BRAN NICOL, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction.

Abstract

THE burden Bran Nicol undertakes in The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction is to define a brand of fiction that purports to be indefinable and unbrandable—an ironically straightforward task if the critic prefaces such an ‘introduction’ to postmodern fiction with a clear explanation of the ‘isms’ (among them, realism, modernism, absolutism, cynicism, relativism) to which it relates and on which its definition relies. Nicol manages clearly to survey postmodern fiction, with helpful commentary that explains postmodernism’s built-in allowance for paradox. He also invites his target readership—literature students previously unfamiliar with postmodern fiction—to make reading postmodernism an experience, even one laced with paranoia. They should be wary (even of Nicol’s text itself), and alert to the fact that any ‘isms’ so categorized are always going to be tendentious. By arguing that reading postmodern fiction should be as intellectually active as writing it, Nicol calls for the reader to recede from the ‘isms’ postmodernism ostensibly rejects, and become an active participant in decoding texts that intentionally attempt to thwart coded-ness. The ensuing game between reader and text is one that Nicol prefaces and promises, but only jumps into late in the book. A book entitled Introduction to Postmodern Fiction should escort the student through the multifaceted nuances of postmodernism. While Nicol’s placing of postmodernism’s ‘holy’ theoretical triumvirate—Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard—in conversation supplies this new student with the theoretical underpinnings of its game, Nicol waits too long to invite his reader to play it. The Preface and Introduction are replete with the dogma behind postmodern fiction, but scarcely provide illustrations on which both a literature student thrives and theory should be based. For example, Nicol’s early explanation of metafiction could be easily illustrated by John Barth’s haranguing of ‘The reader! You dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction’ in his Lost in the Funhouse, a fiction Nicol mentions much later. Or the section on signifiers and signified should, for effect, actually point to such referents. In sum, in at least the first third of the book, for the seasoned reader of postmodern fiction, Nichol relies on instinct; for the unseasoned new student, Nicol relies on faith.