To the postmodern mind? as to any self-respecting avant-garde? the most en trenched of cultural categories offer the most enticing targets. A case in point is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Securely established in popular culture and traditional thinking, the dichotomy of these two concepts has become a favorite target of recent criticism. If culture were made by its theorists, it would be headed to ward a single huge category that subsumes every utterance: a category variously called" texts,"" discourse," or" representations." Since the crisis of the dichotomy is due to the expansion of fiction at the expense of nonfiction, I will call it the doctrine of panfictionality.

In the present essay, I propose to examine some of the textual practices and the oretical arguments that have contributed to the destabilization of the borderline be tween fiction and nonfiction. Previous work in this area tends to regard the open character of this borderline as evidence that fiction and nonfiction cannot be rigor ously distinguished. 1 My assumptions will be different. The possibility of hybridiza tion does not necessarily mean that the two categories are inherently indeterminate: the many shades of gray on the spectrum from black to white do not turn black and white into the same color. On the contrary, grays result from different proportions of two well-defined ingredients blended into a homogenous color, or from various pat terns of discrete black and white elements. To analyze the composition of these shades, we need a clear notion of what is black and what is white. By analogy, I be lieve that the innovative hybrids produced by contemporary literature will be better understood and more precisely described if we regard these experiments as a chal lenge to sharpen our definitions of fiction and nonfiction. Far from dismissing the