirties "because trade publishers could not exploit the national market through conventional means"; the solution hit upon by paperback publishers was to use the existing magazine distribution network (this is why we have paperbacks in airports, drugstores, and supermarkets), and book clubs solved the problem by using the United States postal service. Book clubs were opposed by trade publishers, often in court, until the 1950s; by that time, clubs like the Book-of-the-Month Club (founded in 1926) and the Literary Guild (founded in 1927) had become ineradicable features of the publishing landscape, in large part because of their success in reaching a targeted group of paying readers through direct mailing. Modern paperback publishing, which began with the establishment of Pocket Books in -685- 1939 and Bantam Books in 1945, received a critical boost in its rise to power in the literary marketplace at about the same time. During World War II, the Council on Books in Wartime (founded by Farrar, Norton, and other leading publishers) issued more than 123.5 million copies of paperback books to servicemen, in the Armed Services and Overseas editions.

The success of both paperbacks and book clubs is part of what many have seen as the commercialization of publishing during the last fifty years. A number of people, notably Ted Solotaroff and Thomas Whiteside, have cited the so-called blockbuster phenomenon as a principal culprit in this process. Beginning in the 1960s, publishers started paying huge amounts for the rights to potential bestsellers: a major part of this sudden inflation in contract prices has been the rise in the importance of subsidiary rights. Kadushin et al. observe:

Subsidiary rights can also involve television, merchandise (T-shirts, dolls, etc.), and other tie-ins; in fact, the sales of the book itself often depend on the successful promotion and sale of subsidiary items and productions. The result of this is that the direct sale of books to individuals is far less important than it once was — a situation analogous to that in professional sports, where (as West points out) gate receipts have been overshadowed by the sale of television rights. In the words of Richard E. Snyder, chairman of the board of Simon and Schuster, books "are the software of the television and movie media," and, in fact, one-third of the movies produced each year are based on books. Richard Kostelanetz gives the worst-case account of the influence of subsidiary rights on editorial decision making when he says that "suitability to the mass media determines not only whether a novel will be offered to a large audience, but whether it will be published at all."

It is not coincidental that the ascendency of subsidiary rights was established at the same time conglomerates began buying up pub-686- lishing, houses. Charles Newman, in The Post-Modern Aura (1985), records that

Gulf and Western, which was originally a manufacturer of auto parts, now owns Paramount Pictures, Simon and Schuster, and Pocket Books; Warner Communications, a major producer of films and records and the part owner of the third-largest cable-TV system in the country, is also the owner of Warner Books and Little, Brown; MCA, the owner of Universal Pictures, is also the owner of the hardcover publishing houses G. P. Putnam's Sons, Richard Marek, and Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, and the paperback houses Berkley Publishing and Jove publications.

Another very important force shaping the literary marketplace in the late twentieth century has been mass-market book retailers like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks (the latter now owned by K Mart). Whereas, in 1958, independents accounted for 72 percent of all bookstore sales, by 1985 the bookstore chains had almost half of the market. In some cases, these chains have an influence on the publishing process that goes well beyond retailing: with every cash register hooked up to a computerized inventory system, B. Dalton has been able to track the "item velocity" of each book it sells, and it provides that information to publishers in the B. Dalton Merchandise Bulletin — "one of the most influential publications in the entire bookpublishing business," according to Whiteside. Chain stores such as B. Dalton are divided into metropolitan stores and suburban shoppingmall outlets; a work of literary fiction may well be carried in the metropolitan stores, but if it is judged (by the buyers at the chain) unlikely to sell in the shopping malls, this directly affects the size of the printing that book will receive. An informal survey of publishers -687- at the 1987 American Booksellers Association convention showed, among other things, that the mean for book sales was 10,000 copies, with sales of 70,000 or more copies generally considered necessary to place a book on a major best-seller list: unless a book is carried in the suburban outlets, sales beyond 10,000 copies are unlikely. The chain bookstores also have an effect on what books are kept in print: shelflife is short in these stores, for the simple reason that "item velocity" drops precipitously as books move to the backlist: the same ABA convention survey showed that, on average, 91 percent of a book's total sales were registered in the first year.

In the opinion of some, the influence of the chain bookstores has been more significant than that of conglomerate ownership in publishing. Richard E. Snyder argues that the chains "serve a different community of book readers from any that the book business has ever had before….the elitism of the book market doesn't exist any more." According to Snyder, "the minute you get into the suburbs, where ninety percent of the chain stores are located, you serve the customers, mainly women, the way you would serve them in a drugstore or a supermarket." While some have decried the supermarket approach to selling books as a major contributing factor in the decline of "quality" publishing, Snyder sees the "book supermarket" as an essentially positive development: "Sometimes a publisher will publish a commercial book and that might be sold to Waldenbooks and some people might say that's bad. I say it's good — better that people read a commercial book than read nothing. It's a step up."

However distasteful Snyder's endorsement of the literary supermarket may be to some, his description of that supermarket's customer — nonelite and usually female — matches the historical profile of the audience for the novel itself. Although reading has a long tradition as an activity of the elite, the history of novel reading is linked to the more recent emergence of an educated middle class. Ian Watt, Lewis Coser, and others have pointed out that the rise of the novel in England during the mid-eighteenth century was due, in large part, to the broadening distribution of wealth: as the numbers of the moderately wealthy grew, there was a corresponding increase in leisure time, literacy, and education, all of which were conditions favorable to the novel. The rise of the novel is also attributable to what might be called the rise of domesticity. The literal expansion of the -688- domestic sphere is part of this: reading is by nature a solitary activity, and larger living quarters allowed individuals the privacy in which to pursue it. In our culture, the domestic sphere has traditionally been the domain of women, and middle-class women, although generally excluded from the worlds of business and formal education during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, were increasingly literate and leisured, and made up a majority of novel readers during this period (as they still do, according to Snyder and others in the publishing industry).

The fortunes of the novel are linked not only economically but also ideologically to the fortunes of women. According to William Charvat, American readers of the late eighteenth century consumed quantities of reprinted British novels, many of them written "by women working in anonymous secrecy" for a publisher who paid them a flat fee; this anonymity did not prevent novels from being identified as a form of entertainment by and for women, and American literary critics were nearly unanimous in denouncing the triviality and vulgarity of the genre, effectively depriving the novel of cultural status despite (or perhaps because of) its popularity.

These same considerations obviously made writing novels an unattractive profession in America — especially for male authors concerned with prestige. In explaining how authorship became a viable profession in this country, Charvat concentrates on the economics of the novel: by the 1830s, he says, American authors had begun to write on subjects of broad appeal, American readers had the money to buy their books, and American publishers had the means to deliver them. But he also notes, in passing, that it was the financial success of British authors such as Byron and Scott that finally raised the cultural status of authorship in an "increasingly pecuniary" American society. It would appear, then, that as long as novel writing was regarded as the occupation of women, its cultural status (as well as the remuneration afforded its authors) remained low.

Recent discussions of the literary canon, and particularly of the American canon, have made it clear that the laurels for "serious" literature have been awarded disproportionately to men. This is not because women have not written novels, or have written only bad novels; rather, it is because both the writing and the reading of novels by women has been consigned to the realm of popular (that is, dis-689- posable) culture. In the twentieth century, the bifurcation of the novel into "serious" and "popular" literature has been accelerated not only by mass marketing (which has increased the disparity in size between the audiences for these two categories of cultural production, even though it may not actually have diminished the audience for literary fiction), but also by professionalization, which has provided a positive incentive for certain (mostly male) writers to make their fiction less accessible to the amateur reader.

This account of the current state of literature is likely to meet the same objection from liberal humanists that the Marxist cultural critic's and the classical economist's would, namely, that "the mysterious force of all serious art is the extent to which it always exceeds the requirements of the market" (in Charles Newman's words). But even the liberal humanist would have to admit that the struggle of "serious" literature in America has always been in large part a struggle for an audience, and thus has been a struggle with the marketplace and its requirements. The two types of fiction most frequently identified as postmodern conveniently mark the poles of contemporary artistic response to these requirements. One is the response of writing fiction that is deliberately unmarketable: Charles Newman calls this sort of writing

The other pole of response is represented by postmodern fiction that incorporates and even celebrates mass-market commodities and mass-culture icons. This adaptation to the market may have survival value from an economic point of view, but it is likely to arouse the contempt of intellectuals:

This tirade by Jean-François Lyotard against kitsch eclecticism and commercial realism clearly demonstrates that even those who reject the marketplace still define art in relation to it. The identification of literary merit with opposition to the marketplace derives from the tradition of the historical avant-garde: Flaubert's remark, in 1852, that "between the crowd and ourselves no bond exists" is an early but characteristic rejection of philistinism. This attitude intensified as the marketplace and its cultural influence expanded: Flaubert went on to sigh, "alas for the crowd; alas for us, especially," but sixty years later, Ezra Pound seems to have felt no such regret when he remarked to Harriet Monroe, "So far as I personally am concerned the public can go to the devil."

The artist's claim of autonomy may be one of long standing, but it takes on new significance in an age of professionalism. As Magalia Larson points out, professional autonomy always derives from exclusivity, and "the secrecy and mystery which surround the creative process maximize the self-governance conceded to experts"; Louis Menand, in his study of T. S. Eliot's literary reputation, demonstrates that Eliot was instrumental in teaching both academics and artists that such self-governance depends on establishing "the experts' monopoly of knowledge." Seen in this light, "Art for Art's sake" is a paradigmatically professional credo, since every profession

In the words of Eliot himself, "professionalism in art [is]…hard work on style with singleness of purpose" — in short, literary professionalism manifests itself in artistic formalism and New Criticism, both based on the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. Discussing this same "autonomy aesthetic," Peter Burger points out that it "contains a definition of the function of art: it is conceived as a social realm that is set apart from the means-end rationality of daily bourgeois existence. Precisely for this reason, it can criticize such an existence." And, in fact, the service that both art and criticism have offered the -691- twentieth century has been a constitutively professional one: the analysis of culture from an allegedly disinterested and uninvolved perspective.

The claim to an aloofness from the marketplace is a dubious one at best, not least because the professionalization of "serious" literature has coincided with the movement of the writers of that literature into the academy. As the founding editor of Perspective magazine recalls,

The generation of writers that shaped twentieth century literature (Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc.) earned their livings outside of Academia. In the forties, there was a mass migration of writers into the universities as teachers of courses in "creative writing."

This dating of the professionalization of creative writing coincides with a marked growth in academic publication: sociologist Diana Crane's "analysis of the growth of publications in English literature from 1923 to 1967 reveals a linear pattern of growth until 1939, followed by a very slow rate of exponential growth (doubling every seventeen years rather than every ten years as in the basic science literature)." Some would say, as Per Gedin does, that the result of this coincidence has been "the development of a literary activity which in many cases exists only for the critics."

In "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975" (Politics of Letters [1987]), Richard Ohmann argues that, in addition to sales and major reviews, attention from intellectuals (who in twentiethcentury America tend to be academics) and inclusion on the college syllabus also play a crucial role in establishing literary merit. A book must sell well in order to survive in the short run, regardless of its merit, but a book must also receive the imprimatur of academia if it is to survive in the long run. Ohmann sees inclusion on the college syllabus as the "all but necessary" form of that imprimatur: "the college classroom and its counterpart, the academic journal, have become in our society the final arbiters of literary merit, and even of survival [for literature]."

According to Gerald Graff, there was no such thing as a course in the modern novel until the very end of the nineteenth century, and it was not until the middle of our own century that even "serious" contemporary fiction would have been considered an acceptable sub-692- ject for academic study. It has only been in the last twenty years that English departments have routinely offered courses in contemporary literature, and only in the last ten that this has established itself as a field in its own right within the discipline. New Direction's James Laughlin corroborates Graff's account when he recalls:

Laughlin and Graff (and many others) again point to World War II as the turning point: after the war, Graff says, "an institution that had once seen itself as the bulwark of tradition against vulgar and immoral contemporaneity [became] the disseminator and explainer of the most recent trends." Harold Rosenberg, in a 1960 essay entitled "Everyman a Professional" (The Tradition of the New [1982]), offers the broadest cultural explanation for this shift when he says that in an age of specialization teaching has become a matter of

In his essay "After the Book?" from On Difficulty, and Other Essays (1978), George Steiner goes so far as to suggest that reading itself is splitting into real and pseudo literacy, the former practiced by a small elite mostly consisting of academics, the latter describing the limits of the practice of reading in the culture at large. In Steiner's view, there is nothing wrong with this, except that the elite today no longer has the power or receives the respect that it deserves. On the substance of Steiner's point, Ted Solotaroff agrees, remarking with regret on "the widening gulf between the publishing culture and the literary or even literate one. For if the former is advancing steadily into the mass culture, the latter is retreating to a significant extent from it into the confines of the university." Solataroff does cite the influx of writers into academia as a solution of sorts to the "age-old" problem of the starving artist, but he sees a danger in the increasingly -693- common career-path of the writer from MFA student to teacher of writing, with little adult experience outside the university.

Indeed, many of the authors discussed by these critics have, like the 36 percent of the writers surveyed by Kingston and Cole, spent all or most of their adult lives in the academy. They are also mostly male: though he doesn't point it out, less than 20 percent of the authors whom Ohmann calculates to have made it into the "intermediate stage in canon formation" are women. Moreover, as the discussion of professionalism in literature might lead us to expect, the authors named are frequently those whose fiction emphasizes formal elements, sometimes at the expense of narrative.

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Pierre Bourdieu argues that "to assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that of which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather than the 'subject', the external referent, which involves subordination to functions — even if only the most elementary one, that of representing, signifying, saying something"; this attitude of detachment from function is, he suggests, "the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities — a life of ease — that tends to induce an active distance from necessity." By contrast, those who cannot afford this distance tend to require representationalism and apply "the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in the ordinary circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, [resulting in] a systematic reduction of the things of art to the things of life." In short, Bourdieu contends that our hierarchy of taste, which values formalist sublimation and detachment more highly than "vulgar" and unselfconscious realism, serves to reproduce the hierarchy of class.

It also reproduces a hierarchy of gender, and perpetuates the association of the popular (instinctive, unreflective) with the feminine, and the difficult (deliberate, conscious) with the masculine. In his essay "The Publishing Culture and the Literary Culture" (1984) bemoaning the increasing distance between what is commercially viable and what is artistically valuable, Ted Solotaroff finds hope in the fact that

Solotaroff's remarks, and his examples, suggest that in order to overcome the barrier between literary merit and marketability, even "really gifted writers" must still be realists, and must appeal to "a passionate constituency" — code for "women readers," as they are perceived in publishing. This reading may seem to infer too much about the role of gender stereotypes in the literary marketplace, but a prominent woman editor with whom I spoke suggested that "difficult" fiction is generally written by men and for men, while women writers reach a larger audience (of women) by addressing themselves more directly to spiritual concerns. The flip side of this essentialism is that women who write experimental fiction are likely to be told by editors that their work is not what women want to read — a stricture that may be intensified when the author in question belongs to a "spiritual" race as well as a "spiritual" gender, as bell hooks's experience demonstrates:

In sum, the literary marketplace is, for better or worse, the most reliable indicator of how we value literature. Literary taste, literary status, and literary production are all determined to a significant extent by the economics of that market and, in turn, by the hierarchy of values that are expressed in those economics. In the postmodern era, publishing has become part of a multinational and multimedia marketplace for narrative, and therefore it competes with movies, television, and even "nonfictional" formats such as TV news, which increasingly adopts the trappings of narrative to attract its viewers. In this environment, the most profitable type of novel is that which can be easily translated into other media, namely, the realist narrative. The best-paid authors of such narrative are disproportionately male, as are those who manage the mass market for narrative, but the product is, especially in the case of the novel, marketed to women — often on the basis of essentialist stereotypes of the proclivities and -695- desires of that gendered market. "Serious" fiction that is nonrealist in its aesthetic orientation is prestigious but unprofitable, and those who write it tend to be men confined to the academy, which is the only place that their professionalism does have a market value. In addition to reflecting our hierarchy of gender, the literary marketplace reflects our presuppositions about race and our predispositions toward class, not so much in who gets published as in what gets published and what gets preserved — and it is the difference between these last two that may tell us most about how literary value is determined.

John M. Unsworth

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Postmodern Fiction

The "post" in "postmodernism" signifies both a temporal condition (postmodernism is a period after modernism and thus in certain respects an evolution from it) and an attitude of resistance (postmodernism is a turn away from modernism and thus in certain respects a radical break with it). Postmodernism is thus both a late modernism and an antimodernism. Although this definition seems peculiarly oxymoronic, literary history offers precedents, one of them being modernism itself. "Modernism," as the word is used to define the major avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century, is both a continuation of and a radical break from the dominant literary modes of the nineteenth century — in the case of prose fiction, the modes of realism and naturalism. Although as a descriptive term "postmodern" seems particularly vulnerable to commonsense cavils (how could anything be after, or more modern than, the modern?), "the postmodern novel" has in critical usage a relatively clear range of reference, denoting a group of works and foregrounding the themes and narrative strategies that these works share.

Like the modernist novel, the postmodern novel can be described as an avant-garde tendency within a literary period, in this case the post-1945, or contemporary, period. It cannot be called simply the avant-garde tendency because during this period there have been various kinds of innovative fiction that make even more demands on commensurately more specialized readers (see Robert Boyers's chapter below on the avant-garde novel). To advance an apparent para-697- dox, the postmodern novel is the mainstream avant-garde novel of the contemporary period, with "mainstream" here a function of the material conditions of production — of how a book is published, distributed, and advertised. Of the twelve major novelists discussed in this chapter, only two, Kathy Acker and Joanna Russ, have published a substantial part of their work with small presses. Whatever the claims for the subversiveness or marginality of writers like Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and Don DeLillo, their works have always been widely available and widely reviewed. To cite one of the most evident examples of how relatively established this experimental genre is, Pynchon's notoriously long and difficult magnum opus, Gravity's Rainbow, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

The "mainstream" character of postmodern fictional innovation has other implications. The American postmodern novel is widely perceived — and criticized — as a white male genre. It is significant that the two writers mentioned above as the only major novelists in the canon to have published a substantial part of their work with small presses are also the only two women novelists. Some feminist critics have gone on to claim that the postmodern novel is essentially masculinist or misogynist, inasmuch as a number of the most famous works, especially those produced in the 1950s and 1960s, are preoccupied with aggressive, often violent male sexual behavior and the denigration of female characters. It seems unlikely, however, that instances of identifiable sexism are necessarily connected with postmodern experimentation per se, especially given the fact that other kinds of novels produced by male writers in the early contemporary period also celebrate aggressive male sexuality and present denigrating images of women. Nor is the relative scarcity of women in the American postmodern canon by itself evidence that American women are not writing postmodern novels — much less that they are "not interested" in stylistic and structural innovation; it is only evidence that such novels are not getting the publication and publicity given to the male postmodernists — and, for that matter, to female writers of realist fiction. Furthermore, postmodernism is to some extent a matter of packaging. When in his 1979 essay "The Literature of Replenishment" John Barth drew up a list of international postmodern fiction writers, he included twenty-three men and only one woman, the -698- French "new novelist" Nathalie Sarraute. But Barth's tentative catalog primarily reflects his own affinities and range of reading, in that it includes only those works already identified with high culture. It mentions no "genre" novels, for example, although some of the most exciting experimentation of the period was going on within the field of science fiction: Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany (one of only two African American writers in the canon — the other is Ishmael Reed) are science fiction writers whose work has "crossed over" into the more reputable category of postmodernism. A number of experimental novels by women are also explicitly aligned with the feminist critique of ideology and published in feminist series, usually by small presses: Russ's The Female Man, for example, was initially published as a science fiction novel, then reissued as a feminist novel; only recently has it become established as a postmodern work.

As Cornel West has suggested, postmodern culture is by definition multinational. English-language postmodern fiction, however, is a phenomenon most often associated with the United States, where it appears inevitably engaged with the question of what it might mean to be American in an epoch variously summed up in the paradigms of the global village, the cybernetic revolution, postindustrial capitalism, the triumph of kitsch, the reign of media-ocrity, and the new populism. Such American novels at the center of the postmodern canon as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, DeLillo's Libra, Coover's The Public Burning, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are fundamentally concerned with the construction of recent American history and ideology. Other key postmodern novels — Nabokov's Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, Barthelme's Snow White and The Dead Father, Barth's Giles Goat-Boy and Sabbatical, Acker's Kathy Goes to Haiti and Don Quixote, and Russ's The Female Man — are less overtly concerned with historical data but undertake sustained critiques of social and cultural presuppositions.

The American postmodern novel is thus not in any obvious respects the disengaged, aestheticist, and ultimately narcissistic project denounced by such detractors as Charles Newman and the late John Gardner, nor is it fundamentally ahistorical and superficial, as Fredric Jameson has suggested. The continuing controversy over whether postmodern fiction can have moral or political implications revolves around the question of whether only certain conventions of -699- representation — realist or, on occasion, modernist conventions — are capable of evoking "real world" concerns. The defining condition of postmodernist textual strategies is of course that they disrupt precisely these conventions.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, theorists of the postmodern like Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers argued that the undermining of established narrative conventions is not only formally but also politically subversive or even revolutionary. The reason, they maintained, is that conventions of representation are inextricably linked to ideology, so that to disturb accepted and seemingly natural modes of writing is to raise questions about whether accepted and seemingly natural ideas — for instance, about the fundamental sameness of "human" experience and nature — are not similarly arbitrary and culturebound. Although few critics now hold that formally disruptive writing is by definition politically disruptive writing, this analysis helps clarify how formal disruption can be aligned with ideological critique and why the consequent "difficulty" of certain politically engaged postmodern novels is not necessarily willful obscurantism.

These observations suggest that postmodern fiction has a certain amount in common with the various poststructuralist theories of the contemporary period. Both postmodern fictional practice and poststructuralist critical theory tend to question a commonsense view of language as simply the vehicle that relays the world to the mind, or as an ideally transparent medium guaranteeing the unequivocal presence of meaning in efficacious discourse. Both postmodernism and poststructuralism treat literary language as inseparable from the discourses of praxis and power and deny that literary language — or any language — can be disinterested and value-neutral. Both assert a fundamental continuity between text and world, not because texts reflect or imitate reality but because reality is inevitably experienced as textualized — that is, as already-interpreted within a social and cultural construction of what the world is and how it works. Indeed, one of the great themes of postmodern fiction is the world as text, as a system of codes already constructed by shadowy others for unguessable purposes. In such fiction, the experience of characters trying to interpret the text in which they are enmeshed replicates the experience of the reader, who is trying to interpret the text in which these characters appear. -700-

Such metafictional loops, in which readers enact — and are similarly entrapped within — searches undertaken by characters, are among the most distinctive structural features of the postmodern novel. They indicate how in the postmodern novel structural features are characteristically wound up with thematic features. They also epitomize one of the primary effects of postmodern writing, an effect partly implied by the notion of a convention-breaking genre. This is the effect of textual mastery. To read a postmodern novel is to be surprised and frequently to be overwhelmed; it is to have expectations thwarted and strategies of interpretation anticipated, attacked, parodied, or simply taken on as topics of discussion within the fiction. Although postmodern novels are not invulnerable to critical mastery, they do actively resist those modes of criticism that aim to get the better of a work, to expose its latent and by implication inadvertent presuppositions. In opposition to the premise that a strong reading can master a novel, postmodern novels tend to initiate the agonistic struggle with their implied audiences, inviting tactics that will lead to narrative impasses and cognitive confusion.

Literary categories rarely have essential definitions — that is, definitions identifying the one quality that makes the mode or genre what it is and separates it from every other mode or genre. For example, the judgment that a given work is realist or modernist is largely a matter of degree and emphasis; moreover, it is based on "family resemblances" within the genre, in which, as in the case of biological relatives, each member of a given category possesses some but not all of the family features. There is thus nothing anomalous in the fact that no one structural or stylistic feature is present in all postmodern novels and absent from all novels that are not postmodern. The metafictional loop noted above, in which the activity of the reader interpreting a novel doubles the interpreting activities of characters within the novel, is an example. This kind of effect, in which an aspect of the fiction is represented on some embedded level within the fiction, occurs frequently in postmodern novels but is not limited to them (Patricia Waugh cites Cervantes's Don Quixote as an early instance of metafiction), nor do all postmodern novels have conspicuous metafictional components: the works of John Hawkes, Ishmael -701- Ishmael, and Joanna Russ, for example, are not in any obvious respects about writing or reading.

But although metafictional strategies do not define the postmodern novel, they are very pronounced in much of the writing usually identified as postmodern. One of the most extreme manifestations of the metafictional tendency is the mise-en-abîme, in which a recognizable image of the primary text is embedded within that text. Nabokov's Pale Fire, which incorporates within a text-and-commentary format a long poem called Pale Fire, and Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, in which the main character obsessively develops and documents an imaginary system called the Universal Baseball Association, are particularly interesting examples, which will be discussed at some length in the next section. Such strategies of embedding lead en abîme, "into the abyss," both because they are recursive — Nabokov's Kinbote (or Botkin) and Coover's John Henry Waugh are reflecting quasi-parodically the reader's efforts to make sense of the works in which they occur — and because they have the potential for infinite regress — Kinbote indicates at the close of Pale Fire that he might well disguise himself as Nabokov and write novels, among them, presumably, this one; in the last chapter of The Universal Baseball Association Waugh's imaginary baseball players begin to write competing histories of the Universal Baseball Association.

Postmodern metafictional situations tend to differ from modernist metafictional situations in emphasizing the reading rather than the writing of fiction. The distinction suggests a fundamentally altered view of the artist and of literary creation. In postmodern fiction, even when a protagonist is engaged in producing a text, this writing is represented not as original creation but as a kind of rereading. John Barth maintained in "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) that the writer in the contemporary period is confronted with the "usedupness" of all the viable stories, but such "exhaustion" becomes in the terms proposed by this argument an impetus to write selfconsciously postmodern fiction; indeed, much of Barth's own fiction dramatizes the process or product of reinscription and raises the mechanics and motivations of narrative to central importance. Moreover, if to write is invariably to replicate what one has read and thus to reread, to read is also to rewrite. A recurring dilemma in Thomas Pynchon's novels is that to read history for its meaning is also to -702- postulate connections among events in order to make them mean something. Characters are constantly faced with the question of whether they are reading a historical script that preexists their critical endeavors or whether they have in important respects constructed this script through their desire to read it and their expectation that it will prove readable. In Pynchon's fictional universes, the distinction between reading and writing is both wholly untenable and wholly necessary.

Another metafictional strategy not restricted to postmodern novels but prominent within them is the introduction of a figure who is not only a persona of the author but a persona of the author of this book: in John Barth's Chimera, "John Barth" time-travels to talk with Scheherazade about the used-upness of all the viable stories; a minor character in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is suddenly identified as Vonnegut himself: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book." This kind of strategy is in Brian McHale's words "frame-breaking," in that it intrudes a heretofore "factual" being into a "fictional" landscape. Like the postmodernist use of the mise-en-abîme, this postmodernist use of the authorial persona disrupts both realist and modernist strategies of reading, in that it resists the reader's desire to assign a textual phenomenon to a particular ontological level, such as the level of real-world fact, fictional "fact," or fictional "fiction."

To break narrative frames by allowing one ontological level of the plot to intrude on another ontological level is to introduce radical instability into a work of fiction. Inasmuch as this kind of framebreaking is one of the most important features of postmodern writing, it aligns the postmodern novel with a kind of radical undecidability, a suspicion that the question "What's the real story here?" cannot be answered in any satisfying way — satisfying, that is, in terms of the sorts of expectations bred by realist and modernist fiction. The "real story" is unavailable in the face of contradictions or divergent accounts, not simply because it is unknowable (in which case there is a real story, but readers don't have access to it — a familiar situation in such modernist fiction as William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!), but because there is no single "real" in the story, no sanctioned reality with reference to which other stories can situate themselves as distorted, fictionalized, partial, biased, hallucinated, or -703- simply lying. To put it another way, discrepancies in a postmodern story resist being naturalized as functions of a perceiver — "the" world of the fiction itself is irreducibly multiple. The character Stephen Albert, in Jorge Luis Borges's influential ficcione "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1945), describes a situation in which multiple possibilities are realized simultaneously: "[The writer] thus creates various figures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradiction in the novel." The intimation of such parallel realities leads to the impasse at the conclusion of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 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 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 form to bring together protagonists from the preceding novels with the author, "John Barth," already an ontologically unsettling character in Chimera. In this particularly self-referential twist of the literature-of-exhaustion technique, Barth reinscribes his own stories, giving the characters authorial functions and making the authorial persona subject to the logic of his own various plots. Using the university setting less allegorically than in Giles Goat-Boy, Letters deals on the one hand with the political microcosm of the 1960s campus, on the other hand with the status of language and letters in a world where books are in danger of being supplanted by advanced technologies, especially those of film. The most recent novels, Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) and Tidewater Tales (1987), are more overtly political than any of Barth's previous works. Both introduce new characters, in each case married couples whose union is a primary instance of the synthesis of apparent antitheses. Both are selfconscious in their preoccupation with the mechanics of narrative, their continuing reinscription of prior Barth stories, and their pervasive wordplay, and both use the scientific notion of indeterminacy to unsettle the implication that narrative closure ever closes anything for good. But both also explore the analogies between aspects of the writing process and techniques of surveillance and control in 1980s America. Barth had been widely regarded as one of the most aestheticist of the postmodern novelists: in 1968 he was quoted as declaiming, "Muse, spare me (at the desk, I mean) from SocialHistorical Responsibility, and in the last analysis from every other kind, except Artistic." His most recent novels, however, suggest that his own practice has led him to explore the affinities between the examination of narrative strategies and the critique of ideology.

Like most of the novelists under discussion, Robert Coover has made explicit statements about his reasons for disrupting established forms of representation. In a 1969 interview, he maintained that "the first and primary and essential talent of the artist is to reach the -712- emotions…. I mean when something hits us strong enough, it means it's something real." For Coover, "something real" is precisely not what is conveyed through the habitual doctrines of humanism and strategies of realism: "the contact occurs when there is communication across reality links, not across conventional links which is what most second rate writers make, you know, things you'd expect, you know how the endings are going to be." Coover's first published works, among them a number of the short stories collected in the 1969 volume Pricksongs and Descants, seem determined to counter "things you'd expect." Like the fictions in Lost in the Funhouse, which was published in the preceding year, and like Cervantes's Don Quixote, Coover's own paradigm, the Pricksongs and Descants stories explicitly attack "exhausted art-forms," forms Coover not only sees as "used-up" but aligns with "adolescent thought-modes." A number of the stories are reinscriptions of folktales and myths; many deliberately violate conventions of decorum in treating playfully an extremely inflammatory subject matter — murder, mutilation, and rape, for instance (the last also symptomatic of the masculinism that infected much experimental writing by men during the 1960s). All of them foreground conventions of fiction-making and reading. Probably the best known, "The Babysitter," seems a North American realization of the radically nonlinear narrative described in Borges's ficcione The Garden of Forking Paths. In "The Babysitter," the question of the "real story" does as much violence to the forking paths of narration as the various versions of the story do to the story's erotic victim, the babysitter.

Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966) is in many respects a more traditional work of fiction than the contemporaneous short stories, exploring the evolution of a religious cult in terms insisting on an allegorical relation to the founding and institutionalization of Christianity. The concern with demystifying myth, a constant in Coover's work, here allows the reader a sort of benevolent outside position from which to assess events variously interpreted as mundane or miraculous. Such a reader is invited to conclude that if this is how myths arise, there is a standard of objectivity and accuracy that can be invoked to arrive at some sense of what the real story might be. This privileged vantage point disappears gradually in Coover's second and definitively postmodern novel, The Universal-713- Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968). This work not only synthesizes the major Coover themes and strategies — the origins and developments of religious belief, the affinities between historical and fictional narrative, the reinscription of folklore and myth into convention-disrupting forms — but carefully explores the potentiality of the novel, defining the genre accretively as a game, a ritual, a system evolving its own tendencies and trajectories and ultimately subject to the same entropy as any closed physical system, an analogue of history (particularly history conceived as the sort of totalizing teleological and rule-governed system that postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard calls a master-narrative of legitimation), and finally as encompassing and constituting a putatively "outside" or "real" world.

The author and God-figure of this system John Henry Waugh (JHWH — part of an elaborate structure of Judaeo-Christian allusions in a story that manages to bring such providential events as the flood, the Covenant, and the betrayal and death of Christ into a tabletop game modeled on baseball) changes his relation to the embedded Universal Baseball Association, until in the eighth and final chapter he has disappeared entirely into the game/novel/world that was presented as his creation. The embedded fiction becomes all there is and begins to reenact not only the versions of providential history concocted within this same fiction in the preceding chapter but also the kinds of authorial questions that Waugh had raised about his capacities and responsibilities as maker of this fiction. The question about the "real" story is thus displaced into a question about origins and control: Where did this world come from and who or what is responsible for its events and outcomes? In making a fiction about how the making of fiction becomes a process comprehending all of experience, Coover has allowed metafiction to insinuate a whole series of questions about the nature and scope of interpretation, power, and design.

These questions take political shape in Coover's great encyclopedic work The Public Burning (1977), a novel so disruptive of the borders between history and fiction that legal problems delayed its publication for several years. The Public Burning is about the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs, and about the Manichean theology im-714- plicit in United States foreign and domestic policy during the Cold War. In this novel, too, history resembles fiction in having a design, author, and purpose, but in this case the confusion of ontological levels is complete from the outset. "Fiction" and "fact" mingle uneasily in the exuberantly xenophobic prologue and become thoroughly entangled with the first sentence of the opening chapter, "I was with the President at his news conference that Wednesday morning when the maverick Supreme Court Justice William Douglas dropped his bombshell in the Rosenberg case." The narrative voice is unmistakably that of Richard Nixon in his mid-career memoir Six Crises. The question of the "real story" is immediately irrelevant in a fictional universe where figures like Nixon (who is the principal narrator), John F. Kennedy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Dwight D. Eisenhower interact with corporate trademarks like Betty Crocker, national symbols like Uncle Sam, and political stereotypes like the Phantom, the fictional embodiment of that 1950s catchphrase "the spectre of world Communism."

Throughout The Public Burning, Coover literalizes the symbolism of the dominant ideology, most evidently by having the electrocution of the Rosenbergs take place in Times Square, "the ritual center of the Western world." The ritual murder performed as a national spectacle becomes the central event in a theological construction of history that takes as its revealed text the nineteenth-century American doctrine of Manifest Destiny. According to this Manifest theology, history has a plot — and perhaps this plot is also a conspiracy. It has an origin in the machinations of Uncle Sam and the Phantom. It has a design and perhaps an ultimate purpose, although the dimensions of these are not visible to characters enmeshed in its workings, characters like Coover's disconcertingly sympathetic schlemiel-hero Nixon, who in the closing pages is finally made privy to the central mystery of the politico-providential plot, the secret of Incarnation. In The Public Burning, the strategies of narrative fiction are writ large in the world that is represented. But this world is not merely overdetermined and artificial; it is also in unexpected ways an accurate depiction of Cold War reality — and is accurate precisely because of this overdetermination and artificiality. For Coover, as for most other postmodern writers centrally engaged with events in the public -715- sphere, the irrealist strategies of metafiction have mimetic power, revealing the extent to which official history is inevitably structured like a fiction.

Thomas Pynchon, arguably the most important of the postmodern novelists, is similarly preoccupied with the relations between history and fiction and with the entailed issues of author-ity, control, and design. Maintaining a public profile so low that it approaches anonymity, Pynchon creates fictional universes shot through with intimations of conspiracies vast and pervasive enough to undermine the possibility that there can be anything personal or individual about identity. Pynchon's characters tend to be both allegorical and stereotypical, embodying mythic functions of the quest hero while acting, dressing, and speaking out of the preoccupations of mass culture, thereby deflating corresponding connotations of high seriousness. Plots are labyrinthine and endlessly self-referential: if narrative design is always incipiently a synonym for global conspiracy, paranoia is the state of mind not only of characters struggling to apprehend their place in the pattern but also of readers struggling to comprehend a text that works actively to implicate and overwhelm them. The recurring suggestion is that the reader's own world is a text that behaves in the same way, inscribing ostensibly free agents in preexisting stories that ultimately determine them. Pynchon's novels amass historical evidence documenting this extreme vision of control at the same time as they advance other sources for intimations of fatality: paranoia as a predisposition to "read into" reality for connections and meanings that have only psychological necessity.

Pynchon's first two novels develop the distinctively postmodern motif of the "real story" and explore the implications of a formal refusal to authorize one version of fictional reality as definitive. In V (1963), the central action of the quest reflects the reader's act of interpretation while the structure of the novel raises questions about the structure of historical knowledge. The title initial refers to a mysterious woman who seems to turn up at key moments of chaos during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Allusions to The Education of Henry Adams suggest that this V personifies a force analogous to the physical principle of entropy and that this force destines Western civilization to increasing decadence until it arrives at a terminal condition of inanimateness. -716-

But all these manifestations of the elusive V are identified and connected only in retrospect, by a bumbling quest hero named Herbert Stencil, who is committed to reading history for signs of V in order to construct a reality that gives his own life some meaning. Stencil and the other protagonist, the self-proclaimed schlemiel Benny Profane, inhabit a postwar world in which people and inanimate objects have come to resemble each other so completely that Stencil suspects V has already achieved most of her aims. Yet the existence of V is increasingly in doubt as the quest proceeds, to the point where Stencil begins to wonder if she may amount to nothing more than "the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects." His need to locate a force or conspiracy that will explain the contemporary world may have led him to interpret random phenomena as manifestations of that force or conspiracy. The dilemma is characteristically Pynchonesque; the ending of the novel refuses to resolve it.

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is a shorter and generally more straightforward novel, in which actions occur in chronological sequence, so that readers are less involved with the problems of making connections within the story and more traditionally placed as observers of a hero who makes connections — which is to say, either discerns them in or projects them onto a satirically envisioned landscape of southern California at mid-century. The protagonist here has the quester's resonant name of Oedipa and the deflating surname of Maas — close to "more" in Spanish and "measure" in German — and is joined in her search by characters with names like Manny DiPresso, Stanley Koteks, and Genghis Cohen. The parodic names reinforce a theme of limits on human endeavor and especially on knowledge, most evocatively knowledge of "another mode of meaning behind the obvious." Like V, The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the "plot" of history, conceived simultaneously as a threat to the quester and as a promise of "transcendent meaning."

The publication of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 both secured the reputation of Thomas Pynchon and made him the most controversial figure in contemporary letters. On the strength of this 760-page encyclopedic work, Edward Mendelson declared, "Pynchon is, quite simply, the best living novelist in English," but the editorial board for the Pulitzer Prize, wary of the book's notorious difficulty and lowcomic iconoclasm, overrode the unanimous opinion of the nominat-717- ing jurors that this was the best American novel of the year. Both the acclaim and the hostility testify to the innovation of Gravity's Rainbow. In certain respects a sequel to or pre-text for V (its central symbol is the V-2 rocket), it develops narrative voices, themes, structural elements, and even characters introduced in the earlier novel while drawing even more extensively on literary, intellectual, economic, and social history and on the physical and biological sciences, as well as on theology and occultism, popular culture, folklore, social and linguistic theory, and mathematics. Gravity's Rainbow deals with the development during the Third Reich of the V-2 rocket, the prototype of all guided missiles, which would become the delivery system for the nuclear armaments being developed in the United States during the same period. The merging of the two technological "advances" culminates a "dream of annihilation" that according to Pynchon 's visionary historicism has obsessed Western civilization for centuries. "Gravity's rainbow" symbolizes both the arc of the rocket and the possible trajectory of civilization itself, as it proceeds toward seemingly inevitable self-destruction.

Yet the question of inevitability is an ambiguous one in this novel, not only in terms of theme but also in terms of structure. The trajectory of the initially "main" plot, which concerns a GI named Tyrone Slothrop who appears to be erotically stimulated by being in London locations the V-2 will eventually hit, is complicated by so many subplots that it is difficult to ascertain what happens to this schlemiel-hero or what his denouement might mean. The clues that proliferate at first in apparent testimony to "the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul" continue to proliferate — and to lead in different directions. Moreover, characters (over 300 are developed in some detail), situations, and events burgeon wildly, and the narrative voice shifts without warning from slangy Americanism to the highminded musings of German idealism to oddly private reflections and reminiscences to passages of rhymed verse. If this riotous multiplicity signals an absence of controls or limits, it also occurs in a context where controls or limits are rarely benign. Characters tend to be free to the extent that they evade outside attempts to define them. Inasmuch as the novel itself evades reduction to a single "authorized" reading, it suggests that no trajectory is ever wholly determined, and -718- that perhaps the "course" of history allows for deviation and thus possibility.

Vineland (1989), Pynchon 's first new fictional work in sixteen years, was the first of his novels to receive seriously mixed reviews, perhaps only an indication that Gravity's Rainbow was an impossible act to follow. Vineland continues the tradition of satirically named characters (Zoyd Wheeler, Isaiah Two Four, Weed Atman, and even Mucho Maas, carried over from The Crying of Lot 49) and deals with a conspiracy of indefinite proportions, in this case involving the FBI and its informers among the student radicals of the 1960s. But in this novel the emphasis is less on a corresponding tendency to "plot" connections in order to arrive at some sort of historical coherence than on character and the local relations between individuals, especially the relations of family. The central quest is that of a daughter for her absent mother, and while the process by which the two are united involves an impressive accumulation of information about international corporate practices and structures, the history of the Left in California, the effects of Reaganomics and the War on Drugs, and the popular culture of the 1980s, there are no epistemological impasses or withheld revelations. The "real story" is fully visible; in fact, Vineland is the closest Pynchon has yet come to a realist novel, its mode similar to the magical realism of such Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez (whom Pynchon has called the greatest living writer) in its easy accommodation of a group of latter-day Undead called the Thanatoids into the parodically heightened but recognizable California landscape.

Like Pynchon, Don DeLillo evolves complex narrative structures that mimic and develop his themes, which have to do both with contemporary political and social situations and with real and projected bodies of abstract knowledge. His great encyclopedic novel Ratner's Star (1976), which deals with the efforts of a fourteen-yearold mathematical genius to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, is an elaborate formal system that reflects and returns on itself like the meta-mathematics its protagonist is struggling to develop. Within the apparent self-containedness of this edifice, however, DeLillo's emphasis is on the ungrounded nature of knowledge, Goedelian uncertainty as the fundamental condition of contingent human being. -719-

The uncertainty theme recurs in DeLillo's work, from the relatively early novels End Zone (1973) and Great Jones Street (1974), in which the systems explored for their coherence and explanatory capabilities are football and rock music respectively, to The Names (1982), which works with analogies between systems of language and economic and political systems: multinational capitalism and the oppositional communities and interests in the Third World. White Noise (1985) again focuses on language as a system, this time as an attempt to close off a contingency experienced as fear of death, and on the entropic waste produced by the various purportedly closed systems of American consumer culture. The brilliant and iconoclastic Libra (1988) uses the available information on the assassination of John F. Kennedy to construct a new and heavily conspiratorial explanation, like Coover's The Public Burning ventriloquizing a number of public figures, among them Lee Harvey Oswald.

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 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

-725-

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 be interesting, or confuses us, but because he belongs to no school and stands resolutely apart from the "ordinary" and "traditional." There may be in Hawkes a discernible "aspiration toward popular narrative," but that aspiration exists in tension with his dedication to "austerities" that certify his vanguard status.

Hawkes is an important test case for anyone interested in these matters. If in some way Gertrude Stein embodies the spirit of an originary modernist avant-garde, then Hawkes may be said not to fit the pattern. Leslie Fiedler can speak as emphatically as he likes about Hawkes's unpopular merits, but he cannot make of Hawkes even a wayward son of Stein. For Hawkes exhibits neither the singlemindedness nor the aestheticism of that hermetic precursor. Whatever the austerities of his fiction, he composes narratives with more or less developing characters and something like a subject or a content. The atmosphere of dream that so pervades much of his work is pointedly purposeful, bespeaking psychic dislocation or evoking a sense of entrapment that has some discernible relation to circumstance. When he fails, one is aware of a gap between intention and execution, aura and substance, of the disparity, say, between the intensity of nightmarish dread and the causes that might account for it. Hawkes's novels demand to be read and considered in such terms. Absurdity figures prominently in the novels, but Hawkes nowhere -728- relies on it as an ostensibly adequate "explanation" for anything. Though he demands a responsively attentive reader, he does not expect what William Gass "a jaded eye," which is to say, a reader "for whom all the action, the incidents, the tension and suspense, are well-known and over and dead and gone," the reader, as Gass has it, of "Joyce and Beckett and Barth and Borges." Hawkes's reader is eager to be moved, willing to be wracked by suspense. If the action is limited, the incident thin, it is nonetheless evoked as a something happening, and one suffers it as a cresting momentum that carries within it significant if sometimes unnameable consequences. One is not only intrigued, but drawn in.

Hawkes is an avant-garde writer principally in his handling of surfaces, in his refusal to provide the kinds of continuity and closure that ordinarily distract readers from the rewards of surface. Character in Hawkes is not a random collocation of traits and activities, but neither is it anything like a stable entity. It is a shape and a wordsurface suggesting but never quite embodying or delineating depths. In The Lime Twig a woman suffers and one is moved not by the meaning of her suffering or the depth of her reverie but by the austere evocation of her pain and bewilderment. In Second Skin (1963) a father kills himself, and one is moved not by his story — which we are never given — or by the impact of this deed on a young son: one is moved by the feverish accents and impeccably juxtaposed details of the telling — brief, resonant, almost tritely heartbreaking, but finally artifactual, a little arch, decidedly literary. In Travesty (1976) one is held not by the stale and tediously wicked ideas of the obsessed monologuist but by the sudden irruptions in the surface of his discourse, his linguistic for "elbows of hot metal," "fields of oxygen," and the "grievous tabloidal gesture." It is not that the ideas in such a novel do not exist for us, but that they are not as important as they would be in another sort of work, and that the characters associated with those ideas are frankly an occasion for the performance of certain imaginative resources. Hawkes is an avant-garde writer in the degree that he resists a full commitment to an expansive novelistic or illusionistic treatment of evolving characters and ideas. In the end, his primary interest in language and in the formal management of narrative surfaces ensures that he remain at once a serious artist and a minority writer whose effectiveness is at best intermittent. -729-

Though, in contrast to Hawkes, John Barth might aptly be described as the best-known little-read American novelist, he is unquestionably an avant-garde writer. Author of a famous essay on The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), Barth is dismayed that so many of his contemporaries continue to write in the manner of the nineteenthcentury realists, and asserts that "to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect." Though sharply critical of phony experimentalism, he is frankly committed to an art "that not many people can do: the kind that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas." Sometimes dismissed as a merely academic writer performing outlandish feats for professors easily impressed by dexterous prestidigitations, he is nonetheless a writer of great earnestness and intellectual range whose fiction poses basic questions about the avant-garde in the United States. Is it true, as he contends, that the prodigious virtuosity of the writing he admires is compatible with a capacity to "speak eloquently and memorably to our still-human hearts and conditions, as the great artists have always done"? Or is it the case that such ambitions can only distract the avant-garde writer from his true business, which is to astonish, delight, and impress? Barth is not alone in wishing it were possible to avoid stark dichotomies, but his work encourages them more than he will allow. Pages of Barth's novels and stories may be fun to read, but not many will accept that his extravagant fictions "speak eloquently and memorably to our still-human hearts."

Barth is chiefly celebrated as the author of the novels The SotWeed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966), two of the most fantastic and relentless works in American literature. They are, moreover, works that seem to have been written not so much to be read as contended with. They are quintessential university novels, directed at readers for whom books are at the center of experience and language itself defines what is most important about us. Drawing upon, parodying, imitating, and echoing the literature of the past, Barth's novels are at once boisterous and long-winded, exuberant and earnest, unbuttoned and self-conscious. Embodying what one critic nicely calls a "visionary pedantry," the novels are also apt at times to seem silly, self-indulgent, mythomaniacal, excessive. Brilliantly comic and endlessly inventive, they are by turns playful and obsessive, as one might expect from a writer for whom language games, para-730- doxes, and philosophical conundrums are never-ending sources of wonder. Barth is in fact largely if not exclusively preoccupied with the issue of fictiveness and the way that language continues to embody and embolden the fictions by which we live. In no sense a philosophical novelist, Barth is nonetheless deeply aware of philosophical issues and clearly aspires to ask questions about the relationship between fiction and authenticity, unwitting imitation and deliberate emulation. That he poses these questions with no prospect of arriving at an orderly exposition of the crucial issues, let alone an answer, attests only to the fact that he is a novelist, not a philosopher. That he is shamelessly prolix and self-contradictory attests to his appetite for the performative and exasperating.

Indeed, that appetite says more about Barth's avant-garde credentials than anything else. One does not read Barth to be uplifted or edified or instructed in the ways of the world. A novel that imagines all of Western history as a gigantic university in which persons are routinely obsessed with passing exams is, to be sure, an allegorical fiction, but it is hardly an attempt to make sense of the world beyond the confines of its own created universe. That there are obvious references to the "real world" no one will doubt, but Giles Goat-Boy is more certainly an emblem of creation going about its not-so-usual business than a representation or a disquisition. The English critic Tony Tanner asks repeatedly for less "emphasis" on "the struggle or opposition between referentiality and reflexivity," but it is the intention of the avant-garde writer to fuel that opposition. Of course the important question is not which work is more referential than another, but what qualities of mind and spirit are embodied in a particular book and what purposes — literary or human — they serve. Barth's Sot-Weed Factor interests us in its own peculiar ways, ways that have little to do with the interest we take in a novel by Saul Bellow. But its uniqueness and its interest are in part a function of the implicit challenge it poses to our interest in Bellow. If we conclude that a fiction about storytelling and mythmaking is finally tedious, intolerably self-absorbed, and only intermittently a vital expression of the thing it clearly wishes to be, we do not thereby admit to a preference for referential fiction but simply respond to particular failures or limitations in a Barth.

One cannot get away from the fact that failure, boredom, emo-731- tional limitation, and linguistic excess are often inherent in the very enterprise and intention of avant-garde fiction. As one almost-official spokesman for the American avant-garde, Ronald Sukenick, asserts, for his kind of contemporary writer, "reality doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality doesn't exist." Literature, he maintains, is dead; reading and writing constitute at most a "considered boredom." Another spokesman, Jerome Klinkowitz, celebrates fiction that refuses to delight in anything but "the process" of composition itself, and has especial fondness for works that are insistently opaque, resist "ulterior meanings," and follow out their self-created patterns to "illogical conclusions." Like many other programmatic boosters and fellow travelers, such spokesmen are exclusively turned on by what they take to be the essentially oppositional posture of avantgarde fiction. John Barth's Letters (1979) is admired because it is longer than it needs or ought to be. William Gaddis's JR (1975) is touted for the very trivialization, arbitrariness, and repetitiveness that make it all but unreadable. Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (1979) is praised for its steady undermining of any interest a reader might take in its story, its characters, its topical references. That such works, in all their exasperating inconsequentiality, are created by gifted writers is a fact that one registers without quite knowing what to do with it. It's easy enough to answer the programmatic effusions of a Sukenick or a Klinkowitz, but it's something else again to dismiss utterly the brave if often misguided ambitions of a John Barth.

Robert Coover has worked the terrain ploughed by others, "stirring things up," as he has said, creating, fracturing, mythologizing, ironizing, entertaining, and confounding. Early a favorite of likeminded writers with a taste for "brightly painted paragraphs," compulsive stylization, "pseudo-dramas," and "virtuoso exercises," Coover has grown into something more. Though he remains in every sense a vanguard writer, he has demonstrated that advanced fiction can address important public issues without compromising its commitment to excess, risk, myth, and carnivalesque revelry. As much a satirist as Hawkes, and with as great an interest in the tendency of language to decline into self-parody, he nonetheless uses words to convey essential insights about the way human beings think and feel. To say of him, as one infatuate celebrant has written, that his "fictions defeat attempts to comment upon or clarify them," that in effect -732- they deny "aboutness," is to take him for the predictably vanguard writer he has largely ceased to be. Like John Barth committed utterly to freedom of invention and the autonomous "reality" of his own fictions, he is at the same time more responsive to the claims of a "reality" not of his making and rather less willing to trust exclusively the arbitrary and reflexive. The author of the fiendishly clever jeux of Pricksongs and Descants (1969) has grown into the author of more substantial and troubling if still clever and outrageous works. The novels are, all of them, at one level exercises of a willfully unfettered imagination, the calculated exacerbations of a show-off with an inexhaustible repertoire of inventions to display. The Origin of the Brunists (1966) revolves around numerological puzzles and the antics of mystic sectarians. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968) is a wildly intricate work built around a baseball "game" — played with dice, charts, and statistics — which progressively devours every person and relationship tangled in the novel's complex weave. The Public Burning (1977) is a fantasist's version of a political novel conceived as a mix of the grotesque and the pathetic, the outré and the sober, the plausible and the impossible, the novelistic and the theatrical. Gerald's Party (1986) is a takeoff on detective stories and an intricately layered romance built around dreams, false leads, and memory. Together these novels constitute an ambitious project driven by irreverence, pride, and sheer joy in the power of language.

Such fiction as Coover writes typically features not only elements of pastiche and improvisation but what Robert Alter calls "a cavalier attitude toward consistency" and an "exhilaration of hysteria." Violating formal principles and ordinary (or "bourgeois") decorums, it is by turns arch and slapdash, innovative and innocent. Coover's novels presume the existence of a reader willing to work and to take his entertainments seriously, however riotous the idiom in which he is addressed. If in the end nothing can seem to such a reader really offensive or silly or significantly contradictory — if, in other words, Coover's most extravagant and novel gestures finally seem at best brilliant and amusing — the reader has at least been put through his intellectual paces and made to hang on the words of a continuously peremptory venturer.

Of course, for all of Coover's wayward brilliance, it may be that he does not deserve to be described as an avant-garde writer. By far -733- his best work is the novel The Public Burning, a work that compels at least brief consideration in terms recommended by critics of the avant-garde like Renato Poggioli and Charles Newman. Poggioli describes a situation in which liberal democratic societies cannot but tolerate and finally welcome all "displays of eccentricity and nonconformity." Transgression — in a pluralistic culture that forbids nothing — thus becomes not only an acceptable but also an attractive and finally dominant style. The disorienting antics and studiously "offensive" violations of a Coover would then come to seem not only typical but also de rigueur for anyone making claims to a sophisticated readership. Understanding the terms under which he serves such a readership, a Coover will be hard put to stay ahead of their expectations. Offering the indiscriminate satire and subversive demythologizing that is the advanced novelist's stock-in-trade, Coover also slyly offers a psychological depth and compassionate tenderness that actually violate the "contract" that implicitly underwrites his relation to sophisticated readers (who are supposed to know better than to fall for character, depth, psychology, and so on). Overstepping plausibility at every turn, he grounds his novel in a conceptualization so rigorous and persuasive that the most bizarre and ridiculous gestures are made to seem purposeful and coherent and thereby to succumb to requirements associated with older, ostensibly "repressive" discursive regimes. In short, Coover does what he can to exempt his fiction from Poggioli's charge that the avant-garde can no longer be avant, that it is finally another conformist enterprise.

In The Post-Modern Aura (1985) Charles Newman ridicules the pretensions of the contemporary avant-garde and argues that in the United States there is none. If, as Newman has it, "the avant-garde defines itself historically by the rigidity of the official culture to which it opposes itself," then there can be no avant-garde that presumes upon the good-natured tolerance, affection, and support of a broad readership. Though, as Newman concedes, rigidity can be "hypothesized" when it does not in fact exist, a writer like Coover goes about his business in more or less blithe disregard of any constraint. The unquestioned assumption underlying such a procedure is that only cultural neanderthals and political reactionaries can seriously object to the effusions of clearly gifted writers. Since such persons are not to be taken seriously, and the traditional apparatus for judging works -734- of art is no longer reliable or much in evidence, the literary virtuoso had best follow his instinct if he is to come up with genuinely adventurous and consequently admirable fictions. Though Newman does not train his sights on Coover, it is clear that even a novel with the obvious power of The Public Burning has more the character of a high-stepping entertainment than an insidiously subversive gesture. The peremptory "violations" practiced by a Coover look more and more like mainstream appeals to readers for whom the avant-garde is simply — as Newman says — "what's happening now."

The Public Burning attempts to combine political radicalism and a fully liberated aesthetics — an aesthetics in which everything goes and nothing is forbidden — with the intention of producing what is at once a critique and an expression of "America." By now probably the most widely read would-be avant-garde novel of its time, its success has as much to do with its "conventional" virtues as with its pyrotechnic dazzle. More various and affecting than anything by Hawkes, it is also as relentlessly inventive as anything by Barth. Many commentators stress the surprising humanity of its portrayals, however disfiguring the fantastic distortions and improbable scenarios to which characters are subjected. Others are equally, and rightly, impressed by the range and penetration of the political satire, noting that within the framework of a grotesque saturnalia Coover somehow provides a telling account of American politics in the 1950s. Coover's Richard Nixon is in many ways a great and complex character, the world in which he is made to move articulated with a shrewd command of political detail. Coover's decision to build so long a novel around the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is justified by his capacity to make of their story an emblem of American ideas of love, adversity, ambition, and justice. However much the novel is shaped, driven by Coover's determination to go too far, to handle ostensibly "real" characters and events with the brutally distorting contrivances of a cartoonist, the hyperbolic becomes in The Public Burning a necessary condition to which we object only if we are unable to appreciate all that we are given under its capacious auspices.

To emerge from rapt encounter with The Public Burning only to proclaim that it is no avant-garde creation, that it is too enjoyable, too accessible, too much a reflection of the quintessential energy and -735- awfulness of "America" in its self-indulgence and imperial claim to anything it damn well pleases, is again to recall that "avant-garde" has typically signified a defiant exigency. It is possible, in other words, to regard such a novel as satisfying and successful and, at the same time, as demonstration that a postmodern avant-garde is rarely possible. The happy few, including Coover, who can preen triumphantly within — not the entrapping but the kindly — circumscriptions of language may be as much as postmodern fiction can offer. But it is a far cry from Coover's sense that all of experience is his for the taking, the eagerly complicitous reader his for the astonishing, and the remote high modernist sense of an ascetic vocation pursued without any prospect of general applause. For all of their extravagances and calculated indecencies, both Hawkes and Barth would seem better able than Coover to identify with Flaubert's assertions that "between the crowd and ourselves no bond exists" and that artists like himself must "climb into our ivory tower, and dwell there along with emptiness." One intends no disrespect to Coover when one concludes that The Public Burning is nowhere touched by any austere recognition of its own irrelevance.

More hermetic by far is the fiction of Walter Abish. From the moment his first novel, Alphabetical Africa, appeared in 1974, Abish was acclaimed as an avant-garde writer, his work typically described in the language of "defamiliarization," "surface," "parody," "fragmentation," and "artificiality." In most of his work he displays no wish to transform reality. He is content instead to build artificial structures evincing what the poet John Ashbery calls an "irrefutable logic." Readers with a limited appetite for "pure" fiction — the epithet comes from Abish — were not impressed. Neither did it help much to think of his work as proceeding from his self-confessed "distrust of the understanding that is intrinsic to any communication." Raised to a principle of composition and accepted as a given, Abish's "distrust" promised little in the way of fully engaging fictions. All too attractive to ideologues of postmodern metafiction, Abish's work and the terms he used to talk about it informed the cant employed by American critics like Jerome Klinkowitz who argued that everything is arbitrary and that there is no difference between fiction and reality. Though there is little but verbal life in works like Alphabetical Africa, they deserved better from academics like Klinkowitz, for whom the "fact" -736- that we live in "post-structuralist times" (whatever that can mean) must necessarily prevent serious writers from acknowledging even perfectly obvious distinctions.

Abish's 1980 novel How German Is It is another matter entirely, a work of extraordinary precision that explores rather than simply buys into ideas of fictiveness and the unknowable. A quietly inexorable if also discontinuous meditation on the relationship of the "new" Germany to its Nazi past, Abish's novel on one hand invites the characterization routinely applied to his other fiction: it is fragmentary, parodic, inconclusive, and permeated by artifice. But one would not think to describe it as merely a linguistic tour de force, or as revolving about an arbitrarily chosen or merely "imaginary" landscape. Abish's focus is the Germany of the Federal Republic, the background for his concern the Nazi era and all it says, or might say, about Germany and even German-ness. The characters in the novel speak to one another in the accents of persons who might really exist. Particulars are marshaled with no sense that they are irrelevant. Enigma and obliquity are ever-present, not as manifests of an ostentatiously peremptory imagination but as reflections of pressing questions with which the novel is obsessed, as readers must be. While a critic like Klinkowitz can cheerfully insist that "the signifiers of language have no inherent relationship to the things they describe," Abish's novel treats failures of language as specific failures growing out of particular conditions. Though for Abish the unreliability of language is a problem with which human beings always contend, How German Is It also conveys an abiding concern about the degree to which particular discourses, institutions, cultures can be held responsible for their effort to obscure reality and obstruct memory. If in Abish's novel we are given to understand that the Nazi past is deliberately obscured in postwar Germany, that does not translate automatically into an abstract statement about the irrecoverability of the past. The reader who believes that for Abish one setting or culture is equivalent to another, a particular linguistic pattern a paradigm for all others, does not understand the tenor and design of Abish's novel. There the inaccessible, obscure, or forgotten is evoked not as a function of "the failures of language" but as a consequence of determinate intentions the novelist wishes to anatomize and understand. Whatever its reticence and indirection, the novel is a work of in-737- tensely focused moral urgency. When in the novel an architect says that "morality is not an over-riding issue in architecture," the context makes it clear that he is resorting to a sophisticated formula to evade what he ought to address. This is an instance not of the "failure of communication" but of the way that some human beings subvert the truth and violate their responsibility to speak truthfully or acknowledge what they know. The insight is not "general." It is a criticism of a kind of human failure, and it emerges from a conviction that it ought to be, and may be, possible for persons to do better.

What makes Abish's work an avant-garde novel is important. It is in no way an attempt to amuse, hector, or uplift a large audience. In an entertainment culture drawn to highly charged subjects and sensational treatments it takes on an explosive subject with a dryness and detachment that together bespeak an enormous aesthetic and moral scruple. At the same time, one never feels here that for Abish indirection is a stylistic fetish, opacity a standard postmodern decorum. Abish's commitment to the formal and philosophical premises of the work ensures that he refuse to provide the decisive answers, compellingly colorful characterizations, and dramatic actions favored by more "popular" writers. Even a symbolically charged incident, like the discovery of a mass grave beneath the streets of the town of Brumholdstein, is presented in such a way as to "resist any type of easy assimilation" or climactic resonance. So argues Abish's best critic, Maarten van Delden, who also notes that the extreme precision of the novel, drawing our attention to matters both large and small, ceaselessly "defamiliarizes" everything, compounding an aura established by the "narrator's habit of posing endless questions, even about the most trivial matters." Deconstructing the world of the new Germany, van Delden goes on, Abish depicts it "as a place of evasion and deception, of discontinuities between past and present…where the past is continually being evoked and then side-stepped." Relentlessly involving us in questions and plots we cannot but find interesting, Abish refuses "to tie together the various strands of his narrative" or to permit the creation of an unmistakable "moral center." Though nothing in these refusals seems at all perverse, it is clear that the avant-garde (or subversive) element in How German Is It proceeds from a radical skepticism, however much Abish here resists the claims of the arbitrary and meaningless. Unmoved by the usual forms -738- of indeterminacy and iconoclasm, Abish here demonstrates that for a serious avant-garde writer — quite as Charles Newman demanded — there can be "more to fiction than fiction" and more than "the fatuity of form as final consolation."

William Gass has made himself an unapologetic spokesman for fiction and the consolations of form, assuming in one resounding essay after another an oppositional posture that has made him the foremost exemplar of the avant-garde in his generation. Though his fiction has not quite commanded the attention routinely devoted to his aesthetic tracts and polemics, he is surely one of the most accomplished and original writers around. From the first having inspired readers to speak of his essays and stories as "works of beauty" by a man "who loves words" more than anything else, he has insisted upon the autonomy, the purity of art while struggling to avoid the pallor and empty formalism of a bloodless aestheticism. To those turned off by the idiot ejaculations and glib spontaneities of would-be vanguardists like Jack Kerouac, Gass has seemed a model of pride, wit, cunning, and audacious verbal brilliance. He has been willing to make judgments and take risks, to make art as if it were possible actually to fail and to succeed. Though many younger writers out for the main chance show little interest in his work, they have read him; they know that he is out there, his best work an implicit challenge to their every indifferent sentence and self-indulgent yawp.

Gass's fiction includes an enormous novel-perpetually-in-progress entitled The Tunnel, the 1966 novel Omensetter's Luck, the 1968 story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and a bravura mixed-media fiction called Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1971). No one of these can quite indicate what the others are like. The stories are mostly without those teeming "barrages of verbiage" — John Gardner's description — that one finds in the other works. Omensetter is without the typographic puns and lunacies of Willie. The Tunnel — so far as one can tell from the extended sections published in periodicals — refuses the linear narrative continuity of Omensetter.

At the same time, one need only utter the words " William Gass" to call to mind certain tendencies that together help to place him. Ihab Hassan calls him "logophiliac, perhaps logopath, certainly mythomane." Alvin Rosenfeld speaks of Gass's feeling for "the musical -739- as well as the semantic character" of words, of a verbal "opulence" that can become "self-consciously flamboyant," "strutting," even "dandified." Tony Tanner finds in Gass a constant reminder that "it is precisely in the flamboyance and poetry — the whole 'aside' of style and language finely used — that we find our fun, our dignity." Gass's own essays also steer us in the inevitable direction, nowhere more pointedly than in "The Concept of Character in Fiction," where he announces his ambition "to carry the reader to the edge of every word so that it seems he must be compelled to react as though to truth as told in life, and then to return him, like a philosopher liberated from the cave, to the clear and brilliant world of concept, to the realm of order, proportion, and dazzling construction…to fiction, where characters, unlike ourselves, freed from existence, can shine like essence, and purely Be."

Though this is not the place for a full-scale analysis of such a formulation, it is clear that there is even more to Gass than his own statements reveal. Gass may want characters "unlike ourselves," but his figures sufficiently resemble us to make readers interested in them as if they were or might have been drawn from actual human beings. He may chiefly prize "concept," "order," and "proportion," but his fictions also provide elements of narrative development and recognizable setting. However strenuous his insistence upon consciousness and the internal, he situates his fictions in such a way as to anatomize and explain the instinct to turn inward: no inside without outside in Gass, no self without others, no sufficiency of language without the suggestion of an insufficiency, no shining like essence without traces of desolating everydayness. One thinks words, sentences, music as one reads Gass, but one thinks also of "life" and "experience" in ways that Gass is ever reluctant to allow. Some, like the critic Richard Gilman, deplore "the confusion of realms." Others dismiss the familiar trappings — characters, settings, themes, allegorical options — as so many opportunities for linguistic invention, for the surface play of ostensive signifiers. Gass tells them all what to believe, but no one is quite ready to take as gospel the word of so boisterous a "lie-minded man."

People who write of Gass typically describe the narrator as a "dominant consciousness" or a voice, and in fact there are grounds for doing so, as also for reverting now and again to talk of characters -740- with backgrounds and features and reasons. Omensetter's Jethro Furber is a kind of "verbal architecture," as Arthur M. Salzman sugshy; gests, but he also resembles a man. The landscape in Gass is a kind of metaphor for, rather than a straight depiction of, an actual physshy; ical environment, but for all the reverie and innerness and linguistic aura, we also feel and carry within us the powerful presence of what we take to be actual landscapes. We know that every feature of each such landscape has been created, dreamt, shaped, that it is a fabric of words to which we attend, but we give ourselves over to the halfillusion of place quite as we do in fictions with more palpably illushy; sionistic designs upon us.

In short, one is tempted to say that in his fiction Gass knows thily his deep and joyous absorption in language exists in tension with, or in response to, another kind of absorption, more troubled, more diffuse. Characters in his fiction are hurt into lanshy; guage in a way that the confident master who speaks in the essays need not consider. In tngs he cannot permit himself to know elsewhere. He knows, that is, how entirehe fiction language is a refuge and a trap, in the essays it is all adventure, blessed method, consciousness electrified by beauty. Deeply alert to all that language cannot accomplish, Gass in his fiction tracks the vicissitudes of the language animal confrontshy; ing inertia, grayness, confusion, even history. The power of the ficshy; tion comes from its capacity to evoke in language much that language is helpless to alter or register adequately. There is a pathos and a tension in the best of the fiction that is largely absent even from the already classic philosophical essays on representation, stylization, and the ontology of the sentence.

Is Gass an avant-garde writer? He has so wished to be that it would seem at least ungenerous to deny it. His least sustaining ficshy; tion, Willie Masters, has all the qualities of a willfully outrageous, incorrigibly digressive work, and if it isn't an all too typical avantshy; garde fiction, I don't know what is. The other fictions, including fragments of The Tunnel, are so complex, so full of every kind of aesthetic scruple that they feel like something else. In their overt atshy; tention to language and the obstacles they erect to comfortable apshy; propriation, they are avant-garde works. In the range of palpable pleasures they afford, including the fellow feelings they sometimes enable, they are satisfying in a way that is not often associated with -741- the avant-garde. Charles Newman asks "whether an aesthetic [like Gass's] so fully and systematically engaged against Pseudo-art allows itself the amplitude to authenticate itself." Gass is neither a Joyce nor a Tolstoy, but by pushing past the sometimes straitening requireshy; ments of his own aesthetic he has created fully convincing and ravshy; ishing fictions. These works almost confirm the irrelevance of disshy; cussions bearing on what is or is not avant-garde — discussions in which Gass himself has been an influential participant.

Gass early wrote on Donald Barthelme, celebrating his absorption in the trash of common experience and his success in placing himself "in the center of modern consciousness." Others, equally persuaded by Barthelme's skills and devices, have likened his work to light enshy; tertainment, "like the blowing of dandelion fluff: an inconsequential but not unpleasant way of passing the time." For Gass, Barthelme is an intrepid explorer gaily picking through the dreck left around us by television, books, political speeches, ordinary talk: "The aim of every media, we are nothing but the little darkening hatch they trace when, narrowly, they cross." For Barthelme's severest critics, his flattening of distinctions, his reduction of everything — as Gass puts it — to a "flatland junk yard," is a denial of meaning and a shallow toying with serious questions. Even readers deeply impressed by the variety of narrative modes in Barthelme, by his deft movement from parodies of narrative structure to playful lampoons of cultural institutions, are often in doubt as to what this sort of wit and intelligence can amount to. Gass would seem to claim enough by refusing to claim too much: he asserts that, in addition to the dreck and the play, "there is war and suffering, love and hope and cruelty" in Barthelme, but he doesn't tell us what these count for in Barthelme, how heavily they weigh upon us as we read, how much they are trivialized by the pervasive irony. From what point of view does Barthelme expose consciousness as "a shitty run of category errors and non sequiturs"? If, as Gass says, he "has the art to make a treasure out of trash," what precisely differentiates the treasure from the clever joke, and what in Barthelme authorizes the serious employment of so devalued a term as "treasure"? Gass nicely tells us what a Barthelme fiction is most apt to look like, but questions of force and significance are not much considered.

Barthelme is a kind of avant-garde writer in one sense at least: he -742- writes for an audience that knows something about narrative devices and is sophisticated enough to appreciate parody. The problem, if there is one, is that Barthelme makes things very easy for this audishy; ence and may succeed as well as he does mainly by creating a comshy; munity of sophisticates whose main credential is its willingness to be amused by the likes of Barthelme. It isn't hard, after all, to be soshy; phisticated in the way that Barthelme requires. All that's asked, reshy; ally, is that you be alert to the irony that undercuts everything, that you be too smart to be taken in, that you recognize the joke even if you don't quite get it. Never before has an avant-garde writer seemed so clubbable, so much intelligent fun, so wicked without wanting to hurt, so scathing without wanting any one party to feel singled out for abuse more than another. If serious conventional writing evokes emotion, then perhaps it is fair to say that Barthelme's depersonalshy; ization, his refusal to make us feel anything but superior, is a way of defying convention. But again, for all the wit and brilliance of Barshy; thelme's contrivances, they cost us nothing; we accede to them with no reluctance. Critics like Charles Molesworth stress the "ironic resshy; onance" established when Barthelme's characters come up with solshy; emn value-judgments and straightforward "home truths": there is poignance, says Molesworth, in the need of characters to fall back "on ethical, normative measures that will allow them to comprehend their experience." But of course there is no real conflict in these passages. Readers know at once what is to be made of nostalgias and wisdom-statements in Barthelme. Where the context ensures that nothing be anything but silly or hopeless, where the voice is so perfectly — if narrowly — pitched, where the authorial control is conshy; summate, there can be no genuine tension, no experience of menace or breakdown. It's not alone the artfulness, formal severity, or fanshy; tastic distortion that certifies the presence of an avant-garde work. Barthelme's fictional voice, "both coy and disaffected," as Molesshy; worth says, is strangely status-affirming and comfortable in the postmodern age, and as such it lacks the final accent of fully affecting avant-garde fiction.

This is not to say that the best of the work is anything less than wonderful. If the novels Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1977) seem not much more than elaborate conceits, they do noneshy; theless embody qualities found in the more satisfying stories. Each -743- contains passages that just about any contemporary writer would be pleased to have written. Each raises important questions that it reshy; fuses to address, however intent it is upon wringing from those quesshy; tions what it can by way of aura and amusement. What makes the stories so much better than the novels is that in the shorter works we are not made to expect development or deepening of insights. In the novels Barthelme's refusal to press for development may itself be taken as a token of avant-garde defiance, but mostly it seems a matter of incapacity. Barthelme knows what he wants to do, and has a sly contempt for those who are inclined to go too far, to say more than they mean. In The Dead Father he writes a hilarious passage on the "true task" of the modern son, which is to reproduce the father, "but a paler, weaker version of him," and thereby to move "toward a golden age of decency, quiet and calmed fevers." It is possible to hear in this passage not the accent of angry rebuke but the mostly wistful accent of one who knows himself and his time too well to demand too much. As we interpret such words — hearing in them mostly biting satire or ironic self-acceptance — so will we be inclined to regard Donshy; ald Barthelme's relationship to the avant-garde.

Less problematic by far is Guy Davenport's posture. An inheritor of the high modernist tradition, drawn by training and disposition to what Hugh Kenner calls "the austere and astringent," Davenport is allusive, learned, precise, languorous, backward- and forward-looking all at once. Infatuated by things past, dreaming always of new colshy; locations and conjunctions, he offers a combination of intellectual rigor and lyric sensuality, prudent attention to detail, and eccentric foraging (his word). Though characterizing himself as a maker of assemblages, a builder, Davenport uses an essentially collagist techshy; nique to create narratives with a strange and enchanting momentum. One is carried through a Davenport fiction not by a structured sucshy; cession of events or by the promise of discoverable thematic cohershy; ence but by the steady unfolding of images and thoughts, the playful but never forced alternation of affinities and digressions. Working often with named historical or artistic figures — Charles Fourier, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka — Davenport imagines and excavates, borrows and invents, states and evokes, ever intent — as he says — on making contact with "pioneers of the spirit," the better to grasp what is meant when we say that "man was created to understand the world." -744-

Though such an enterprise is not by its nature inevitably an avantshy; garde project, in Davenport's hands it is altogether exigent, stimushy; lating, and original. One would not think to place Davenport at the head of an aggressive formation, moving inexorably forward and spearheading an opening for others — the German writer Hans Magshy; nus Enzensberger's view of the historic avant-garde. But then such a view little applies to most other plausible participants in an American vanguard. Davenport not only has no wish to lead but also manifestly refuses to write out of a sense of impatience with what is past. His works are created out of an abiding absorption in things loved, found, collected, retrieved, used, studied, assimilated, and shared. The continual surprise and pleasure afforded by the work has much to do with the delight it takes in handling its own materials, in finshy; gering a skein of thought, a line, a physical detail, an almost forgotten fact of history, an image. Exchanges of words, confidences, emotions, couplings: these too are facts, materials, partially or barely recovershy; able presences like all the others in Davenport. His works are pershy; petually in advance of us and of most everyone else's work by virtue of what one critic calls its "almost archaic naivete," its warm yet simultaneously dispassionate embrace of the "literal" and the "enshy; cyclopedic," the "inconclusive" and the "visionary."

Davenport's several collections of short fiction contain a few novella-length works, including the lascivious rhapsody on the life of the Dutch Fourierist philosopher Adriaan van Hovendaal entitled "The Dawn in Erewhon." Though he has produced no full-scale novel, his writing is central to the achievement of avant-garde fiction in the United States, and aspects of his work are strangely novelistic. There is an expansiveness of vision, a leisureliness of pacing in Davshy; enport that have nothing to do with the usual concision and implicshy; itness of the short story. Indeed, such qualities distinguish most of the shorter stories as much as they do the longer. "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg," however elegant its organization around a single character and a single unifying experience, can accommodate all sorts of ideas and vagrant references, and one's quiet exhilaration at the end is mixed with disappointment that there is to be no more within a structure flexible enough to accommodate more. Just so, in the title story of his first collection, Tatlin! (1974), much of the richshy; est material is not strictly entailed in the premise from which the -745- fiction unfolds. There is nothing arbitrary or willful about these inshy; clusions. The method is such as to justify itself, continuously, by finding what will serve, extend, illuminate, delight. Development is in the expansion of the evolving consciousness that is the fiction itself. Selection is, as in few other writers, inevitably a matter of addition, discovery leading — not inevitably, but plausibly — to discovery. In no other writer is there such variety of reference with so little ostentashy; tion; in no other so assured a combination of what the character Adriaan calls "meticulous draughtsmanship" and "voluptuous" or "generous" command. In Davenport the American avantshy;garde demshy; onstrates a maturity, a poise and comeliness and elevation, that has not been much in evidence before.

Initially one is more apt to speak of enchantment and sorcery than of maturity in connection with the writing of Steven Millhauser. The author of several novels and collections of stories, he has frankly invited comparison with a wide range of precursors — from the Italo Calvino of Invisible Cities to the Vladimir Nabokov of Pale Fire and the Jorge Luis Borges of "Pierre Menard" — only to astonish readers with the extraordinary singularity of his work. Millhauser's aesthetic control and meticulous intelligence have been often remarked, but there are better reasons to think of him as the most mature of vanshy; guard writers. A fantasist with a taste for the whimsical and farcical, Millhauser is also a strangely sober, sometimes melancholic writer. Though in every sense of the word an artificer, he can move within a sentence from inspired prestidigitation to disillusionment. For all of his commitment to creating "an air of legend," the better to set off creatures "perfect and complete in themselves," he is ever alert to the fact that "today's novelty is tomorrow's ennui," the marvelous "a revelation that never comes." If maturity is reflected in the achieveshy; ment of a perfect balance between abandon and constraint, lightness and weight, innocence and irony, exhilaration and defeat, then Millshy; hauser is the most mature of writers. What appears in his work as a reluctance to let go of childhood and its prerogatives seems upon reflection a persistent intimation of all that childhood, like art, canshy; not sustain. If, often, he trades in the eccentric or bizarre — one thinks of the erotic miniatures sometimes painted upon the sides and tips of the nipples of court ladies in "Cathay" — he never seems far from evoking what Goethe called "the spirit of eternal negation." -746-

That the mood of a Millhauser fiction is quite different from anyshy; thing to be found in other contemporary vanguard works is obvious. Nowhere else is there so haunting a combination of enchantment and disenchantment. A character speaks of "the obscenity of maturity" only to end by impressing upon us the frailty and bad faith of an undifferentiated commitment to play. Poetic activity is extolled only to issue in puerility or terminal self-absorption. Parody is systematshy; ically employed as a critique of particular conventions only to conshy; clude by undercutting the validity of everything, including its own playful subversions. From delight in fluency and metamorphosis we move to an equally vivid "skepticism" and "the knowledge that we can never be satisfied" or fully taken in. The language itself embodies these alternations and ambivalences. Pregnant, even lugubrious passhy; sages suffused by the "secretive, dark and wayward" are also — simultaneously, deliberately — undercut, brushed by the academic, the finicky, the fanatically observant. From "abysmal promises," "the disillusionment of the body," and "I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded loveless rooms" we move to or from the likes of "He thinks of Pope's tunnel at Twickenham, of the emergence of eighteenth century English gardens from the rigidity of French and Italian forms." At its best the language is so entirely a blend of the two dimensions, of the precise and the mysterious, light and dark, that one must speak not of shifts but of interanimating textures and tonalities: wish and recoil, dream and disinfatuation are one.

Millhauser made his reputation with the 1972 novel Edwin Mullhouse, a mock-biography of a "great" novelist, dead at eleven, and a wickedly suggestive portrayal of his "biographer," also his confishy; dant and closest friend, Jeffrey Cartwright. For all its verbal high jinks and its intense remembrance of childish pleasure, it is a book of enormous sadness. In satirizing the romantic religion of art, including the nostalgias that often inform poetic reverie, the novel strikes at its own deepest affinities, at its own sense that in art alone there is the possibility of seeing and feeling truly. Like the character Edwin in his ostensive novel i, Millhauser "approaches a serious subject by means of comic and even ridiculous images." Like Jeffrey, ostenshy; sive narrator-author, Millhauser exalts and demeans, gives and takes back. Everywhere, even as it cavorts and puns and burlesques, the -747- novel secretes a poisonous, anathematical will to put an end to its own high spirits. At its most self-canceling indulging a language of transparent excess, hyperbole, cliché, it turns its own generous exshy; travagance to ridicule. With its every "woe to the writer, most wretched of the damned" and "who can fathom the soul of man? Friendship is a mystery. Curiosity killed the cat," the novel irrevoshy; cably undermines its troubled commitment to "literature," sincerity, and wisdom. Unable quite to renounce its visceral involvement in soul and seriousness, the novel is prey to the "peculiar vanity" of Edwin Mullhouse in wishing "to seem not quite serious." But for all its occasional playfulness, the novel does not really wish to sustain "the cute grin of a cartoon cherub," and where it does appear, as Jeffrey remarks, "that grin is itself the mask, beneath which lies a grimace of earnestness." Though one is necessarily reluctant to adopt the self-conscious observations of such a novel as if they were a reshy; liable guide to its intentions, the reader may be certain that Millshy; hauser knows exactly what is at stake and has installed within the novel as much as we need to discern its terrible urge to ironic selfdisenchantment.

Millhauser's subsequent books emerge from the same vision and rely for their effects upon similar procedures. The most brilliant of these later works — including the novella "August Eschenburg" from In the Penny Arcade (1986) and the title story of The Barnum Mushy; seum (1990) — however singular, have all to do with inauthenticity and the diminishing prospects for creating serious art. In "August Eschenburg," these issues are the subject of the work; in other stories they flit in and out of focus as the discourse turns on one, then another related image or reflection. It is simple enough to mark out the dominant counters in "August," with its references to "worldshy; irony," "love of truth," and the relation between art and "soul." Here, in a work whose resonance reminds us not of Borges but of Thomas Mann and Confessions of Felix Krull, we have a focused reflection on the capacity of art to "express spiritual states." Other works, in spite of their obvious interest in such questions, intermitshy; tently take up a variety of concerns, and with nothing like an urging toward substantive closure. Single images carry enormous weight in such fictions, sometimes reversing the primary thrust of the work in which they appear. But again, for all the paradox, invention, and -748- irony, we cannot but discern the principal business of Millhauser's fiction.

The key to Millhauser's art, and to the avant-garde element in his outlook and practice, has much to do with irony. Millhauser is the most ironic of writers. He writes, that is to say, in a style at once extravagant and self-conscious, confident and guilty. What looks to be the smile of imagination eager to take everything for its province is also the self-mocking smile of one who knows too well that imagshy; ination can be neither innocent nor robust, effectual nor free. Irony in Millhauser is the sign of imagination disabused, slyly giving itself over to procedures by which it will exercise its powers only to conshy; front the ultimate failure of those very powers. In the expression of this irony there is joy, but it is the harsh, pyrrhic joy of consciousness triumphant over its own creative powers and illusions. Millhauser creates in the Barnum Museum what he calls "a realm of wonder," but as he leads us through its "gaudy halls" and "brash abundance" he cannot but note "a certain coarseness," and worse, a capacity even in the most stirring exhibits to inspire "boredom and nausea," stushy; pefaction, desolation. This is in itself only modestly disturbing, reshy; flecting as it may what are merely changing moods. More insidious by far is the suggestion that the oppositions presented in such a work are themselves not to be seriously entertained, that the very language of wonder is itself so tainted by excess and cliché that it ought not to convey what it ostensibly intends. Even the disillusion so steadily interposed between the poet and his reverie is compromised, literary, inauthentic — not always farcical or ridiculous, but at least slightly exaggerated so as to seem a parody of an earlier mode of austere disillusion.

In fact, parody is so bound up with irony in Millhauser as almost to seem an integral component of his stance. This is not parody as we find it in other postmodern writers, in Barth or in Barthelme, to take two illustrious examples. In novels like The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, parody — say, of seventeenth-century English and American prose, or the language of savior myths — is employed to revivify our relation to the past and thereby to empower Barth's claim to a mythmaking novel of the future. In Barthelme, as Charles Molesworth has written, we have "a field of free-floating parody, where no anchoring content or style serves as the central vehicle of -749- intention against which the other structures are judged or intershy; preted." This yields, in Barthelme, not only an indiscriminateness in the targeting of objectives but also "a feeling of the author's lack of responsibility," which enthusiasts rather celebrate as "decentering" or "undecidability." Millhauser's parody is neither future-oriented nor irresponsibly nihilistic, neither voraciously imperialistic nor inshy; discriminate. Neither can parody in Millhauser be reduced to an anxshy; ious competition with models or a desire to recuperate energies asshy; sociated with earlier literary cultures. If he would surely agree with the painter Robert Motherwell that every intelligent artist carries the whole culture of modern art in his head, and that "his real subject" is likely to be that whole culture, he would no doubt find it harder to accept that "everything" he creates "is both an homage and a critique." Such a formulation too emphatically suggests that the writer proceeds with targets before him, that in parodying literary biography he is criticizing literary biography, that in simultaneously parodying and investing in romantic archetypes his primary goal is to say something about romanticism.

But Millhauser parodies in the more radical spirit of the Thomas Mann who in 1944 noted in his diary that "I myself know only one style: parody." This was not in Mann a boastful statement, and of course there is nothing boastful even in the most riotous of Millhauser's fictions. If, like Mann, Millhauser knows only parody, this must be understood as reflecting a disciplined refusal to escape from self-consciousness, from a sense of the potential or actual hollowness, conventionality, ludicrousness of his own best language and ideas. Erich Heller, in his 1958 book Thomas Mann: The Ironic German, develops this view of the radical artist with surpassing lucidity, and nowhere more powerfully than in a passage he quotes from Nietzsche: the artist, Nietzsche writes, "reaches the ultimate point of his greatness only when he has learned how to see himself and his art beneath himself — when he knows how to laugh at himself." Millhauser consistently sees himself and his art beneath himself: so one believes in reading his novels and stories. What he parodies, more than any genre-convention or empty discourse, is his own steadfast effort to rise above the conventional, the trivial, the shoddy. In parshy; odying even the most lucid and earnest of literary employments, inshy; cluding the helplessly familiar language of affection and admiration, -750- Millhauser takes on what Heller terms "the misgiving that the pursuit of art may have become incompatible with authenticity." For Millhauser, the essential thrust of parody is not critique — however much he may criticize moribund forms and corruptions of spirit — but autocritique. The irony and pervasive melancholy of his art consist in its steady acknowledgment that the exercise of creative freedom can only authentically issue in the truth of its inadequacy.

Though other writers have adopted some such dark view of art and of the condition of language, few have expressed it with such seriousness and grave amusement. However obvious the differences between Millhauser and modernist masters like Mann and Kafka, he reminds us of their severe gaiety, their powers of detachment and melancholy serenity. The avant-garde element in Millhauser is clear not in his power to enrage or to shock but in his sense — expressed in a prose vigorous and precise — that to explore the boundaries of conshy; sciousness and invention is to discover not inexhaustibility but limit. The greatest of avant-garde writers have understood that an oppresshy; sive sense of limitation was inherent in the energetic, sometimes fushy; rious attempt to overcome expressive constraints. If the selfproclaimed avant-garde in the United States has often seemed unduly, not to say preposterously, overconfident, that has usually reflected a lack of seriousness associated with the view that limits exist only to be ignored or wished away. The German writer Hans Magnus Enshy; zensberger writes of "the historic avant-garde" that "never did it try to play it safe with the excuse that what it was doing was nothing more than an 'experiment.'" The contemporary avant-garde, lacking the seriousness of its predecessors, too often adopts the guise of breakthrough and irresponsibility as "trademark and as camouflage." The fiction of Millhauser, in its exigence, reminds us of all that the imagination wishes it were free to accomplish, and impresses upon us the infinite longing for culminations we are increasingly without the resources to believe in. In so doing, Millhauser helps restore to the avant-garde project a scruple and seriousness largely abandoned by ambitious American writers in the late years of this century.

Robert Boyers

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