Stone Lion and Other Stories

Postmodern cuento, fabulation, or talk story is no doubt the reaction to social and historical bankruptcy, to the blocking of possibilities that leaves — as Jameson stresses — "little option but the imaginary." Their very invention and -534- contagious inventiveness, however, privileges a creative politics by the sheer act of multiplying events they cannot control. Postmodern realist invention thus by way of its very speculation becomes the figure of a larger politics of the possible and of resistance. Another form of postmodern realism in the United States is in some ways more quotidian than the previous ones. Here a new K Mart/mass cultural realism, minimalized and self-examining, has grown up in the various writings of Raymond Carver, Helena Maria Viramontes, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone, and others. If, as Malcolm Bradbury noted, there has been for our postcontemporary generation "warfare in the Empire of Signs, there is also every sign…that the Empire can indeed strike back." While these writers hardly share a homogeneous ideological sensibility, they do share a common sense that a crisis in representation is clearly at hand ...»