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critical respect back then were the likes of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and young John Updike; to some of us literary deckhands, however, those indisputably talented writers seemed of less impressive stature than the preceding generation of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein—not to mention Joyce, Kafka, Mann, and Proust. My own living navigation stars and ship’s officers in those days were Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov, joined presently by Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez. Although the vessel didn’t have a name yet—Ihab Hassan’s Dismemberment
of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Aesthetic wasn’t published until the early 1970s—a number of us felt that we were working something out that would honor the high artistic standards and radical innovations of our great Modernist predecessors while maintaining a degree of skepticism and modest irony with respect to their heroic ambition. (What self-respecting Postmodernist would presume, like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race”?). If they were the century’s Homers and Virgils, we would endeavor to be its Catulluses and Ovids and Petroniuses—an honorable aspiration.
    All of that was, by now, a generation ago. Given that the iconoclastic, filiocratic spirit of 19th-century Romanticism has persisted right through our own time, it was to be expected that the second generation of (lower-case) postmodern culture would look to distance itself from its immediate forebears; that impulse is as American as . . . Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schlegel? I don’t know how much and how consciously it has impelled younger writers in the ever-more-beleaguered medium of American trade p-fiction; I do suspect it to be among the impulses behind the phenomenon of e-fiction.
    And that is quite all right: “Let a thousand flowers blossom,” et cetera. If the edifice of printed lit is tottering, long may it totter, like the Pisan campanile, and become all the more appealing in its totterment. If we are in the late-Cretaceous era of print, and if e-fiction turns out to be the asteroid whose impact spells our doom “in lightforms” (which I doubt), let us take comfort in the reflection that the great dinosaurs not only hung in there for another million years or two before realizing that their time was up, but in a few instances attained their most ultrasaurian proportions even as those
newly evolving mammalian critters scampered between their tremendous feet—and occasionally got squashed flat. It was the same with cathedrals and square-riggers and zeppelins and ocean liners. Que será será , but not always in a hurry.
    Someone might assert that the sentiments I’ve expressed here are an example of what the aforementioned e-fictionist Michael Joyce has wittily called “modality envy.” So be it, if so it be, although I believe “modality curiosity” to be a more accurate characterization: Mine is the ongoing curiosity of a Postmodern Romantic Formalist about the state of the art, as well as about the state of such new and, after all, essentially different arts as I believe e-fiction to be—in case there’s something there that a writer like myself might make use of in my venerable medium.
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    THIS JUST IN from Scientific American , one of those “wigged-out zines” to which I subscribe: It appears that we late-Cretaceous p-fictionists may have an unappreciated edge in the evolutionary competition down the road. Give us acid-free paper, a source of light, and familiarity with our language, and we are in business for the long haul. Digitalized information, on the other hand (including e-fiction), turns out to be only theoretically invulnerable to the ravages of time; the alarming fact is that the physical media on which it is stored, not to mention the