"Closing the Gap": American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands (review)

??? COHPAnATIST general will profit from this important body of scholarship. Most important, the many critics of"theory" in our discipline, those who lament the second-rate scholarship and fatuous generalizations ofcareless ideologues and ignorant culture critics and thereby dismiss the entire theoretical enterprise, will meet here with worthy opponents, formidable thinkers who articulate sophisticated philosophical positions, avoid reductive historical generalizations, and challenge realist epistemological assumptions in their domain ofgreatest strength—that ofscience and technology. Ronald BogueUniversity ofGeorgia REVIEWS THEO D'HAEN AND HANS BERTENS, eds. "Closing the Gap": American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997 (Postmodern Studies 20). 267 pp. Judging from a number ofrecent reappraisals ofpostmodern fiction, the antifoundational approaches developed by postmodernism in response to Cold War ideologies have appeared outmoded to some ofus after the collapse ofthose normative metanarratives in the events of 1989. In volume 5 of 7Ae Encyclopedia ofWorld Literature in the 20th Century (ed. Steven R. Serafín. New York: Continuum, 1993), Robert F. Kiernan notes that postmodem metafictionists have "ceased in the 1 980s to enjoy the critical deference they received in the late 1960s and 1970s [...]. [Their works] found only limited audiences, not just because they are inherently difficult books, but because their self-reflexive conceits and multidimensional, nonlinear combinations of fantasies, joke, and horror seem to many readers a throwback to the intellectual temper ofthe 1970s" (26). As this description suggests, the swerving away from experimentalism has ideological motivation. The prevailing tendency after 1989 has been to push postmodern innovation to the margin as part ofa counteroffensive against those alternative paradigms deemed responsible for the current crisis of authority, identity, and values. Critics ofvarious stripes want to "rescue" fiction from its engagement with language and the subversive ideologies ofthe sixties, returning it to conventional forms ofrealism. The recent Modern Library list ofthe 100 best twentieth-century novels in English is a case in point. Few postmodernists made the list (Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, John Fowles, and Salmon Rushdie). Conspicuously absent were Coover, Pynchon, and Reed, but also Atwood, Morrison, and Walker. In an amnesic revision mat took literature back one or two generations, the list reinstated the primarily white male canon from Joyce and Fitzgerald to Saul Bellow, William Golding, and James Dickey. By contrast, the writers featured in Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens' collection ofessays on the reception ofpostwar American fiction in four Western European countries are exactly those left out by the Modern Library list: Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Gilbert Sorrentino, Thomas Pynchon, and Ronald Sulenick (Paul Neubauer, "The General Reception of Postmodern American Literature in Germany " 9); also postmodern feminist and ethnic authors like Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Marilyn French, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker. The primary Italian bibliography ofBarthelme, William S. Burroughs, Coover, James Purdy, and VcH. 24 (2000): 171 REVIEWS Pynchon "is almost as rich as the American one" (Daniela Daniele, "The Fate of Postmodern American Fiction in Italy" 149). In Spain, certain translations of Barthelme, Cisneros, Don DeLillo, Gaddis, Jerzy Kosinski, Morrison, Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut have run through several reprints (Francesco Collado-Rodríguez, "The Columbus Connection: American Postmodern Fiction in Spain" 177, 178-81); so have Vonnegut's works in the Netherlands (Frans Ruiter, "The Reception ofPostmodem American Fiction in the Netherlands" 223) or those ofAbish, Barth, Coover, Federman, and Pynchon in Germany (Neubauer 12, 24). Federman's German bibliography may soon overtake his American one, including for example radio plays not performed in the US. Academic criticism in Western Europe has devoted monographs not only to Pynchon and Vonnegut, but also to William Gass, Federman, feminist metropolitan fiction, or postmodern short story writers, treating their works as "acts ofdefiance and critique," attempts to break open official history and develop "ironic and parodistic counter-histories oftheir own" (Neubauer 82, 88). Substantial literary anthologies and collections of essays, such as Gerhard Hoffmann's three-volume Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman: Von derModerne zur Postmoderne (1988), have supplemented the picture, refining or problematizing its contours. The convergence oftranslation, magazine criticism, and academic research has ensured a multidimensional "reception of...