Theory of reflexive fiction José Ángel García Landa Universidad de Zaragoza, 1992 Internet edition 2004 Introduction It is difficult to write history today. In a postmodern age we have become extremely self-conscious about the artificiality of theories, and the constructedness of history. This problem also affects the historian of literature. The evolution from naturalism into modernism was well documented and theorized some decades ago: it seemed only natural that one literary movement would succeed another. But the transition from modernism into postmodernism seems far more problematic; the concept of postmodernism itself is a strongly debated one. One of the characteristics of the postmodernist era, then, is that we are not so sure that there are such things as eras, that we do not know very well what is postmodernism and whether it is really there that we are. Or what we should do once we are there. Does the novel go anywhere in particular? It has always been difficult to answer such a question. It is even more difficult now because of our self-consciousness about the artificial and selective nature of an answer, which implies telling a narrative about the novel. Earlier critics often told such narratives. For Henry James, the novel was becoming a form of art, refining its shape and evolving towards a form of psychological drama. For the French new novelists, the novel was becoming an exploration of its own possibilities, an allegory of its own production and its use of language. There was a clear sense of evolution away from certain forms and towards others. Nowadays, there are no such clear aims which novels should fulfil in order to be at the forefront of evolution. There is a reaction against continued abstraction, and a number of mimetic and emotive elements have reasserted themselves; there is also a reaction against the view of novelistic evolution as a kind of competition in experiment. The situation seems pluralistic, in keeping with the postmodern ethos of "anything goes". A perspective on the evolution of the novel becomes more defined if we examine the theory of fiction over the last few decades and try to discern changing emphases and new elements in the discussion. The history of the novel and the PDFmyURL.com