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The Self-conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon, and: The Dark and Light Gods: Essays on the Self in Modem Literature (review)

Brian Stonehill's book on The Self-conscious Novel will be welcomed by students seeking to impose some order and definition on the increasingly impenetrable output of the postmodernists now flowing into the literary marketplace. With its sensible analysis and its ordered categories of the characteristics of "self-conscious" fiction, it provides a guide of sorts through the jungle. That it does so through a short but rigorous examination of the work of five preeminent novelistsÂ—James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and John BarthÂ— adds to the value of the undertaking. The critic concerns himself with fiction that seeks to draw attention to itself as fiction, with the nonmimetic work that demands to be encountered as such. There is a level on which the action is less important to the reader than his recognition that such action, and the characters involved in it, are there for the writer's own purposes. The author, in other words, plays a game in his literary work, seeking "esthetic satisfaction" rather than the verisimilitude which was the avowed aim of much of earlier fiction.