Fiction: The 1960s to the Present, p. 335-361

The study of contemporary American fiction has matured considerably since the days when anyone trained in an earlier period yet holding a subscription to the New York Review of Books and a membership in the Book-of-the-Month Club could be considered an expert in the field. The recent prominence of literary theory has taken work on relatively new writers well beyond the thematic, and expansion of the canon has invited close attention to figures whose fiction tends to suit this same purpose. Scholars and writers increasingly work hand-in-hand. Critics alone no longer lead, and commentators who presume to talk about literature of the 21st century without even having adapted to methods of the 20th are left sadly behind.

i General Studies

How scholarship has not only grown up but taken quantum leaps ahead of what was considered only recently the cutting edge is demonstrated by Joseph Tabbi. His Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota) corrects many misunderstandings that had become conventional wisdom, such as that Thomas Pynchon's meganovels of the 1960s and 1970s are the precursor of equally long but differently inclined works by Paul Auster, Richard Powers, and other writers emerging in the 1980s and 1990s, or that John Barth's apparent reflexivity is anything other than what Tabbi calls "a high cultural elitism." For him behaviorism is the culprit, having discounted the mental in favor of what could be publicly observed. Instead, he prefers "the reality of cognition" that is found in "various autopoetic systems," namely "the modules and reentrant circuits that make up the mind and make possible its expansion into the media environment and its coordination with other minds." He sees American fiction heading "toward an ecological realism aware of the many cognitive environments but capable of holding onto its own literary autonomy." Tabbi's principal examples of this trend are the novels of Auster and Powers. Here he sees a new style of metafiction, well beyond Barth's and Robert Coover's and advanced from the "naturalist strain in politically neutral writers such as William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace," one that recognizes closure in one created system so that narrative consciousness "can re-enter the system at another level (and at a later time), and thus keep things going." Auster uses this method for autobiographical contemplation, while Powers typically presents a narrator "who looks back at a past life and also imagines another life for himself or herself constrained by a different set of knowledges." Supporting Tabbi's thesis are later works by Thomas Pynchon and continuing experiments by David Markson and Harry Mathews. The model for this kind of narrative is the literary journal as written in the electronic age, capable of producing "daily entries constantly subject to revision in the context of new experience."

Although Tabbi's emphasis is positive, he does a good job of discounting the presumed progression from Barth and the earlier works of Pynchon to Wallace and Vollmann as a mainstream in literary history. A similarly helpful distinction is made by David Lodge, whose Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Harvard) reflects Lodge's own critical progress from close-readings of novels (in a manner that the New Criticism has reserved for poetry) through the methods of Continental European structuralism and the dialogical concerns of Mikhail Bakhtin to an understanding of the mind-based theories that inform Cognitive Fictions. The difference is that Lodge has come to this understanding by virtue of work on his own novel, Thinks . . ., for which he studied the same bodies of knowledge that motivate Tabbi's study. The result is a combination of critical tradition and innovation that, acknowledging the view of theorists of artificial intelligence "that the mind or consciousness is like software to the brain's hardware," grasps the deeper fact of a "ghost in the machine" that offers evidence of "qualia," those idiosyncratic examples of "the specific nature of our subjective experience of the world" that writers of fiction seek to capture and convey. Metafiction is part of it, but (as Tabbi would agree) on a more sophisticated level than Barth's and Coover's...