Nicol - The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction

The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction

BRAN NICOL

For Karen, Joe and Jamie

In an essay about postmodern fiction a student once declared that Beckett's writing doesn't go down easily. As I was the marker, I had to point out that this phrase was not exactly appropriate academic discourse. But I could also see her point. If reading Jane Austen is like having a nice Sunday lunch, and The Da Vinci Code is the equivalent of a McDonald's, then reading Beckett is, for some, like being asked to complete the Bushtucker Trial in the TV show Im A CelebrityGet Me Out Of Here .

Besides the parallel between literature and food, her statement implied a definition of fiction. A novel should be something accessible, easy to read. Literature should be digestible . But why is this? Why shouldn't literature be a challenge to the reader? Who said reading a novel has to be easy? After all, we accept more readily the fact that modern art, the kind we are confronted with in the Tate Modern or the Turner Prize, does not communicate straightforwardly, that we have to work to interpret it. Even poetry, part of the staple diet on university literature courses, is something we accept from the outset is not going to give its meaning over to us without a struggle.

If asked why they read, most people (including myself) would say that they read fiction for pleasure. It is hard, though, to determine exactly what the pleasure of reading a novel or a short story is. It may be the pleasure of escapism, of experiencing what it would be like to be another person, indulging one's fantasy-life, or exercizing the intellect. If asked why they choose to study literature at university, most students reply that it is because they enjoy reading fiction. (For the kind of reasons just mentioned.) But very quickly they realize that reading literature at university is not simply about enjoying reading. In fact, for some students, it turns out to be the exact opposite. Many students feel that the process of studying literature empties reading of the enjoyment that caused them to study literature in the first place. Why do we have to ask so many questions about a book? Can't we just accept that an author wrote something because he or she felt like it, or wanted to make money?

Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader. This is true even though most of it is actually not as hard to comprehend as Beckett, and many of the authors labelled as postmodern (and examined in this book) are among the most popular, acclaimed, and, I think, enjoyable, writers in contemporary fiction: Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis.

But postmodern writing challenges us because it requires its reader to be an active co-creator of meaning rather than a passive consumer. More than this, it challenges its readers to interrogate the commonsense and commonplace assumptions about literature which prevail in our culture. Though it is a product of the latter half of the twentieth century, studying postmodern fiction can deepen our knowledge about literature on a wider scale. To read postmodern fiction is to be invited to ask: what is fiction? What does reading it involve? Why do we read? Why, for that matter, do novelists write? Why do they create innovative, experimental forms rather than just stick to traditional ones?

This book is an introduction to postmodern fiction, offering accounts of its various waves in a period stretching mainly from the 1950s to the 1990s and providing in-depth readings of texts which have been consistently associated with postmodernism by literary critics and theorists.

Though the term postmodern is still an important one in a number of academic disciplines and remains essential in the literary-studies lexicon, the topic of postmodernism is no longer hotly debated in academic journals and research monographs. Linda Hutcheon, one of the major theorists of postmodern , 165).