Fiction: The 1960s to the Present

Because this chapter encompasses 51 years of period coverage, it is interesting to note that only now has the PEN American Center published the proceedings of its landmark international conference held in New York during the third week of January 1986. Forward looking at the time, its statements and debates raised issues that today are being fully addressed by scholarship. A quarter-century’s consideration is proper, even for so-called contemporary fiction. An essay by a then currently popular novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, can be read this year in the company of no less than five major books on this author, who died in 2007. In a similar manner, the fractious debate between Grace Paley and Norman Mailer that altered the meeting’s tone can be better appreciated now that death has closed both of their canons and history can assess the unifying power of the feminist issues that divided these two writers, whom time has proved to be allies. In 2011 a number of important general and specific studies reinforce the notion that fiction since the 1960s remains a coherent field.

i General Studies

Issue number 14 of PEN America draws on editor Sara Blackburn’s transcription (presently housed in the PEN American Center archives at Princeton) “The 48th Congress of International PEN, January 12–18, 1986, New York City” (pp. 85–160). In his opening address, PEN American Center president Norman Mailer credits Donald Barthelme with conceiving the conference theme, “The Imagination of the State.” Interpreted at first as a political topic, one that prompted an invitation to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, the notion resolved itself as a literary issue suggestive of a new aesthetic cosmography, something quite obvious for the apolitical but structurally innovative Barthelme. Another innovator, Vonnegut, was chosen to present an address focused directly on this theme. In it the author recounts how being a soldier and then a prisoner of war provided his only agency with the state’s imagination and how it would have been meanly selfish decisions that could have made him an effective agent. As it was, this failure created his ethos as a writer and an entirely different, more rewarding form of citizenship. John Barth describes a similar restructuring of the aesthetic world in the work of Barthelme, where the elitism of high culture is invaded and transformed by the democracy of media culture. As for history’s resistance to such restructuring, Toni Morrison notes how responding to it in her art can be not only difficult to do but painful to recall. As the week’s proceedings came to a close, Paley addresses Mailer directly on the affair’s underrepresentation of women, and to his credit Mailer responds in artistic terms redolent of the aesthetic cosmography Paley and the other contributors would construct.

It is rewarding to see how much of these writers’ vision at the PEN congress has materialized as the world described by Christian Moraru in Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Michigan). “Twenty Years After” is how Moraru heads the introduction of his thesis, which is that over this period “the cornerstone of America and its self-perception in literature” has been restructured by a “historically unrivaled intensity and extensity with which our relations with others recast our world and our representations of it.” The result has been “a new imagination modality,” one that is equally reminiscent of but developmentally beyond both modernism and the postmodern. The time-peg for this change is the end of the Cold War in 1989, after which “relationality” takes on a new meaning in life and art. No longer is there a place to hide (as behind either side of the Berlin Wall) where self and other “could opt out of the mutually ‘defining’ concept of each other’s proximity, influence, and inquiring gaze.” What this creates in fiction is the view shared by writers as diverse as Chang-rae Lee, Raymond Federman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Don DeLillo, and John Updike. Because other divergent canons of literature have claimed them, the notion of cosmodernism is all the more important for providing...