Annotated Bibliography: Postmodernist Fiction

Brian McHale
Postmodernist Fiction
Routledge
A MEMBER OF THE TAYLOR » FRANCIS GROUP
* Ft not?"

POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Brian McHale
London and New York
In memory of

Robert J. McHale 1927-85 Steve Sloan 1952-85 Arthur A. Cohen 1928-86
First published in 1987 by
Melhuen, Inc.
••,
Published in Great Britain by Methuen 6- Co. Ltd
Reprinted 1989,1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001
© 19S7 Brian McHale
Photosct by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain at the
University Press, Cambridge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrici>al system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McHale, Brian.

Postmodernist fiction.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Fiction—20//1 century—History and criticism. 2. Postmodernism.

I. Title. PN3503.M24 1987

809j'04

86-31140

/SEN 0-416-36390-3 ISBN 0-415-04513-4

British Lil'rui-y Ctitiil
McHale, Brim. Postmodernist ficti 1. Fiction — 20th ce I. Title. S09.3

PN35U3

ISBN 0-416-363 90-3 1SBNO-4I5-U4513-4

m Publication Data tury — History and criticism.

Contents
Acknowledgments Preface x XI

Part One:

Preliminaries

1: From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of dominant
The dominant
Beckett
Robbe-Grillet
Fuentes
Nabokov
Coover

Pynchon
2: Some ontologies of fiction Heterocosm
"The old analogy between Author and God" Ingarden Possible worlds The social construction of (un)reality
3
6 12 13
15 18 19 21
26
27
29
30
3336
Part Two:

Worlds

3: In the zone
How to build a zone Ohio, Oz, and other zones Intertextual zones
4: Worlds in collision Parallel lines
43
45 49 56

59 62

viii POSTMODERNIST FICTION
CONTENTS
IX

The science-fictionalization of postmodernism The postmodernization of science fiction
5: A world next door
Hesitation
Banality
Resistance
From "worlds" to worlds
Displaced fantastic
6:
Constrained realemes Apocryphal history Creative anachronism Historical fantasy
Part Three: Construction
7: Worlds under erasure
SSswthfflgexistS'
Excluded middles, forking paths
The sense of a (non-)ending
8: Chinese-box worlds
Toward infinite regress
Trompe-rceil
Strange loops, or metalepsis
Characters in search of an author
Abysmal fictions
Which reel?
Part Four: Words
9: Tropological worlds Hesitation revisited Hypertrophy I Postmodernist allegory ^ Allegory against itself
10: Styled worlds
Kitty-litter, litanies, back-broke sentences
Letters
Machines
65 68
73
74 76 77 79 80

84
86
90 93 94
99

101 103 106
109

112
114
115 119 121 124 128
133
134 137 140
143

148
151
156 159
11: Worlds of discourse
Discourse in the novel
Heteroglossia
Carnival
Part Five:

162
154
155
J7]

Groundings

12: Worlds on paper
179
"A spatial displacement of words"
181
Concrete prose
184
Illustration and anti-illustration
187
The schizoid text
190
Model kits
194
13: Authors: dead and posthumous
197
The dead author
199
Auto-bio-graphy
202
Roman-a-clcf
206
Authority.
210
Short-circuit
213
Part Six: How I learned to stop worrying and love postmodernism
14: Love and death in the post-modernist novel
219
Love...
222
. . . and death
227
Coda: the sense of Joyce's endings
233
Notes
236

Index

259

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
The author and publishers would like to thank the following copyright holders for permission to reproduce the extracts of concrete prose which appear on pp. 185-8.
Christine Brooke-Rose and Hamish Hamilton, London, for the extract from Thru (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1975).
Ronald Sukenick for the extract from his book Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues (New York, Fiction Collective, 1979).
Raymond Federman for the extract from his book Take It or Leave It (New York, Fiction Collective, 1976).
Raymond Federman and The Ohio University Press, Athens, for the extract from Double or Nothing (Chicago, Swallow
Press, 1971).
Hufsliidter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
(Douglas R. Hofstadtcr, Codel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 1979)
A book which does not include its opposite, or "counter-book," is considered incomplete.
(Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," from 'The Garden of Forking Paths," 1941)
This book falls under the category of descriptive poetics (librarians and compilers of bibliographies, please note). That is, it does not aspire to contribute to literary theory, although there is plenty of theory in it - too much for some people, no doubt, and not nearly enough for others. Nor does it aim to establish interpretations of particular texts, although it incorporates a good deal of mostly incidental interpretation. But what this book primarily aspires to Where Berger and Luckmann had focused on the construction of "paramount reality," Cohen and Taylor concentrate on the relations between this reality and the other "finite provinces" or "enclaves," the peripheral realities that Pavel calls "leisure ontologies." These "escapes" from the world of paramount reality range from mental strategies of ironic disengagement ("the mental management of routine") through hobbies, games, gambling, sex, holidays, mass-media entertainment, therapy, the use of alcohol and drugs ("free areas," "activity enclaves," "mind-scaping"), to the extreme of radical escapes such as religious conversion, Utopian alternative societies, and, ultimately, schizophrenia. However, Cohen's and Taylor's most interesting discussions bear not on the radical alternative worlds at the extreme end of the scale, but rather on the frequency and density of "escape attempts" in normal, everyday life. A "hypothetical daily sequence" would, they suggest, have to involve a great deal of "shuffling" among worlds: the world of a celebrity's love-life, as reported by the morning newspaper; the world of daydream reminiscences, triggered by an old song heard on the car radio while driving to work; the game-world of a conversation about sports with colleagues over lunch; the projected "new landscape" of a conversation about holiday plans with one's spouse over dinner; the fictional "leisure ontology" of a
James Bond adventure movie after dinner; and so on.
All around us - on advertisement hoardings, bookshelves, record covers, television screens - these miniature escape fantasies present themselves. This, it seems, is how we are destined to live, as split personalities in which the private life is disturbed by the promise of escape routes to another reality.37
Contemporary writing, says Steve Katz, "has to echo in its form the shape of American experience, the discontinuous drama, all climax, all boring intermissions in the lobbies of theaters built on the flight decks of exploding 747s."38 "To echo in its form": postmodernist fiction turns out to be mimetic after all, but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form. "The shape of American experience, the discontinuous drama": what postmodernist fiction imitates, the object of its mimesis, is the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures - and not only in the
United States. "All boring intermissions": one of the features of this ontological landscape is its permeation by secondary realities, especially mass-media fictions, and one of the most typical experiences of members of this culture is that of the transition from one of these fictional worlds to the paramount reality of everyday life, or from paramount reality to fiction.39 "The flight decks of exploding 747s": if our culture's ontological landscape is unprecedented in human history - at least in the degree of its pluralism - it also incorporates one feature common to all cultures, all ontological landscapes, namely the ultimate ontological boundary between life and death.40 Yet even
SOME ONTOLOGIES OF FICTION 39 here our culture is innovative, for it alone has had to make room in its ontological landscape for mass technological death - "exploding 747s" -even, ultimately, global nuclear death.
So postmodernist fiction dues hold the mirror up to reality; but that reality, now more than ever before, is plural.
And how does postmodernist fiction achieve this modeling of our pluralistic ontological landscape? Precisely by foregrounding the ontological themes and differences, internal and external, described by ontologists of fiction from
Sidney through Schlegel to Ingarden, Hrushovski, and the possible-world theorists. Ingarden believed that the ontological structures of the text could not themselves be of any aesthetic value or interest, although they could, of

course, sustain components of indubitable interest and value. The strata belonged permanently to the background of the artwork, never to rise above the threshold of perceptibility: the skeleton of the layers and the structural order of sequence in a literary work of art are of neutral artistic value; they form the axiologically neutral foundation of the work of art in which the artistically valent elements ... of the work are grounded.41 But Ingarden was wrong; it is precisely by foregrounding the skeleton of layers - as well as the double-decker structure of reference described by Hrushovski, the transworld identity described by Eco, and so on - that postmodernist fiction achieves its aesthetic effects and sustains interest, in the process modeling the complex ontological landscape of our experience. Ingarden, in other words, simply failed to foresee postmodernism.
In what follows I have attempted to describe the repertoire of strategies upon which postmodernist fiction draws in order to foreground the ontological structure of text and world (or worlds in the plural). As an organizing scheme, I have adapted Hrushovski's three-dimensional model of semiotic objects, altering that model in one important respect.42
Hrushovski's three dimensions are the reconstructed world ("Worlds"), the text continuum ("Words"), and the dimension of speakers, voices, and positions. I have had to reconceive this third dimension of semiotic objects in a way more congenial to the special postmodernist objects I am trying to describe. The dimension of speakers, voices, and positions is especially foregrounded in modernist poetics, but, while of course still present and functional in postmodernist poetics, relatively backgrounded there.43 In place of modernist forms of perspectivism, postmodernist fiction substitutes a kind of ontological perspectivism, the "iridescence" or "opalescence" of which Ingarden has written. This "flickering" effect intervenes between the text-continuum (the language and style of the text) and the reader's reconstruction of its world. I have treated this ontological perspectivism as a separate dimension in effect straddling the dimensions of text-continuum and reconstructed world, and for want of a better term have labeled it the dimension of "construction" - a term appropriately ambiguous between the process of construction and its product, the thing constructed.
Finally, I have also considered how postmodernist fiction exploits to its own ends the ontological "groundings" which, in Ingarden's view,

40 POSTMODERNIST FICTION guarantee the autonomous existence of the literary work of art. The literary work, according to Ingarden, subsists autonomously (that is, apart from the reader's constitutive consciousness) thanks to three factors: the language, which exists intersubjectively in the minds of its speakers; the material book; and the biographical author who originally produced the work. Postmodernist strategies involving the first of these factors have been absorbed into Part 4,
"Words"; the strategies by which postmodernist fiction foregrounds and problematizes the other two are covered in
Chapters 12 and 13, respectively.

PART TWO: WORLDS
I am conscious of the world as consisting of multiple realities. As 1 move from one reality to another, I experience the transition as a kind of shock.
(Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of
Reality, 1966)

Worlds, infinite worlds.
(Guy Davenport, "The Dawn in Erewhon", from Tallin!, 1974)

3: IN THE ZONE
Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. . . . The single roost lost. . . . Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone. (Thomas
Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973).
The Empire of the Great Khan, in Halo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972), contains a number of continuous cities, shapeless, sprawling urban agglomerations lacking internal articulation or even clear external boundaries. There is
Penthesilea, a city of continuous suburbs, without a definite center; Cecilia, a city which over the years has engulfed all the surrounding territory; and Trudc, a city indistinguishable from any other, to the point of identity:
The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.1
Contradictions arise: how can three cities, each said to have absorbed the entire space of the Empire, coexist? If Trude is coextensive with the whole world, what room does that leave for Penthesilea or Cecilia, or indeed any of the other cities of the Empire? Perhaps Penthesilea, Cecilia and Trude are only different names for one and the same continuous city; but if so, why are their descriptions so dissimilar? What paradoxical kind of space does this Empire occupy?
What kind of world is this?
A problematical world, that much is certain. It has been designed, as Thomas Pavel has said of certain Renaissance texts, for the purpose of exploring ontological propositions. Some of Calvino's invisible cities place the world of the living in confrontation with the "other world" of the dead; others confront the sacred world with the profane; still others confront the real-world city with its representation or model or double. Not all of the cities explore ontological propositions, however; some raise classic epistemological issues - appearance vs reality, multiplicity of perspectives, the distortions of desire and memory, and so on. One might be tempted to think that the frametale of Invisible Cities focuses on this sort of epistemological problem he We

r

fc
44

POSTMODERNIST FICTION ther than on an ontological one. Certainly, the framing narrative does
, reerOund the question of reliability or unreliability in Marco Polo's account f the cities he claims to have visited. By my reading, however, this issue is ubordinate to ontological issues in the text as a whole, above all the issue of what kind of space is capable of accommodating so many incommensurable and mutually exclusive worlds.
What kind of space? A heterotopia. The concept comes from Michel Foucault:
There is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite;... in such a state, things are "laid," "placed," "arranged" in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.
. . . Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they destroy "syntax" in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite to one another) to "hold together."2
The empire of Calvino's Great Khan is just such a heterotopia. Radically discontinuous and inconsistent, it juxtaposes worlds of incompatible structure. It violates the law of the excluded middle: logically, either Trude is everywhere or
Cecilia is everywhere; in the Empire of Invisible Cities, both are everywhere, and so are Penthesilea and the other continuous cities as well. Umberto Eco might refuse to consider this a "world" at all, since it fails to observe the basic rules of world-building. In deference to this view, we might try avoiding the use of the term "world" in this connection, and instead follow the practice of a number of postmodernist writers who have found a different name for this sort of heterotopian space. They call it "the zone."
There is Julio Cortazar's zone, William Burroughs's, Alasdair Gray's. Behind them all lies Apollinaire's poem "Zone"
(from Alcools, 1913), whose speaker, strolling through the immigrant and red-light districts of Paris, finds in them an objective correlative for modern Europe and his own marginal, heterogeneous, and outlaw experience. Clearly derived from Apollinaire's, Cortazar's zone (in 62: A Model Kit, 1968) is a space of overlapping subjectivities, including shared fantasies and nightmares, which comes into being whenever his cast of bohemians and cosmopolitans convenes somewhere in "the DMZ [demilitarized zone] atmosphere of cafes." Burroughs's zone, or interzone, is a vast, ramshackle structure in which all the world's architectural styles are fused and all its races and cultures mingle, the apotheosis of the Third World shanty-town. Sometimes it is located in Latin America or North Africa, sometimes (as in The Ticket That Exploded, 1962) on another planet, sometimes (as in Cities of the Red Night, 1981) in a lost civilization of the distant past. By contrast, Alasdair Gray's zone (in Lanark, 1981), a space of paradox modeled on the
Wonderland and Looking-glass worlds of the Alice books, has been displaced to the ambiguous no man's land between cities. IN THE ZONE 45
Finally, combining elements of all these postmodernist zones, there is Thomas Pynchon's zone. "In the Zone," the title of the third and longest section of his Gravity's Rainbow (1973), refers to occupied Germany in the anarchic weeks and months immediately following the collapse of the Third Reich. "It is a great frontierless streaming out here," says
Pynchon's narrator about the zone:3 former national boundaries have been obliterated, the armies of the victorious
Allies are jockeying for position, entire displaced nations are on the move, spies, black-marketeers, and free-lance adventurers dodge back and forth across the ruined landscape. So far, Pynchon's zone would seem to be a realistic construct, closely corresponding to historical fact, and a far cry from the heterotopian empire of Calvino's Great Khan.
But the collapse of regimes and national boundaries, it turns out, is only the outward and visible sign of the collapse of ontological boundaries. As the novel unfolds, our world and the "other world" mingle with increasing intimacy, hallucinations and fantasies become real, metaphors become literal, the fictional worlds of the mass media - the movies, comic-books - thrust themselves into the midst of historical reality. The zone, in short, becomes plural:
Isn't this an "interface" here? a meeting surface for two worlds . but which two?4

sure,
In fact, Pynchon's zone is paradigmatic for the heterotopian space of postmodernist writing, more so than Gray's or
Burroughs's or even Calvino's. Here (to paraphrase Foucault) a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impossible space which is associated with occupied Germany, but which in fact is located nowhere but in the written text itself.
How lo build a zone

The space of a fictional world is a construct, just as the characters and objects that occupy it are, or the actions that unfold within it. Typically, in realist and modernist writing, this spatial construct is organized around a perceiving subject, either a character or the viewing position adopted by a disembodied narrator.5 The heterotopian zone of postmodernist writing cannot be organized in this way, however. Space here is less constructed than deconstructed by the text, or rather constructed and deconstructed at the same time. Postmodernist fiction draws upon a number of strategies for constructing/deconstructing space, among them juxtaposition, interpolation, superimposition, and misattribution.

Spaces which real-world atlases or encyclopedias show as noncontiguous and unrelated, when juxtaposed in written texts constitute a zone. For instance, Guy Davenport, in "The Haile Selassie Funeral Train" (from Da Vinci's Bicycle,
1979), sends his fictional funeral train on an impossible itinerary. Setting out from Deauville in Normandy, it passes through Barcelona, along the Dalmatian coast of present-day Yugoslavia, to Genoa, Madrid, Odessa, Atlanta (in the
State of Georgia, USA!), and back to Deauville again. The spaces it traverses, simply by the fact of having traversed them, and in that order, constitute a zone. Not coincidentally,

46 POSTMODERNIST FICTION among the train's incongruous collection of passengers is Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the first to have conceived of modern Europe as a heterotopian zone.
The strategy of interpolation involves introducing an alien space within a familiar space, or between two adjacent areas of space where no such "between" exists. This strategy has a long history prior to its adaptation to postmodernist uses.
It underlies the "Ruritanian" topos of the imaginary country, a staple of swashbuckling adventure-stories in the tradition of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) or, in a more sophisticated, modernist form, Joseph
Conrad's Nostromo (1904).
Uqbar, the invented Near Eastern country in Borges' story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
(1941), and the African kingdoms of Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afriqtie (Impressions of Africa, 1910), exemplify the postmodernist adaptation of this Ruritanian topos. Apparently located somewhere in Asia Minor,
Uqbar's exact geographical position is indeterminable. There is a "fundamental vagueness" in the encyclopedists' description of its frontiers, which are all fixed with reference to geographical formations within the space of Uqbar itself. Although certain identifiable place-names appear in the same context with Uqbar - Khurasan, Armenia, Erzurum
- it is not clear how the interpolated space relates to them. Like Borges' Uqbar, Roussel's kingdoms of Ponukele andDrelshkaf are mentioned in the same context with a few place-names that belong to the real world and can be found
on a map: Marseilles, Tripoli, Porto Novo, Bougie.
But the exact geographical disposition of these kingdoms with respect to known places is impossible to determine, and Roussel has the Emperor of Ponukele's cartographer exploit the indeterminacy of real African frontiers around the turn of the century by extending Emperor Talu's zone in every direction: On both sides of the vast watercourse [The Congo River], a huge red area represented the state belonging to the allpowerful Talu.
As a form of flattery, the designer of the garment had indefinitely extended this impressive territory, which submitted to the rule of a single sceptre and whose boundaries were, in any case, largely undetermined; the brilliant carmine stretched to the southernmost point, where the words, "Cape of Good Hope," were set out in large black letters.6
The interpolation of a spurious space between known spaces serves here as the opening wedge for a total assimilation of the known to the spurious: Africa is engulfed by the zone.
A third strategy is superimposition. Here two familiar spaces are placed one on top of the other, as in a photographic double-exposure, creating through their tense and paradoxical coexistence a third space identifiable with neither of
the original two - a zone. The great precursor is William Blake, who in his long poem ] erusalem (1804-20) superimposed the counties of the United Kingdom and the Twelve Tribes of Old Testament Israel to generate a visionary space. "And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green?" - yes, they did, and at the same time no, they did not: no law of excluded middles in Blake. Guy Davenport's materials in "The Invention of Photography in Toledo"
(from Da Vinci's Bicycle) are a good deal
IN THE ZONE 47 humbler, but the result is comparable. Exploiting the homonymy bet Toledo, Spain, and Toledo, Ohio, Davenport has superimposed th ™ cities, their topographies, histories, cultures:
A small town safe in its whereabouts, Titus Livy said of Toledo It sit promontory at a convergence of rivers.
Has not a silver cornet band strutted down its streets in shakos a scarlet sashes, playing with brio and a kind of melancholy elation Sant Ana's Retreat from Buena Vista? Swan Creek flows through its downtow into the blue
Maumee, which flows into Lake Erie. It bore the name of Port Lawrence until Marcus Fulvius Nobilor erected the fasces and eagles of th SPQR in 193. Originally a port of Michigan until Andrew Jackson gave his nod to Ohio's claim, the fierce violet of its stormy skies inspired El Greco to paint his famous view of the city. It was in Toledo that the
Visigoths joined the church and made Spain Catholic. And in 1897 Samuel L. (Golden Rule) Jones was elected mayor on the Independent ticket. Its incredible sunsets began to appear in late Roman eclogues.7
The effect is that of a disorienting double-vision: Toledo is both a former bone of contention between Ohio and
Michigan and (in the same sentence) the subject of a famous painting by El Greco; it is both associated with the
Visigoths and Marcus Fulvius Nobilor, and with Andrew Jackson and "Golden Rule" Jones; it is both sited on the banks of Swan Creek and on a promontory at the convergence of two Spanish rivers.
Similar effects are achieved by Julio Cortazar in his story "The Other Heaven" (from All Fires the Fire and Other
Stories, 1966), where Buenos Aires of the 1940s is superimposed on Paris of the 1860s; and on a much larger scale in
Nabokov's Ada (1970). The alternate world, or Antiterra, of Ada has been constructed by superimposing Russia on the space occupied in our world by Canada and the United States, Britain on our France, Central Asia on European Russia, and so on. All of these geographical double-exposures are elaborately motivated: at the level of the fiction, by the science-fiction topos of the parallel world; at the level of the author's biography (which in a Nabokov text cannot be ruled out as an irrelevance), by the complex layering of cultures and homelands - Russia, England, France, the United
States - that constituted Nabokov's personal experience.
A fourth strategy of zone-construction is misattribution. Traditional catalogues of places and their attributes, such as

those of Walt Whitman, in effect transcribe the unwritten encyclopedia of conventional wisdom and commoi knowledge. Every association is "automatic" - or at any rate would have b< in the mid-nineteenth century:
At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland, At home in the fleet.of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking, At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch.8

48 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Common knowledge automatically associates Canada with snowshoes, Newfoundland with fishing, Vermont with hills
(in this case the attribute is etymologically contained in the name), and so on. It would in a sense be ungmnmatical in this context to associate Vermont with ranches, or Texas with fishing or the woods, even though, objectively, there are certainly fishermen and woods in the real-world Texas. Ensuring its own intelligibility by copying the encyclopedia,
Whitman's catalogue at the same time reinforces or corroborates the encyclopedia, reassuring us that our associations are correct, that the image we have of North American places corresponds to what is really to be found there.
Postmodernist fictions, by contrast, often strive to displace and rupture these automatic associations, parodying the encyclopedia and substituting for "encyclopedic" knowledge their own ad hoc, arbitrary, unsanctioned associations.
Examples of such unsanctioned, skewed attribution may be found in Donald Barthelme's story "Up, Aloft in the Air"
(from Come Back, Or Caligari, 1964), where the cities of Ohio have been assigned attributes which, if not quite impossible, are certainly unlikely, anti-verisimilar: Cleveland is associated with dancing, Akron with transistor radios and "ill-designed love triangles," Cincinnati with "polo, canned peaches, liaisons dangereuses," and so on.9 This skewing of attributions is a matter of degree. Thus, Barthelme's Ohio is unlikely, but Kenneth Patchen's in The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941) is a bizarre impossibility, an exotic land where as recently as 1924 cannibalism was practiced.10 Falling in much the same category is Chad in Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa (1974), a country to which Abish has managed to assign a beach, although the real-world Chad is landlocked; and Israel in Ronald
Sukenick's 98.6 (1975), a tissue of deliberate misattributions:
In Israel there are places where the jungle comes down to the sea and this is where I like to eat lunch. They have beach cabanas there you can have a long leisurely meal cooled by the breezes coming in from the Mediterranean as you watch the submarine excavation projects. Despite the jungle and the deserts inland Israel has perfect weather all year round it has to do with air currents generated over the Afar Triangle on the Red Sea. . . .Here in Israel we have no need of cars. . . . Automobiles have long been exiled from the cities and towns where transportation depends on various beasts of burden camels burros oxen. . . . We have an extensive monorail system and colorful barges make their way among the canals.11
In Israel, of course, there are no places where the jungle comes down to the sea, for there is no jungle, nor any monorails or barges or canals either; no more than there are roasting pits for the preparation of human flesh in Ohio, despite what Kenneth Patchen says.
In short, Sukenick's Israel, like Patchen's Ohio or Abish's Chad, has the same status as the Paraguay of Barthelme's story by that name (from City Life, 1970):
This Paraguay is not the Paraguay that exists on our maps. It is not to be found on the continent, South America; it is not a political subdivision of that continent, with a population of 2,161,000 and a capital named Asuncidn.12
IN THE ZONE 49
This Paraguay of Barthelme's is the negation of the Paraguay of the encyclopedia - in this case, of the actual encyclopedia, the place where facts of the kind Barthelme cites (only to negate them) are to be found. "This Paraguay,"
Barthelme continues, "exists elsewhere." Precisely; it exists in the zone.
Ohio, Oz, and other zones

The zone sometimes appears where we least expect it. In Ohio, for instance. In the literary imagination and the popular imagination alike, Ohio has long maintained, as they say, a low profile. Its "image" is one of colorlessness and poverty of associations. It is middle-American in every sense: middling in its landscapes and natural phenomena, culturally middling, sociologically middling - not, one would think, likely raw material for ontological improvisation. Yet, as we have seen, a number of postmodernist writers have chosen to improvise on the theme of Ohio: Patchen in The journal of Albion Moonlight, Barthelme in "Up, Aloft in the Air," Davenport in "The Invention of Photography in Toledo.
"The zone of Ohio, it would appear, is a recurrent feature of postmodernist writing, a toftos in both senses, geographical as well as rhetorical. But why Ohio in particular? And, more generally, why do a few favored geographical areas seem to recur as zones throughout postmodernist fiction? The reasons are various. Behind each of the recurrent zones lies a different historical-cultural explanation for its place in the repertoire of postmodernist topoi.
For example, in order to understand why Ohio, of all places, belongs to the postmodernist repertoire, we need to take into account the semiotics of American space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For early nineteenth-century culture, and its imaginative writers in particular, America was organized into two adjacent worlds, the world of
"civilization" and that of the "wilderness," separated by an ambiguous and liminal space, the "frontier" - a prototypical zone. This frontier zone fascinated American writers, not just those like Fenimore Cooper who located their narratives on the frontier itself, but also those who transposed the liminality and ambiguity of the frontier from geographical space into other spheres- Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, even Edgar Allan Poe.
The characteristic form for all these writers was the romance, which the critic and literary historian Richard Chase has described as a kind of "border" fiction, whether the field of action is in the neutral territory between civilization and the wilderness, as in the adventure tales of Cooper and Simms, or whether, as in Hawthorne and later romancers, the field of action is

conceived not so much as a place as a state of mind - the borderland of the human mind where the actual and the imaginary intermingle.13
The geographical frontier retreated westward ahead of advancing settlement throughout the nineteenth century. With the closing of the frontier, and the effective absorption of the wilderness space by civilization, American writers were forced to reconceptualize and imaginatively restructure their country. This process of reimagining American space has continued well into the twentieth century, for instance in texts like Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted

50 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
River" (from In Our Time, 1925), Faulkner's "The Bear" (from Go Down, Moses, 1942), Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and Thomas McGuane's Nobody's Angel (1982). Such texts have sought to recover the frontier, sometimes nostalgically or elegiacally, sometimes in an ironic mode. But there is another approach to the reconceptualization of American space, one undertaken earlier than these modernist examples, and on the margins of the literary system rather than at its center. Its locus classicus is L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1900), a book intended for children. The Land of Oz, as everyone must surely know, is a fantastic self-contained world, encompassing several dissimilar realms. Baum locates it somehow within the state of Kansas - an impossibility, since its land-area must surely exceed that of Kansas. In effect, Oz is the frontier zone, but a displaced frontier; no longer marking the extreme western limit of civilization, the zone now stands at its very center, the geographical middle of the continental United States. Baum has reacted to the closing of the frontier, and everything it stands for in American ideology, by reopening the frontier in Middle America.'4 This strategy of reimagining America as an interior frontier clearly struck a responsive chord in the popular imagination; witness the extraordinary mythological status of the
Hollywood movie version of The Wizard of Oz, which both exploited and helped consolidate the status of Baum's original. . All this helps explain, I think, the function of Ohio in postmodernist writing. It has gained a place in the postmodernist repertoire not by virtue of being Ohio as such, but by virtue of being typically middle-American - like
Baum's Kansas, which is its functional equivalent. The American zone is the "Zone of the Interior."15 Its strangeness and liminality are foregrounded by its being located not on the edges of the continent, but at its center. It is the historical descendant of the frontier zone, transposed to the flat, middling (in every sense) American heartland.
It is this version of American space, the Oz version, so to speak, rather than the elegiac lost-frontier version, that recurs throughout postmodernist writing about America, for instance in Michel Butor's Mobile (1962), Ronald Sukenick's Out
(1973), Raymond Federman's Take It or Leave It (1976), and Angela Carter's quasi-science-fiction picaresque novel
The Passion of New Eve (1977). Federman's American zone is, like the Manhattan of Spark's Hothouse by the East
River (1973), a world under erasure. His narrative promises a classic transcontinental journey like those in, say,
Kerouac's On the Road (1957); his hero's itinerary from East Coast to West is even plotted on a map; but none of the westward journey ever actually materializes. Preempted by an arbitrary and unforeseen turn of events, the promised journey slips from its ontological status of anticipated fact into the limbo of the merely hypothetical; it is canceled, erased out..of existence. In Butor's Mobile, the American zone is shaped by homonymy; here geography is at the mercy of the play of the signifier. Butor's text leaps back and forth across the continent, radically disrupting geographic continuity, its displacements triggered by identity of place-names: we leap from Concord, California, to Concord,
North Carolina, at the other extreme of the American continent, then to Concord, Georgia, then Concord, Florida, and so on. As in Davenport's "Invention of Photography in Toledo," similarity or identity at the level of the linguistic signifier has been
IN THE ZONE 51 allowed to derange and remodel geographical space. Butor also uses the irregular spacing of typography on the pages of his text to represent or simulate geographical space in an oblique and distorted way. Sukenick in Out similarly constructs an analogy between page-space and geographical space, but his analogy is more straightforwardly iconic, less oblique than Butor's. As Sukenick's protagonist moves westward across the American continent, the pages of the text become increasingly blank, until the moment of his embarkation upon the Pacific Ocean, when the text literally vanishes into the void of the empty page. Finally, Angela Carter has constructed what may be the paradigmatic representation of America as the zone. The hero/heroine of The Passion of New Eve travels from east to west across a future America devolved into warring city-states, each zone-city embodying a different "possible order." Approaching the end of this journey, Carter's protagonist reflects that since leaving New York she/he has lived in systems which operated within a self-perpetuating reality; a series of enormous solipsisms, a tribute to the existential freedom of the land of free enterprise.16
"A series of enormous solipsisms": it could be a characterization of Calvino's Empire of the Great Khan, or Pynchon's zone - or, indeed, of the Land of Oz itself, the "innocent" precursor of postmodernist heterotopian America.
Other recurrent postmodernist zones have different historical roots. Take, for example, the postmodernist use of LatinAmerican space. We have already seen examples from Barthelme ("Paraguay") and Cortazar ("The Other Heaven"), and this does not even begin to take into account the other major writers of the so-called "boom" in South American writing, including Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, and AlejoCarpentier, among others. Clearly, Latin America constitutes another postmodernist topos, a favored zone. Just as clearly, however, the historical conditions of Latin-American postmodernism differ radically from those in North America. The frontier experience has not left nearly as deep a mark on the conceptualization of Latin-American space as it did in North America; nor has Latin America yet joined the ontological landscape of advanced industrial society (described in the preceding chapter) as fully as the United
States has. We must look elsewhere for the formative conditions of the Latin-American zone.
These can be found, I think, in two mechanisms which converge upon the reinvention of Latin America as a

heterotopia. The first mechanism involves the conceptualization of Latin America as opposite to the European world
(including Anglo-America), Europe's other, its alien double. This dualism, Europe vs Latin America, runs right through Latin-American culture itself, of course; indeed, it even runs through the personal experience of many of the
Latin-American "boom" writers, a number of whom - including Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, Fuentes - are or have been expatriates from their native lands. The theme of dualism is explicit in Alejo Carpentier's El rccurso del inetodo
(Reasons of Stale, 1974), in which a Latin-American dictator, connoisseur of European (especially Parisian) culture, shuttles back and forth between the two continents. Elsewhere, however, the Europe/Latin America dualism appears at a deeper level than that of theme. It constitutes the

52 POSTMODERNIST FICTION ontological structure of a text like Cortazar's "The Other Heaven," or, on a much larger scale, his novel Rayuela
(Hopscotch, 1963/7), or Fuentes's Terra nostra (1975). The organization of both Hopscotch and Terra nostra is that of an immense triptych. In each, the first "panel" is devoted to Europe - "The Old World" in Fuentes, "The Other Side" in
Cortazar - while the second turns to Latin America - "The New World," "This Side." This division of the fictional universe into two opposed worlds-literally different ontologies in Fuentes's case, only figuratively so in Cortazar's - is not, however, the end of the process, but only its first step. Once the unity of the fictional ontology has been split, further splittings-off follow; duality of the fictional world gives rise, by a kind of chain-reaction, to a plurality of worlds. Thus, the third "panel" in both Hopscotch and Terra nostra belongs to neither Europe nor Latin America, but breaks up into multiple worlds. In Hopscotch, this "pluraliza-tion" affects mainly narrative structure, which dissolves into a collection of heterogeneous "expendable chapters," including citations from other texts, metafictional reflections on the nature of the novel, and narrative episodes "lost" from the main story. In Terra nostra, however, this pluralization is genuinely ontological: a plurality of worlds.
The second mechanism, complementary to this one, hinges upon the conceptualization of Latin America not in terms of its external difference from Europe, but in terms of its own internal differences, its inherent multiplicity.
Objectively, Latin America is a mosaic of dissimilar and, on the face of it, incompatible cultures, languages, worldviews, landscapes, ecological zones. Its condition is, we might even say, intrinsically postmodernist. Even a "straight" realistic representation of the continent would have to take this multiplicity into account; and from such a representation to a postmodernist one is only a few short steps. These steps beyond realism are explicit in the narratives (and even, in one case, the title) of Alejo Carpentier's late-modernist novels Los pasos perdidos (The Lost
Steps, 1953), and El sigh de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1962), which approach but stop just short of postmodernist poetics. The protagonist of The Lost Steps travels up-country along one of the great rivers of the South
American continent, passing successively through locales so disparate that they seem to belong, like the "invisible cities" of the Great Khan's empire, to different worlds: the Lands of the Horse, the Lands of the Dog, the Capital of the
Forms, the Great Plateaus, and so on. An explicit analogy is drawn with The Odyssey, the paradigmatic travel narrative involving visits to disparate realms. The Homeric analogy could have been applied even more appropriately to the voyages of Explosion in a Cathedral, in which the realms visited are actually island-worlds scattered throughout the
Caribbean, like the Mediterranean island-worlds of The Odyssey. This multi-world Caribbean zone comes very close to constituting a heterotopia similar to those in postmodernist texts. Exactly how close, we can see from the episode in which privateers, driven off course by a storm, discover a miniature scale-model of the Caribbean, a gulf full of tiny islands: Full of islands, but with the incredible difference that these islands were very small, mere designs or ideas for islands, which had accumulated here just as models, sketches and empty casts accumulate in a sculptor's studio. Not one of these islands resembled its neighbour, nor were any two
IN THE ZONE 53 constituted of the same material. . . . this Magic Gulf was like an earlier version of the Antilles, a blue-print which contained, in miniature, everything that could be seen on a larger scale in the Archipelago.17
This is still a naturalized heterotopia, "magic realism" with the emphasis on the realism; but the slightest shift of emphasis would yield a magic universe like that of Terra nostra or One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
Africa, too, recurs as a zone in postmodernist fiction; we have already seen such examples as Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique and Abish's Alpliabetical Africa. Both adopt the strategy we observed in Butor'sMoW/e, that of subordinating the representation of geographical space to the free-play of the linguistic signifier. In the case of Roussel, freeplay means generating elaborate, implausible pseudo-African scenes from a set of arbitrary plays on words, puns which do not even appear at the surface of the text, and whose role in its composition we would not suspect, had
Roussel not explained the process elsewhere (in Comment j'ai ecrit certains de mes livres, 1935). Abish's linguistic strategies are more transparent, though no less arbitrary than Roussel's. His Africa, as his book's title suggests, is alphabetized: the first chapter is composed exclusively of words beginning with the letter a, the second chapter of awords supplemented by b-words, the third of a, b, and c-words, and so on, until by the twenty-sixth chapter the entire lexicon has become available; after that, the process is reversed, the vocabulary dwindling gradually down to a-words again. In short, an arbitrary distribution of vocabulary, corresponding, at the level of the fictional world, to a strange, piecemeal representation of Africa, full of anomalies such as the non-existent beaches of landlocked Chad.
The result, in the case of both Roussel and Abish, is a redrawing of the map - literally. We saw above how Roussel's cartographer redraws the map of sub-Saharan Africa, flattering Emperor Talu by absorbing most of it into his Empire.
Abish's characters, too, make maps:
Life in Tanzania is predicated on the colored maps of Africa that hang in the place, courtesy of National Geographic.

On the maps Tanzania is colored a bright orange. Neighboring Malawi is light blue. The maps are the key to our future prosperity. The maps keep everyone employed, says the Queen. . . . Each day one hundred thousand Tanzanians carrying ladders, buckets of orange paint and brushes, are driven and also flown to different sections of the country.
They paint everything in sight. . . . The Queen also proudly explains that Malawi has also decided to conform to international mapping standards, and since Tanzania had a technological headstart, she could export a light blue paint to Malawi.18
These maps, Roussel's as well as Abish's, are constructions en abyme: that is, they reflect on a miniature scale the structure of the texts in which they appear. In Tanzania, and somewhat less literalistically in Talu's Empire, real space does not determine the map but the other way around, the map determines the real space: if the map of Tanzania is colored bright orange, so must the real Tanzania be colored orange. In an exactly analogous way, the play of the signifier in these texts determines the shape of the fictional world, and not, as we would normally assume, the other way around.

54 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Africa, in short, appears in these texts by Roussel and Abish as a free, undetermined space, a playground for ontological improvisation. Their maps strangely echo an earlier, more familiar map of the African continent: the one in
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902). Conrad's narrator, Marlow, recalls how as a "little chap" he used to be fascinated by the unexplored "blank spaces" on maps, in particular the blank space in the interior of Africa. The map of
Africa appears here as a screen upon which the young Marlow projects his fantasies of adventure and (no doubt) conquest, "a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over." Like Roussel's cartographer and Abish's Queen of
Tanzania, Marlow confuses the map with the space it represents: if the map is blank, the corresponding area of the real world, too, must be a kind of empty space, offering minimal resistance to the realization of adventurous fantasies.
Heart of Darkness, of course, recounts the collapse of this dangerous illusion about the blank space of Africa, for, far from offering no resistance to fantasy, Africa is apt to absorb the unwary adventurer into its own nightmare. In other words, this map stands at the center of a typical modernist structure, that of illusion and disillusionment. Roussel and
Abish in effect parody the illusion/disillusion structure of Heart of Darkness, substituting ontological improvisation where Conrad had an epistemological motif.
This is not by any means an "innocent" parody. Conrad's map, and its function in the young Marlow's imagination, in effect constitute a psychological alibi for imperialist expansion: it is the very blankness of the map, the inherent fascination of the unknown, that provokes the imperial response. The postmodernist parody only substitutes one kind of imperialism for another, an "imperialism of the imagination," so to speak, for an imperialism in fact. In a sense, it has been too easy to re-invent Africa, and some, at least, of the postmodernist writers have displayed a troubled awareness of this fact. Abish, for one, seems sensitive to the imperialist dimension of his Alphabetical Africa. He projects into its fictional world a surrogate author-figure who seems to reflect some of his own internal contradictions.
On the one hand, this character asserts his freedom to improvise an Africa that answers to his own will and desires:
I am inventing another country and another "now" for my book. It is largely an African country, dark, lush, hot, green and inhabited by a multitude of giant ants. . . . If I were to invent Africa all over again, I would not change a thing. I'd introduce a few broad tree-lined avenues, an outdoor cafe, a puppet theater and a realistic cannon pointing at the airport.l9 On the other hand, he admits that Africa exceeds his imaginings:
Basically Africa doesn't need any inventions, doesn't even need new interpretation. . . In general authors are provided a certain liberty. I'm no exception, as everyone happily gives me a certain freedom, and anticipates fabulous distortions.
But Africa is not my invention by any means. I have not made any concessions, I have not invented anything I've seen or done.20
There is here at least an implicit critique of non-African writers' imaginative expropriation of African space. Angela
Carter's critique is more explicit. In
IN THE ZONE 55
The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972), she has constructed an Africa wholly derived from European fantasy. She populates its coast with cannibal tribesmen straight out of party jokes, comic-strips, and slapstick comedy; while in the interior she places centaurs, in effect suppressing indigenous mythology in favor of an imported European myth. This is imperialism of the imagination, and Carter knows it; indeed, her purpose is to foreground it and expose it for what it is. Thus, we learn from her Dr Hoffman that nothing in the European castaways' experience of this Africa was real: the "hitherto unimaginable flora," the "herds of biologically dubious fauna," the "hitherto unformulated territory," all of it was only the reification of the castaways' desires.21 Dr Hoffman's analysis might be extended to the
African zones of Roussel, Abish and others: their Africas, too, appear to be reifications of European desire. Is presentday Africa, then, still what it was for Conrad's Marlow at the turn of the century, a particularly inviting blank space on the map, fodder for westerners' dreams and wish-fulfillments? i Mimesis, clearly, is alive and well in postmodernist fiction. Postmodernist '7\ texts such as Impressions d'Afriinie or
Alphabetical Africa may not reflect objective African realities, but they do faithfully reflect our culture's ontological landscape, which allots a certain space to an unreal zone called "Africa." In a similar, and equally disturbing way postmodernist fiction also reflects the disruption of that landscape by twentieth-century war. War in our century has forced us to rethink the received categories of space, conceptual as well as geographical space; it has taught us to think in terms of the zone. The lexicon of war is one of the sources of the term "zone," and certainly the postmodernists have borrowed many of the characteristics of their zone from the zones of military discourse - the war zone, the occupied

zone, the demilitarized zone.
The zone of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, I have said, is the paradigm of the occupied zone in postmodernist writing.
Earlier, John Hawkes in The Cannibal (1949) had created a comparable zone, but on a drastically reduced scale.
Where Pynchon's zone spans Central Europe from the North Sea to the Polish frontier, Hawkes telescopes his into a single German town, which he calls Spilzen-on-the-Dien. Spitzen-on-the-Dien concentrates within its narrow confines all the derangements of the occupied zone at large. Its local history recapitulates the history of the Third Reich, sometimes obliquely and symbolically, for instance when during the closing days of the war the insane-asylum inmates stage a revolt. The same migrating nationalities that sweep across Pynchon's zone also appear in Hawkes's, but reduced to a representative handful of displaced persons at a dance in the town. Spitzen-on-the-Dien even has its own "other world": on the town's outskirts, ghosts of English soldiers haunt a ruined tank. Kenneth Patchen's strategy in constructing the zone of The Journal of Albion Moonlight is equally bold. Patchen, like Guy Davenport or Julio
Cortazar, superimposes one space upon another. His zone is a double-exposure of war-torn Europe and the still neutral, peace-time America of 1939-40. The result is a composite vision of the American landscape transfigured by war in the same way that the European landscape is transformed in the texts of Hawkes and Pynchon. Patchen thus introduces the war zone into the American heartland. His

I
56

POSTMODERNIST FICTION
America, like Pynchon's, is a "Zone of the Interior," but in a somewhat different sense from the one we find in
Pynchon. Or is it so different? It took a certain prescience for Patchen to imagine, in 1940, Middle America transformed bv a war in its midst; Pynchon, looking back on the 1940s from the vantage-point of the 1970s, needed no such prescience, for by now we are all aware of the ease with which total war can be delivered to our doorsteps, in Middle
America or anywhere else. Since the days of Patchen's Albion Moonlight, the war zone has expanded to embrace the entire globe, thanks to nuclear weaponry and the science of ballistics, and it is Pynchon who, on the last page of
Gravity's Rainbow, has given us the most memorable symbol of that all-embracing zone: the missile suspended a hair's-breadth above the movie-theater in which we readers sit.22
Intertextual zones
The disparate worlds that constitute the zone occupy different, incompatible spaces; as Foucault says, it is impossible to find any common locus beneath them all. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the worlds of the zone do, in most cases, occupy the same kind of space. That is, they all belong to the projected space of the fictional universe, the space concretized by readers in the process of reading the text. In this sense, the zone is not heterotopian after all, but
/wmotopian. One could, however, break up this homotopia by constructing a zone that embraced or straddled different kinds of space, one which annexed to the space of the fictional universe the spaces of other ontological strata.
But what other kinds of space could there be, apart from the space of the fictional universe? For one thing, there is the physical space of the material book, in particular the two-dimensional space of the page. It should be possible to integrate this physical space in the structure of the zone - and indeed, we have seen a number of cases where this has been done, including Michel Butor's Mobile and Ronald Sukenick's Out, which in effect annex the space of the page to the represented space of the American zone. This type of space, and its uses in postmodernist writing, will be discussed in Chapter 12, "Worlds on paper" (see pp. 179-96). There is also the conceptual space of language itself.
When we conceive of linguistic signs as being composed of a signifier and a signified, we have in effect spatialized language, introducing an internal space within the sign. This space between the signifier and the signified may be wider or narrower; there may be slippages, displacements of one tier vis-d-vis the other. These gaps and slippages are what permit the free-play of the signifier; and texts such as Butor's Mobile, Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique, or Abish's
Alphabetical Africa which, as we have scon, exploit the play of the signifier, in effect annex linguistic space to the projected space of their fictional universes. This type of space is discussed in Chapter 10, "Styled worlds" (see pp. 14861).
Finally, there is a third type of space which may be annexed to the zone: intertextual space. It has become commonplace since Eliot's "Tradition and the individual talent," and even more so since the French structuralists' work on intertextualiry, to picture literature as a field or, better, a network whose nodes are the actual texts of literature. By this account, an intertextual space is
IN THE ZONE 57 constituted whenever we recognize the relations among two or more texts, or between specific texts and larger categories such as genre, school, period. There are a number of ways of foregrounding this intertextual space and integrating it in the text's structure, but none is more effective than the device of "borrowing" a character from another text - "transworld identity," Umberto Eco has called this, the transmigration of characters from one fictional universe to another.
Now, our normal literary intuitions would seem to suggest that this device of borrowing characters is not really permissible. Lubomir Dolezel captures this intuition when he speaks of the "compossibility" of characters. Two fictional characters are compossible, that is, capable of coexisting and interacting, only if they belong to the same text; characters belonging to one text are normally not compossible with characters from another. Thus, Emma Bovary is compossible with Rodolphe Boulanger, but not with Ivan Karamazov. There would appear to be only one regular exception to this norm, and that is in the case of retour de personnages, when the identical characters recur in different texts by the same author; the paradigmatic examples are Balzac's Comalie Huinaine and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha

novels. Here, however, transworld identity is the tail that wags the textual dog: it is precisely because characters persist from text to text that we are disposed to redefine a series of novels as a single continuous text, a kind of "super-text," thus preserving by a stratagem the rule of compossibility of characters. Furthermore, far from damaging the realistic illusion by calling our attention to intertextuality, the device of retour de personnages actually buttresses realism.
Thus, Robert Alter describes retour de personnages in Balzac as: a strategy for sustaining the imperative claim to life of his fantasies by writing a huge ensemble of overlapping novels in which the figures and actions invented in one are reinforced, in a sense confirmed, by their reappearance in other books.24 How far can the device of retour de personnages be pushed before it begins to have the opposite effect, destabilizing rather than consolidating fictional ontology? Clearly there is a limit, and postmodernist fiction has explored and sometimes violated that limit. Robbe-Grillet is an example. In his novels from La Maison de rendez-vous (1965) through Djinn (1981), a number of characters -Johnson, Manneret, Dr Morgan, King Boris, Jean (or Djinn), Laura recur in more than one text, some in as many as three. But is this true transworld identity, or only what Eco calls homonymy, identity of names without any carry-over of essential properties from text to text? It is difficult to say.
Because of the extreme instability of Robbe-Grillet's fictional worlds, characters are not even self-consistent within the same text, so they can hardly be expected to be consistent from one text to another. If the retour de personnages consolidates these texts into a "super-text," the world of that "super-text" is no unitary whole, no Yoknapatawpha, but an uneasy juxtaposition of incommensurable worlds - a zone, in fact, but an intertextual zone. Robbe-Grillet, by abusing the motif of recurrent characters in this way, in effect parodies this device, substituting for the unitary worlds of La Comedie Humaine or Yoknapatawpha a heterotopian intertextual zone.

58 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
John Barth, too, carries the retour de personnages too far, but through exaggeration rather than, as in the case of
Robbe-Grillet, indeterminacy. In LETTERS (1979) he has written the collective sequel to all six of his previous novels, from The Floating Opera (1956) through Cliimera (1972), reviving from each of them its major characters and reintegrating them in a new fictional world. In some cases this is unproblematic, but in others the retour de personnages places severe ontological strain on the fictional world of LETTERS. This is particularly true of the character Jerome Bray, who claims to be descended from Harold Bray, Grand Tutor of the University in the parallel universe of Giles Goat-Boy (1966) - a world radically incompatible with the more or less realistic world of LETTERS.
Furthermore, all of the "revived" characters are obsessed, in various ways, with what one of them calls the "recycling" of their lives; in short, they are aware of living through a sequel, and even if this awareness is too vague to destroy the realistic illusion, it is more than enough to foreground the intertextual dimension of this text for the reader.
The annexation of inlertextual space can proceed along other lines as well. "Characters," asserts the narrator of Flann
O'Brien's A! Swiiii-Two-ltinla (1939), should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire ' corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference.25
Borrowed characters abound in postmodernism. Thus, for example, Halo Calvino has expropriated Dumas' characters
Dantes and the Abbe Faria in his rewriting of "The Count of Monte Cristo," (1967) while Alejo Carpentier in El recurso del metodo has peopled his fictional Paris with characters borrowed from Proust (including Morel, Brichot, the painter Elstir, the composer Vinteuil, and Madame Verdurin). Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude mentions the room in Paris where Rocamadour will die one day - but Rocamadour dies not in the world of One
Hundred Years of Solitude, but in the world of Cortazar's Hopscotch, from which Garcia Marquez has borrowed him.
And Gilbert Sorrentino, in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), arbitrarily marries off one of his male characters to - Lolita!
I have a mildly interesting idea ... for those readers - and they are, 1 understand, legion - who insist on a character they can "get ahold of." Let's say that Bart's wife is Lolita. I mean, she is the exact Lolita that Nabokov stitched together.
O.K. Now you've got Bart's wife- there she is, already made, grown up, yes, as she is at the end of the book, with
Humbert dead.26
Is this retour de pcrsonnagel Transworld identity? In a sense, yes, of course, but parodied in such a way as to spectacularly violate, and thereby foreground, the ontological boundaries between fictional worlds. World-boundaries having been overrun in this way, the result is a kind of between-worlds space - a zone.

4: WORLDS IN COLLISION
I draw the line as a rule between one solar system and another. (Christine Brooke-Rose, Such, 1966)
Science fiction, like postmodernist fiction, is governed by the ontological dominant. Indeed, it is perhaps the ontological genre par excellence. We can think of science fiction as postmodernism's noncanonized or "low art" double, its sister-genre in the same sense that the popular detective thriller is modernist fiction's sister-genre. Darko
Suvin has defined the science-fiction genre as "literature of cognitive estrangement." By "estrangement" he means very nearly the Russian formalists' ostrancnic, but a specifically ontological ostranenie, confronting the empirical givens of our world with something not given, something from outside or beyond it, "a strange newness, a novum."1 By qualifying this estrangement as "cognitive," Suvin means to eliminate purely mythopoeic projections that have no standing in a world-view founded on logic, reason, positive science. Robert Scholes, Suvin's disciple in this, offers an elegant paraphrase:
Fabulation ... is fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to

confront that known world in some cognitive way. . . . Speculative fabulation [ie. science fiction] ... is defined by the presence of at least one clear representational discontinuity with life as we know it.2
Actually, this is more than paraphrase, for Scholes here neatly plugs up a hole in Suvin's definition. Any fiction of any genre involves at least one novum - a character who did not exist in the empirical world, an event that did not really occur - and very likely involves many more than one. What distinguishes science fiction is the occurrence of this novum not (or not only) at the level of story and actors but in the structure of the represented world itself - Scholes's
"representational discontinuity," as opposed to what he calls "narrational discontinuity." Or, better: not the occurrence of a single nomini, but the projection of a network of innovations, with their implications and consequences;
60

POSTMODERNIST FICTION

in other words, the projection of a world different from our own yet, as Suvin and Scholes both specify, in confrontation with our world. Science fiction, by staging "close encounters" between different worlds, placing them in confrontation, foregrounds their respective structures and the disparities between them. It thus obeys the same underlying principles of ontological poetics as postmodernist fiction.
It obeys the same underlying principles but, in the course of its independent historical development, has evolved topoi of its own for working out these principles in practice, conventions that are specific to the science-fiction genre. How is one to place worlds into confrontation? How are these "close encounters" to be managed? The answer takes a variety of historically-determined forms within science-fiction writing. In general, as Darko Suvin and, following him, Mark
Rose have both observed, we can distinguish two-complementary strategics: the first is to transport (through space, time, or "other dimensions") representatives of aur world to a different world; the second, its inverse, involves (to use
Pynchon's phrase) "another world's intrusion into this one."3
In the most typical (and stereotypical) science-fiction contexts, "worlds" should be understood literally as planets, and
"confrontation between worlds" as interplanetary travel. "Another world's intrusion into this one," in the interplanetary context, takes the form of invasion from outer space -whether malign, asinH. G. Wells's classic War of the Worlds
(1898), or benign, as in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953). The complementary topos, that of the earthling's visit to an alien planet, occurs in a number of variants: the simplest, travel to a single other world (e.g. Wells's The
First Men in the Moon, 1901, or Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, 1950); or "planet-hopping" from world to world, as in pulp-magazine "space operas" or their cinematic equivalents, such as Star Trek and Star Wars; or travel across a planet on which disparate life-forms, races, civilizations are juxtaposed, a multi-world world (e.g. Edgar Rice
Burroughs' Martian romances, or C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, 1938). The "zero degree" of the interplanetary motif involves projecting a different planet without any provision for intrusion in either direction, by its inhabitants into our world or by earthlings into their world: worlds in collision without the collision. A classic example is Frank
Herbert's Dune (1965), which constructs an integral, self-contained planetary world, nowhere explicitly related to our
Earth. Here the confrontation between the projected world and our empirical world is implicit, experienced by no representative character but reconstructed by the reader.
Many space-travel narratives, although by no means all of them, are projected into the future, for the obvious reason that they depend upon technologies which have been extrapolated from those of the present day. In other words, displacement in space is intimately bound up with displacement in time. They are, in fact, functionally equivalent: spatially distant other worlds may be brought into confrontation with our world, but so may temporally distant worlds, and with identical results of "cognitive estrangement." Science-fiction future worlds tend to gravitate either toward the
Utopian pole (as in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 1888) or, more frequently, toward the dystopian pole (as in
Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes,

W ORLDS IN COLLISION 61
1899, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, 1932, or George Orwell's 1984,1949). The mode of displacement from present to future falls into one or another of several categories: that of "future history," which narrates more or less continuously the unfolding of "things to come" (e.g. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, 1930, or Isaac Asimov's
Foundation trilogy, 1951-3); or the "sleeper wakes" motif of Wells and Bellamy (and Woody Allen!), in which an inhabitant of our time hibernates through the intervening centuries and awakens in the world of the future; or the timemachine motif inaugurated by Wells's novel The Time Machine (1895), and apparently not exhausted yet. As in the case of the interplanetary topos, there is also a "zero degree" of temporal displacement in which a future world is projected but without any inhabitant of our time visiting it, the confrontation between worlds being left to the reader to reconstruct. Once we have accepted the pseudo-scientific premise of travel outside the three familiar dimensions of space, through the "fourth dimension" of lime, there is nothing to prevent us from going on to imagine travel to worlds in dimensions beyond the fourth. Here the ontological confrontation occurs between our world and some other world or worlds somehow adjacent or parallel to our own, accessible across some kind of boundary or barrier, just as Wells' time-travel conceit seems to be inexhaustible, so his contemporary Edwin Abbott's conceit of interdimensional travel in Flatland:
A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) continues to be exploited in science-fiction writing. The most intriguing variant of the other-dimension topos is the parallel- or alternate-world story based on historical speculation, the "whatif" premise so beloved of amateur historians - and of Borges. "He believed," writes Borges of the imaginary author of the novel The Garden of Forking Paths, in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
This web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces every possibility.4

In history's "garden of forking paths," one fork will inevitably be chosen in preference to all the other forks that might have been chosen instead. But what if things had gone differently, what if one of the other forks had been chosen?
What kind of world would have resulted if, for instance, the Axis Powers instead of the Allies had won the Second
World War? This speculation generates the world of Philip K. Dick's classic parallel-world story. The Man in the High
Castle (1962). Inevitably, such a story invites the reader to compare the real state of affairs in our world with the hypothetical state of affairs projected for the parallel world; implicitly it places our world and the parallel world in confrontation. And sometimes even explicitly: in Dick's Man in the High Castle, a science-fiction writer in the parallel world publishes his own parallel-world story, based on the premise that the Axis had lost the Second World War. The parallel world of a parallel world is our world.
Finally, we must not forget the "lost world" topos of science-fiction writing. Important in earlier periods of the genre's development, this variant has all but ceased to be productive today, since it requires "blank spaces" like those on young
Marlow's maps of Africa, onto which the writer may project "lost"

62 POSTMODERNIST FICTION fragments of the Earth's past, or parallel civilizations cut off from the mainstream of human history. Examples include
H. Rider Haggard's She (1886-7), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That
Time Forgot (1924), and variants in which the lost world is projected into the interior of the hollow Earth, such as
Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Burroughs' romances of Pellucidar.
Parallel lines

Invasions from outer space, visits to other planets, Utopian or dystopian futures, time-travel, parallel or lost worlds all of these science-fiction topoi serve the purposes of an ontological poetics, but one that has developed almost entirely independently of postmodernism's ontological poetics. Science fiction and postmodernist fiction, it would appear, have advanced along parallel literary-historical tracks. Occasionally these separate but parallel lines of development have produced motifs and topoi which are strikingly similar. One of these is the topos of the closedsystem world in both science fiction and postmodernist fiction;5 another is the topos of the death-world or "world to come." Philip Jose Farmer, in his science-fiction tetralogy of "Riverworld" novels (To Your Scattered Bodies Go, 1971; The
Fabulous Riverboat, 1971; The Dark Design, 1977; The Magic Labyrinth, 1980), has constructed a simple but flexible closed-system world in which to stage a cycle of adventure-stories. The entire human race, in Farmer's fiction, has been resurrected by technological means on a planet especially prepared to receive it: the Riverworld, self-contained, self-regulating, a river-valley some ten million miles long through which flows a mile-wide river whose source and mouth are the same north-polar sea. No space has been allotted for raising food to feed the thirty-six billion or so human beings who occupy the banks of this river, so Farmer must breach his system at one end and introduce a providential food-supply, meals generated apparently ex nihilos by energy-matter converters ranged along the riverbanks. There is death on the Riverworld - death by accident or violence -but only temporarily: those killed since the simultaneous, general resurrection undergo a "little resurrection," rematerializing elsewhere along the river's vast length. So this astonishing eco-system recycles souls as well as bodies. The entire elegant contraption, it turns out, has been designed and set in motion by superior beings called Ethicals. Having collected the souls of human beings throughout mankind's history, the Ethicals have now regenerated mankind and placed it on this new, closed-system world in order to give it a second chance to attain superior ethical development.
Farmer's closed-system world bears comparison with the world of Samuel Beckett's postmodernist text, The Lost Ones
(Le Dcpcupleur, 1971; English trans., 1972). The exact ontological status of this world, as with all of Beckett's fictional worlds since at least The Unnamable (1952), is indeterminable. Perhaps it is a version of the afterlife, an updated Purgatorio or Inferno, as an isolated allusion to Dante might lead one to believe; or perhaps its closest analogue is, rather, the science-fiction topos of the multiple-generation

W ORLDS IN COLLISION 63 voyage to the stars (as in Robert Heinlein's story "Universe," 1941, or J. G. Ballard's "Thirteen for Centaurus"). Vague though its status might be, the structure of this world is remorselessly clear, mathematically exact. Picture a cylinder fifty meters in diameter and sixteen high, inhabited by a "tribe" of some two hundred individuals - one body per square meter of floor-space. There is no egress from the cylinder: huis clos. The tribe's environment is subject to a "twofold vibration" of light and temperature, non-synchronous swings from dim yellow light to darkness and back again, and from extreme heat to extreme cold, with irregular momentary breakdowns of the rhythm. Several types of behavior are observable: some of the lost ones queue up to climb ladders, from which they may explore niches in the cylinder's wall; others circulate restlessly, searching the faces of their fellows; still others have lapsed into temporary or permanent stasis. Each type of activity is apparently governed by fixed rules, which the text specifies.
Obviously, at one level of description Beckett's cylinder-world differs in almost every particular from Farmer's
Riverworld. Farmer's world is all hyperbole - a river ten million miles long, with thirty-six billion inhabitants, a tetralogy of some 600,000 words- while Beckett's is all minimalist understatement - fifty meters by sixteen, two hundred inhabitants, 8,000 words. Behind this huge difference in scale lies, however, the same cybernetic principle of the self-regulating closed system, the world as machine. Substantive differences only appear when we ask to what narrative use the closed-system world-structure is put in the two texts. In Beckett's case the answer is, to no use whatsoever. There is no foreground narrative action in The Lost Ones; the condition of the cylinder is merely described. The only change - and without change, of course, there is no possibility for narrative -is a change from bad

to worse in the overall condition, an increase in the system's entropy. Farmer, by contrast, uses his Riverworld in a fairly conventional way, as the backdrop to a foreground romance narrative. To do so, he must disrupt the stability and integrity of his closed system, replacing infinite recyclings with linear action -a plot. Like the designers of classical closed-world tragedies, Farmer has recourse to a dcus ex madiina: a renegade Ethical who sabotages the project and instigates a quest to the river's headwaters by the most adventurous and enterprising of the Riverworlders. Farmer thus satisfies the science-fiction genre's ontological imperatives while at the same time performing the duty which is incumbent on all popular writers - and science fiction is, after all, a popular genre - namely, the duty to tell a "good story." If the most important differences between Farmer's and Beckett's worlds can be attributed to the different criteria for popular fiction as opposed to "art" writing - Farmer must tell a story, while Beckett need not - their similarities cannot, conversely, be traced to shared conventions. The appearance of the same closed-system world-structure in the two texts must be explained in terms of a different history and logic of development in each case. The various elements of
Farmer's Riverworld can be traced back to topoi already in circulation in science fiction for decades: the interplanetary topos of supervision by superior beings (e.g. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) and 2003 (1968)); the topos of a war fought among time-travelers from different epochs (e.g. Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, 1958); the "Robinson Crusoe" topos of

64 POSTMODERNIST FICTION ingenious technological improvisation by castaways (e.g. Verne's Mysterious Island, 1874); above all, the precedent for constructing a planetary eco-systein, exemplified by Frank Herbert's Dune (1965). There is no need to refer to such science-fiction topoi to explain the appearance of an analogous closed-system world in Beckett's writing, no reason even to suppose the least familiarity with science fiction on Beckett's part. All the elements of Beckett's cylinder-world are already present in his own writings, or those of his precursors or postmodernist contemporaries, without his having to go further afield to find them. The cylinder extends Beckett's earlier experimentation with "art in a closed field"6 - as in the "calculus of possibilities" of Mr Knott's movements around his room, or the systematic circulation of Molloy's sucking-stones -and combines it with the tendency toward minimalism in Beckett's later short fiction, toward
"Lessness" (the title of one of those fictions). In short, this world appears in Beckett's text for reasons intrinsic to postmodernist writing, and not traceable to the influence of science fiction, just as the analogous world appears in
Farmer's text for reasons intrinsic to science fiction, and not traceable to the influence of postmodernism. This is a clear case of parallel development, not mutual influence.
Independent but parallel development also explains the similarities between Philip K. Dick's science-fiction novel Ubik
(1969) and Muriel Spark's postmodernist text The Hothouse by the East River (1973), both of which construct equivocal afterlifes, variants on the "world" to come. Dick projects his characters into a bizarrely deteriorating world, one in which the material culture seems to suffer a temporal regression, degenerating from the high technology of 1992 to a quaint 1939, while the eleven protagonists themselves die off one by one in a highly gothic manner, aging and decaying before their companions' eyes like Rider Haggard's Ayesha or Wilde's Dorian Gray. This world, it turns out, has all along been a state of death, or half-death: the eleven, killed at the outset by a terrorist bomb, have been kept in a state of suspended animation, and the world they have experienced has only been a kind of shared dream or hallucination. Their spectacular deaths by instantaneous aging represent, in fact, a second and "true" death, as the suspended-animation system fails.
Similarly, Spark in The Hothouse by the East River constructs the familiar, comfortable world of a group of uppermiddle-class New Yorkers which, like the world of Ubik, deteriorates before our eyes. Inconsistencies and improbabilities begin to creep in, inexplicable events occur. This, too, it turns out, has been a death-world, but one initially coinciding at every point with the real-world Manhattan. Spark's dead, victims of the 1944 V-2 blitz of London, act out a perfect simulacrum of the life they would have lived had they survived until the 1970s, even to the extent of raising the children they would have raised. This conditional existence starts breaking down from the moment when the dead begin to realize that they have been dead all along; Spark's world, like Dick's, erases itself.7
The parallelisms are striking, but again, as in the case of Farmer and Beckett, arise independently in the two genres.
Dick plays variations on a set of familiar science-fiction topoi, such as suspended animation, and uses a number of devices drawn from the repertoire of popular fiction to organize
W ORLDS IN COLLISION 65 his plot: the "ten little Indians" structure, the red herring that delays the solution of the mystery, the twist at the end, and so on. Spark's death-world, so similar to Dick's, nevertheless derives not from science-fiction conventions but from developments within postmodernist fiction itself. It derives, in particular, from the postmodernist preoccupation with death as the ultimate ontological boundary, which may be traced through the many postmodernist variants
(revisionist, parodic) on the venerable topos of the "world to come," including Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman
(written, 1940; published, 1967), Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Stanley Elkin's The Living End (1979),
Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981), and so on. And where Dick draws freely on the formal repertoire of popular writing,
Spark's principal device belongs to the repertoire of distinctively postmodernist strategies, namely the strategy of placing projected objects - in this case, an entire projected world -suusrulure, under erasure (see pp. 99-111). Here again we have evidence that the two ontological sister-genres, science fiction and postmodernist fiction, have been pursuing analogous but independent courses of development.
The science-fictionalization of postmodernism

If science fiction and postmodernist fiction have tended on the whole to advance along parallel but independent tracks, there has also been a tendency for postmodernist writing to absorb motifs and topoi from science fiction writing,

mining science fiction for its raw materials.8 The postmodernists have not always been gracious in acknowledging their borrowings from their sister-genre, presumably because of the "low art" stigma that still attaches to science fiction. "/ am not writing science fiction!" protests the "author" in Alasdair Gray's Lanark, and Raymond Federman seconds this on the opening page of his The Twofold Vibration (1982), in the process compiling a fairly thorough (if dismissive) catalogue of pertinent science-fiction motifs:
Call it exploratory or better yet extemporaneous fiction, that's right. . . but no futuristic crap, I mean pseudoscientific bullshit, space warfare, fake theories of probabilities, unsolvable equations, strange creatures from other planets, ludicrous busybodies with pointed ears, wings instead of arms or wheels instead of legs, none of that, a way to look at the self, at humanity, from a potential point of view, premembering the future rather than remembering the past, but no gadgetry, no crass emotionless robots ... no none of that infantilism, at least within reason, no invasions of earth by superbrains, spaceship battles in the galaxies, worlds that collide, nothing spuriously progressive or regressive in this story, nothing prophetic or moralistic either.9
They protest too much. In fact, both Lanark and The Twofold Vibration are transparently indebted to science fiction for some of their materials, and many of the motifs dismissed by Federman in fact form a part of his own repertoire, as well as that of other postmodernist writers.
Among postmodernism's borrowings from science fiction, strikingly few have come from the part of the repertoire that is most closely associated, at least in the popular mind, with the science-fiction genre, namely its inter-

66 POSTMODERNIST FICTION planetary motifs. Only William Burroughs has made very much use of these motifs, but he exploits them so extensively and so centrally as almost to make up for the other postmodernists' neglect. Nearly every variant of the interplanetary topos can be found somewhere in Burroughs' ocuvrc: the invasion from outer space (e.g. in Nova
Express, 1964, and The Ticket That Exploded, 1962), the earthling's visit to an alien planet (in The Ticket That
Exploded), and so on. Burroughs unabashedly seizes on the lowest common denominator of science-fiction conventions; his invaders from outer space are pulp-style bug-eyed monsters - insect people, scorpion electricals, crab guards, telepathic fish-boys. Italo Calvino, too, improvises on various interplanetary themes in the science-fiction fables of his Cosmicomics (1965) and t zero (1967). On the whole, however, postmodernist writing has preferred to adapt science fiction's motifs of temporal displacement rather than its spatial displacements, projecting worlds of the future rather than worlds in distant galaxies. Similarly, in constructing future worlds, postmodernist writing tends to focus on social and institutional innovations rather than on the strictly technological innovations which are stcreotypically associated with science fiction: "no gadgctry," Federman declares. Nevertheless, there is a good deal of gadgetry in postmodernist worlds of the future. Burroughs, for instance, projects an elaborate repertoire of advances in the biological sciences, including cloning (Naked Lunch, 1959; The Wild Boys, 1971), synthetic human beings (The
Soft Machine, 1961; revised, 1966), and, obsessively, virus plagues and biological warfare (Exterminator! 1973; Cities of the Red Night, 1981). Don DeLillo's gadgets in Ratner's Star (1976) tend to be sly parodies of current technology for instance, his Sony 747 miniaturized jet airliner, large enough to contain a rock-garden-but he also projects a number of disturbing and currently unthinkable innovations in the theoretical sciences: zorgs and Nutean surfaces in mathematics, sylphing compounds in chemistry, and, in physics, Moholean relativity, which implies the dissolution of the physical sciences as we presently understand them. Often the postmodernists seem content to borrow science fiction's most hackneyed "advanced technologies," using them simply as backdrops and not taking them very seriously: an example would be Federman's spaceport and gigantic spaceship in The Twofold Vibration, The spectacular exception to this is Raymond Roussel, a postmodernist precursor whose impossibly ingenious contraptions, derived from those of Jules Verne, are the end-all and be-all of his enigmatic texts (Impressions d'Afrique, 1910; Locus
Solus, 1914).
In general, however, postmodernist writers are more interested in the social and institutional consequences of technological innovation, the social arrangements these advances give rise to, rather than in the innovations themselves. Actually, this has been true of much of the science-fiction writing of recent decades as well, so that
Federman is being somewhat unfair when he dismisses science fiction as mere "gadgetry" by contrast with his own
"exploratory" or "extemporaneous" fiction, Federman himself, for instance, speculates on future sexual and marital arrangements (The Twofold Vibration), while Alasdair Gray projects the welfare state of the future (Lanark), and
Burroughs the Biologic Courts that will be needed to adjudicate among competing life-forms in a crowded and jostling universe (Nova Express). Many
W ORLDS IN COLLISION 67 postmodernist texts are preoccupied with the "cartelization" of the future, the growth of international conglomerates that threaten to displace national governments and engulf the entire world. Examples include Burroughs' Trak Sex and
Dream Utilities (The Soft Machine), the Consortium Hondurium in DeLillo's Ratner's Star, and the group of conglomerates known collectively as "the creature" in Gray's Lanark.
Most postmodernist f u tu res, in other words, are grim dystopias - as indeed most science-fiction worlds of the future have been in recent years. The motif of a world after the holocaust or some apocalyptic breakdown recurs. For instance, Angela Carter in The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Sam Shepard in his play The Tooth of Crime (1972) project similar visions of a future America that has disintegrated into an anarchic landscape of warring private armies and desert marauders. Carlos Fucntes in Terra nostra (1975) imagines a world that has broken down under the pressure of the population explosion, Burroughs in The Wild Roys one that has regressed in the aftermath of the exhaustion of earth's fossil-fuel reserves. In particular, the topos of nuclear holocaust and its aftermath recurs;

examples include Gravity's Rainbow, Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969), Russell Hoban's RUidley Walker
(1980), Maggie Gee's Dying, in other words (1981), and, in a slightly displaced form, Christine Brooke-Rose's Old
(1964). Unlikely though it may seem, positive, Utopian treatments of this postapocalyptic motif are also possible. For instance, Richard Brautigan in In Watermelon Sugar (1968) projects a pastoral idyll apparently set some time after the collapse of industrial civilization. Another of the rare Utopian future worlds occurs in Monique Wittig's
LesGueri//eres(1969).
Dystopias or Utopias, postmodernist worlds of the future typically employ the "zero degree" of temporal displacement, projecting a future time but without making any particular provision for bridging the temporal gap between present and future; that bridge is left for the reader to build. There are a few exceptions, however. For instance, the topos of "future history" occurs in The Twofold Vibration, where in the early chapters Federman rather breathlessly reviews twentiethcentury history and "premembers" future developments as far as New Year's Eve, 1999. Temporal displacement through time-travel, like its spatial analogue, interplanetary flight, has been too closely identified with science fiction as such for postmodernist writers to bi? able to use it with much freedom. Only Burroughs, as might have been expected, makes much substantial use of it (in The Soft Machine, The Wild Boys, and especially Cities of the Red
Night). Time-travel, for Burroughs, provides the fictional frame, the motivating alibi, for the slippages and segues between one identity and another, one memory and another, one culture and another, which are staples of his writing.
Time-travel also figures in Fuentes' Terra nostra. Here a late-twentieth-century Parisian travels back in time to Spain's
Siglo de Oro, while interlopers from past times invade and overwhelm Paris in the closing days of the twentieth century. This influx of time-travelers goes well beyond the simple confrontation of present and future, or past and present, of most time-travel stories, approaching the extreme conflation of all epochs in such science-fiction texts as
Farmer's "Riverworld" tetralogy or Fritz Leiber's The Big Time.

68 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
W ORLDS IN COLLISION 69
What if the Russians, rather than the British, had settled most of North America? What if France had remained part of a British Continental Empire? What if electrical energy had been banned, even verbal allusions to it becoming taboo?
Returning to history's forkings and choosing the alternative paths that events could have taken, Vladimir Nabokov in
Ada generates a parallel world lying, presumably, in some "dimension" adjacent to our own. His world of Demonia or
Antiterra is "a distortive glass of our distorted globe."10 The degree and direction of its distortions can be gauged, for instance, from its teasingly askew place-names - the New World Express goes "via Mephisto, El Paso, Mcksikansk and the Panama Chunnel" to Brazilia, the African Express leaves from London and reaches the Cape "through Nigero,
Rodosia or Ethiopia"11 -and its alternative literary history - Proust is the author of Les Malheurs de Swann, "The
Waistline" is "a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits,"12 and Anna Karcnitia begins, "All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike." u Like Dick in The Man in the High
Castle, Nabokov lays bare the "alternateness" of his Antiterra by allowing its science-fiction writers and psychotics to envision a world parallel to their own -Terra, the what-if premise of a what-if premise, the parallel world of a parallel world. Other postmodernist parallel-worlds include the oddly skewed Miami of Harry Mathews' The Sinking of the
Odradek Stadium (1971-2), and the world of John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966), in which the history of western civilization (including its literary history) has been displaced into the microcosmic history of a university.
Increasingly rare in modern science fiction, the "lost world" topos figures hardly at all in postmodernist writing.
Perhaps the only candidate is the disturbing lost civilization of Vheissu, visited in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) by the explorer Godolphin. But in fact the case of Vheissu demonstrates in what ways V. is not, after all, a postmodernist text.
Every piece of evidence about Vheissu reaches us at a second or third remove, refracted through successive unreliable sources and mediators: the aged Godolphin's traveler's yarn is narrated to interested parties, overheard by eavesdroppers, transmitted by them to Stencil, who reconstructs the original narrative according to his standard operating procedure of "inference, poetic license, forcible dislocation of personality," and finally transmitted by him to still other listeners. Thus, the reality of this alleged "lost world" is diluted by a succession of mediating minds, and we are left not with an ontological projection but an epistemological puzzle: who knows about Vheissu? What does he know? How does he know it? In short, here Pynchon has superimposed epistemological structures upon science fiction's ontological motifs. V. is a late-modernist text, not "science-fictionalized" postmodernism.
The postmodernization of science fiction

There is, then, ample evidence of postmodernist writing's indebtedness to the science fiction genre. But the indebtedness also runs in the opposite direction. Just as postmodernism has borrowed ontological motifs from science fiction, so science fiction has in recent years begun to borrow from postmodernism. As a noncanonical, subliterary genre, science fiction has inevitably tended to lag behind canonized or mainstream literature in its adoption of new literary modes. Thus, the first flowering of popular science fiction in the United States during the 1930s coincided with the years of American modernism's most profound formal innovations in the hands of Faulkner, Dos
Passes and others, yet the poetics of 1930s science fiction was not that of modernism, but the realist poetics that modernism strove to supersede.14 Science fiction's breakthrough to modernist poetics did not occur until the 1960s, with the so-called "new wave" in American and British science-fiction writing. Dating from the "new wave," however, the pace of change in science fiction has accelerated, so that already by the late 1960s and early 1970s we can begin to discern, in the work of certain seminal figures, if not in the genre as a whole, an increased openness to developments in postmodernist writing - in other words, a tendency toward the "post-modernization" of science fiction.
One of the agents of this change has been the British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard. Ballard had already made an important contribution to science fiction's first breakthrough, the "new wave" breakthrough into modernism, with his

apocalyptic narratives of the 1960s, including the novella "The Voices of Time" (1960) and the trilogy of The
Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966). The vehicle through which Ballard had introduced modernist poetics into science-fiction narratives was stylization - specifically, the self-conscious adaptation and exaggeration of elements of Joseph Conrad's modernist poetics, including his perspectivism, his melodramatic rhetoric and symbolist imagery, and even elements from his represented world. Of course this aspect of late-modernist stylization coexists in Ballard's novels with the ontological motifs characteristic of science fiction, in particular the familiar topos of apocalypse and post-apocalyptic survival. Nevertheless, in all of these narratives of the early- and mid-1960s Ballard holds his ontological improvisations firmly in check by means of a carefully-constructed epistemological frame. In all of them except the earliest ("The Voices of Time"), the perspective is scrupulously restricted to a single observer, whose consciousness is the only one to which we have access, with the result that we are encouraged to wonder how much of the implausible external landscape might actually be due to this observer's projections and distortions.
In his story-sequence The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) Ballard finally frees his ontological projections from their epistemological constraints, producing what is essentially a postmodernist text based on science-fiction topoi. Like all literary breakthroughs, this one has a prehistory, which is readily traceable in the works leading up to The Atrocity
Exhibition. Already in the apocalypses of the early- and mid-1960s we can discern a pattern of repetition-withvariation embracing the entire series. In each, Earth is subjected to a global disaster, whether a plague of sleepingsickness, rising sea-level, a manmade drought, or the bizarre crystalization of living matter. In each, a researcher, called Powers or Kerans or Ransom or Sanders (the last three near-anagrams), becomes obsessed with the strange new conditions of existence, and is drawn

70 POSTMODERNIST FICTION deeper and deeper into them, to his own annihilation. In each, the researcher forms a liaison with a mysterious woman, and suffers persecution at the hands of a demonic male figure, in some sense his double; and so on. Ballard even begins to repeat proper names from text to text: Mount Royal, the devastated English city of The Drought, reappears as
Mount Royal, the African settlement of The Crystal World. All of this suggests, in a somewhat veiled way, the gamelike permutation of a fixed repertoire of motifs - "art in a closed field" - which is precisely the organizing principle of
The Atrocity Exhibition, except that here it is not veiled at all but, appropriately enough, exhibited. The protagonists of these stories are all obsessed with the problem of isolating a "modulus," a single abstract form which is repeated in a series of unrelated and apparently formless or irregular phenomena: photographs, erotic poses, urban landscapes. This theme of the "modulus" at the level of story-content in The Atrocity Exhibition exactly duplicates the formal organization of the stories, in which a fixed repertoire of modules, many of them repeated from the earlier apocalyptic novels, are differently recombined and manipulated from story to story. The modules include: a mentally unbalanced researcher whose name always begins with the letter T (Travis, Talbot, Traven, Tallis, Trabert etc.); a woman whom he "experimentally" murders (in several instances she bears the name of the mysterious female companion in The
Drought, Catherine Austin or Austen); a demonic former student of his, whose name always begins with the letter K
(Kline, Koester, Roster; cf. Kaldren in "The Voices of Time"); abandoned or ruined urban landscapes; recurrent objects or backgrounds, such as art and photography exhibitions, wrecked automobiles, helicopters, billboard advertisements, film showings, etc.; recurrent allusions to Dadaist or surrealist or neo-expressionist art (Ernst, Tanguy,
Duchamp, De Chirico, Malta, Bacon); and so on.15
This transparently formalistic, game-like "art in a closed field" complicates science fiction's ontological confrontation between the present and a dystopian future world by superimposing on top of it, so to speak, a characteristically postmodernist ontological confrontation between the text as formal object and the world that it projects (see Chapter
10, "Styled worlds" pp. 148-61). Analogous strategies of serialism and transparently artificial formalism can be found, for instance, in Claude Simon's Les Corps conducteurs (Conducting Bodies, 1971) and Triptych (1973) or in Walter
Abish's short fictions from Minds Meet (1975) and In the Future Perfect (1977). Behind both Simon and Abish stands the precursor-figure of Raymond Roussel, and it is surely no coincidence that Ballard has titled one chapter of a story from The Atrocity Exhibition "Impressions of Africa," and a chapter of another story "Locus Solus." These allusions complete the trajectory of Ballard's progress: from Conrad he has moved to Roussel, from late-modernist stylization to postmodernism. Samuel Delany's progress, in his two "big" science-fiction novels of the mid-1970s, Triton (1976) and Dhalgren
(1974), bears comparison with Ballard's. Like Ballard in his apocalyptic novels of the mid-1960s, Delany in Triton couples science fiction with modernist poetics, exploiting science fiction's ontological motifs yet holding them in check by means of a modernist epistemological frame. Ontological motifs in Triton include the "war of the
W ORLDS IN COLLISION 71 worlds" topos and the motif of visiting an alien planet - here elegantly inverted, since the alien planet, from the point of view of a citizen of Triton, is Earth. Delany's projected future world, although inevitably involving a good deal of gadgetry, focuses primarily on areas that most interest the postmodernists, namely social and institutional extrapolations: living arrangements, norms of sexual behavior, religious cults, even future art-forms and boardgames.
Ontologically oriented though it may be in these regards, Triton, like Ballard's apocalyptic novels, is nevertheless mediated through a single consistent centcr-of-consciousness, one Bron Helstrom, whose self-deceptions, recognitions and mis-recognitions, limitations and unreliability as a perceiver inevitably become the focus of our attention. In effect, the presence of Bron's mind as a refracting medium "tames" ontological improvisation to a characteristically modernist epistemological structure.16

The same sort of "taming" of ontological license might have been expected from Dhalgren, Delany's other "big" 1970s novel. Here, as in Triton, the perspective is rigorously limited to the point of view of the protagonist, the nameless drifter who comes to be known as Kid. Kid, with his history of mental disorder and institutionalization, supplies a motivating framework that could enable us to explain - and explain away - the bizarre conditions under which the citizens of Bellona, the urban setting of Dhalgren, apparently live. These conditions include Bellona's inexplicable isolation from the rest of the country; its impossibly fluid and unstable topography, so that, for instance, an apartment located on one occasion only a few short blocks from the river, on another occasion is miles from it; the similar instability and variability with which time unfolds there; and its spectacularly implausible astronomical phenomena, including the apparition of two moons and a gigantic red sun hundreds of times larger than normal. Are all these implausi-bilities, and others like them, merely subjective delusions experienced by Kid alone? Kid himself, for one, assumes that the apparition of the giant red sun occurred in a dream, and attributes the disparities between his experiences and those of others to solipsism.
But Bellona really does exist under some special dispensation which affects all who remain there, not Kid alone. The astronomical miracles, for instance, are no solipsistic dreams but shared experiences, corroborated by witnesses other than Kid. And, the most persuasive evidence of all, there is at least one bizarrely implausible event which Kid himself fails to notice, but which the reader can reconstruct from the text. Members of a women's commune flee the city once and for all near the beginning of Kid's experiences in Bellona, and the same women flee again near the end of his experiences there. Blatantly self-contradictory, these events undermine the ontological stability of the represented world. Though he transmits these events to us, Kid misses the self-contradiction in them, which in a sense guarantees their objective, and not merely subjective, reality. Thus, we are compelled to abandon the epistemological explanation for the impossibilities of Dhalgren. Bellona is not a state of mind but a state of being; an ontological condition, not the symptoms of a psychological one.17
In Breakfast of Champions (1973), the imaginary science-fiction author Kilgore Trout meets his author, Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr. Vonnegut, who had already
.

-"• -

72 POSTMODERNIST FICTION used Trout in two previous novels (God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, 1965, and Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969), here sets his character free from the prison-house of fiction. (Actually, Vonnegut will subsequently renege on his manumission of
Trout, at least to the extent of reviving his name as a pseudonym for another imaginary writer in jailbird, 1979.) This encounter can serve as a parable for the argument I have been trying to make about the interaction between science fiction and postmodernist writing. Kilgore Trout is Vonnegut's self-caricature, Vonnegut imagining himself as the more or less "straight" science-fiction writer that he had started out to be in early novels like Player Piano (1952), The
Sirens of Titan (1959), and Cat's Cradle (1963). The Kurt Vonnegut who projects himself into the world of his novel in order to interview - and liberate! - his own character is practicing romantic irony, and thereby aligning himself with the postmodernist revival of romantic irony. So Trout, archetypal science-fiction writer, alter ego of the "early"
Vonnegul, meets the "later," postmodernist Vonnegut - what could be more symbolic? Particularly since the occurrence of such a meeting in itself exhibits the postmodernism of Breakfast of Champions. Spokesman of one of the genres of ontological poetics, Trout finds himself inside a text belonging to the other ontological genre - this is the relation of science fiction to postmodernist writing, in a nutshell.

5: A WORLD NEXT DOOR listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go
(e. e. cummings, "pity this busy monster, manunkind," 1944)
"You know what a miracle is. . . . another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm."
(Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966)
If you took a confrontation between worlds, such as you might find in a science-fiction novel, and could somehow fold or compress it to fit into the interior space of a normal-sized house, what would you have? Perhaps you would have
Julio Cortazar's "House Taken Over," from End of the Game (Final del juego, 1956), in which supernatural beings occupy the rear of a normal suburban house, forcing its middle-class, middle-aged inhabitants, a brother and sister, to retreat to the front half and seal off the back half behind a stout oak door: "another world's intrusion into this one." Or you might have Carlos Fuentes's "Aura" (1962), in which a young historian takes up residence in a Mexico City apartment occupied by an aged woman and her double, the "ghost" of her younger self: this world's intrusion into the other world. Or you might have Cortazar's "Bestiary" (from Bestiavio, 1951), or its slapstick version, "The Tiger
Lodgers" (from Cronopios y famas, 1962), or Richard Brautigan's "gothic western," The Hawkline Monster (1974), another slapstick version, or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (begun, 1928; completed, 1940) or
Cortazar's 62; Modelo para armor (62: A Model-Kit) (1968), not a house but a city taken over; and so on. Whatever the example, the ontological structure of the projected world is essentially the same in every case: a dual ontology, on one side our world of the normal and everyday, on the other side the next-door world of the paranormal or supernatural, and running between them the contested boundary separating the two worlds -Cortazar's stout oak door.
What you would have, in short, is a "Gothic enclosure," to use Rosemary

74 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Jackson's term;1 or, in other words, a haunted house. The implications should be clear: postmodernist fiction has close

affinities with the genre of the fantastic, much as it has affinities with the science-fiction genre, and it draws upon the fantastic for motifs and topoi much as it draws upon science fiction. It is able to draw upon the fantastic in this way because the fantastic genre, like science fiction and like postmodernist fiction itself, is governed by the ontological dominant. Hesitation
The fantastic: a genre of ontological poetics? This proposition requires some defending, for the consensus in contemporary poetics favors, on the contrary, an epistemological approach to fantastic writing.
The most influential version of this epistemological account is, of course, Tzvetan Todorov's.2 The fantastic, for
Todorov, is less a genre than a transient state of texts which actually belong to one of two adjacent genres: either the genre of the uncanny, in which apparently supernatural events are ultimately explained in terms of the laws of nature
(for instance, as deceptions or hallucinations); or that of the marvelous, in which supernatural events are ultimately accepted as such - where, in other words, the supernatural becomes the norm. An example of a fantastic narrative that ultimately resolves itself into the uncanny would be Foe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"; one that resolves itself into the marvelous would be any of H. P. Lovecraft's horror stories. A text belongs to the fantastic proper only as long as it hesitates between natural and supernatural explanations, between the uncanny and the marvelous. Hesitation, or
"epistemological uncertainty,"3 is thus the underlying principle of the fantastic according to Todorov.
Few texts manage to maintain this delicate balance to the end. One that does is James's Turn of the Screw (1898); another, I would argue, is Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (1966). But if this is so, then to push past this point of poised epistemological uncertainty - as Pynchon does in the transition from Lot 49 to Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and as other postmodernist writers do at various stages in their own careers - means to exit the fantastic genre and enter the marvelous. Postmodernist ontological fiction should, it would appear, lie by definition outside the fantastic genre proper. How, then, do 1 justify my claim of affinity between postmodernist fiction and the fantastic genre?
Todorov himself would be the first to acknowledge that there is something anomalous about the behavior of the fantastic in the twentieth century, from his point of view. The paradigm case is Kafka's story "Metamorphosis" (1916), a text characterized throughout by a most unfantastic tone of banality, and one in which none of the characters actually experiences any epistemological hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations.4 Stymied, Todorov is forced to conclude that Kafka's text heralds the disappearance of the fantastic in twentieth-century literature. This disappearance, he tells us, is a consequence of the disappearance of representation in contemporary writing, for the possibility of producing the fantastic effect is dependent upon the possibility of representing the real; without the latter, the former is out of

A W ORLD NEXT DOOR 75 the question. The fantastic "charge" has been absorbed into contemporary writing in general; all writing is "hesitant" now, although no writing can be hesitant in the fantastic mode any longer.5
But this is jumping to conclusions. For one thing, neither the absence of a hesitant character within the fictional world, nor the unfantastic banality of that world, need count against "Metamorphosis," for neither of these are necessary criteria of Todorov's fantastic, but merely optional ones.6 Granted that somebody must experience epistemological hesitation, otherwise there is no fantastic effect at all in Todorov's sense, then why not say that, in the absence of a character to do the hesitating, the reader himself or herself does it? - which indeed seems to be the case in
"Metamorphosis." As for the charge of banality-granted, the sort of fantastic narrative with which we are most familiar typically transpires in an atmosphere fraught with threat, terror, the unexpected; nevertheless, this is a historically contingent fact about the fantastic, and not a logical or structural necessity.
Finally, reports of the disappearance of representation in twentieth-century literature have been greatly exaggerated as have reports of the disappearance of fantastic writing, for that matter. Much postmodernist fiction continues to cast a
"shadow," to use Roland Barthes's expression: it continues to have "a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject."7 Indeed, it is precisely by preserving a bit of representation that postmodernist fiction can mount its challenge to representation. Todorov has failed to see that in the context of postmodernism the fantastic has been co-opted as one of a number of strategies of an ontological poetics that pluralizes the "real" and thus problematizes representation. The postmodernist fantastic can be seen as a sort of jiu-jitsu that uses representation itself to overthrow representation.
So the anomalies lie not in "Metamorphosis" or postmodernist fantastic fiction, but in Todorov's theory and its ability to handle such texts. Todorov's epistemological approach simply does not get to the bottom of the fantastic. That
"bottom," the deep structure of the fantastic, is, I would argue, ontological rather than epistemological. Rosemary
Jackson, taking her cue from Baxlin, has described the fantastic as dialogical, an interrogation of the "real" and of monological forms of realistic representation.8 The fantastic, in other words, involves a face-to-face confrontation between the possible (the "real") and the impossible, the normal and the paranormal. Another world penetrates or encroaches upon our world (as in "House Taken Over"), or some representative of our world penetrates an outpost of the other world, the world next door (as in "Aura"). Either way, this precipitates a confrontation between real-world norms (the laws of nature) and other-worldly, supernatural norms. Sometimes the confrontation is understated to the point of bland acquiescence, and the fantastic flattens out into that tone of unfantastic banality that Todorov found so problematic; at other times, as we shall see, it is strenuously agonistic.
The fantastic, by this analysis, can still be seen as a zone of hesitation, a frontier - not, however, a frontier between the uncanny and the marvelous, but between this world.and the world next door.9 Todorov is right, of course, that for a certain historical period, running roughly from the rise of the gothic
75

76

POSTMODERNIST FICTION

ovel in the eighteenth century to Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a structure of epistemological hesitation was superimposed upon the underlying dual ontological structure of the fantastic, naturalizing and "psychologizing" it. But in the years since "Metamorphosis," this epistemological structure has tended to evaporate, leaving behind it the ontological deep structure of the fantastic still intact. Hence the practice of an ontological poetics of the fantastic by postmodernist writers. Banality

"Acceptance of a world that is, willy-nilly, a given of experience": this is the ontological attitude that Alan Wilde has attributed to Barthelme and other postmodernist artists, and while it is far from the only attitude discernible among the postmodernists, it is certainly a characteristic one. Todorov found it in "Metamorphosis," and it is shared by many postmodernist fantastic texts whose tone is unfantastically banal and whose characters, like Kafka's Gregor Samsa and his family, are impossibly blase in the face of miraculous violations of natural law.
Thus, for example, in T. Coraghessan Boyle's story "Bloodfall" (from Descent of Man and Other Stories, 1980), blood begins inexplicably raining from the sky, yet the comfortable counterculture types who people this story seem unable to muster any reaction more vigorous than vague irritation. Similarly, in Cortazar's "Bestiary," the unpredictable presence of a tiger in the house is accepted by the family with casual matter-of-factness. Brautigan carries this matterof-factness even further in In Watermelon Sugar (1968). What does a little boy talk about with tigers - talking tigers, that is - who have just finished killing his parents? His arithmetic homework, of course:
"What do you want to know?" one of the tigers said.
"What's nine times nine?"
"Eighty-one," a tiger said.
"What's eight times eight?"
"Fifty-six," a tiger said.
I asked them half a dozen other questions: six times six, seven times four etc. I was having a lot of trouble with arithmetic. Finally the tigers got bored with my questions and told me to go away.10
"Finally the tigers got bored": it is easy to see how they might, but a good deal less easy to see why postmodernist fantastic writers like Brautigan, Cortazar, Boyle, or Kafka before them, should want to flatten out a fantastic situation in this way.
"We shall never be sufficiently amazed about this lack of amazement," Camus said of Kafka,11 and much the same could be said of "Bloodfall" or "Bestiary" or In Watermelon Sugar. For this is precisely the point: the characters' failure to be amazed by paranormal happenings serves to heighten our amazement. The rhetoric of contrastive banality, we might call this. Far from smothering or neutralizing the fantastic effect, as Todorov apparently believed it would, this "banalization" of the fantastic actually sharpens and

A W ORLD NEXT DOOR 77 intensifies the confrontation between the normal and paranormal. Normality in the hippie household of "Bloodfall" or on the country estate of "Bestiary"is exaggeratedly normal, normal to the point of boredom ("Finally the tigers got bored"); therefore any encroachment of the fantastic upon it will be felt as supremely disruptive, provoking the sharpest dialogue between normal and paranormal. This helps to explain the recurrence throughout the postmodernist fantastic of that hoary gothic locale, the haunted house: nothing is more domestic, more normal, than a middle-class house, so nothing is more disruptive than other-worldly agents penetrating and "taking over" a house. The rhetoric of contrastive banality is carried to its logical extreme in the worlds of texts such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children (1981) or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). The India of Midnight's Children is a world thoroughly pervaded by miracles - so thoroughly, indeed, thai the miraculous comes to appear routine.
Similarly, in Garcia Marquez's Macondo, supernatural beings and happenings, including ghosts and apparitions, supernatural plagues of insomnia or amnesia or dead birds, and so on, are all accepted quite matter-of-factly. But
Garcia Marquez goes a step further than Rushdie, for the Macondoans' reactions are not merely inappropriate or out of proportion to the strangeness of the events, they are actually inverted. On the one hand, the gypsies' flying carpet and
Remedios the Beauty's ascension into heaven are regarded as normal everyday occurrences; on the other hand, the natural phenomenon of ice and the all-too-explicable massacre of demonstrators appear implausible, paranormal, too fantastic to be believed. Thus, in Macondo not only does the fantastic become banal but, by a kind of chiasmus, the banal also becomes fantastic. Nevertheless, the dialogue between the normal and the paranormal still continues in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, although their relative positions have been reversed. One Hundred Years is still, in my sense, a fantastic text despite- or indeed because of- its banalization of the fantastic.
Resistance

Thus, even in those postmodernist fictions which seem to acquiesce in the fantastic, reducing it to banality, some resistance of normality against the paranormal continues to be felt - if not by any of the characters, then at least by the reader. As long as such resistance is present, the dialogue between the normal and the paranormal will continue - more than that, it will have been heightened, foregrounded, by the contrastive banality of the characters' bland non-reaction.
This is one of the means postmodernist writing uses to emphasize the ontological confrontation inherent in the fantastic. The other means is more direct: it involves dramatizing the confrontation, turning the resistance of normality against the paranormal into an agonistic struggle.
As always, Borges is ready with a parable. The purely ideal world of Tlon, in his story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," first manifests itself within our world through the appearance of other-worldly objects, piecemeal intrusions, but in the end it seems on the verge of supplanting our world entirely: "Contact with Tlon and the ways of Tlon have disintegrated this world."12

78 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
Borges' narrator, at the story's close, doubts whether our world has the will to resist usurpation by the ideal world.
The fantastic invasion proceeds on many fronts throughout postmodernist fiction. Italo Calvino's "invisible city" of
Theodora, having laboriously eliminated all its natural vermin - serpents, flies, termites, rats, and so on -succumbs to an invasion of fantastic fauna from its library - sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, unicorns. In Cortazar's 62:
Modelo para arinar, a visit by two characters from our world to the next-door parallel world called the City triggers a massive counterinvasion, as the real-world cities of Paris and Vienna are invaded and overwhelmed by the fantastic.
And in Fuentes' Terra nostra (1975) three brothers, identical triplets, serve as the shock-troops of a fantastic invasion.
Cast up on the shore of Philip ll's sixteenth-century Spain, each is an emissary from some other world beyond or next door to this one: one brother has just returned from discovering a new world peopled by the divinities of Aztec mythology; the second is a character from gothic fiction, offspring of a royal father and a she-wolf; and the third is an intertextual character, none other than Don Juan Tenorio. These brothers carry their incommensurable realities into the midst of Philip's closed and unitary Spain, shattering it into multiple, jostling, juxtaposed worlds, and opening the floodgates to an influx of the supernatural. Philip's palace of El Escorial is overrun by the fantastic and transformed into a gothic haunted castle; indeed, Spain itself becomes a gothic enclosure, a country invaded and "taken over" by the paranormal.
How are the denizens of our world to resist this fantastic invasion? In Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, when
Satan invades Moscow under the cover of a touring magic-show, Moscow officialdom attempts to organize resistance by constructing plausible rationalizations, explanatory frameworks within which to "naturalize" the satanic miracles.
The aim, in effect, is to convert the fantastic into what Todorov would call the uncanny. The topos of fantastic invasion and rationalistic resistance is most fully dramatized, however, in Angela Carter's Tlic Infernal Desire Machines of Dr
Hoffman (1972). Here Dr Hoffman wages a "guerilla war" against the everyday reality of the City by projecting into its midst disruptive unrealities, "concretised desires":
Since mirrors offer alternatives, the mirrors had all turned into fissures or crannies in the hitherto hard-edge world of here and now and through these fissures came slithering sideways all manner of amorphous spooks. And these spooks were Dr. Hoffman's guerillas, his soldiers in disguise who, though absolutely unreal, nevertheless, were.13
Dr Hoffman's assaults on reality include transforming the entire audience at a performance of The Magic Flute into peacocks - his "first disruptive coup" H -and blowing up the cathedral, which disintegrates into fireworks and music
(the Symphonic Fantastique, naturally). Resistance to Hoffman's invasive unreality is organized by the Minister of
Determination, an uncompromising empiricist who stands, one might say, for militant normality:
He believed the criterion of reality was that a thing was determinate and the identity of a thing lay only in the extent to which it resembled itself. . . .He
A W ORLD NEXT DOOR 79 believed that the city - which he took as a microcosm of the universe -contained a finite set of objects and a finite set of their combinations and therefore a list could be made of all possible distinct forms which were logically viable. These could be counted, organized into a conceptual framework and so form a kind of check list for the verification of all phenomena, instantly available by means of an information retrieval system.15
In short. Carter elaborates the ontological confrontation between this world and the "world next door" into a literal agonistic struggle, analogous to the science-fiction topos of the "war of the worlds."
From "worlds" to worlds

Thus postmodernist fiction co-opts the fantastic genre in much the same way that it has co-opted science fiction, developing the fantastic genre's inherent potential for ontological dialogue into a vehicle for a postmodernist ontological poetics. But this is not the only route by which postmodernism arrives at its own form of the fantastic. It also reaches the fantastic by literalizing a characteristic modernist metaphor. This is the metaphorical use of "world" in the sense of way of life, life-experience, or Weltanschauung - a familiar metaphorical extension of the literal ontological sense of "world" to embrace an epistemological, psychological, or sociological meaning.16
Stages in the literalization of this modernist metaphor of "world" can be traced to the early writings of Julio Cortazar.
The modernist metaphor can be found in Cortazar's novel Rayucla (Hopscotch, 1963), whose protagonist, Oliveira, is obsessed with the classic Berkeleyan (and late-modernist) epistemological problems of solipsism:
The most absurd thing about these lives we pretend to lead are the false contacts in them. Isolated orbits, from time to time two hands will shake, a five-minute chat, a day at the races, a night at the opera, a wake where everybody feels a little more united (and it's true, but then it's all over just when it's time for linking up). And all the same one lives convinced his friends are there, that contact does exist, that agreements or disagreements are profound and lasting.
How we all hate each other, without being aware that endearment is the current form of that hatred, and how the reason behind profound hatred is this excentration, the unbridgeable space between me and you, between this and that. All endearment is an ontological clawing.17
"Isolated orbits," "excentration": Cortazar's planetary imagery here develops in a particularly concrete way the metaphor of the "worlds" of individual experiences and outlooks. If Oliveira despairs at the falseness of most supposed contacts between life-worlds, Hopscotch shows us that true contact tends to be violent and disruptive. The novelist
Morelli, moving in the solipsistic world of his fictions, is "touched" by the outside world when he is knocked down by a car; Oliveira, newly returned to Buenos Aires from Paris,
80

80 POSTMODERNIST FICTION
' ees disruptively upon the calm and orderly shared world of Traveler
H Talita The erratic behavior provoked by Oliveira's intrusion reaches an a [> urd climax when Talita is made literally to walk the plank between the th'rd-floor windows of facing flats to deliver a package of yerba mate to
Oliveira. A consequence of trying to bridge the "unbridgeable gap between and you," this episode also, of course, dramatizes the idea of "bridging the gap" between solipsistic life-worlds.
As we move from Hopscotch to Cortazar's early short stories we see how he eoes about literalizing this metaphor of
"worlds." In Hopscotch, Oliveira and his lover La Mega are fascinated by aquariums, and one readily sees why.
Interposing a transparent but nevertheless impenetrable barrier between one order of being and another, aquariums serve as an analogy for the solipsistic isolation of one individual consciousness, one life-world, from another, even (or perhaps especially) in the case of lovers. Isabel, the adolescent heroine of "Bestiary," is similarly fascinated by the animal-life behind the glass wall of her ant-farm, in which she no doubt recognizes an analogy for her own alienation.18 But the more important analogy is with the "haunted house" in which she is spending the summer: just as the world of the ants is separated by a barrier from Isabel's world, so the house is partitioned between normal areas and off-limit areas "taken over" by the marauding tiger. Here, in other words, the confrontation between worlds is no longer a psychological and epistemological metaphor, but a literal ontological structure, a fantastic double ontology.
Finally, the narrator in the short story "Axolotl" (from Cortazar's End of the Game) also confronts an alien order of being - this time, that of the axolotl, a type of salamander - across the glass barrier of an aquarium tank. But here the ontological barrier ultimately fails to keep incommensurable orders of being separate: there is an exchange of identities, the narrator's consciousness becoming that of the axolotl- "what was his obsession is now an axolotl."19
Simultaneously with the breakdown of this boundary between worlds, the supernatural intrudes into the world of this story, and the metaphor of "worlds" becomes fantastically literal. This moment when metaphorical "worlds" merge, the world of the story itself shifting simultaneously into the fantastic mode, recurs throughout Cortazar's early short fiction: for instance in "The Distances" (from End of the Game), when a middle-class Argentine girl and a Budapest beggarwoman meet on a bridge and supernaturally exchange identities; or in "The Island at Noon" (from All Fires the
Fire, 1966), in which an airline steward, obsessed by a Greek island glimpsed from the plane window, ventures into the island-world, only to converge there with his own alter ego, with fatal results. In all these cases the collapse of world-boundaries is violent, disruptive, catastrophic, as it is in Hopscotch - except that here, unlike in Hopscotch, this violent dialogue of worlds is not a trope but literal, fantastic reality.
Displaced fantastic

Despite what Todorov says, then, the fantastic has not been wholly absorbed into contemporary writing in general; it is still recognizably present in its

A W ORLD NEXT DOOR 81 various postmodernist transformations. Nevertheless, Todorov does have a point: the fantastic no longer seems to be the exclusive property of texts which are identifiably fantastic in their ontological structure; a generalized fantastic effect or "charge" seems to be diffused throughout postmodernist writing, making its presence felt in displaced forms in texts that are not formally fantastic at all. For some notion of how this displacement and generalization of the fantastic comes about, we might consider two puzzling short texts: Maurice Blanchot's L'Arret de mart (1948), and
William Gass's "Order of Insects" (from In t/ic Heart of the Heart of the Country, 1968).
Of the two, L'Arret dc mart is the only one that might properly be considered fantastic on structural grounds. It contains a number of apparently supernatural events - a woman briefly revives from the dead at the narrator's bidding, then later returns to take demonic possession of his lover- for which rational, nonsupcrnatural explanations are also available. It hesitates, in short, between the natural and the supernatural, or between (in Todorov's terms) the uncanny and the marvelous. "Order of Insects," by contrast, need not be read as fantastic at all. In it the narrator, a middle-class
American housewife, finds herself succumbing, like Isabel in "Bestiary" or the narrator of "Axolotl," to an unwholesome fascination with an alien, inhuman order of being, the "world" (in the metaphorical sense) of the bugs that mysteriously turn up dead on her carpet in the morning. Nothing occurs that is supernatural or even very extraordinary, and the narrator's fixation on the "order of insects" can easily be explained away as the onset of a nervous breakdown.
And yet, and yet . . . The fantastic structure of L'Arret de mart is severely undermined by the vagueness and incoherence with which the narrator presents the situation and its possible explanations. By contrast with "classically" hesitant fantastic texts such as The Turn of the Screw or The Crying of Lot 49, neither of the explanatory frames, natural or supernatural, emerges here with any clarity. The narrator's language is maddeningly evasive, almost ungraspable, as he hints at dark secrets that he refuses to disclose (or does not himself know?). It looks as if hesitation has been transferred from ontological structure to language in this text. Conversely, the apparently nonfantastic "Order of Insects" retains some irreducible element of strangeness, some residue of the fantastic that cannot readily be explained away. Here, too, the locus of strangeness is the language - not excessively vague and elusive, as in the case of L'Arret de mart, but on the contrary excessively mannered and writerly. Where has such an apparently unexceptional woman acquired such an improbably heightened, self-conscious style?
Let us say, then, that the mysteries of these texts are mysteries of language, not of their fictional worlds. In that case, what would dispose the reader to continue to regard them as in some way related to the fantastic genre? For one thing, the presence in both texts of that most characteristic of fantastic topoi, the haunted house or "gothic enclosure" - oddly

transformed, to be sure, but nonetheless unmistakable. Throughout L'Arret de mart, domestic interiors are constantly being penetrated by aliens - not supernatural beings, but other characters. Natural as this may appear on the surface, each of these intrusions (I count nine of them in the course of an eighty-page text) accompanies or provokes aggressive or guilty or otherwise bizarre behavior on the part of the

82 POSTMODERNIST FICTION characters involved. The intruder's reasons, when he or she has an)'' arc invariably inadequate or absurd, and the one intruded upon bchaVcs as inexplicably as the intruder. No reader, I think, could fail to recognize in lncsc uncanny episodes variants on the venerable gothic motif of the "house la^en over."
The house in "Order of Insects" is also haunted, also "taken over": P one sense, by the mysterious (although perfectly natural) bugs; in another Sense' by the woman whose obsession with these bugs transforms her life ar* tnat of her family.
But the nature of this "haunting" cannot be under5'000* completely unless we take into account the context in which
"Or