Postmodernism’s Polytropic Imagination

Abstract

In his 1988 reappraisal of “Self-Reflexive Fiction,” Raymond Federman described narrative innovation as a form of resistance against official constructions of reality during the Cold War era. The “New Fiction” took shape in the 1960s to fill “the linguistic gap created by the disarticulation of the official discourse in its relation with the individual” (Critifiction 25). Its main effort was to “place into the open, in order to challenge it, the question of representation in fiction, especially now that the line between the real and the imaginary” had been erased by the official discourse (25). Coming of age in the “decade after Hiroshima,” when mainstream fiction—as Thomas Pynchon also recalls—was “paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and the McCarthy years” (“Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” 41), John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Ursula LeGuin, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut denounced the ideological myths on which official representations relied, retelling history in a satirical key. By replacing a conventional mimesis of “content” with a subversive mimesis of “form” that foregrounded the culture’s symbolic systems, early postmodern fiction disrupted the traditional socialization of reality, disentangling the discourse of the subject from the discourse of the “Establishment” (Federman, Critifiction 23). Other writers emerging after 1968 (Walter Abish, Raymond Federman, Kenneth Gangemi, Madeline Gins, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick) rejected “mimetic realism and mimetic pretension” altogether (31), denouncing their “silent agreement with the official discourse of the State” (28–29).