It is generally agreed that writing in the United States went through an extraordinary period of regeneration in the 1960s because of a combination of political and social factors. The decade began with the election to president of John F. Kennedy, ushering in a very short-lived period of hope. Kennedy was of course assassinated in 1963, one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis almost plunged the world into nuclear war. During the presidencies of his successors, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, there was the war in Vietnam and widespread protests against it, the advent of the civil rights movement, the rise of black power, and an alarming increase in violent murder and gun crime throughout the decade.

All this contributed in various ways to a growing ‘counter-culture’, which had begun with the Beat generation in the 1950s, but now expanded to take in the ‘hippy’ movement, drug culture, bop and jazz events, ‘happenings’, and left-wing political rallies, and expressed a general suspicion about authority and official power, and a faith in the values of youth and spontaneity.

The spirit of the counter-culture is reflected in popular culture of the time such as music (e.g. The Beatles, Woodstock) and film (e.g. Easy Rider), but also pulses through ‘serious’ art, including literature. However, here we come to one of the odd things about this moment in US culture.

Despite its near-definitive tendency to problematize or collapse generic boundaries (demonstrated in many of the readings in this book) postmodern fiction, like any current within literary history, has inevitably favoured some genres over others, though not of course using them ‘straight’, but adapting and subverting them. This chapter assesses the way that postmodern literary fiction co-opts two popular narrative genres – science fiction and detective fiction – and the implications of this for understanding how postmodern fiction works.

Sci-fi and cyberpunk

Science fiction, and its potential to offer an alternative to realism – and a critique of it – has proved central to postmodernism. We have noted this already with regard to writers such as Burroughs, Vonnegut, Atwood, and Acker, each of whom draws on sci-fi in their work.

The reason for this is explained by Brian McHale, the theorist who has made the most valuable contribution to the study of the relationship between postmodernism and science fiction, and its subgenre cyberpunk. We recall that science fiction plays a key role in his poetics of postmodernism, as ‘it is the ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence), and so serves as a source of materials and models for postmodernist writers’ (McHale, 1987, 16). This is because both postmodernism and sci-fi make use of ‘the universal fictional resource of presentation of virtual space’. Of course, as we considered in Chapter 1, ‘projecting virtual space’ is a definitive characteristic of all fiction.

While modernist fiction can be seen as the response to Ezra Pound's command to ‘make it new’, the major question for the early postmodern writers of the 1960s and 1970s – though they share the modernist conviction that realism as a fictional mode is largely invalid in the twentieth century – is simply how to keep on writing in the face of developments in newer artistic forms such as cinema and television, the increasingly ‘fictional’ quality of contemporary life, and also the strong sense that the novel is effectively exhausted as a literary form.

Exhaustion is the term used by the American postmodern novelist John Barth in one of the most important contributions to the postmodern debate, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967), which views the contemporary novel as in decline. What he means by exhaustion is not some kind of ‘physical, moral, or intellectual decadence’ but simply the growing sense that ‘certain forms or…certain possibilities’ in fiction are ‘used up’ (Barth, 2002, 138).

Barth here is voicing an anxiety that beset a number of 1960s and 1970s writers: that it is impossible to say or do anything new in the novel following the achievements of modernism. The problem, he writes, is not a general weariness towards all-too familiar traditional art forms, for this could simply be overcome by producing gimmicky novels made up of other kinds of documents such as ‘Somebody-or-other's unbound, unpaginated, randomly assembled novel-in-a-box’ (a curious prediction of B. S. Johnson's experiment in his novel The Unfortunates, published two years after Barth's essay) or ‘printing Finnegan's Wake on a very long roller-towel’ (Barth, 2002, 139).

Postcolonialism is concerned with the processes of colonization and its effects on different societies and cultures. Its focus is primarily on how the colonial experience has shaped not just the former colonies of Europe, but colonizing countries such as Britain, and ‘settler’ nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It is important to acknowledge that the ‘post’ in postcolonialism does not refer simply to a historical period after the colonial rule of a particular country is over, such as, for example, post-August 1947 when India secured its independence from Britain. The colonial process, theorists insist, is never ‘over’ in the way a single event is over but is continual. India, in a variety of social, political, and cultural ways (we might consider the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in late 2007, for example) is still subject to the effects of Empire.

When it comes to literary criticism and theory, postcolonialist reading strategies concentrate on specific representations and debates in literary texts. Representation, whether through the media, art, or other cultural practices, is a crucial and powerful means of maintaining control over a people – but also a way by which the colonized can resist, subvert, or critique the colonial process.

Linda Hutcheon argues that the postmodern historical novel marks the return of ‘plot and questions of reference’ to postmodern fiction. Where both plot and referentiality were either disavowed in radical metafictional experimental writing – as in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Coover's Pricksongs and Descants – or endlessly problematized, because their authors' primary aims were to ‘explode realist narrative conventions’ (Hutcheon, 1988a, xii), by contrast, a work of ‘historiographic metafiction’ (her label for postmodern historical fiction) is still committed to telling a long and involving story, full of believable characters, which can be enjoyed by the reader in the manner of nineteenth-century realism. This explains why, of all the modes of fiction associated with postmodernism, historiographic metafiction has been ‘bestselling’ as well as the subject of serious academic attention. The three authors whose work we will consider in this chapter, John Fowles, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift – as well as others whom we shall consider in due course, such as Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie – have all enjoyed such dual acclaim. The postmodern historical novel is therefore what we might think of as ‘the acceptable face of postmodernism’ in literary fiction, influenced by postmodern ideas about fictionality and its relationship with reality, but also popular with a general readership on a mass scale.

As Hutcheon's term suggests, historiographic metafiction is a self-conscious work of fiction concerned with the writing of history.

Gender is an especially problematic issue when it comes to postmodern theory. A cursory glance at the roster of prominent names in the postmodern debate might lead to an obvious question: where have all the women gone? Indeed a version of this question informs part of the argument of two important contributions to the debate at its highpoint in the 1980s, Craig Owens's ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’ (Owens, 1983) and Andreas Huyssen's 1984 essay, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’ (Huyssen, 2002). Their assumption is that feminism ought to find something of value in postmodernism, for it is about challenging authority and asserting difference.

These discussions by male theorists did serve to provoke many feminist theorists into the debate. Sandra Harding, for example, protested that feminism can only go so far in throwing out Enlightenment ideals (Enlightenment assumptions and prejudices are another matter), for, like Marxism, it is by definition committed to some of these, such as emancipation (Harding, 1990, 99). Sabina Lovibond took this argument further by identifying in the championing of postmodernist theoretical principles by male theorists ‘a collective fantasy of masculinist agency or identity’, one exposed by Owens's and Huyssen's assumption that it is humiliating to be ‘caught out’ – as they imply feminists are – ‘longing for a world of human subjects sufficiently “centred” to speak to and understand one another’ (Lovibond, 1989, 19).

There is an episode of The Simpsons in which the barman, Moe Szyslak, tries to transform his dingy bar into somewhere ‘cool’ and futuristic, decorating it with randomly chosen objects such as suspended rabbits and eyeballs. His regulars don't get it. Faced with their non-comprehending stares, Moe explains: ‘It's po-mo!…Post-modern!…Yeah, all right – weird for the sake of weird’ (‘Homer the Moe’, Simpsons Archive).

The Simpsons is widely considered one of the most exemplary postmodern texts because of its self-reflexive irony and intertextuality. But postmodernism is not weird for the sake of being weird. Nor is it simply ‘the contemporary’ or ‘the experimental’. It may be ‘avant-garde’ (though many critics, myself included, think it isn't), or it may be a continuation of the values and techniques of modernism (but then again it may just as plausibly be a break with modernism). It may be an empty practice of recycling previous artistic styles…or a valid form of political critique.

Postmodernism is a notoriously slippery and indefinable term. It was originally coined in the 1940s to identify a reaction against the Modern movement in architecture. However, it first began to be widely used in the 1960s by American cultural critics and commentators such as Susan Sontag and Leslie Fiedler who sought to describe a ‘new sensibility’ in literature which either rejected modernist attitudes and techniques or adapted or extended them.

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 I'm A Celebrity…Get 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.

Postmodern fiction can be considered as a response to the kind of socio-historical changes discussed in the previous chapter. Larry McCaffrey, for example, argues that with the assassination of President J. F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963, ‘[p]ostmodernism was officially ushered in – at least in the United States – since that was the day that symbolically signaled the end of a certain kind of optimism and naïvete in our collective unconsciousness, the end of certain verities and assurances that had helped shape our notion of what fiction should be’ (McCaffrey, 1986, xii).

There can be no doubt that literary change works ‘symptomatically’, as a result of what occurs at a wider social and cultural level. But if there is any validity in the category ‘postmodern fiction’ it comes from using it for more than simply identifying particular related themes within a group of texts. Likewise, as well as being a symptom of wide-ranging cultural change, postmodern fiction needs to be understood in terms of specific currents within literary theory and practice. This means considering postmodern fiction in terms of form rather than context, assessing how social and cultural change might prompt changes in what fiction does and how it positions its readers to respond to it. This is the aim of this chapter, which is divided into three main sections.