Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel

The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction Paul Dawson (bio) I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient feature, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fiction: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly outmoded omniscient narrator. In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-knowing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive commentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world. The novelists I'm thinking of include Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, David Lodge, Adam Thirlwell, Michel Faber, and Nicola Barker in the UK; and Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody, and John Updike in the US. In this paper I want to consider why so many contemporary writers have turned to omniscient narration, given the aesthetic prejudice against this narrative voice which has prevailed for at least a century. For instance, in 2004 Eugene Goodheart pointed out that: "In the age of perspectivism, in which all claims to authority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patronized when he is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when he appears in contemporary work" (1). How are we to evaluate novels which employ an ostensibly redundant nineteenth century form in the twenty-first century? Are they conservative and nostalgic [End Page 143] by virtue of their form, or are they experimental and contemporary in their use of this form? This paradox is captured with ironic pithiness in the last paragraph of David Lodge's 2002 novel, Thinks: "In the first year of the new millennium Helen published a novel which one reviewer described as 'so old-fashioned in form as to be almost experimental'. It was written in the third person, past tense, with an omniscient and sometimes intrusive narrator" (340). We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that modernist and postmodernist fiction throughout the twentieth century can be characterised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omniscient narration. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in fact represents a further development and refinement of some of the technical experiments of postmodern fiction. I want to further argue that the reworking of omniscience in contemporary fiction can be understood as one way in which authors have responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last two decades. Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to productively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself. According to Gérard Genette, in Narrative Discourse, the paradox of poetics is that "there are no objects except particular ones and no science except of the general" (23). Existing theoretical accounts of omniscient narration derive largely from the study of classic nineteenth century novels. While narrative theory acknowledges historical shifts in fashion, it operates with a synchronic understanding of omniscient narration as a static element of narrative, produced by the structural relationship between focalization and voice. A study of contemporary fiction will enable us to approach the category of omniscient narration as a mutable and historically contingent practice of novelistic craft sensitive to historical and cultural contexts. The Debate About Omniscience It is a fascinating historical coincidence, I think, that a theoretical debate about omniscience has emerged in the first decade of the new millennium, at roughly the same time that a revival of omniscient narration has reached a critical mass in contemporary fiction. A dramatization of this debate would see Nicholas Royle and Jonathan Culler lined up for a concerted new millennium attack on literary omniscience, and Barbara K. Olson and Meir Sternberg carrying out a staunch rearguard defence.1 And yet, so far, besides terminological wranglings and abstract theorizing, the debate has not led beyond re-examinations of nineteenth century fiction, such as William Nelles...

The Fiction of Postmodernity is a significant and accessible new study of the relation of postmodern fiction to theories of the postmodern. Contemporary works of fiction by novelists such as Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon and Martin Amis are viewed in relation to critiques of the 'culture industry', analyses of the 'postmodern condition' and theories of simulacra. The work of influential theorists of the postmodern - such as Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard - is explained and compared. The book offers descriptions of the postmodern from both the Marxist critical tradition and from the perspective of postmarxism. Key features in both these definitions are explained in relation to modernist and postmodern works of fiction. Issues relating to the postmodern representation of history and the development of a postmodern politics are also addressed in relation to works of contemporary fiction. Key Features Substantial readings of fiction by major contemporary authors (e.g. Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo) Introduces influential theories of the postmodern (Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard) Analysis of the relationships of modernism and the avant-garde to postmodernism Focuses on the critical potential of postmodernism and postmodern fiction

Recent fiction signals shift in orientation with regard to religious. Many contemporary novels depict performance of turning in lives of characters or introduction of moments of mystery and religious possibility, such as those found in works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. In other novels, characters who already espouse some religious belief take up secular challenges to religion by reconsidering religious assumptions, toying with practice of faith, attempting to rebuild religion afresh, or placing an existing tradition alongside other faith systems in syncretistic articulation of belief. Yann Martel, E. L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison are among authors engaged in these kinds of activity. John McClure has dubbed this manifestation of turn to religious, the Ina 1995 article in Modern Fiction Studies, McClure described period of resacralization in contemporary fiction and theory as movement toward religious ways of knowing. McClure complicates accounts of postmodern, like Frederic Jameson's and Jean-Francois Lyotard's, contesting their claim that postmodern is already secular, and even post-religious. (1) McClure notes, as Linda Hutcheon's account of postmodernity suggests, that secular strand of postmodern is rivaled by different strand, which allows for different kind of reading than one privileged by critics who assume secular constructions of postmodern. He points to presencing (using Homi Bhaba's term) of religious discourses in some postmodern fiction, including Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. (2) postsecular shift has only intensified in years since McClure first published on subject. (3) Currently, postsecularism in literature describes marked increase in production of novels involving journeys of soul (Ford S6-S7). In December of 2007, McClure published Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in Age of Pynchon and Morrison, first full-length book devoted to subject of contemporary postsecular fiction. In preface, he defines postsecularism as a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity (ix). Postsecular narratives, he writes, suggest need for religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of real, yet they refuse, for most part, to endorse any single religious discourse (3). Postsecular thinkers, for McClure, neither reject religious priori nor do they accept existing interpretations of religious priori. I argue that postsecular can be characterized as turn, as notion is elucidated in Martin Buber's writings. Martin Buber, who wrote in first half of twentieth century, called for renewal of religious to counter prevalent secularism of his age. (4) In works such as I and Thou and On Buber urged not return to existing models of religious but turn toward unmediated relation with divine. Buber's renewalism, and in particular his interest in prophetic, can help us to think out shift of orientation through which we seem to be moving, and especially literary writing now characterized as postsecular. In his article, The Man of Today and Jewish Bible, Buber articulates definition of prophetic reading. Buber states that man must read Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before him ready-made, as though he has not been confronted all his life with sham concepts and sham statements that cited Bible as their authority. He must face Book with new attitude as something new. (5) Buber posits practice of reading scripture in context of one's historical hour and undertakes to move biblical reading from tripartite relation (which is arbitrated by convention) to bipartite relation (which involves unmediated contact with divine) (Prophecy). …

Many contributors to Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature’s 1963 special issue on J.D. Salinger found themselves dealing with the sticky fact that his writing after The Catcher in the Rye (1951) had grown increasingly unconventional and, for numerous readers, off-putting. In the lead essay, for example, Ihab Hassan focused on ‘‘certain peculiarities of form in these stories, a form that is so asymmetrical, so tolerant of chance and digression, as to warrant the name of antiform’’ (5). Salinger’s asymmetries and digressions were of interest to Hassan because they exemplified a ‘‘new conception of form, particularly suitable to their vision, which is becoming rife in current literature’’ (6). Although today any critical attention paid to Salinger is centered almost exclusively on The Catcher in the Rye, it is worth asking how his later work could be representative of a new antiform becoming ‘‘rife’’ in American literature. This later work is indeed significant because its digressive sensibility can be read as a response to the influence of New Critical attitudes toward narrative fiction, which held that to be successful, fiction must exhibit a unity (‘‘The sense of wholeness or oneness’’) which digression would disrupt (Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction 608). 1 Salinger’s aesthetic, on the other hand, emphasized that far from being a rhetorical device that merely distracts from the main point of the work, digression could be significant in and of itself. In fact, insofar as his highly digressive work disrupts the sense of unity described by the New Criticism, it encourages readers to re-evaluate how they assign meaning and significance in and for the work, a task that amounts to what I will term ethical work. In its interest in antiform more broadly and digression specifically, Salinger’s later work, dismissed though it has been by those critics working from New Critical standards of evaluation, actually anticipates the postmodern turn of the later 1960s and beyond. This essay first describes a New Critical Steven Belletto is assistant professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College. His essays on postwar American literature and culture have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, ELH, Clio, and Criticism. His book, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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.

Transgressive Women, Transworld Women

Things just don’t make sense the way we’re told they used to — if, in fact, they make any sense at all — and they certainly don’t in postmodern fiction. But what does it mean ‘not to make sense? Whatever other implications the expression might enjoy, it most certainly means that the categories and concepts in terms of which we attempt to structure and grasp the constitutive moments of our experience are inadequate to the task. In other words, incomprehensibility is the unhappy product of the incommensurability of the structure of our understanding and the world in which we live: our traditional categories no longer apply. If this is correct, we might expect to find some trace of this incommensurability reflected in postmodern fiction, one defining characteristic of which is precisely the ultimate incomprehensibility of the contemporary world. In this paper, I argue that this trace is already to be discerned in what I refer to as ‘early postmodern fiction’, much of which explores new manners in which to depict the spatio-temporal dimensions of human existence, our ‘place in time’. I suggest that the new ways of depicting human temporality go hand in hand with the depiction of both the world and human existence as ultimately meaningless, and I locate the source of this meaninglessness in the inapplicability of the traditional, ‘modern’ categorial structure of our understanding to the contemporary world. I argue that the mystery of meaning which is our inheritance from Martin Heidegger has found its home in contemporary fiction, where we find human temporality depicted in a startlingly new manner, a manner that reflects the impossibility of the application of categories to the world, and hence the impossibility of discovering any ultimate meaning either in that world itself or in human existence within that world. In concluding, after taking a quick look at the traditional literary treatment of the theme of immortality, I raise a question regarding the manner in which this theme, mutatis mutandis, is dealt with in postmodern fiction — a question that is intended to provoke further questions about both the nature of human being and the hermeneutical dimension of the experience of the postmodern literary work of art.

Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.

This paper aims to deconstruct the claim that postmodern narrative lacks historical truth by challenging the assumption that history no longer retains its representational authority. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon's concept of historiographic metafiction, the study argues that postmodern historical fiction remains deeply engaged with history, though it reconfigures historical truth as a discursive and textual construction rather than a transparent mirror of the past. Through the theoretical frameworks of post-structuralism and historical skepticism, particularly the works of Hutcheon, Edward Said, and Hayden White, I argue that postmodern fiction does not abandon history but interrogates the conditions under which it is constructed, represented and legitimized. Rather than being ahistorical, postmodern historical fiction critically examines the processes of narrativity that shape historical understanding. Hutcheon emphasizes that texts are never severed from their historical and material referents, and postmodern fiction highlights this embeddedness by drawing attention to its own narrative strategies. I draw on Toni Morrison's Beloved as a case study of postmodern historical fiction that challenges conventional historiography. Morrison's work exemplifies how fiction can recover silenced voices and reconstruct forgotten histories, presenting history as a site of struggle rather than a settled truth. Ultimately, postmodern fiction does not retreat from history but instead foregrounds its complexities and contradictions. In an age marked by post-truth and historical revisionism, such fiction offers vital insights into the contested nature of historical knowledge and the ongoing need to question how the past is narrated.

Seeking to free us from the clutches of our self-made rigid conventions, postmodernism criticizes the metanarratives of modern times, while metafiction seems a better spokesman of it. New York Trilogy , Paul Auster’s debut composition and a meta-detective novel, has secured its fame in the postmodern fiction. It uses and abuses the conventions of detective novel, and lays bare the conventions of objective historiography. In doing this, Auster has given a self-reflective and equally historical dimension to his oeuvre through the technique of “historiographic metafiction”. Linda Hutcheon sees “historiographic metafiction” as a way to rewrite history in postmodern fiction. Postmodernism seeks to embrace a plurality of truths, and history is no longer monolithic and objective. Hutcheon contends that the postmodernist fiction is characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. Utilizing historical accounts as intertextual effects, the writers of postmodernist fiction distrust in history. The present article will attempt to analyze New York Trilogy as a “historiographic metafiction”. Firstly, and insofar as it is within the scope of the article, it will attempt to offer a critical analysis of “postmodernism”, “metafiction”, and “metaphysical detective fiction”. Then, it will examine Auster’s novel as a “historiographic metafiction” in the light of Hutcheon’s theories.

Reviewed by: Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-Modern Context, and: Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy, and: Postmodernist Fiction E. Ann Kaplan M. D. Fletcher . Contemporary Political Satire: Narrative Strategies in the Post-Modern Context. New York: Lanham, 1987. 185pp. $25.00 cloth; pb. $12.50. Lance Olsen . Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy. Westport: Greenwood, 1987. 134pp. $27.95. Brian McHale . Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. 300pp. $39.95 cloth; pb. $13.95. The three books under review (all published in 1987) confirm that postmodernism is still a term in search of a definition; each area of study (English Literature, American Literature, Film Studies, Art History, and Criticism) uses "postmodernism" in different ways that have to do with theoretical models current in that field. None of the books here, for instance, makes much use of the work of either Jean Baudrillard or Fredric Jameson (to name two central postmodern theorists often discussed in media and art criticism) or of the debates that have taken place in feminist and Marxist circles. In fact, I suspect diat some of the writers here felt constrained to position their work within the now fashionable concept of postmodernism, or they succumbed to pressure from publishers always concerned about "marketability." The strain is perhaps felt most keenly in Fletcher's book about satire and apologues. Fletcher's aims are laudable: taking a traditional literary genre and basic method, he traces changes in the specifically political satire or apologue from the 1950s to the present. The strain appears in his insistence on making a case for the postmodernsatire—that is, in including recent works as examples of political satire. What he actuallyshows is that satire in its original senses and as a specific literary genre is impossible in the postmodern era. This is something that Fletcher himself at times admits: for instance, in the Introduction, Fletcher notes that the prerequisites for satire "appear to conflict with the contemporary assumptions about reality, human knowledge and values that inform 'post-modern' literature—metafiction, surfiction, the nonfiction novel, etc." Nevertheless, Fletcher prefers to see a novel like Vidal's Duluthas a "Post-Modern Political Satire" rather than simply as a postmodern text. It might have been better to argue that once postmodernism emerges as a new kind of consciousness in the wake of the 1960s, something so drastic happens to the political satire that the term no longer applies. Fletcher could either have invented a new term for a novel like Duluthor have explored the pertinence of Fredric Jameson's concept of pastiche (a mode set off against parodythat belongs in the satiric genre) that Jameson sees as specifically postmodern. Either strategy might have worked better than straining to fit Duluthinto the same tradition as the other novels considered. In many instances, it is clear that Fletcher needed to address the modernist/postmodernist debate; for often when he uses or refers to the term "postmodern," I thought that "modernist" was what he really was after. For example, he talks about the idea that reality is fragmented as a postmodern concept, when that seems to me rather a modernistnotion. I don't believe that Fletcher ever uses the term "modernist," which would support my hunch that he is collapsing two terms that require clear differentiation. Since postmodernism precisely [End Page 733]announces the demise of satire, Fletcher's thesis would only have been strengthened by his making that idea central: as it is, he confuses matters by alternately insisting on textual properties traditionally labeled "satire" and arguing that, after all, contemporary satire can, as it were, add on what Fletcher calls "the intellectual assumptions of post-modern literature," as if such assumptions were a kind of decoration rather than a way of being. Many of these problems are taken care of in Lance Olsen's Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy, which, interestingly enough, takes on a project analogous to Fletcher's and is similarly organized. Where Fletcher took the traditional literary genre of satire and attempted to position it within the contemporary context, Olsen takes a traditional genre—this...

When they asserted that our postmodern society has reached the end of theorists Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Francis Fukuyama launched a compelling debate that has persisted for a decade. They argue that we no longer believe in teleological metanarratives, that our concept of history has become spatial or flattened out, and that we inhabit a perpetual present in which images of the past are merely recycled with no understanding of their original context. In short, they think that postmodern culture has lost a sense of historical consciousness, of cause and effect. Jameson, in particular, sees literary postmodernism as a by-product of this new worldview. Such a controversial stance has, of course, provoked numerous antagonists to speak out. Linda Hutcheon, for example, has written two studies of historiographic metafiction, suggesting that much of postmodern fiction is still strongly invested in history, but more importantly in revising our sense of what history means and can accomplish. My project is to examine how Toni Morrison's acclaimed historical novel Beloved (1987) enacts a vision of history and time that sheds new light on issues addressed by Jameson and Hutcheon in their theories of the postmodern - topics such as the fictionality of history, the blurring of past and present, and the questioning of grand historical metanarratives. I argue that while the novel exhibits a postmodern skepticism of sweeping historical narratives, of Truth, and of Marxist teleological notions of time as diachronic, it also retains an African American and modernist political commitment to the crucial importance of deep cultural memory, of keeping the past alive in order to construct a better future. Morrison's mediations between these two theoretical and political camps - between postmodernism and African American social protest - enable her to draw the best from both and make us question the more extremist voices asserting that our postmodern world is bereft of history. Since the term postmodern has been at the center of many highly charged cultural debates, I am aware that describing Beloved as such, even as a hybrid postmodern novel, is a gesture that might draw criticism. Clearly, the novel's status as part of the African American tradition of social protest, and Morrison's investments in agency, presence, and the resurrection of authentic history, seem to make the novel incompatible with poststructuralist ideas at the root of postmodernism. Morrison herself has spoken out against a postmodernism that she associates with Jameson's terms. In my view, however, Morrison's treatment of history bears some similarity to Hutcheon's postmodern historiographic metafiction, but her relationship to this discourse is affected by her aim to write black-topic texts. Morrison acknowledges that history is always fictional, always a representation, yet she is also committed to the project of recording African American history in order to heal her readers. Instead of a playful exercise in deconstructing history, Morrison's Beloved attempts to affect the contemporary world of the real. While the novel should not simply be assimilated into the canon of postmodernism, Morrison's work should be recognized as contributing a fresh voice to the debates about postmodern history, a voice that challenges the centrism and elitism of much of postmodern theory. Beloved reminds us that history is not over for African Americans, who are still struggling to write the genealogies of their people and to keep a historical consciousness alive. The relationship of African American writers and their work to the discourse of postmodernism has been hotly contested, and there has unfortunately emerged a dichotomy that I would like to question. This relationship has become even more vexed since the Nobel Prize committee bypassed postmodern guru Thomas Pynchon to select Toni Morrison as their 1993 literature winner. …

In his reflections upon the spirit of place in recent fiction, John Barth remarks that the setting as metaphor is a function of the discourse within which it is situated. Perhaps predictably, Barth insists that the proper function of the trope of place in contemporary fiction is to be found in a postmodern reconciliation of competing claims: "realism and antirealism, linearity and nonlinearity, continuity and discontinuity"; however, as the narrator of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," reminds us, to decipher the figurai truth in an urban landscape might well mean the pursuit of a text that will "not permit itself to be read."1 Nevertheless, Barth's reflections suggest the ways in which, in both his own fiction and in the work of Don DeLillo, the site of the narrative's unfolding is always the sign and context of a particular postmodern attitude. As the scene of the dead repetitions of history and of the dispersal of the self, the city in the fiction of both authors is an exemplary sign of the anxieties of the postmodern condition, one which surely echoes the panicky amnesia of the culture of the simulacrum and the "[postmodern] fascination with a degraded landscape."2 But this is only one side of the postmodern rewriting of the city; in postmodern fiction we also confront the ironic encoding of the city as a positive site of resistance to the master tropes of cultural authority, and particularly those of the modernist tradition. Both these attitudes can be found in postmodern fiction, and often they are found together in the same text as signs of the ambivalence that resides at the heart of postmodern culture.

(1992). “To Wielderfight His Penisolate War”: “The Lover's Discourse” in Postmodern Fiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 63-79.

The description of Pynchon's Oedipa Maas above might once have served to describe Pynchon critics and, indeed, Critics of postmodernism generally. Emphasis on the epistemological and ontological uncertainties of self-reflexive and open-ended texts has for too long distracted attention from their social and political import. Even Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, who might be expected to be more receptive to the social meaning encoded in complex texts, have characterized postmodern fiction as apolitical pastiche or depthlessness–generalizations as premature as they have been influential. Almost as if in response to these critics, Pynchon has recently published a text ( Vineland [1990]) so ostentatiously political that it might well prompt a more socially conscious rereading of his entire oeuvre. This essay is a mere prolegomenon to such a rereading, spurred by Vineland and by the recent work of critics like Linda Hutcheon and Robert Siegle who have begun to see the formal innovations of postmodern fiction, not merely as intellectual puzzles, but also as responses to social context and as cultural interventions designed to effect change within that context.