[Let] us postulate one overriding function of this contraption called V., namely to call attention to history not as a nightmare from which we're trying to awake, but as a fantasy into which we've been mythically herded. It should be pointed out that V. proposes no history at all, not even a fake one, since to be historical is to be fictional in the least rewarding sense…. Such history-oriented fictions—and it makes no difference whether the history is personal or public, social or psychological—all accept the whims of chronology, the arbitrary daydream of events poised in sequence. Yet we have every reason to believe that this long-accredited view of the universe is as false as the Ptolemaic Disneyland it managed to replace, that it is only in our contrived histories of what never was that events could not stall into psychic tableaux, pockets of occurrence. Far from being the metaphorical vehicle of experience, time is simply its tenor; and far from being endlessly fluid, it stalls constantly, folding itself neatly into synchronisms whose raison d'être lies hidden in the accidents of consciousness that give rise to their perception. Thus V. is everyone and no one, eternal and non-existent; she is Cherchez la femme and Sweet Cheat Gone, maximum Vicissitude and maximum Velocity. Indeed, she must be considered what one of Pynchon's anti-figures, Dnubietna, engineer-poet of the Anglo-Maltese school …, observes history to be: a "step-function." For where all characters are one character and all history reincarnates the fraud that each of us has been here before regressing to lives we've never lived, what we experience as fiction becomes inseparable from those patterns of recurrence which to us are everyday "reality." (pp. 29-30)
What has disappeared from the scene is the writer whose imagination of reality dominates our fictional rehearsals of that reality. In the golden age of omniscient narration, the authorial stance always resembled Hamlet on the battlements soliloquizing with a ghost. Writers postured, they gesticulated, they sent their egos into whatever combat nature or society saw fit to engage them with…. But Dickens and Thackeray created their heroes without novels and novels without heroes without realizing that they themselves were postmodern; writers like Pynchon and Barthelme—the first to employ cybernation in the service of literature—not only know they are postmodern but have manufactured a universe which knows it is too. It is as though a complex mechanism had been designed specifically to build another mechanism whose only purpose was to observe itself in the act of being a machine. (pp. 30-1)
James Rother, in boundary 2 (copyright © boundary 2, 1976), Fall, 1976.
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