Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy
Book by Lance Olsen; Greenwood Press, 1987

Prelude: Nameless Things and Thingless Names
Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. Beckett ( Molloy, 31)
Suggesting that what Alain Robbe-Grillet somewhat misleadingly calls the Balzacian mode of fiction (a mode primarily interested in content; the communal; the psychological; the chronological; the fully rounded character; the mimetic--a mode, in other words, firmly grounded in "the world") is dead seems a little like suggesting there are no such things as UFOs. As much as one would like to believe or not in such charming and marvelous ideas, the fact remains that the National Enquirer and the U.S. Air Force report and catalog sightings continually. Competent writers working under realist, naturalist, and even modernist assumptions are presently alive, well, popular, and often financially successful, and their fiction, as Fredric Jameson points out, "persuades us in a concrete fashion that human actions, human life is somehow a complete, interlocking whole, a single, formed, meaningful substance. . . . Our satisfaction with the completeness of plot is therefore a kind of satisfaction with society as well" But alongside these modes, roughly since the 1940's, what has come for better or worse to be called postmodernism has surfaced. This mode of discourse agrees with Robbe-Grillet that such previous composition is reactionary, "no longer anything but an empty formula, serving only as the basis for tiresome parodies" ( For a New Novel, 135). For him, "the novel of characters belongs entirely to the past, it describes a period: that which marked the apogee of the individual" ( 28 ); "the old myths of 'depth'" ( 23 ) are useless for describing mankind's current conception of self; the ideas of communal time and space and "reality" are fictions; and the universe "is neither significant nor absurd" ( 19 ).

In his well-known essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," John Barth furthers this notion by suggesting that contemporary culture has entered into a state of "used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities" ( 29 ). Just as "Beethoven's Sixth Symphony or the Chartres Cathedral if executed today would be merely embarrassing," he continues, so is the "turn-of-thecentury-type" novel simply written "in more or less mid-twentieth-century language." In fact, "to be technically out of date is likely to be a serious defect" since "art and its forms and techniques live in history" ( 30 ) and so must change to reflect changes in historical consciousness. Rewriting the nineteenthand early twentieth-century novel as our civilization swings into the last few years before the twenty-first reduces one to producing banal imitations, the argument goes. But "'the literature of exhausted possibility--or, more chicly, 'the literature of exhaustion'" is "by no means necessarily a cause for despair" ( 29 ) because it frees one up to search for new strategies or, more precisely, new combinations of old strategies. One strategy that has been employed frequently by postmodern literature as a way to liberate its imagination from the realist, naturalist, and modernist modes of fiction is the fantastic. A mode that has been around since The Epic of Gilgamesh, which has been used for a variety of purposes (didactic, escapist, and so on), and which has often been considered a relatively minor genre, now fantasy has begun to compete with the Balzacian mode as the dominant form of fiction. Jean Kennard has gone so far as to argue that fantasy techniques "most of all characterize contemporary fiction. . . . [I]ndeed in the 1960s they became the rule rather than the exception" ( 10 - 11 ).