include A Hall of Mirrors (1967), A Flag for Sunrise (1982) and Outerbridge Reach

(1992).

Among all the literary treatments of the Vietnam War, though, the one that stands out is a work of non-fiction, very much in the vein of the New Journalism, Dispatches (1977) by Michael Herr (1940– ). There have been many other nonfictional accounts, of course, notably A Rumor of War (1977) by Philip Caputo (1941– ) – which Caputo tersely described as ‘simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them’. But no account matches Dispatches in its narrative power, its ability to capture the brutally material yet dreamlike, hallucinatory quality of combat, its strangely unreal reality. Almost at once, Herr plunges the reader into the middle of the action: ‘Going out at night the medics gave you pills.’ You the reader are snatched into the world of ‘you’ the narrator and ‘you’ the ‘grunts’, the ordinary infantrymen who are at the centre of the action. The erratic rhythms of war dictate the rhythm of the narrative. ‘Sometimes everything stopped,’ Herr records; then, suddenly, everything will slip into hysterical, high-velocity action. Herr deploys direct address, pacy language, the syncopations of jazz, rock and pop to register a battle landscape that is also a Sixties spectacle. Here, the phrase ‘theatre of war’ takes on a series of haunting multiple meanings since this is a real conflict shot through with alternative realities: media events, bad drug trips, John Wayne movies and rock concerts. Real and basic enough, however, are the ‘shitty choices’ with which the ‘grunts’ are confronted. They can have ‘fear and motion’ or ‘fear and standstill’, Herr observes. ‘No preferred cut there, no way even to be clear about which was really worse, the wait or the delivery.’ Dispatches is a great non-fiction novel about war because, caught in its panoramic field of vision, is the insanity of combat as it was experienced by men teetering on a precipice, standing on the edge of death every moment of every day. And, in its dark way, the book even has its own heroes: those men themselves, the ‘grunts’, who somehow made their way through things – with the help of black humour, bleak cynicism and the belief that, in a world without logic, the only logical thing to do was to go with the flow, stick to the job and try to stay alive.

Language and Genre

Watching nothing: Postmodernity in prose

When Wolfe was cataloguing the forms of the contemporary American novel that, he believed, had failed in the primary duty to the real, he picked out one group for particular condemnation. They were the postmodernists: those who, Wolfe scornfully suggested, wrote about ‘The Prince of Alienation . . . sailing off to Lonesome Island on his Tarot boat with his back turned and his Timeless cape on, reeking of camphor balls’. For their part, some of those writers have returned the compliment. One of them, for example, clearly thinking of figures like Raymond Carver,

has referred to the school of ‘Post Alcoholic Blue-Collar Minimalist Hyperrealism’. The opposition is not universal, of course, nor even inevitable. On the contrary, most contemporary American novelists exploit the possibilities of both realism and postmodernism, and others besides, as they attempt to navigate the two rivers of American history described by Mailer. Nevertheless, the opposition has been there at times: between the New Journalists and the Fabulators, the dirty realists and the fantasists or systems builders. And it is mapped out clearly in the gap that separates Wolfe, Carver and the Capote of In Cold Blood from the wholehearted postmodernists of contemporary American writing: notably Thomas Pynchon (1937– ) and John Barth (1930– ). Pynchon is perhaps the most acclaimed and personally the most elusive of the postmodernists. Relatively little is known about him, apart from the fact that he studied at Cornell, for some of the time under Vladimir Nabokov (who did not remember him), and that he worked for a while for the Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle. He has chosen social invisibility, the last known photograph of him dating from the 1950s. Although this is almost certainly motivated by a desire to avoid the pitfalls of celebrity and the publicity machine, it has given the figure of Pynchon a certain alluring mystery. It also adds to the mystique his fiction projects, since that projection is of a world on the edge of apocalypse, threatened by a vast conspiracy directed by or maybe against an established power elite. This conspiracy, the intimation is, is decipherable through a series of arcane signs. The signs, however, require interpretation, decoding according to the rules of structural paranoia. And one of those rules is that structural paranoia is impossible to distinguish from clinical paranoia. So interpretation may be a symptom rather than a diagnosis. Pynchon’s novels are extraordinarily intricate webs, self-reflexive halls of mirrors, precisely because they replicate the world as text – a system of signs that must but cannot be interpreted. Each of his books creates a lexical space, a self-referential verbal system, that imitates the post-humanist space, steadily running down and losing energy, that all of us now occupy.

Pynchon has been his own fiercest critic. In an introductory essay to his early stories, Slow Learner (1984), he has said that his fundamental problem when he began writing was an inclination ‘to begin with a theme, symbol, or other unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it’. His books are certainly packed with ideas and esoteric references; and, whether one agrees with this self-criticism or not, it is clear that Pynchon laid down his intellectual cards early. The title of his first important short story is ‘Entropy’ (1960). It contains specific references to Henry Adams; and it follows carefully the Adams formulation, ‘Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man’. The use of entropy as a figure for civilization running down was to become structurally formative in his later fiction. So was his use of two kinds of characters, alternative central figures first sketched out here. The situation in ‘Entropy’ is simply and deliberately schematic. There is a downstairs and upstairs apartment. Downstairs, a character called Meatball Mulligan is holding a lease-breaking party, which moves gradually towards chaos and consequent torpor. Upstairs, another character, an intellectual

called Callisto, is trying to warm a freezing bird back to life. In his room he maintains a small hothouse jungle, referred to as a ‘Rousseau-like fantasy’. ‘Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave in the city’s chaos,’ the reader is told, ‘alien to the vagaries of the weather, national politics, of any civil disorder.’ The room is a fantasy, a dream of order, in which Callisto has ‘perfected its ecological balance’. But the room leaves him in paralysis, the dream does not work; the bird dies, and Callisto’s girlfriend, realizing that he is ‘helpless in the past’, smashes the window of their hermetically sealed retreat, breaking the shell surrounding his fantasy life. Meatball Mulligan, meanwhile, does what he can to stop his party ‘deteriorating into total chaos’ by tidying up, calming his guests, getting things mended.

‘Entropy’, in this way, mediates between binary opposites: which are the opposites of modern consciousness and culture. There is the pragmatist, active to the point of excess, doing what he can with the particular scene, working inside the chaos to mitigate it. And there is the theorist, passive to the point of paralysis, trying to shape and figure the cosmic process, standing outside as much as he can, constructing patterns for the chaos to explain it. Meatball is immersed, drowning in the riotous present; Callisto is imprisoned in the hermetically sealed glasshouse of the past. The text, which here and later is the dominant presence in Pynchon’s writing, is the interface between these two figures, these two systems or levels of experience. As such, it sketches out human alternatives in a multiverse where mind and matter are steadily heading for extinction. Or, it may be, the alternatives of hyperactivity and containment, the open and the closed, between which the individual consciousness constantly vacillates. The two are not, in any event, mutually exclusive. To an extent, what Pynchon does in his work is to give a decidedly postmodernist spin to perennial American preoccupations. In the tradition of the American jeremiad, he presents a culture, if not bound for heaven, then bent towards hell, its own form of apocalypse or heat death. And in the grain of American writing structured around the figures of the wilderness and the clearing, he develops a sometimes bewildering series of systems, human and non-human, built around the fundamental, formative principles of spatial openness and closure, immersion and separation, the flexible and the fixed, the signified and the signifier – a world that is a totality of things, data, and a world that is a totality of fact, signs.

In his first novel, V (1963), Pynchon returned to two formative characters recalling Callisto and Meatball in the shape of Hubert Stencil and Benny Profane. The book confirms its author’s sense of the modern world as an entropic wasteland, inhabited by men and women dedicated to the annihilation of all animatedness. It is bounded by dead landscapes, urban, mechanical, underground. A populous narrative, it is also packed with characters who are ciphers: seeing others and themselves not as people but as things, objects, they lapse into roles, masquerade and cliché. Blown along the mean streets, and even meaner sewers, of this story, Benny Profane is a schlemiel, the suffering absurd comedian of Jewish lore. A faded copy of a picaro, he drifts through life in such enterprises as hunting alligators underneath New York City; it is there, in fact, in the darkness and oblivion of the

sewers, that he finds his greatest comfort and peace. Hubert Stencil, on the other hand, searches the world for V., the mysterious female spy and anarchist who is by turns Venus, Virgin, Void and seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Stencil appears to be on a significant quest. Described as ‘a century’s child’ and born in 1901, he is pursuing the remnants of the Virgin in the world of the Dynamo. His father, a former British spy, has left behind enigmatic clues pointing to a vast conspiracy in modern history. So, whereas Profane lives in a world of sightlessness without signs or discernible patterns, Stencil enters a world of elusive signs and apparent patterns, all gravitating towards an absent presence, the lady V. His quest is for a fulcrum identity. In a sense, he is given an outline identity by his search, since he thinks of himself as ‘quite purely He who looks for V. (and whatever impersonations that might involve)’. It is also for the identity of modern times. Using the oblique strategy of ‘attack and avoid’, Stencil moves through many of the major events of the twentieth century, seeking to recover the master plot, the meanings of modern history and this book. The only meaning found, however, is the erasure of meaning: the emptying of a significant human history and its sacrifice to mechanism and mass. The purposiveness of Stencil, it turns out, and the purposelessness of Profane are both forms of ‘yo-yoing’; movement, often violent oscillation, bereft of all significance except the elemental one of postponing inanimatedness.

At the heart of V, in short, is a paradox characteristic of all Pynchon’s work. Its enormous historical bulk and vast social fabric is so constructed that it may be deconstructed, so complexly created that it may be doubted then decreated. The deconstruction is there, centrally, in the controlling sign of V. herself, ‘a remarkably scattered concept’ as we are told. A human figure, passing through many stages and identities, she comes down to Stencil’s final dream of her as a plasticated technological object. A shifting letter attached to a historical process of progressive deanimation, the human figure is translated into a figure of speech. The other two compositional principles of the novel, Stencil and Profane, may apparently be opposed, just as Callisto and Meatball are, as the creator of patterns and the man of contingency, the constructive and the deconstructive, he who seeks and he who floats. They are joined, however, not only in a failure of significance but a failure of identity. Stencil and Profane inhabit a textual world that simultaneously exhausts and drains meaning: there is a proliferation of data, in excess of possible systems and in denial of any need, any compulsion to explain. Not only that, they are created only to be decreated, just as that textual world is – and in the same terms as that elusive non-character, V. herself. Their names are parodies, their words and gestures gamesome or stereotypical, their physical bearing a series of masks. As such, they offer playful variations on a definition of life supplied during the novel: as ‘a successive rejection of personalities’. In the simplest sense, V is not a book without a subject or a plot. Full of characters (of a sort) and events, it exploits a number of narrative genres to keep the action lively and the attention engaged: among them the mystery story, the tale of the quest and science fiction. But in another, more elemental sense, it is. Not only a text about indeterminacy, V is

also an indeterminate text: its significance, its subject is the lack, the impossibility of one.

Almost the last reported words of V. are, ‘How pleasant to watch Nothing’. In his subsequent fiction, Pynchon has continued this watching, and searching, the boundlessness of ‘Nothing’ in a variety of fictional guises. In his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the main character, Oedipa Maas, learns that her onetime lover, Pierce Inverarity, has made her an executor of his estate. Now he is dead, she sets out to investigate Inverarity’s property: an investigation that leads to the discovery of what she takes to be a conspiratorial underground communications system dating back to the sixteenth century. Following the clues, she finally believes she will solve the enigma through a mysterious bidder keen to buy Inverarity’s stamp collection. But the novel ends with the enigma unsolved, the plot and its meaning unresolved, as Oedipa awaits the crying out at the auction of the relevant lot number 49. The subject, and its significance, still wait to be located. So do they in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Pynchon’s third novel. Set in the closing years of the Second World War, the story here, a complex web of plots and counterplots, involves a Nazi Lieutenant Weissman, disguised as a mysterious Captain Blicero, and an American sleuth, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, while V-2 rockets rain down on London. Weissman, it appears, was once the lover of V.: in this elaborately intertextual world, Pynchon’s texts echo his own as well as the texts of others. The gravitations of mood are characteristic: from black humour to lyricism to science fiction to fantasy. So is the feeling the reader experiences, while reading this book, that he or she is encountering not so much different levels of meaning or reality as different planes in fictive space, with each plane in its shadow box proving to be a false bottom, in an evidently infinite regression. So also, finally, is the suspicion of conspiracy: Gravity’s Rainbow explores the possibility that, as one character puts it, ‘war was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted’.

In this fictive maze, the V-2 rocket assumes an elusive significance. It answers ‘to a number of shapes in the dreams of those who touch it – in combat, in tunnel, or on paper’; each rocket, the reader learns, ‘will know its intended and hunt him . . . shining and pointed in the sky at his back . . . rushing in, rushing closer’. The intimations of a conspiratorial system, here ‘dictated . . . by the needs of technology’, is wedded, in a way characteristic of Pynchon, to a centrally, crucially indeterminate sign. Like V., the V-2 rocket is as compelling as it is mysterious, as beautiful as it is dangerous, constantly dissolving into nothingness, deadly. Compared to a rainbow arched downwards, as if by a force of gravity that is dragging humankind to its death, the rocket initiates the same need to find meaning as V. did. Similarly, it offers an excess of meaning, an excess that is an evacuation. Since Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon has moved forwards to the landscape of the 1980s and, through ample reminiscence, the 1960s in Vineland (1990). Then, he has moved back to the early republic in Mason and Dixon (1997), to the days when men like the two famous surveyors mentioned in the title were trying to establish boundaries in the boundlessness of America, in order to appropriate it. America is

memorably described in this novel as ‘a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true’. It is the realm, the landscape that inhabits all Pynchon’s fiction: the realm of measurelessness and dream, the indicative and the subjunctive, the closed and appropriated and the open. And it is typical of the author that he should weave his speculations on legends, the rich ‘Rubbish-Tip’ of dreams (‘Does Britannia when she sleeps, dream?’ one character asks, ‘Is America her dream?’), into a densely populated social fabric and a meditation on historical decline. The fictive energy of Pynchon seems inexhaustible, not least because it careers with tireless energy between contraries. But to an extent, what drives it is summed up in one simple question one central character asks the other in this novel: ‘Good Christ, Dixon. What are we about?’

The narrator of John Barth’s second novel, The End of the Road (1958), begins the story he is to tell with a sly parody of the opening sentence of Moby-Dick: ‘In a sense, I am Jake Horner.’ That use of language to set up distances is characteristic. The distances are several: between reader and character (Horner is already asking us to look at him as only ‘in a sense’ what he names himself ), between the narrator and character (who only ‘in a sense’ form a negotiable, nameable identity) – above all, between the world inside the text and the world outside. Barth has proved to be his own best critic and commentator precisely because his is a fiction that continually backs up on itself, subverting any temptation to link that fiction to reality by commenting on form. His texts and characters are constantly commenting on themselves, or inviting or insisting on such comment. His fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), for instance, begins with fictive letters of introduction by several editors that suggest, among other things, that the author is ‘unhealthy, embittered, desperately unpleasant, perhaps masturbative, perhaps alcoholic or insane, if not a suicide’. Or then, again, that he is a mysterious unknown, or even a computer. Besides creating multiple dubieties, making the book a series of masks, the letters both liberate the author from the authority of authorship and advise the reader as to how to read this fiction. Which is, as fiction: a series of signs that have no reference to objects outside themselves, and whose value lies in their intrinsic relationship, the play between them. ‘This author’, one editor complains, ‘has maintained . . . that language is the matter of his books’; ‘he turns his back on what is the case, rejects the familiar for the amazing, embraces artifice and extravagance; washing his hands of the search for Truth, he calls himself . . . “doorman of the Muses’ Fancy-house” ’.

‘What is the case’ is a sly allusion to a famous remark made by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘The world is all that is the case.’ The world, Wittgenstein argues, is the sum of what we take to be true and believe that others take to be true. We construct our world from the inside out; and the crucial weapon in those configurations, those patternings of things, is the system of language we have at our disposal. We cannot, in fact, get outside of the prisonhouse of our language; all we can do, when we draw a picture of our world, is draw the bars. Inadvertently, one of the fictive editors reveals the project that is at the heart of all Barth’s fiction, and all other work that is sometimes called postmodern and sometimes metafiction.

Everything is only ‘in a sense’ this or that it is named. The self is the sum of its rules, of its locutions; the world is the sum of our constructions of it; any apparent essence, any ‘natural’ being or feeling or presence, is really a social construct, a sign of culture trying to wear the mask of nature (and ‘nature’ is a cultural convention, too). And the text refers to nothing but itself. The ultimate postmodern protagonist is perhaps Echo in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Barth’s first collection of stories, who ‘becomes no more than her voice’. That, together with the self-referential nature of his language and the self-reflexive character of his fiction, may make Barth’s work sound abstract to the point of being ossified. It is not, on the whole, because the voice is vital: his novels and stories are as packed with voices, energetic, comically ebullient, often ironic, as Pynchon’s are with masks and figures. Not only that, in his hands, the prisonhouse of language does become a funhouse, a place for play and passionate virtuosity.

As for voices: these range from the tones of the narrator of Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera (1956), recalling his experiences on the day in 1937 when he debates suicide, to the multiple voices of his fifth novel, Letters (1979). As its title implies, Letters is an unusual development of epistolary fiction. In it, seven more or less parallel narratives are revealed through correspondence written by seven characters from Barth’s earlier fiction, including the author himself as just another imaginary figure. The intricate story that emerges is a characteristic enquiry into enclosure and liberation: the patterns into which all seven characters have previously been set, the degree of freedom they may possibly discover and possess. Typical of Barth’s voices, that of Jake Horner, in turn, is notable for its sometimes playful, sometimes angry, irony, its humorous elusiveness. Horner is a man so aware of the plural possibilities of existence, the ‘game’ involved in living, that he often finds himself incapable of reacting, acting out a role. He can always find a reason for doing something, or its complete opposite. And the action of The End of the Road concerns a time when, on the advice of his doctor, he attempts to remedy this by becoming a college teacher, to ‘teach the rules. Teach the truth about grammar’, the vocabulary of life. The novel circles around a disastrous travesty of a love triangle, when Jake becomes briefly involved with the wife of a fellow teacher who does believe life can be contained within one version of it – who, as Jake marvels, is ‘always sure of his ground’. Yet that triangular affair, and its dreadful outcome, is less in the foreground than Jake’s sustained sense of the absence of identity, his or that of others, outside of roles, or the absence of action or meaning apart from performance. He and we the readers are constantly being reminded that this is a story, one possible version of the world among an infinite number. What gives the novel its power is the tricky movements of Jake’s voice, always prone to tell us something then confide, ‘in other senses, of course, I don’t believe this at all’. And what gives it its passion is the vacillation, the constant movement Jake’s awareness of his predicament instigates, between play and paralysis. The games enforced in The End of the Road, with their painful consequences, conclude, in fact, with Jake leaving the college and taking a taxi cab to the airport. Jake’s last word is his ambiguous instruction to the driver, as he gets into the taxi: ‘terminal’.

Jake seems to step out of life and motion as he steps into the cab and out of the narrative. Life equals language equals story. That is the formula animating Barth’s work. To cease to narrate is to die: a point that Barth makes more or less explicit in his use of the figure of Scheherezade in the opening story in his collection Chimera (1972). Scheherezade was, of course, the figure in Arabian folktale who stayed alive simply by telling stories. Telling stories, in turn, spins into fantasy. Barth is fond of creating worlds within worlds, using parody and pastiche, verbal and generic play to produce multiple, layered simulacra: that is, copies, imitations of something for which the original never existed. It could and can never exist, because there was and is no reality prior to the imitation, to tales and telling. So, in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Barth takes up the author of the 1708 Maryland poem with the same title, Ebenezer Cooke, about whom virtually nothing is known. He then uses Cooke as the hero of a lusty picaresque tale that is a pastiche of history, conventional historical fiction, autobiography and much else besides. The Sot-Weed Factor also raises the issue of how history and identity are known, by slyly eliding them with all kinds of literary ‘lies’ from poetry to tall tales and braggadocio to mythology. Giles Goat-Boy, after its initial framing in the debate over authorship, continues this subversion through similarly comic devices. The whole modern world is conceived of as a university campus, controlled by a computer that is able to run itself and tyrannize people. The book is, in part, a satirical allegory of the Cold War, since it is divided into East and West. It is also a characteristically layered fiction, since it parodies several genres (myth, allegory, the quest and so on) and a variety of texts (including the Bible, Don Quixote and Ulysses). Above all, it translates the earth into an artifice. The world, the intimation is, is a fable, a structure created by language and, as such, comparable to the artificial structures created by the author of this novel (whoever he or it may be) and by all his characters (who practise their several disciplines, their different roles and subject vocabularies). Works written since Giles Goat-Boy, such as Letters, Sabbatical: A Romance (1982), The Tidewater Tales (1987) and The Last Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor (1991), continue Barth’s passionate play with various forms, the numerous ways in which we tell ourselves stories to live them and live in them. For him, that play is at once imperative and inspiring, a form of necessity and a liberation, something co-extensive with breathing. Some of his characters, sometimes, may yearn, as one of them puts it, ‘to give up language altogether’. But that, as Barth feels and indicates, is to ‘relapse into numbness’, to ‘float voiceless in the wash of time like an amphora in the sea’. It may seem attractive occasionally, but to evacuate voice is to erase identity, place and presence. To abandon language, and its difficulties, is to surrender to death.

Two writers who have sketched out very different possibilities for postmodernism, and, in doing so, created distinctive fictive landscapes, are Donald Barthelme (1931– 89) and John Hawkes (1925–98). The distances between them, despite their common allegiance to work of art as object, an opaque system of language, rather than transparent account of the world, are suggested by two remarks. ‘Fragments are the only forms I trust,’ observes the narrator in one of the stories in Barthelme’s

second collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). ‘The need is to maintain the truth of the fractured picture,’ Hawkes insisted in an early interview. Hawkes is interested in creating strange, phantasmagoric landscapes, dreamscapes in a way, that evoke, always in their own terms, what he has called ‘the enormities of ugliness and potential failure within ourselves and in the world around us’, ‘our potential for violence and absurdity as well as for graceful action’. Barthelme is just as committed as Hawkes is to the displacement of the writer from the work. He is also committed to the displacement of the work from the world, so that the work becomes simply, as Barthelme puts it, ‘something that is there, like a rock or a refrigerator’. But, whereas Hawkes’s fiction has a quality of nightmare, entropic stillness, Barthelme’s stories and novels are witty, formally elegant, slyly commenting on themselves as artefacts. Hawkes began his writing, he said, with ‘something immediately and intensely visual – a room, a few figures’. Then, eschewing interest in plot, character, setting and theme, he aimed for what he called ‘totality of vision or structure’. Using corresponding events, recurring images and actions, and a prose style that seems to freeze things in time and retard readerly attention, he created landscapes of evil and decay. As his characters traverse these landscapes almost somnambulistically, their and our feelings vacillate between fear, dread, and the bleakly, blackly humorous. Barthelme, however, begins his writing in the verbal rather than the visual. ‘Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!’ complains the title character in Barthelme’s first novel, Snow White (1967). Barthelme obliges with a verbal collage, full of odd juxtapositions and unpredictable swerves: a linguistic equivalent of Pop Art, in a way, which picks up the shards and fragments, the detritus of modern life, and gives them a quality of surprise. ‘We like books that have a lot of dreck in them,’ admits the narrator of that same novel. And it is precisely the dreck of contemporary conversation, from the commonest clichés to intellectual chatter, that is picked up in his books and turned all to strangeness by omitting or fragmenting the habitual arrangements and separations by which we seek to retain a feeling of control over our environment. Waste is turned to magic in his work: but the sense of magic is also accompanied by unease. Barthelme’s fiction constantly fluctuates between immersion in trash culture and the impulse to evade, an impulse that finds its emotional issue in irony, disappointment and a free-floating nostalgia. Everything doubles back on itself, nothing is not placed in implicit, ironic question marks in this fiction. Nevertheless, what Barthelme captures in his work along with what one of his characters has called ‘the ongoing circus of the mind’ is the sadness of the city: the suspicion that, after all, it may not be that easy to go with the junk flow – or to be what Barthelme has called himself, ‘a student of surfaces’.

‘Do you like the story so far?’ asks the narrator of Snow White about halfway through. He then helpfully provides the reader with an opportunity to answer: ‘Yes ( ) No ( )’. This is followed by a further fourteen questions for the reader to fill in his or her preferences. Quite apart from reminding us that this book is, after all, an artefact, an object, the product of play and planning, the questionnaire offers a slyly parodic comment on the currently fashionable ideas of the work of art as

open and the reader as co-producer rather than a consumer of the text. But the last question sounds a slightly melancholic note. ‘In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? ( ),’ the narrator asks. ‘Two sets of shoulders? ( ) Three? ( ).’ Any world has its stringencies, its absences, restricting the room for magic and play. The absence of several shoulders is not the most pressing of these, perhaps. But how else would Barthelme intimate these limits and lacks but in a manner that subverts, pokes fun at his own intimation? Barthelme is resistant to message. One of his stories, ‘The Balloon’, in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, even toys with the absurdity of meaning. An enormous balloon appears over the city. People argue over its significance. Some manage to ‘write messages on the surface’. Mainly what people enjoy, though, is that it is ‘not limited and defined’. It is delightfully random, amorphous, floating free above ‘the grid of precise, rectangular pathways’ beneath it. And ‘this ability of the balloon to shift its shape, to change’, the reader learns, ‘was very pleasing, especially to people whose lives were rather rigidly patterned’. Clearly, the balloon is a paradigm of the art object, the kind of free-form product, plastic and ephemeral, that Barthelme is interested in making: resistant to understanding, interpretation or reflection. But, in its own odd, jokey way, as it floats free over the citizens, it generates a ruefulness, a wry regret that carries over into Barthelme’s other fictions. ‘I am in the wrong time,’ Snow White reflects. ‘How does the concept of “something better” arise?’ the narrator of that same novel asks, ‘what does it look like, this something better?’ It is noticeable that the sportive fantasy and verbal trickery of Barthelme are often at their best when he is playing with loss and longing: ‘Emily Dickinson, why have you left me and gone?’ goes a passage in Snow White, ‘ah ah ah ah ah.’ Readers can certainly walk around a Barthelme verbal object, seeing in it above all a model of how to free up language and feeling from stale associations. But what they are likely to catch, as they walk around, is a borderline melancholia. So, when Snow White writes a poem, the seven men who live with her have no doubt as to its theme. ‘The theme is loss, we take it,’ they ask caustically. Her reply is simple: ‘I have not been able to imagine anything better.’

Of John Hawkes’s 1961 novel, The Lime Twig, his fellow novelist Flannery O’Connor has observed that ‘You suffer it like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you wait to escape from but can’t.’ That is true of all his fiction. His nominal subjects range far and wide, many of them, he has said, acquired from the newspapers or from other writers. So, for instance, The Cannibal (1949) explores the horrors of devastation in postwar Germany. The Lime Twig presents the psychopathic effects on a man of life during and after the blitz on London. Travesty (1967) is the monologue of a Frenchman that serves as a suicide note while he prepares to kill his daughter, his friend and himself. Virginia (1982) concerns a girl who has experienced two previous lives in France, both marked by strange sexual experience. And Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985) is about a boy confronted with hunting and sexuality during a trip to Alaska. What characterizes all these and his other novels, however, is the vision of a dreamscape fractured by an appalling yet almost ritualized violence. Hawkes has said that he

wanted, from the first, to create, ‘a totally new and necessary fictional landscape’. ‘My writing depends on absolute detachment,’ he has explained, ‘and the unfamiliar or invented landscape helps me to achieve and maintain that detachment . . . I want to try to create a world, not represent one.’ What he is after is objectification, not representation. As Hawkes puts it, his aim is ‘to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world’, so as to achieve ‘a formalising of our deepest urgencies’. His characters come and go across his frozen landscapes as if caught in a strange sort of repetition compulsion. They are not so much imitations of life as figures from an exhibition, waxwork curios from some subliminal house of horror. And the violence they inevitably encounter is as vivid and distant as violence seen through soundproof glass. In The Cannibal, the primary act of violent negation is signalled by the controlling metaphor of the book, which also gives it its title. Although the main setting is Germany after the war, it reaches back to 1914 and forwards to a future repetition of Nazi control, which will return the entire nation to an insane asylum. The dominant presence, and narrator, is Zizendorf, the leader of the Nazis. Set in contrast to him is a young girl, Selvaggia, who stands at a window, in innocent, impotent terror, watching the evil that men do. By the end, she is ‘wildeyed from watching the night and the birth of the Nation’. Zizendorf orders her to draw the blinds and sleep. The last sentence of the book gives us her response: ‘She did as she was told.’ The return to an evidently endless sleep, a nightmare of violent repression, seems inevitable, since there is no intimation, in this or any other book by Hawkes, that things can change or get better. Just as character and setting appear paralysed, so events are peculiarly without progressions. Hawkes so rearranges the fractured elements in his fictive picture that the temporal dimension drains away into a spatial patterning of detail. And he so contrives his prose, into complex sequences of baroque fragments, that the reader too is held back, left in suspense. We are doomed to watch the world Hawkes creates just as Selvaggia does, with helpless, horrified wonder. Or, to return to that remark of O’Connor, we have to suffer it, like a dream.

Two other writers associated with postmodernism, Thomas Berger (1924– ) and John Gardner (1933–82), could hardly be more different from Barthelme and Hawkes, or from one another. Which goes to show, perhaps, that postmodernist is almost as capacious a term as realist. A prolific writer, Berger has produced a series of comic novels about his non-Jewish schlemiel hero Carlo Reinhart (Crazy in Berlin [1958], Reinhart in Love [1962], Vital Parts [1970], Reinhart’s Women

[1981] ). He has written parodies of the detective novel (Who is Teddy Villanova? [1977] ) and Arthurian romance (Arthur Rex [1978] ), replayed Oresteia (Ossie’s Story [1990] ) and Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crews [1994] ) for modern times, and engaged in satirical fables about, for instance, a man with the power to become invisible (Being Invisible [1987] ). Unquestionably his best novel, however, is Little Big Man (1964). The narrator of this novel, Jack Crabb, the Little Big Man, is by his own account 111 years old. He claims to be the sole survivor of Custer’s last stand, to have knocked out Wyatt Earp, and to have been in a shootout with ‘Wild

Bill’ Hickock. Drawing on the traditions of frontier humour and the tall tale, Berger endows Crabb with a voice that is vernacular and vital, and a view of life that is shifty, amoral and unillusioned. ‘Most of all troubles comes from having standards,’ he declares. So, he careers between roles and between cultures with ‘a brainy opportunism’, as it is called by the prissy amateur historian, Ralph Fielding Snell, who frames the novel with a foreword and epilogue. Snell admits doubt as to whether Crabb is ‘the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions’. From one point of view, however, that hardly matters. Either way, Snell and Berger intimate, Crabb is heroic: providing, either by deed or word, ‘an image of human vitality holding its own in the world amid the surprises of unplanned coincidence’. Set in a classic American past though it is, Little Big Man is about the typical protean man of postmodern fiction, for whom there are no settled certainties, no sure codes, and roles are picked up or discarded like a set of clothes. There are no absolutes, no essences; that classic past and its myths are themselves demystified, mocked and parodied. The only constant here is the constant of self-fashioning: a self exploratory, in flux, that casually acts or voices itself into being – that makes itself up as it goes along.

As the title of one of his critical works, On Moral Fiction (1978), suggests, Gardner was nominally far from such moral relativism. ‘Art leads, it doesn’t follow,’ he said in an interview in 1977. ‘Art doesn’t imitate life, art makes people do things,’ he added; ‘if we celebrate bad values in our arts, we’re going to have a bad society; if we celebrate values which make you healthier, which make life better, we’re going to have a better world.’ Consistent with this, he produced in his 1976 novel October Light two interwoven stories concerned with the nihilism and alienation of contemporary life. One circles around popular culture: television, with its ‘endless simpering advertising’ and ‘its monstrously obscene games of greed’. The other focuses on high culture: the literature of absurdism and entropy with its assumption that ‘life . . . was a boring novel’. What the protagonist in both stories has to learn is a deeply traditional lesson: the difference between false art and real life. He has to return from the false worlds of mass culture and amoral literature to the true world of relationship; and, finally, he does. Gardner’s finest novel, Grendel (1971), however, does not entirely conform to his own expressed views about art. The book tells the story of the Old English epic poem Beowulf from the point of view of the monster. Gardner himself was a medievalist scholar; and here he plays with medieval notions of psychology and numerological symbolism as he sets the materialism, nihilism and sheer brutishness of Grendel against heroic Christianity. What emerges from this extraordinary tale is the revelation that Grendel is indispensable to the civilizing forces of science and the arts. He is the brute existence on which humans depend for their definition of themselves. ‘You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are,’ a sympathetic dragon tells Grendel. ‘You are mankind, or man’s condition: inseparable as the mountainclimber and the mountain.’ A source of power for humanity, apparently, Grendel is also the source of power for the book. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he may lose

but the author seems secretly to be on his side. Edgy, unnatural, unreliable, Grendel is a typically postmodern narrator. Constantly dramatizing or changing himself, his strong, seductive voice leaves the reader without sure ground. ‘I cry, and hug myself, and laugh,’ he declares, ‘letting out salt tears, he he! till I fall down and gasping and sobbing. (It’s mostly fake.).’ Gardner may have been suspicious of postmodernism and keen to give his work a moral dimension. Ironically, his finest character and narrator is irredeemably, necessarily amoral. And his best work is his best precisely because it has a postmodern edge.

The range of possibilities charted by writers as otherwise different as Gardner and Berger, Hawkes and Barthelme suggests that postmodernism is probably best seen not as a unified movement but as a cluster or constellation of motives, a generic field. It is a field that is itself marked by scepticism about specific generic types; in its disposition to parody, ironic inversion and metafictional insistence on its own modes of significance – and, in particular, language – it is the absolute reverse of the stable. On the contrary, the one constant in postmodernism may be instability and, beyond that, the capacity to challenge the stability of all that is signified, all that is supposedly real. This master paradox of postmodernism, that it is constant only in its inconstancy, was handily summarized by Ronald Sukenick (1932– ) in The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (1969). There, he insisted that ‘the contemporary’ lived in ‘the world of post-realism’ and had ‘to start from scratch’. ‘Reality doesn’t exist,’ Sukenick argued. ‘God was the omnipresent author, but he died: now no one knows the plot.’ So, living in an age of epistemological redefinition, an urgently felt need to redraw the mental maps of the world, postmodernist writers thrive on the imperative of being aberrant, arbitrary – above all, different. And the loose, baggy monster of postmodernism can include such diverse radical experimentalists, aside from writers already mentioned and Sukenick himself (Up [1968], 98.6 [1975], Blown Away [1986] ), as Nicholson Baker (1940– ) (The Mezzanine [1988], Vox [1992], The Everlasting Story of Wory [1998] ), William H. Gass (Omensetter’s Luck), Steve Katz (1935– ) (The Exaggerations of Peter Prince [1968], Moving Parts [1977] ), Clarence Major (1936– ) (All-Night Visions [1969], No [1973] ), Stephen Schneck (1944– ) (The Nightclerk [1965] ), Gilbert Sorrentino (1929– ) (Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things [1971], Flawless Play Restored [1975], Aberration of Starlight [1980] ) and Rudolph Wurlitzer (1938– ) (Nog [1969] ). For that matter, it can incorporate Joseph McElroy (1930– ), whose Lookout Cartridge (1974) conveys a sense of formal systems functioning in a void and one of whose novels, Plus (1977), is about a mind suspended in space. And Robert Coover, who in his finest novel, The Public Burning (1977), transfers actual events, including the Eisenhower years and the execution of the Rosenbergs for spying, to the figurative realm. The execution of the Rosenbergs is turned into a public burning in Times Square, New York. Times Square itself is presented not just as a public meeting place but as a source of a history, since it is here the records of the New York Times are created. Coover goes on to analyse how historical record is made, in a bold imaginative gesture which shows that fiction does not only aid fact in the rehearsal of the past; it can also, and does, draw it into

subjective reality. In doing so, he offers what is in effect a postmodernist meditation on history and on the urgencies, the origins, of story.

John Barth once suggested that the way postmodernism showed its distinctly American face was through its ‘cheerful nihilism’, its comic and parodic texture. That is, of course, too sweeping. But across from radical experimentalists like McElroy and Coover, there are those many postmodern writers who have chosen to pursue an absurd humour, a dark comedy that deconstructs and demystifies all it surveys. Again, apart from those already mentioned, such writers include J. P. Donleavy (1926– ) (The Ginger Man [1955], The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B [1968] ) and Terry Southern (1926–2000) (Candy (1958), The Magic Christian [1959], Blue Movie [1970] ), whose predilection for protean, amoral characters has got them into trouble with the censorship laws. Notably, there is also John Kennedy Toole (1937–69) who, in his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), mocked everything to do with his region, the South, and his hometown of New Orleans, making his hero, Ignatius Reilly, sound sometimes like a Southern traditionalist on speed. And there is Stanley Elkin (1930–95), a novelist and storyteller who, during the course of a long career, produced satirical, surreal versions of the success story (A Bad Man [1967], The Franchiser [1976] ), a picaresque tale about adventures in the media trade (The Dick Gibson Show [1971] ) and comic fantasies about death (The Living End [1979] ) and reincarnation (George Mills [1982] ).

Postmodernism as black humour or brave fantasy tends to merge here with contemporary confessional forms of male liberationists like John Irving (1942– ) (The World According to Garp [1978], The Hotel New Hampshire [1981], A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], A Son of the Circus [1994] ) and female liberationists like Erica Jong (Fear of Flying, Fear of Fifty [1994] ) and Lisa Alther (1944– ) (Kinflicks [1976], Original Sin [1981] ). At the other edge, postmodernism as radical, metafictional experiment is more inclined to reveal its international relations. Experiment is, of course, an American tradition; and the subversion of fictional forms, in particular, goes back at least as far in American literature as Herman Melville. But the specific terms in which postmodernists have interrogated word and thing, language and its connection to reality, show the impact and sometimes the influence of writers from outside America. Like other cultural movements, more so than most, postmodernism is on one level an international phenomenon. And the sense postmodernist writers have of living after realism is one shared with, say, European poststructuralist critics, writers of le nouveau roman like Michel Butor and Raymond Queneau, and Latin American magic realists. This international dimension is foregrounded in the work of those postmodern novelists whose own story is one of crossings between national boundaries, especially the European and American. The fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, born in Russia, spending long years in Europe before continuing his exile in America, is a case in point. So are the narrative experiments of the French American Raymond Federman (1928– ), whose Take It Or Leave It (1976) announces itself as ‘an exaggerated second hand tale to be read aloud either standing or sitting’, and the books of the Polish-born, Russian-reared

Jerzy Kosinski (1933–91) from The Painted Bird (1965) through Being There (1971) and Blind Date (1977) to his last novel, The Hermit of 69th Street (1988).

Another instance of international origins promoting international connections is the writing of Walter Abish (1931– ). Abish was born in Austria and reared in China before taking United States citizenship. His first novel, Alphabetical Africa (1974), invites a comparison with le nouveau roman in its stern attention to verbal structure. Every word of the first chapter begins with the letter A, the second with A or B, the third with A, B or C, and so on. At Z, the process reverses, the final chapter beginning every word again with the letter A. Abish’s second novel, How German It Is (1984), suggests other international relations. A postmodern political thriller, it concerns an American of German parentage who returns to a German town to investigate his father’s wartime death and to seek an answer to his own question as to how German he is. The international, influential presences here are several. They include American writers like Pynchon and French ones like Butor, who have used popular genres to break and undercut them. More deeply, persuasively, though, they are other European writers such as Italo Calvino and Peter Handke. As in the work of Calvino and Handke, there is a bleak detachment, a flat materialism to How German It Is, the presentation of a world of signs without meanings under which dark meanings may hide. A writer like Abish, as he explores the crisis of relations between history and form and pursues the task of unlocking some hidden code that might interpret those relations, shows how postmodernism

–like any other movement in American literature, at some point – has to be perceived within a frame of reference other than the American. It has to be, not only because postmodernist writers skip across national boundaries with such calculated and consummate skill – and not only because some of them, at least, cannot or will not shake off their own international origins. It is also, and more fundamentally, because – as it has been the peculiar fate of postmodernism to emphasize

–no boundary of any kind is impermeable. No frame of reference, including the national one, is adequate, absolute or terminal.

The actuality of words: Postmodern poetry

Internationalism is also a marked feature of the postmodernist impulse in poetry, especially that form of postmodernism known as language poetry. The antecedents of the language poets, for instance, include not only American writers like the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons, Louis Zukovsky, Laura Riding and John Ashbery, but also the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake (1939) and the Russian futurist writer Velimir Khlebnikov, inventor of zaum or ‘transrational language’. Reflecting the belief of one of the leading language poets, Charles Bernstein (1950– ), that ‘poetry, like philosophy, may be involved with the investigation of phenomena (events, objects, selves) and human knowledge of them’, those antecedents and influences include a number of continental philosophers as well. Notable among these, from an earlier generation, are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Contemporary European poststructuralists have been just as

important to the language poets, because they see their project as continuous with that of ideology critiques and literary theory. To quote Bernstein again, as they see it ‘poetics is the extension of poetry by other means’. And, in constructing a poetic and a poetry, the language poets have turned to such figures as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. What that construction involves is suggested by one poet who became a point of origin for language poets and, to an extent, became one of them, Clark Coolidge (1939– ). ‘What I think is that you start with the materials,’ Coolidge explained. ‘You start with the matter, not with rules.’ ‘I was really trying to work with the words, look at the words, try to use all their qualities,’ he added of his own work in a collection like Polaroid (1975). ‘There’s no question of meaning, in the sense of explaining and understanding the poem. Hopefully, it’s a unique object, not just an object.’

Language poetry is as various in its manifestations as contemporary sculpture or photography, but Coolidge is alerting the reader here to one aim all language poets do have in common. Instead of employing language as a transparent window on experience, the language poet attends to the material nature of words. He or she insists on the materiality of the medium used and its distance from whatever we are inclined to think of as natural or immediate. An analogy might be made with the sculptor who draws attention to the stone with which he or she is working, its weight, texture and cleavage. A more specific comparison might be made with the famous, frequently reproduced paintings by Magritte of a pipe, accompanied by the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). In common with Magritte, or that sculptor, the language poet questions the status of the work being created, and forces us to question that question. Privileging technique, resisting any temptation to present the poem as a window on experience, the language poet builds up a mosaic structure by means of seemingly unrelated sentences and sentence fragments. This progression of non-sequiturs frustrates the reader’s expectations for linear development at the same time as it discloses a more complete world of reference. The stress is laid on production rather than ease of consumption, on the use of artifice in such a way as to force open given forms and break habitual patterns of attention. Another poet who has served as a point of origin for the language poets, Jackson Maclow (1922– ), has conceded that ‘no language is really ‘nonreferential’. ‘If it’s language, it consists of signs, and all signs point to what they signify.’ However, he has argued, that hardly detracts from the core aim of language poetry: which, as Maclow puts it, is to centre the focus ‘on linguistic details and the relation among them, rather than on what they might “point to” ’. The language poet resists all inclination to totalize or account for diversity in literary productions – or in experience – by the imposition of unifying schemes or rigid constructs. By interrogating, subverting or even exaggerating the effects of formal logic and linguistic structures on our thinking, he or she demonstrates how those structures can have a determining influence on what we see, how we behave

– and, not least, who we think we are.

Along with this emphasis on the materiality of the signifier, what language poets also have in common is the project of restoring the reader as a co-producer of the

text. That follows inevitably from their resistance to closure. ‘The text calls upon the reader to be actively involved in the process of constructing its meaning,’ as Bernstein has put it. ‘The text formally involves the process of response/interpretation and in doing so makes the reader aware of herself or himself as producer as well as consumer of meaning.’ A poem is not about something, a paraphraseable narrative, symbolic nexus or theme. It is the actuality of words. And those words call the reader to attention and action. They also call the reader, as Bernstein expresses it, ‘to a reconsideration and a remaking of the habits, automatisms, conventions, beliefs through which, and only through which, we see and interpret the world’. For some language poets, at least, the strenuous attention to opacity and openness has clear political implications. ‘The question is always what is the meaning of this language practice,’ Bernstein has insisted; ‘what values does it propagate; to what degree does it encourage an understanding, a visibility, of its own values or to what degree does it repress that awareness?’ ‘Language control = thought control = reality control’ for Bernstein, and for the more politically inclined language poets like Bob Perelman (1947– ) and Bruce Andrews (1948– ). So part of their task, as they see it, is to ‘bring into visibility as chosen instruments of power what is taken as neutral or given’: to expose those language practices that distribute meaning and authority, that underpin the system of assumptions, the series of naturalized collusions and constraints on which their society operates. What such writers are after, as Andrews has it, is ‘a conception of writing as politics, not writing about politics’: poetry that interrogates language habits to discover whether their social function is liberating or repressive. Perelman has put it more satirically: ‘Question: How do you tell a language from a dialect? Answer: A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.’ Works that foreground the way that language works, the sense here is, reveal the weaponry that gives it social weight. More generally, they show language as a field of ideological contention, not a monolithic system: as a series of constructed practices, neither innocent nor inevitable, but a symptom and agent of power.

Even those language poets who do not share this political edge or intention tend to privilege the marginal over the mainstream. This is if only because the limits of structure and ideology come into view most noticeably at the point where structure and ideology break down: where, as in language poems, instead of disappearing into the unstated assumptions of an activity, they appear all too clearly as evidence. So, one of the finest language poets, Susan Howe (1937– ) has explained that her poetic project is to piece together and ‘lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted – inarticulate’. They include the numerous, unnamed victims of economic depression and world war or women slighted by history. The Europe of Trusts (1990) addresses the anonymous victims. The Liberties (1980) is one among many of Howe’s works to consider marginal female figures: in it, Esther Johnson, known to history as Jonathan Swift’s Stella, takes centre stage. No longer Swift’s creature, she speaks with words of her own, Swift himself appearing only as a ghost. Similarly, Lyn Hejinian (1941– ) has constructed a discontinuous narrative of her own childhood in My Life (1987). ‘Repetition, and the rewriting

that repetition becomes, make a perpetual beginning,’ Hejinian has written. True to that formula, and to her belief that ‘language itself is never in a state of rest’, Hejinian creates autobiography through a mosaic of discontinuous sentences and glimpses, in which the title of one section of the book-length sequence finds its way into the text of another. The result is fugitive and absorbing, producing a jumpiness of word and mood that Hejinian has described as ‘so natural to my “real life” experience’ as to ‘seem inevitable – and “true” ’. In her own way, with disjunction of surface and voice, Hejinian uses her own slighted, elusive life experience to pursue the central project of language poetry: which, as Bernstein once expressed it, is ‘to cast doubt on each and every “natural” construction of reality’.

Historically, that project began around the early 1970s. In 1971, the first issue of This appeared, co-founded by Robert Grenier (1941– ) and Barrett Watten (1948– ). ‘I HATE SPEECH,’ Grenier declared in an essay in that issue. It was his particular aim, in saying this, and the aim of This generally, to reject a poetics based on the assumptions of speech: to raise the issue of reference and to suggest that any new direction would require poets to look at what a poem is actually made of – language itself. The resistance sounded here, to the simple, seemingly obvious idea that words should derive from speech and refer to things, was followed up on the West Coast, in San Francisco, by writers like Bob Perelman, Watten, Hejinian and Carla Harryman (1952– ). From 1977 to 1981, for instance, Perelman founded and curated the San Francisco Talk Series, then edited Writing/ Talks (1985), a collection of talks and writings from the series. The ‘talks’ consisted of a presentation by the poet, during which the audience responded with their own thoughts. Then, on the East Coast, in and around New York City, a number of writers converged: among them, Bernstein, Andrews and Ray Di Palma. From that convergence came L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the first American journal of poetics by and for poets. Its editors said that they were ‘emphasizing a spectrum of writing that places attention primarily on language’. They were, they explained, intent on ‘ways of making meaning’ and taking nothing for granted, ‘neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, or subject matter’. Their journal lasted from 1981 until 1984, dedicated throughout that period to its mission of ‘repossessing the word’. It was followed, in 1984, by an extensive anthology of pieces from the different issues. Then, two years later, two further anthologies appeared, ‘Language’ Poetries, edited by Douglas Messerli, and In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry, edited by Ron Silliman (1946– ). In the American Tree was particularly groundbreaking and influential. Silliman, himself an accomplished language poet, explained in his introductory essay that the issues debated in and by language poetry were ‘not to be underestimated’. They included ‘the nature of reality’, ‘the nature of the individual’, ‘the function of language in the constitution of either realm’. The debate, Silliman added, was ‘situated within the larger question of what, in the last part of the twentieth century, it means to be human’. With that, language poetry boldly announced itself as a leading register of its times, and among the most important of contemporary American poetic forms.

What it means to be human covers a lot of territory, of course, even if the meanings are delimited to one or two decades. Beyond a commitment to writing as rescue, repossessing the word and restoring the reader, language poets shoot off in a number of directions. Robert Grenier, for example, shows an interest in visual as well as sonic design. He has published three books in special formats. Sentences (1978) consists of five hundred poems on small index cards. CAMBRIDGE M’ASS (1979) is two hundred and sixty-five poems on a large poster. What I Believe Transpiration/Transpiring Minnesota (1989) is composed of photocopied pages, most of which are hand-written poems ‘drawn’ from the other side of the paper, as if the poet were writing with his left hand. Barrett Watten, whose books include Frame: 1971–1990 (1994), is a more formidable writer, a radical formalist who calls for ‘resistance between writer and reader’. Quoting with approval De Kooning’s remark, ‘I keep painting until I’ve painted myself out of the picture’, Watten pursues ‘anarchy of production’, verbal forms so disjunctive and detached that their author is conspicuous only by his absence. An understanding of the political implications of language poetry has led Bob Perelman to a satirical view of consumer society, and a search for the strange and unsettling. In books like Braille (1975), Captive Audience (1988) and Virtual Reality (1993), he has tried to answer his own call for a ‘defamiliarisation’ of poetry by removing it from the comforting orbit of the oral. ‘Unlike the oral poet,’ Perelman has said, ‘who is reinforcing what the community already knows, the didactic writer will always have something new, and, possibly, unacceptable to get across.’ And, to that extent, he clearly sees his own poetic project as didactic. Similarly political in intent, Bruce Andrews has declared his allegiance to a radical poetic practice, involving what he terms ‘an infinitising, a wide-open exuberance, a perpetual motion machine, a transgression’. ‘Are “make it new” and “make it even” compatible?’ one poem, ‘Species Means Guilt’ (1992), asks. And his cunning machines made out of words seem always to be debating the possibility of an answer.

‘Language is, first of all, a political question.’ That annotation, made in one of the poems of Ron Silliman, would appear to align him with Andrews or Perelman. It does, in a way. But Silliman is much more of an experimentalist, an eccentric inventor of forms. His ongoing long poem, The Alphabet (1983– ), as its title implies, will eventually grow to twenty-six volumes. His prose poem Tjanting (1981) is written according to the Fibunacci number sequence, the result being that the number of sentences in each paragraph equals the number of sentences in the previous two paragraphs. And his prose poems, in particular, feature what Silliman calls the ‘new sentence’: a form intended to frustrate the conventions, and the closure, of both the poetic line and ordinary prose, as a series of discrete units are accumulated into a kind of disjunctive verbal mosaic that recalls the writing of Gertrude Stein. Stein is also an influential presence in the poetry of Michael Davidson (1944– ), whose work, gathered together in volumes like Summer Letters (1977) and Post Hue (1996), maps out what he has termed ‘the space occupied by chiasmus’: that is, the rift or rupture between the world and its articulations in language. Both Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, on the other hand, gravitate

towards forms that, as Harryman has put it, ‘distribute narrative rather than deny it’. Hejinian does this not only in that abruptly self-reflexive version of autobiography she calls My Life, but also in, say, Oxata: A Short Russian Novel (1991), a series of ‘sonnets’ through which she creates a portrait of post-Soviet Russia. And Harryman does it in her often humorously erotic poetry, collected in such volumes as The Middle (1983) and In the Mode of (1991). A writer from a slightly earlier generation than most language poets, Hannah Weiner (1928–97) mixed techniques learned from language poetry with more random elements, automatic writing, in her attempt to capture her own psychic experiences (Clairvoyant Journal [1978] ). A writer from a slightly younger one, Diane Ward (1956– ) owes a debt to Virginia Woolf. In the poems collected in, say, Relation (1989) and Imaginary Movie (1992), she uses form to generate mood. In her own words, she puts ‘things’, ‘two disparate objects or events’ ‘side by side’, ‘thereby creating a third feeling (state) of perception’. What all these poets, despite all their differences and diversions, have in common is revealed by two other writers associated with the language movement, Ray Di Palma (1943– ) (whose works include The Jukebox of Memnon [1988] ) and Bernadette Mayer (1945– ) (a selection of whose poetry is to be found in A Bernadette Mayer Reader [1992] ). ‘When and where there / is no such thing /’ writes Di Palma, ‘the thought walked.’ ‘The best obfuscation’, Mayer observes, ‘bewilders old meanings while reflecting or imitating or creating a structure of beauty that we know.’ There have been few more formidable expressions of a common impulse, a shared motivation, than these two: few more memorable expressions, that is, of that energetic, enigmatic relation between thing and thought and language that drives all workers in the field of language poetry to write.

Nobody shares that impulse more than those three writers who are, arguably, the leading exponents of language poetry: Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer (1943– ) and Susan Howe. Along with being the leading theorist of language poetry, Bernstein is an accomplished poet, his numerous collections of poetry including Poetic Justice (1979), Islets/Irritations (1983) and Rough Trades (1991). Sometimes, the two vocations – which are nevertheless linked for Bernstein – come together. Artifice of Absorption (1987), for example, is an essay in verse that makes a core distinction between absorption and impermeability in literature. The one, suggests Bernstein, connotes all that is ‘rhapsodic, spellbinding, / mesmerising, hypnotic, total, riveting, / enthralling’, the other everything that is to do with ‘artifice, boredom, / exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, digression, interruptive, transgressive’. Absorptive writing pursues the realistic, continuous and transparent; impermeable or anti-absorptive writing favours artifice, discontinuity, the opaque. It is the impermeable, clearly, that Bernstein prefers. ‘In my poems, I / frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable / elements,’ he declares, ‘digressions & / interruptions, as part of a technological arsenal.’ His aim, Bernstein writes, is for the reader ‘to be actively involved in the process of constructing its meaning’, and, as far as both reader and writer are concerned, ‘to wake / us from the hypnosis of absorption’. In Artifice of Absorption, Bernstein cites his poem ‘The Klupzy Girl’ as an example of his poetic technique. With typically antic humour, he takes an

all-American klutz of both French and British descent (since she bears a close resemblance to Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’) as his demonic muse here. He then uses a rich mix of styles, redundancies, clichés, awkward or irrelevant constructions to create what is called, towards the end of the poem, ‘a manic / state of careless grace’. The artifice is foregrounded by various cinematic devices: cutting and shifting focus, unanticipated breaks, disturbing and distorted perspective. It is this disjunctive rate of change that dictates the poem’s rhythm, as it lurches from statements so bald that they border on parody (‘Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference: / it brings you to your senses’), through disconnected snatches of conversation, phrases that might be overheard in the street, comments that float unanchored. Art, Bernstein has insisted, must be extraordinary, aberrant, abnormal. ‘It partakes of both good and ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable,’ as he puts it. ‘Or rather, it is within its mass that these oppositions are able to sketch themselves out.’ Bernstein pursues an oppositional writing: and, in ‘The Klupzy Girl’, he manages just that – with a style that distorts and a strange, disturbing lady as his muse and the poem’s occasion.

Michael Palmer has said that he is ‘a little bit outside’ ‘the way many of the so-called language poets work’ because the way ‘I inhabit language, or language inhabits me, is in a sense more traditional’. Certainly, his poetry betrays other debts, to the Black Mountain and New York poets in particular; and, in his critical writings, he has admitted the inevitability of narrative. But his work is fundamentally of the language movement because of his core commitment to what he calls ‘radical discontinuities of surface and voice’ – to a poetry that resists and interrogates. He is interested, he has said, in a poetry that ‘will not stand as a kind of decor in one’s life, not the kind of thing for hammock and lemonade, where at the end everything is in resolution’. He is also concerned with the political implications of style and form: his work questions the status quo on the rhetorical level, supplying a critique of ‘the discourses of power by undermining assumptions about meaning and univocality’. He may be more interested in story than, say, Bernstein is. However, as Palmer himself has pointed out, story, as well as autobiography, always involves a measure of concealment. ‘What is taken as a sign of openness – conventional narrative order –’, he has said, ‘may stand for concealment.’ Conversely, ‘what are understood generally as signs of withholding or evasion – ellipsis, periphrases, etc. – may from another point of view stand for disclosure’. So, in a work like Notes for Echo Lake (1981), he uses devices of concealment, like writing about himself in the third person, in order to disclose. But, even while disclosing, there is a gnomic, hermetic quality to his writing that issues from a radical scepticism: a fundamental uncertainty about, as he has it, ‘whether I know whatever I know’. Palmer is a prolific poet. His many collections include Plan of the City O (1971), First Figure (1984) and At Passage (1995). Nearly all of his work is marked by a search for an evidence of order in the sound and structure of language and proof of life, love in the steadiness of companionship. As the third of his ‘Six Hermetic Songs’, dedicated to Robert Duncan, expresses it: ‘Send me my dictionary / Write how you are.’

Structurally, the poetry of Susan Howe often registers her early training in the visual arts. Some of her work treats words like fragments in a collage. Others experiment with the significations that emerge from the irregular distribution of letters on the page. The lines, ‘Do not come down the ladder / iforI / have eaten / ita / way’, from ‘White Foolscap: Book of Cordelia’ (1983), distribute sense, a layer of potential meaning, on a specifically visual level. Howe grew up during the Second World War, however, and, as a young woman, came under the influence of Charles Olson. Both experiences ignited her interest in an often silenced, often slighted history. ‘The deaths of millions of people in Europe and Asia’, Howe has said, ‘prevented me from ever being able to believe history is only a series of justifications, or that tragedy and savagery can be theorised away.’ Her many books of poetry include The Western Borders (1976), Defenestration of Prague (1983), Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (1987) and The Nonconformist’s Memorial

(1993). And many of her poems, gathered here and elsewhere, show her extraordinary ability to transform historical documents, the archive and the chronicle, into an elusive, elliptical yet deeply personal drama: in which, say, the ancient Britain of Lear, the New England of the Indian wars or the New England of Thoreau enter the consciousness of a woman living and working at the end of the American century, and beyond. Unlike Olson, Howe has never constructed a central persona. Instead, her poems contain lines and phrases that just will not come together in a unifying speech, form or episode. Lines may pass with one or two others, then typically drift off by themselves or into new, temporary arrangements. A charged lyricism fuses with a critical examination of authorial voice as, using pun and word play, Howe calls meaning itself into question. Figures hover at the edge of memory and history, in her work, and on the borderlines of speech. They seize our attention momentarily, then they are gone. ‘For we are language Lost / in language,’ one poem, ‘Speeches at the Barriers’, declares, ‘Wind sweeps over the wheat / mistmask on woods.’ ‘Sleet whips the page / flying leaves and fugitive,’ that same poem continues later; ‘Earth of ancient ballad / earth as thought of the sea / water’s edge to say goodbye.’ A feeling of dissolution marks out these lines, a perpetual erasing inherent in the endless ebb and flow of human language, consciousness and history. It is a characteristic of her poetry that makes Howe one of the most exceptional, extraordinary poets of her generation.

Signs and scenes of crime, science fiction and fantasy

Language poetry remains very much the literature of a small community, one that began by being alternative but that later – as, for instance, many language poets took up posts at universities – became mainstream and, within limits, influential. As postmodernists, though, language poets are inclined to resist the traditional division of culture into minority and mass, elite and popular. In their turn, writers of detective stories, thrillers, hardboiled and science fiction have shown or encouraged the same resistance over fifty or more years, producing work so powerful or pervasive in its influence that it has helped erase the line of demarcation between

genre fiction and literature. As far as hardboiled and detective tales are concerned, the period from roughly the 1940s to the 1960s was notable for the development of paperback original series and mystery magazines. Publishers like Fawcett, Avon and Dell produced brand-new, easy-to-read novels in a convenient pocket-size format. They adapted the pulp formula of the 1930s and 1940s for postwar American society, with all its changes in lifestyle, its looser attitudes to sex and violence, and its newfound sophistication. They paid writers reasonably well, with initial payment in advance of royalties that were up to four times as much as hardcover publishers were paying. They relied on printing hundreds of thousands of copies of many titles to reach every possible outlet and buyer. And they were committed to rapid turnover: very few of these paperback originals ever got beyond an initial printing unless they were extraordinarily popular. In just the same way as the pulp magazines had engineered the decline of dime novels, so these paperbacks brought about the end of the pulps. All major pulp titles were finished by the middle of the 1950s. The new setting for shorter fiction was the digest-size detective story or thriller magazine. These magazines, too, were phenomenally successful until the late 1960s: one of the first, for example, Manhunt, sold half a million copies on its first issue.

Two very different writers who benefited from these new means of literary production and distribution were Mickey Spillane (1918– ) and Jim Thompson (1906–76). Spillane leaped to success in 1947, when he created the private eye Mike Hammer for I, the Jury. Hammer is a veteran of the Second World War who sets out to avenge the murder of an old army buddy who once saved his life. Assisted by his loyal, sexy secretary, Velda, he vows to let nothing stand in his way. And, at the climax of the story, he shoots his naked fiancée in the abdomen when he finds out that she has killed his buddy and five others. An untrammelled id who is constantly exploding in messianic rage – against intellectuals and homosexuals, or anyone who oppresses the ‘little guy’ from the Mafia to the Communist Party – Hammer continued his pursuit of vigilante justice in a series of novels whose titles suggest their tone and tenor: My Gun is Quick (1950), Vengeance Is Mine (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1952). The unrestrained violence, which approaches sadism at times, and overt sexuality register a loosening up of popular attitudes and tastes after the war. The right-wing politics, and the paranoia about ‘reds’ in particular, reflects the Cold War atmosphere in which the books were written. Altogether, there may be doubts about the value of the Hammer novels, with their fantasies of irresistible male potency (women are constantly ripping off their clothes in the presence of the great detective), but there can be no doubt about their impact and influence.

Jim Thompson is a much darker and more impressive writer than Spillane, although he also shows a taste for psychopathic violence. His noir fiction contains few detectives. What it has in abundance, however, is unreliable narrators and protagonists whose mental state constantly verges on and often topples over into psychosis. The condition they inhabit is measured by the scatological mathematics of Thompson’s 1959 novel South of Heaven: ‘shit and three are nine . . . screw and two is four and frig makes ten.’ Typical is the narrator of The Killer Inside Me

(1952), Deputy Lou Ford. Ford pretends to be a simple-minded hick, when in fact he is a ruthless, sadistic killer, responsible for the murders he is supposed to be investigating. The world this smiling villain inhabits is a bleak one, where human nature festers, corrupts and disrupts. The narration is sly, fooling the reader much of the time as well as the other characters. And the narrative tone, darkening the brutal, gaudy landscapes the Deputy negotiates, is cold, comic and caustic, exposing what looks like an almost universal hypocrisy. Nick Corey, the narrator of Pop. 1280 (1964), is a twin to Ford: another polite, even amusing law officer who happens to be murderously corrupt. Typically for Thompson, the story Corey tells bypasses the tenets of good taste, with monstrosities of action and narration that serve as a harsh abrasive, a corrective to all our assumptions about human dignity. ‘You might think it wasn’t real nice to kick a dying man,’ Corey says to the reader, after he has done just that. ‘Maybe it wasn’t. But I’d been wanting to kick him for a long time; and it just never seemed safe until now.’ In other novels, Thompson introduces us to con artists (The Grifters [1963] ), lowlife criminals (The Getaway [1959] ), and people cracking up in a figurative prison of tough talk, ‘lowdown’ behaviour and smalltown scheming (After Dark, My Sweet [1955] ). The family offers no refuge here; it is riven with incestuous desires and violence. In King Blood (1954), for instance, the protagonist is aroused in the act of beating his mother. People are on their own in a world of ‘sickness’, trying to cope while maybe knowing that, as Lou Ford puts it, ‘all of us started the game with a crooked cue’. The task of coping is inevitably a hopeless one. Nowhere is this more evident than in two of Thompson’s most troubling fictions, A Hell of a Woman (1984) and Savage Night (1953). So, the narrator of A Hell of a Woman copes in the end by going insane. The ‘I’ of the story splits into two voices: ‘I laughed and laughed when I read that story. I felt safe. from what? not the thing I needed to be safe from.’ The narrator then throws himself out the window. And Savage Night has an equally chilling finale. The narrator this time is a diminutive hit man, Charlie ‘Little’ Bigger. Holed up in an isolated house with a woman sent to spy on him, he and his companion Ruthie slip into madness. Ruthie attacks and chops him to pieces with an axe. And Bigger leaves us in a condition, a plight, that somehow epitomizes all Thompson’s major characters. ‘The darkness and myself. Everything else was gone,’ Bigger confides, as he drags what is left of him through the basement. ‘Death was here,’ he concludes. ‘And he smelled good.’

There were several notable generic developments in crime and hardboiled fiction during the three decades or so following the Second World War. These included the emergence of police procedural fiction and a kind of crime novel in which motivation rather than detection was central. The police procedural form, in which the role of protagonist is given to an entire unit of police officers, was introduced by Lawrence Treat (1903–98). However, the writer who has achieved most marked success with it is Evan Hunter (1926– ), working under the name of Ed McBain, who has produced more than forty novels set in the Eighty-seventh Precinct of a thinly disguised New York City. The detectiveless crime novel, in turn, became the particular forte of Patricia Highsmith (1921–95). Her first novel, Strangers on a

Train (1950), set the pattern and established her claustrophobic, irrational, perilous fictive world. Here, and in other novels like This Sweet Sickness (1960), strangers are emotionally tied to each other through acts of violence. People are twinned, find themselves with secret sharers of their lives, in relationships that vacillate between love and hatred. Highsmith seems especially interested in acts of doubling and disguise that expose the darker side of life, and the murkier depths of human personality. This is especially so in her most popular books, about the pleasant, totally amoral young American Tom Ripley. The first and probably the best of these, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), offers a sardonic variation on The Ambassadors by Henry James, as Ripley, despatched to rescue a wealthy young man from the cultural fleshpots of Europe, ends up by murdering him and assuming his identity. There are no puzzles in Highsmith’s work, justice is rarely done in them, and the emphasis is generally on the perpetrator of the crime rather than the victim or detector. What there is, besides this shift of emphasis, is a disconcerting dissolution of the boundaries that serve to keep society safe and ourselves comfortable: between reality and fantasy, the permissible and the forbidden, good and evil.

Other women writers besides Highsmith began to explore the possibilities of crime and mystery at the same time as her: among them Leigh Brackett (1915–78) and Helen Nielsen (1918–2002). Other male writers, in turn, added a subtler shading and tone to the generic field of mystery writing. Rex Stout (1886–1975), for instance, introduced an eccentric armchair detective called Nero Wolfe in Fer- de-Lance (1934). Joined with his sidekick, a variation on the hardboiled private eye named Archie Goodwin, the two became the most successful team in American mystery fiction. Equally successful, and more interesting, were the protagonists in the novels of John D. Macdonald (1916–86) and Ross Macdonald (1915–83). John Macdonald produced a series of twenty-one novels with Travis McGee as their hero. An unofficial private eye, and an intelligent, honest con man who swindles the swindlers, McGee is a character of some subtlety and complexity. The abuses that money and power may engender fuel the plots of all the novels in which he appears; and John Macdonald uses the narrative spine of the mystery to examine serious social issues, notably pollution and the destruction of the environment (Bright Orange for the Shroud [1965], The Turquoise Lament [1973] ). Of Ross Macdonald, Eudora Welty once wrote that he had produced ‘the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American’. His main protagonist, Lew Archer, first appeared in The Moving Target (1949). At first, Archer was a relatively stereotypical version of the hardboiled hero. Even in this first book, however, he reflected his creator’s conviction that nothing is clear-cut. ‘Evil isn’t so simple,’ Archer explains here. ‘Everybody has it in him, and whether it comes out in his actions depends on a number of things. Environment, opportunity, economic pressure, a piece of bad luck, a wrong friend.’ Gradually, though, Archer evolved into a prototypical figure of the Vietnam years and after. ‘Not the usual peeper’, as one of the characters observes in The Far Side of the Dollar (1965), Archer becomes more reflective and coolly perceptive. More interested in listening than detecting, in understanding rather than meting out justice, in books like The Drowning Pool

(1950), The Galton Case (1959) and The Underground Man (1971), Archer discovers the roots of present traumas in past betrayals. He exposes the schemes and self-deception concealed below the comfortable surfaces and plastic moralities of the marketplace. And he shows how the older generation have disturbed and disoriented the younger. As a quiet moral centre rather than a focus of action, Archer reflects the view, expressed in Sleeping Beauty (1973), that ‘every witness has his own way of creeping up on truth’. Interrogation becomes less a matter of intimidation, more a chance for the participant to unburden knowledge, to dig up a buried past and perhaps come to terms with it. That past, invariably, has a social dimension: since what, on a deeper level, these stories dig up involves the sins of the founding fathers being visited upon the sons and daughters – the dreams of a nation turned irrevocably sour.

From the 1970s, novels written in the general generic field of crime and mystery have largely been published first in hardback. The paperback original and mystery magazine died out. And those short stories in the field that were still published appeared mostly in non-specialist magazines or crime anthologies. What has been particularly remarkable about this period is the rapid growth in the use of the genre to address serious issues. The drugs epidemic, urban violence, racism, homelessness, AIDS, sexual abuse, the issue of abortion: these and many other problems endemic in contemporary society have been confronted in mystery novels over the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. At the same time, markedly more sophisticated approaches to narration and characterization shown by many American mystery novelists have further eroded the distinction between genre writing and literature. That growth of sophistication is perceptible in the work of three contemporary masters, Elmore Leonard (1925– ), George V. Higgins (1939–99) and James Ellroy (1948– ). Leonard began by writing Westerns, notable among which are Hombre (1961) and Valdez is Coming (1970). Then, after reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972) by George V. Higgins, he turned to the mystery genre and new ways of telling stories. The work of Higgins portrays sleazy characters on both sides of the law, with a toughly realistic sympathy for their struggles. It depends, above all, on dialogue, a stylized vernacular that has the smell of authenticity, and draws the reader into a world of rough justice, hard money and fast deals. Leonard developed a similar sympathy for his morally dubious characters through an equally vigorous use of their speech. Voice is as important to him as it is to Higgins. And, in works from Fifty-Two Pickup (1974) through La Brava (1983) to Glitz (1985), Get Shorty (1990), Pagan Babies (2002) and beyond, he has used a variety of urban settings in which to place his humanized villains. There are no true villains in the work of Ellroy either. In his case, however, it is because there appears to be no moral code here to distinguish heroes from villains, or to hint at the possibility of redemption. What Ellroy describes, with darkly comic venom and in a prose as strung out as a telegraph wire, is a world of violence and betrayal and corruption – where the ugliness just keeps on getting uglier. This is particularly noticeable in his Los Angeles Quartet, consisting of The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992). Written in

what sometimes seems like a frenetic shorthand, the quartet charts crime and corruption in the City of Angels from the end of the Second World War to the election of John Kennedy. It is not so much a series of mystery novels as an absurdist vision of urban hell.

Higgins sets The Friends of Eddie Coyle in Boston, and Leonard has used a variety of urban settings including Detroit, Atlantic City and Miami Beach. In one of his more recent novels, American Tabloid (1995), Ellroy appears to take all America, or its underbelly, for his canvas. This reflects a general gravitation of mystery writing beyond its traditional locations and into new areas: such as New Orleans in the books of James Lee Burke (1943– ), among them The Neon Rain (1987) and Black Cherry Blues (1989), or Boston in those of Robert B. Parker (1932– ). The novels of Parker, such as Mortal Stakes (1975) and Paper Doll (1993), also measure the further development of the private eye character into a person of considerable sophistication and internal conflict. But more interesting, perhaps, than this have been two other seminal developments. The hardboiled and mystery traditions have recently been reconstructed as a vehicle for feminism. They have also been subject to radical revision and rewriting along racial lines. The private eye originated as a descendant of the frontier hero, carrying with him a freight of assumptions about gender and race. White, male and unattached, he negotiated a world controlled and corrupted by men like him. Women were mostly distractions, when they were not dangerous femmes fatales. Men and women of other races were scarcely noticed by him at all. And although he constantly exposed social corruption, he almost never registered the racial segregation and institutional racism that were an integral part of it. That all changed, from about the 1970s on. In the process, the mystery genre further revealed itself as a field of possibilities, with a capacity both to register historical change and to reflect and address pressing social issues.

Among American women writers of mystery fiction, Sara Paretsky (1947– ) is particularly notable. With her first novel, Indemnity Only (1982), Paretsky introduced a private investigator, Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski, known as ‘Vic’ or ‘V.I.’, who narrates her experiences just as the traditional, hardboiled hero does. As this and the other Warshawski books, such as Deadlock (1984), Killing Orders (1985), Blood Shot (1988) and Total Recall (2001) show, though, Paretsky entered the hardboiled tradition in order to revise it. Her protagonist may be as sharply observant and harshly reflective as the traditional private eye; the prose may crackle with the same urgency; the same cool eye is cast on the grainy textures of everyday life and vital revelations of character and motive. But this is a private eye, and private eye fiction, with a difference. For one thing, Warshawski wryly distances herself from earlier textbook heroes: ‘I’m no Philip Marlowe,’ she observes in Tunnel Vision (1994), ‘forever pulling guns out of armpits or glove compartments.’ For another, she is constantly concerned about her own toughness, worrying that her job diminishes human connection. And she seeks, and finds, that connection, not so much with men of her own age – her sexual relations, even her brief, past marriage, seem relatively peripheral to her – but with an older, male neighbour

and, even more, with other women. Her closest relation is with another, older woman, Lotte Herschel. That, perhaps, is one measure of Warshawski’s own sense of female solidarity. Very much a child of the Sixties, she is constantly reflecting on the raw deal women still have despite the women’s liberation movement in which she participated. She is also constantly trying to help other women, in her capacity as private eye and through her involvement in various causes and groups, such as a women’s shelter. The feminism Paretsky embodies and expresses through her central character is neither narrow nor shrill. Warshawski is an unsentimental, unself-pitying, acerbically intelligent character with an ironic sense of humour as well as a keen eye for injustice. And the wrongs to women Warshawski may uncover are always seen to be irrevocably tied to a wider web of corruption. The specific crimes she investigates, and solves, are usually committed to preserve or consolidate power and always relate to wider social problems. The power may involve men but it is never definitively male; the problems may involve women but they are never exclusively female.

What has been described as the first African American detective novel, The Conjure-Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher, appeared in 1932. Over twenty years later, Chester Himes (1909–84) published For Love of Imabelle (1957, reissued as A Rage in Harlem [1965] ), the first in a series of urban thrillers, resembling the police procedural in form, whose main characters grew to be two African American police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Himes had himself been in prison, for armed robbery. It was there that he became an apprentice writer. Once he was released, he began writing novels that reflected his preoccupation with the destructive power of racism (If He Hollers Let Him Go [1945] ), his experiences in prison (Cast the First Stone [1952] ) and his own problems as an intelligent, sensitive black man living in a world dominated by whites (The Primitive [1955] ). ‘The American black man is the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic, unanalysed, anthropologically advanced specimen of mankind in the history of the world,’ Himes wrote in the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972). It was partly to escape the pain, the predicament outlined here, that he became an expatriate. Leaving for Europe in 1953, he made only occasional trips back to the United States, usually to New York City. After several lean years in Europe, Himes was given the opportunity to write for Éditions Gallimard’s Série noire, a respected series of translated American crime fiction. And so it was in Europe that his own variations on the police procedural scored their first success: among them, The Real Cool Killers (1959), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) and

Blind Man With a Pistol (1969). In each of these novels, Himes juxtaposes absurdly comic characters with sinister situations, setting everything against the grim background of a swarming, degraded ghetto. Many of them concern a goodhearted black male, just inching along, who finds himself involved in a desperate struggle for his life. A morally equivocal light-skinned woman may be at the heart of his trouble. In any event, the scene is packed with hard-nosed gamblers, religious freaks and drug-crazed killers. Armed with identical revolvers, dressed in black suits and driving a battered Plymouth sedan, Johnson and Jones do the best they

can in this world. As they struggle to deal with the chaos and corruption that surround them, the two detectives inspire the same fear, respect and awe as the ‘bad men’ of African American folklore. For all that, however, their struggle seems increasingly hopeless. By the time of the last book in the series, Blind Man With a Pistol, chaos seems to have come to Harlem in earnest and Johnson and Jones seem unable to restore order. The final image of the novel, signalled by its title, sums it all up: people are helpless in the face of a scattershot destructiveness that is as wasteful as it is random.

Twenty years after Himes completed his series of novels with Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones at their centre, Walter Mosley (1952– ) published Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). This was followed by several other novels, including White Butterfly (1992) and A Little Yellow Dog (1996), set in postwar Los Angeles and featuring a reluctant black investigator, Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins. The novels unfold in a developing history: Devil in a Blue Dress takes place in 1948, A Little Yellow Dog just before the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. What is more, they show an acute sense of the racism endemic in American society, not least in its police force. A migrant from the South, financially secure yet still painfully aware of the precariousness of being black, Easy Rawlins is a Second World War veteran who recalls that ‘the army was segregated just like the South’. ‘The white boys hated me,’ he remembers, ‘but if they didn’t respect me I was ready to fight.’ Easy carves out a life for himself with a home, some rental properties and an unconventional family of two adopted children, all of it concealed from the gaze of white bureaucracy. He is socially invisible in a way, just like the protagonist of Invisible Man. And, as he manoeuvres his way in and around the absurdities of a world dominated by whites, he attends to the voice inside him to guide him. ‘The voice

. . . just tells me how it is if I want to survive: Survive like a man,’ Rawlins confesses in Devil in a Blue Dress. ‘When the voice speaks, I listen.’ Not a detective as such but someone in the ‘favour business’ of the black community, he is drawn into each adventure by attending to that voice: in order, that is, to maintain some tenuous grasp on security for himself and his children. The danger Rawlins encounters comes from inside as well as around him. He is only too aware of his own capacity for violence: a capacity powerfully figured in Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander, a childhood friend and sidekick whom he both loves and fears. Alexander is gleefully amoral and murderous; and his casual, conscienceless approach to things adds depth and shade to the portrait of Rawlins – not only as a contrast but also as a reminder of dark currents running within the protagonist, just below the brooding, reflective surface. Mosley has said that he owes a debt to Albert Camus in his conception of Easy Rawlins. And it is clear that, like other African American writers before him, he has used existentialism to explore the trials of race. Whatever else he is, this amateur detective (anti-)hero is a man in process: using his quicksilver sensibility not just to get by but to make himself and make his own morality up, as he wanders around some of the meanest streets in the city.

Native American sleuths began appearing in fiction well before their African American counterparts. Popular interest in the West, and in what was seen as the

exoticism of Native American cultures, led to the wide dissemination of books with titles like Velvet Foot, the Indian Detective, or, The Taut Tiger (1882) in the later part of the nineteenth century. Even ‘Buffalo’ Bill tried his hand with a mystery story that had a Native American detective, Red Ruard, the Indian Detective, or, The Gold Buzzards of Colorado: a romance of the mines and dead trails (1886). The

‘Indian detective’ in these and similar stories was adept at tracking, following footprints or investigating the scene of a crime. He had an intimate understanding of the terrain, and he could negotiate different cultures with aplomb. In other words, he was stereotypical: a heroic type, evolved out of a number of perceptions and received assumptions about Native American people, with varying degrees of accuracy. What is different about more recent developments in this area is that mystery writers now are far more alert to cultural difference. Writers such as Tony Hillerman (1925– ), in novels like The Blessing Way (1970) and Finding Moon (1996), pursue their work on the intersection where Anglo and Native American cultures meet. They expand the methods of investigation to incorporate different value systems and processes of thought; they explore the uneasy meeting, the conflict and occasional congruence, between whites and Native Americans; and they open the genre to political processes, such as the rights of indigenous peoples or the impact of commercial exploitation of the land both on the harsh landscapes of the Southwest and on those cultures still closely tied to the earth. This opening up of the generic field of mystery, to the processes of history and in particular the problems of cultural conflict, is not just the work of those who take Native Americans or African Americans as their prime subject. Chicano culture enters the detective genre in the fiction of Rudolfo A. Anaya, concerned with Sonny Baca, an Albuquerque private eye who first appears in Zia Summer (1995). It does so, again, in Partners in Crime (1985) by Rolando Hinojosa. In turn, immigrant culture in general and Korean culture in particular is the scarcely hidden agenda in Native Speaker (1995) by Chang-Rae Lee (1965– ), a book that uses the mystery formula to investigate what is called the ‘ugly immigrant’s truth’ of social exploitation, cultural confusion and, sometimes, personal self-hatred. In novels like these, it becomes simply impossible to preserve a distinction between mystery fiction and serious literature. If there was ever a wall between genre writing and other forms, then that wall has now been torn down.

The challenging and breaking up of genres by some writers does not mean, of course, that others have not chosen to exploit genre formulas by staying within their limits. There is, it seems, an inexhaustible public appetite for formulaic fiction, as the career of Stephen King (1947– ) testifies. King has achieved phenomenal success by simply and skilfully working within different genres, particularly horror, and utilizing their formulas, their rhythms of expectation, tension and release, to the full. Other writers have achieved as much success by developing new formulas. A variant on the police procedural, for instance, the legal procedural, was developed by Scott Turow (1949– ) in Presumed Innocent (1987) and by John Grisham (1955– ) in a series of best-sellers beginning with A Time to Kill (1989). And Thomas Harris (1940– ), in The Silence of the Lambs (1988), probed the psychology

of a serial killer in a form that might be called noir Gothic. Even here, however, the distinction between genre and literature tends to become blurred, to the point of disappearance. Another, equally unnerving journey into the mind of a serial killer, American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, is, quite clearly, a crossover. A surfeit of violence and horror, an obsession with commodity fetishism and a knowing use of narrator (it is never clear whether the killer, who tells the story, is recording fact or fantasizing): all turn this novel, not untypically for its times, into a work that seems to want to be sensationalistic and serious at one and the same moment. Books like American Psycho or Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Douglas Coupland (1952– ) seem, in fact, not so much to critique commodity culture as to be contained in it. In the new information age, the sign has been commodified, becoming the standard coinage, the fuel of the postmodern economy. So, the inference is, the author, in adding his signature to his series of signs – known as the story or poem – is simply signing on to the economy. He is acknowledging, however wryly or bleakly, his implication in a culture where, as the narrator of Generation X puts it, ‘genuine capital H history’ has ended, ‘turned into a press release, a marketing strategy’. Writers like Coupland and Ellis are sometimes called ‘the blank generation’ (which itself sounds suspiciously like a marketing strategy). Their characters exist in a state of anomie, in a deadpan culture of empty television shows, ‘Elvis moments’, semi-disposable Swedish furniture, fast food and designer labels. And their fiction circulates in that culture as part of its currency, stamped with the blank, value-free mark of the times. To talk of any distinction between genre and other writing is peculiarly irrelevant here, since the world recorded and the recording instrument are themselves layerings of genres, series of imitations of life that have no evident existence outside the systems of exchange.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) by Kurt Vonnegut, the protagonist drunkenly addresses a meeting of writers of science fiction. ‘I love you sons of bitches,’ he announces, ‘You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on.’ That echoes a sentiment expressed by many readers of science fiction. Given the enormous pace of technological change in the twentieth century, with its consequent transformation of every corner of our lives, its potential for further transformation and perhaps global annihilation, then, so the argument goes, science fiction is the only form of literature really addressing the truth. Separate and different from mainstream literature, it is so because it is better. As a distinct genre, it reveals ‘what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us’, to quote Mr Rosewater again, ‘what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents, and catastrophes do to us’. It is also a distinctively American genre, since American writers have been at the forefront of developments in the genre since the time of H. G. Wells. A formative figure here was H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Primarily remembered, perhaps, as a writer of Gothic fiction, Lovecraft also produced works that exploited dislocations of time and space and extraterrestrial encounters. He was an initiator in those forms of science fiction in which fantasy, rather than scientific knowledge, dominates. And many of his stories first appeared in the magazine

Weird Tales. As a promoter and disseminator of science fiction narratives, this magazine was soon complemented by the founding, in 1926, of Amazing Stories and then, in 1937, Astounding Science Fiction. Amazing Stories was particularly influential here. It was founded by Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967), an indefatigable publisher of periodicals committed to science and fantasy. Because of this, and to a lesser extent because of his ‘Baron Munchausen’ stories (‘Munchausen on the Moon’ [1915], ‘Munchausen Departs for the Planet Mars’ [1916] ), Gernsback, an immigrant from Luxembourg, is sometimes called ‘the father of science fiction’. In turn, another early writer, Edward Elmer Smith (1890–1965), usually known as ‘Doc’ Smith, is often referred to as ‘the father of space opera’. Good and evil in his ‘Lensman’ novels, such as Triplanetary (1934; revised 1948), First Lensman (1954) and Galactic Patrol (1937–8; revised 1950) are parcelled out between the benevolent Arisians and the malign Eddorians. There is a wealth of space opera fantasy here. For example, certain members of the Galactic Patrol acquire telepathic powers by wearing a ‘lens’ or bracelet, which gives the ‘lensman’ series its title. At its core, however, this sprawling epic recalls earlier epics of American empire: this is a Western transported into space.

The work of a later science fiction writer like Robert Heinlein (1907–88) is more sophisticated than this, not least because his works negotiate a path between scientific literalism and fantasy. Heinlein is also capable of humour and social comment. Double Star (1956), for instance, is about a failed actor who claims to be a galactic politician. And he can use the genre to make intelligent guesses about the future – from which vantage point he can then cast a critical eye over the present. So, the novel for which he is best known, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), concerns Mike Smith, a human who has been brought up on Mars. Initiated into an unearthly way of regarding reality, Smith has also acquired suprahuman powers. On returning to earth, he founds a new religion on more Martian habits, a good deal more pacifist and hedonist than most earthly creeds. At the end of the novel, though, he is torn to pieces by outraged humans, crucified for his beliefs and practices. Among those practices, and at the core of this new religion, is what is called ‘grokking’. ‘“Grok” means “identity equal”,’ a Martian character explains. ‘ “Grok” means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in a group experience.’ In effect, Stranger in a Strange Land takes themes ingrained in the American experience and writing – the lonely hero, the clash with conventional society, exile, longing and the impulse to merge with older, deeper forms of community – and gives them a new twist. This is a new siting of a series of classic tropes. So is another novel, Childhood’s End (1954), by an equally influential science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke (1917– ). This is a story about the end of the world, not due to some humanly produced catastrophe but because the human race achieves a total breakthrough into pure mind. It is experienced by all the children under ten, who suddenly cease to be individuals and become a vast group endowed with extraordinary powers. Jan, the last man on earth and observer of its final hours, watches the children; ‘their faces’, he comments, ‘were merging into a common mould’ as they

serve and merge into what is called here the Overmind. The whole trajectory of the narrative, with its driving impulse of life disentangling itself from the flesh to become pure intelligence, is in fact distinctly transcendentalist: Overmind, after all, seems to echo the Emersonian notion of the Over-Soul. This is another story that rewrites old American stories in new forms.

Apocalypse of a very different kind occurs in the Dune series of Frank Herbert (1920–86). Dune (1965), one of the most successful science fiction novels ever, is a complex story of intrigue, mysticism and ecological theory. Its messianic hero, Paul Atreides, known as ‘Maud’dib’ ’, is descended from a line of space migrants who have been guided by the simple precept, ‘thou shalt not disfigure the soul’. Creating an alien, elaborate but credible environment, Herbert combines action with speculation. As the human species struggles for survival against terrible odds, the narrative invites the reader to consider questions of social control, free will and determinism and the relation between human nature, nature and technology. In the sequels to Dune, Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976), the perils of the messianic impulse are explored. ‘We’re locked into forms, of government, of belief and behaviour which draw us to keep repeating ourselves,’ Herbert has said. ‘That’s one of the points I wanted to make in Dune.’ He does so by showing the universe exploding in violence, in a ‘jihad’ or holy war, as the vision of Maud’dib’ is debased by a theocratic bureaucracy and the messiah himself departs for the wilderness leaving his children to inherit the burden. With an ambition equal to that of Herbert, Isaac Asimov (1920–92) explored the nature of human history in his Foundation series: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), Second Foundation (1953), Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986). Asimov was also prodigiously productive. He published his first science fiction tale in Amazing Stories in 1938; by the time of his death, he had published four hundred and seventy titles, in science fiction and a number of other forms and genres.

Ray Bradbury (1920– ) published numerous short stories before establishing his reputation with The Martian Chronicles (1950). It describes the first attempts of earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, the thwarting of their efforts by the gentle, telepathic Martians, the eventual colonization and the eventual effect on the Martian settlers of a nuclear war on earth. As much a work of social criticism as anything, the novel explores some of the prevailing anxieties of the 1950s and beyond: the fear of war, the longing for a simpler life, the resistance to racism and censorship. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is also a cautionary tale that uses an imagined future to critique the present. The title refers to the temperature at which books are supposed to burn; and the book is set in a future world where the written word is banned. A group of rebels resist the ban by memorizing entire works of literature and philosophy. Here and in his other books (including numerous collections of stories like The Golden Apples of the Sun [1953] ), Bradbury views technological change with a cautious sympathy. Not against such change in itself, he is nevertheless alert to potential dangers – above all, the possibility that the moral evolution of human beings will not keep pace with their mechanical development. The use of science fiction or fantasy as a critique and corrective is just as notable in the work

of Ursula Le Guin (1929– ). In fact, in her introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Le Guin has insisted that ‘science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive’. True to that formula, this novel describes and critically defines sexual prejudice. It is set on an imaginary planet populated by ‘androgynes’, people who can at different times be male, female and neuter. An ordinary human who falls in love with a member of this trisexual society is forced to examine the meaning of sexual roles. And the reader, in turn, is invited to imagine what it may mean to be simply human, living outside the social determinants of sexual identity. Other books are critical of contemporary American political and social values. The Word for World Forest (1972) is about Vietnam; The Dispossessed (1974) is a fantasy set on an anarchist moon colony and its capitalist mother planet; The New Atlantis (1975) presents a futuristic vision of a totalitarian United States. Her most ambitious and acclaimed work, though, the ‘Earthsea’ trilogy, is more preoccupied with fundamental values: addressing, in terms of scientific fantasy, the need to face the evil in oneself (A Wizard of Earthsea [1968] ), the need for trust and truth (The Tombs of Atuan [1971] ) and the need to accept the ineluctable fact of death (The Farthest Shore [1972] ).

The scope of science fiction, its capacity to explore not only social and moral issues but matters of being and knowledge, is nowhere more evident than in the stories of Philip K. Dick (1928–82), Samuel R. Delany (1942– ) and Octavia Butler (1947– ). Preoccupied with problems of perception, Dick returned obsessively to the permeable boundaries separating the real from the illusory, fact from fiction. Which is a reason for his interest in hallucinatory drugs, and their impact on consciousness (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1964], A Scanner Darkly

[1977] ). As the title of his most famous novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), indicates, it was also the reason for his imagining of cunning facsimiles of humanity that call into question all our ideas of what it means to be human. The work of Delany reflects his own belief that, as he has put it, ‘the science fictional enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction’. An African American, Delany began by writing relatively traditional science fiction. His first book, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), explores themes of quest, the capabilities of technology and the status of the artist, to all of which Delany would later return. The Einstein Intersection (1967) is an ambitious attempt to satirize forms of human life using a science fiction frame. Nova (1968) is a dense translation of the myths of Prometheus and the Holy Grail into futuristic terms. These novels reveal an increasing complexity. In Nova, for instance, cryptic narrative information alternates with passages of lyrical rhetoric and the characterization is consistently freakish and bizarre. In the early 1970s, however, Delany moved altogether away from conventional narrative logic. Dhalgren, published in 1975, marks the change. ‘A book about many things’, as Delany has described it, it presents a city that has suffered a disaster so catastrophic that the space-time continuum has been distorted. In a powerful image of society in chaos, buildings burn endlessly without being consumed; and the only possibility of redemption seems to shine in youth and art. Time, logic and narrative viewpoints are all cut loose from their traditional