While many writers still perform comfortably in the Balzacian and modernist modes of fiction, clearly since about the nineteen forties another impulse has surfaced along side these projects. Whether as a shorthand for a system of concerns we call this mode of perception postmodernism, or conjure up a less loaded term--perhaps Hassan's Age of Indetermanence, or something else, Absurdism, Uncertainism, The Age of Silence--we find a new cluster of obsessions arises, a certain fixation with exhaustion, degree zero, the dehuman, perversion of cultural norms, a belief in The End, decreation, signifer rather than signified, hyper self-reflexivity, and so on. Since this new impulse arose in response to a universe under physical and metaphysical erasure, and since it tries to come to terms with a situation it believes fantastic, there is little wonder that the mode of discourse chosen as a vehicle for its consciousness is the fantastic.Postmodern fantasy, as we discover in the projects of Kafka, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Fuentes, Pynchon, Garc(')ia Marquez and Coetzee, is the literary equivalent of deconstructionism, for it interrogates all we take for granted about language and experience, giving these no more than shifting and provisional status. It may be seen as a mode of radical skepticism that believes only in the impossibility of total intelligibility in the endless displacement of "meaning" in the jamming of conceptual closure in the production of a universe without fault, "truth," origin in a bottomless relativity of "significance."Fantasy is a metagenre that touches upon romance, fairy tales, folklore, myth, legend, science fiction, satire, utopia, dystopia, detective stories, allegory, dream visions, surrealist fictions, tales of horror, and so forth. It is a mode of discourse, as Todorov points out, that stutters between two other modes, the marvelous and the mimetic, thereby confusing them and generating a dialectic that refuses synthesis it explores the unsaid and unseen in a culture, rejects any definitive version of "reality." As a result, its function is to surprise, question, put into doubt, produce anxiety, make active, repel, rebel, subvert, make ambiguous, dislocate, destabilize.
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