The patriarchs of American metafiction—Barth, Gaddis, Pynchon, Coover; the literary flank of sixties culture-culture—played a historically important role in tearing down the presumption of unmediated, ‘real’ representation. The original anti-windscreen crowd. Not only that, their cynical convention-flouting, their anarchistic attack on the literary and cultural establishment, their acerbic rejection of the sentimental American values that perpetuated the status quo, were all politically powerful, even radical, when folks like Barth and Coover and Burroughs did them. As Wallace said in an interview, “irony and cynicism were just what the hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for.” But their innovations also opened the door for a postmodern aesthetic and cultural posture that privileges cynicism and irony as ends in themselves, not as means toward some constructive project, some form of redemption. Instead of mimetically depicting and darkly satirizing the endlessly mediated, recursive, and atomized cultural and social conditions of late capitalism—as the best sixties and seventies metafiction did—later postmodern fiction revels in it, in the meaningless play and slippage of signs and significance. [10]
[10] Another way to put all this: a few decades ago, it was a really funny and sometimes radical thing to say to your reader, “hey, here I am writing this thing,” to pull back the curtain and show the audience all the strings, and show them the author—the ‘I’—up above, vigorously manipulating the objects on stage. This made people feel good, connected, inside a cool little club they had suspected existed but always felt far away from, like when a big brother invites his little brother to a high school party. The problem was that after a while the little brother’s initial excitement is going to wear off, that sense of transgressive inclusion can only sustain itself for so long, and then he’s going to get sleepy and start looking around for some place to sit that doesn’t already have beer or puke on it. We readers were let inside the inner-workings of fiction by our postmodern big brothers, but after a while we realized that the messy interior, the big kid party, was sort of banal and redundant—not to mention ugly and unloving. We wind up feeling like it’s not terribly much better now than before, when we were peeking in a foggy window from the outside, and the inside was alluringly obscured. But now we know what’s in here, and we can’t go back.