To "place" any contemporary author in a literary context or tradition is a hazardous affair, especially when, as is the case with Hawkes, that author continues to write novels which intentionally disrupt both the singular contexts his fictions create and the traditions of the novel in general…. [In novel after novel Hawkes] forces us to reassess the role of the artist and the fiction-making process, often rendering ironic the portrait of an artist in an earlier work, so that his fiction as a whole presents us with a fluid, self-parodic, generative vision of consciousness and artistry. (p. 143)
If any one thing can be said to characterize the fiction produced and worth considering since World War II, it would be that writers, disenchanted with tradition, even the recent traditions of modernism, create works that ironize, parody, reject, and annihilate the boundaries set forth by those traditions. Contemporary fiction is by turns apocalyptic, exhaustive, thoroughly antimimetic, and disruptive, even of itself, depending upon which critic one reads—but clearly it, like Hawkes's fiction, is impossible to classify in any sense; it is self-consciously atypical. Thus it defies tradition and categorization, and implicitly argues that it is in the nature of fiction to do so.
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