Postmodernism is in some ways a theory-driven trend; in others, it represents a costly triumph over the critic. Every possible response is pre-empted, every shot fired in advance. The critic within the book analyzes “the devices the Author has used, such as the strategy of the double negative, the snares and delusions he has concealed in the lower levels of his plot,” then goes on to “the problem of credibility and reliability, which raises the fundamental question of narrative authority and, in turn, the dimension of social irony and the elusive boundary between this and self-irony …” And so on.
Intellectual engagement seems pointless when the book has already had the last word. Emotional engagement is ruled out by the shifting status of the “characters” — why step over the threshold and enter the interior spaces of the fiction, when the carpet is only there to be pulled out from under you?
Postmodernism in fiction seems to lead largely to dead ends, though Isak Dinesen with her Chinese-box structures of story within story and Borges with his labyrinths and mirrors go on testifying to the possibility of a metaphysical fiction less thoroughly armored against its audience, still attuned to the rewards of surrender.
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