[In Post-Modernist literature there is an obsession] with the primacy of style and structure over "subject matter": The artist is willfully and ingeniously refined out of existence, as Joyce never was, so that the perfect art would be art in a vacuum—a perfect vacuum—not only self-referential but lacking a self to which to refer. Stanislaw Lem, a Polish writer of science fiction, states in the parody-review of a parody-introduction to his own book, "A Perfect Vacuum": "Literature to date has told us of fictitious characters. We shall go further: we shall depict fictitious books. Here is a chance to regain creative liberty, and at the same time to wed two opposing spirits—that of the belletrist and the critic."
An ambitious project, fraught with intriguing perils: To create ghost-books obliquely glimpsed in reviews (alas, they are really review essays and sometimes disquietingly lengthy) that are in turn written by ghost-reviewers whose shadows fall upon the page, sometimes distracting us from the author's "true" thesis. Joyce did something similar in "Ulysses," where each chapter is dominated by—is in fact filtered through—a "voice," and the reader is asked to deal with the voice as well as with the narrative that is evidently unfolding behind it; but Joyce's great work is so thoroughly grounded in the naturalistic world, in Dublin, that even the most befuddled reader, lost for paragraphs at a time, can nevertheless strike solid earth again and continue with the "story" as if it were there all along.
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