Twentieth-century changes in theories of language have been dramatic, emphasizing the severe limitations of language as a way of knowing oneself and the external world. While the ability to use language as a way of referring to the world has grown increasingly complex, from the primitive identification of name and object through Saussure's theory of signification, referential language has remained a stable way of placing oneself within a shared social context. In fiction, referential language has been the basis for mimetic or realistic novels which can reproduce recognizable versions of that shared social reality and create characters who live plausibly within its settings.;Critics of contemporary fiction have most often identified these two trends. One can retain a belief in reference and write the traditional, realistic fiction of Updike. Or, one can reject reference and write the reflexive fiction of Barthelme. It seems to me, however, that the most dynamic and successful of contemporary novels do not come from any comfortable acceptance of either reference or reflexiveness, but rather are based on the irreconcilable tension between the two. For, while our intellectual acceptance of reference may be destroyed, referential language itself so shapes and encloses our perceptions and experience that it cannot be escaped. This is the paradoxical nature of language which is a fundamental problem for novelists who must use language to articulate the full dimensions of human experience, an experience which must include both out distrust of and dependence on language. Beckett, Ellison, Lessing and Gass all confront the same paradox of language, and their varied responses to the tension between reference and reflexiveness determines the shapes of their fictions.;The introductory chapter traces changes in the theories of language and the corresponding developments in fictional techniques, moving from referential to reflexive theories and from traditional eighteenth-century realism to contemporary anti-realism. In Chapter 2, the novels of Samuel Beckett are examined, as the best articulations of the language problem at the start of the contemporary period. Watt is a thematic and formal analysis of the reference/reflexiveness tension; and, The Unnamable illustrates how this tension is successfully used as the basis for the novel's form. Chapter 3 discusses Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel which considers the creative potential of reflexive language, thematically and formally, but which remains traditional in its insistence on the stable, communicative properties of reference. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Briefing for a Descent into Hell are discussed in Chapter 4. The limit of reference is presented as a thematic issue in The Golden Notebook; and, in the later work, we see how Lessing's inability to come to terms with the paradox of language mars the novel's structure. In Chapter 5 the theory and fiction of William Gass is used to exemplify the Beckettian acceptance of the paradox as a dynamic source for fiction, particularly in Omensetter's Luck. That such a range of authors responds to the same language problem allows us to use the reference/reflexiveness tension as a way of defining a distinct trend in contemporary fiction.;In the last fifty years, however, referential language itself has seemed to be a fiction. Since Wittgenstein, language has not been thought of as a transparent medium referring to a congruent reality outside itself; rather, it is thought to be opaque. Unable to point to anything outside the system of language itself, language becomes reflexive, creating its own world of words. The implications for fiction are most clearly evident in the contemporary trends of anti-realism and metafiction, which reject any pretense of referring to a social reality in a mimetic way.
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