What do you get if you cross detection and science fiction? What do you call someone who looks like a baby but behaves like an adult? And what happens when a human being is crossed with a kangaroo? The punchlines are all to be found in Jonathan Lethem's novels, and they are only partially comic. This article proceeds from an initial, broad observation that Jonathan Lethem's novels and short stories subvert established fictional genres in some way, and that the frequent intermingling of genres is reflected in the bizarre characteristics displayed by many of the characters. For example, “Light and the Sufferer” is a gritty urban drama of fraternal bonding, drug addiction and robbery which just happens to feature mysterious aliens following the main characters. The Fortress of Solitude disrupts a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative by investing some of the neighbourhood Brooklyn kids with superheroic powers. As She Climbed across the Table is billed as a “campus comedy,” yet allows science fiction to infiltrate its witty satire on academic life. Girl in Landscape is a western set in space and introduces traditional frontier loners to alien races.

Even leaving aside Lethem's aversion to “bankrupt categories,”Footnote ² it can of course be argued that any genre is necessarily an unstable or flexible category, a volatile mixture of repeated, conventional elements and the variations that provide an individual text with a sense of identity. Scholars such as Margaret Cohen, in “Traveling Genres,” have argued just this: genre, she argues, is not simply an inert literary category, but “enables discussion of the social dimension of poetics.” “Genres that travel,” she continues, “have flexibility and play, offering a way to negotiate cultural differences” at a national and, as I will suggest, a regional level.Footnote ³ Rick Altman, in Film/Genre, goes further. While there is a common assumption that genres “have clear, stable identities and borders,” Altman argues, such an assumption invariably masks ideological or political views. The maintenance of clearly delineated genres helps shore up critical or disciplinary positions. Thus “genres are never entirely neutral categories. They – and their critics and theorists – always participate and further the work of various institutions.”Footnote ⁴ Of particular relevance to my argument is Altman's refutation of the idea that genres are “transhistorical,” that they can “be lifted out of time and placed in a timeless holding area as if they were all contemporaries.” Once again, such an idea stems from a desire to make a historically defined theoretical or critical perspective appear universal and definitive. Yet “there is no place outside of history from which purely ‘theoretical’ definitions of genre might be made.”Footnote ⁵ Genres evolve and mutate, and their critical reception is historically determined. The reader of Lethem's fiction sees genres interacting and changing over time, in the process of reading, and is forced to consider the historical and political circumstances contributing to these changes.

What is particularly interesting about Lethem's idiosyncratic treatment of shifting genre, notably in the novels I examine here – Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) and Amnesia Moon (1995) – is first its evident self-consciousness. What I mean by this, specifically, is that genre functions both for protagonist and reader as a form of cognitive mapping (to employ an evolutionary term I return to presently). In providing templates or simulation models for human behaviour, genre becomes a means of orienting oneself in geographical, ethical and literary space. Quite simply, one knows roughly how to behave when the generic boundaries, allowing for original elements, are clear. The problem for character and reader is that in Lethem the boundaries are almost never clear.

As a result, hints of self-consciousness about generic conventions (and the disruption of those conventions) can be found throughout Lethem's work.Footnote ⁶ For example, at one point during Gun, with Occasional Music, the narrator reflects on “the actuality of the violence” which erupts through the smart-aleck dialogue: “Violence isn't part of the ping-pong game of wisecrack and snappy comeback,” he says; “it puts an end to all that and leaves you wishing you'd stayed in or under the bed that morning.”Footnote ⁷ The disorientation the reader may feel at Lethem's generic mixing in these novels therefore mirrors the characters' experiences as their personal schemata become obsolete in what one might call “postmodern” environments. (These are environments which are, for the sake of argument, media-saturated, driven by technology and the market, commodifying, heterogeneous and fragmentary.) As Joseph Carroll argues, “The desire to construct reliable cognitive maps assumes unmistakable prominence in a period of serious cultural disorientation.”Footnote ⁸ But as I shall argue, Lethem is as much afraid of scientific, taxonomic impulses such as those exemplified by the literary critic and rabid anti-post-structuralist Carroll as he is the potential chaos of dismantled categories.

Secondly, and relatedly, there is a close connection between genre stylistics and the narrative preoccupations of Lethem's first two novels. In this essay I argue that the way in which genres intermingle and evolve in his work, ultimately achieving a kind of unstable hybridity, is consistent with the author's interest in evolution itself as a scientific, ethical and political standpoint. I focus on three key interlinked themes: evolution, amnesia and regionalism, demonstrating that Lethem tends to approach evolution as an adaptive process ironically, and that evolution is therefore not viewed as progressive, but frequently as a retreat into deliberate amnesia or denial of history, coupled with an increasingly atomized and parochial world view.

In each text, it is the ascendance of science fiction tropes which heralds the radical forgetfulness and narrowing of perspectives suffered by the characters. Therefore science fiction occupies a contradictory position: it is the common endpoint of an evolutionary trajectory of genre that simultaneously reveals its own ethical and literary inadequacies. It should be stressed once again that Lethem's attitude towards genre is in no way rigid or hierarchical: his concern is precisely that when hierarchies do get constructed for political ends, when for example a sci-fi obsession with advanced technologies and scientific development begins to take precedence within society, seemingly old-fashioned concepts like “community” and “freedom” are fatally compromised.

Ostensibly, Lethem might appear to set up a classic (and naive) opposition between the literary – that which is ambiguous, contested, questioning – and the scientific – that which delimits, avoids equivocality, seeks answers. However, even these categories eventually become destabilized, especially in his third novel, As She Climbed across the Table (1997). In fact, Lethem is at pains to present the complex relationship between science and literature in a far more nuanced way than a theorist such as Joseph Carroll in his mammoth polemic Evolution and Literary Theory (1995). Carroll's book belongs to a venerable critical tradition, a pivotal contributor being Ferdinand Brunetière with his L'Evolution des genres (1890–94), which draws on Linnaean and Darwinian classificatory models to label and fix the boundaries of genre. As Rick Altman says, such work aims to prove that genres “operate systematically, that their internal functioning can be observed and systematically described, and that they evolve according to a fixed and identifiable trajectory.”Footnote ⁹ It also represents an attempt to make a historically determined scientific viewpoint seem universal and timeless, as I have mentioned. Moreover, such work maintains a naive distinction between the scientific and the literary precisely by its need to circumvent ambiguity and its faith in science's ability to do so.

For Lethem, science and literature are not mutually exclusive discourses. Evolution is a story unfolding in unpredictable ways; science creates space for literary interpretation or storytelling and is in itself a form of literature. Therefore it cannot pretend to objective “truth.”Footnote ¹⁰ Joseph Carroll, impatient with rhetoricians who “insist that the laws of discourse take precedence over the laws of science,” at least recognizes that literature itself constitutes, just as science does, a form of knowledge.Footnote ¹¹ However, he fails to acknowledge that the reverse is also true: science deals in narrative speculation as well as knowledge. More damagingly, he chooses to ignore the ideological undercurrents of evolutionary theory and its more nefarious ramifications (notably eugenicsFootnote ¹²), and then proceeds to incorporate all literature into a biological evolutionary paradigm that reduces literary knowledge to a series of taxonomies. For instance:

To recap my opening remarks: if Lethem's work illustrates anything, it is that human life is not readily amenable to the imposition of generic boundaries, and that even if genres do indeed offer a form of cognitive mapping, the vicissitudes of experience will eventually, and necessarily, redraft those maps. Although Carroll acknowledges the complex interrelations between the genres listed above, there is surely the risk of placing even more emphasis on forms of discourse than those critics he savages for denying a reality beyond the text. Literature does indeed reflect human experience, but such categorizing risks an inadvertent inversion: human experience can best be described through textual species. Carroll merits close attention, if only for his unblushing adherence to what he calls the “truth” of science;Footnote ¹⁴ for his bludgeoning collective dismissal of thinkers as diverse as Fredric Jameson, Richard Rorty, Terry Eagleton and Jacques Derrida; and for his remarkable equation of queer theory with a postmodernist conspiracy to rob the world of material reality and replace it with autogenous text.Footnote ¹⁵ In the words of Philip Engstrand, the narrator of As She Climbed across the Table, he truly has “[p]aradigm eyes.”Footnote ¹⁶ The following remarks demonstrate that Lethem's texts at least approach evolution – as a scientific, ethical and literary concept and as a way of reflecting on Lethem's own development as an artist – with somewhat more maturity and inclusiveness than this.

Lethem's debut novel Gun, with Occasional Music, if one is to believe the blurb, is a scintillating stylistic marriage of Philip K. Dick's dystopian visions and Raymond Chandler's literary detective fiction. The protagonist, Conrad Metcalf, is unmistakably a gumshoe wisecracker in the Philip Marlowe mould:

Somewhere on the West Coast, Conrad is investigating the death of a former client, a doctor called Maynard Stanhunt, on behalf of the chief suspect Orton Angwine. There is nothing especially unconventional in this. Yet the maelstrom of corruption, violence and sexual intrigue which ensues, involving some deeply unpleasant gangsters as well as the “Inquisitors,” a futuristic police force intent on controlling the state, throws up characters one would not normally expect to find in a detective narrative. Chief amongst these are Joey, the talking, gun-wielding kangaroo assassin, and Barry the “babyhead.”

How these two outlandish individuals have come to be, and how they might disrupt the trajectory of the detective narrative, are central to understanding the text's ethical orientation. With another nod to generic self-consciousness, Conrad reveals Barry and Joey's provenance:

One consequence of the mysterious Dr. Twostrand's therapy is that, for the detective, the streets no longer seem mean enough; they have, in fact, ceased to feel alive at all. His natural environment has been stripped of the idle talk that so often provides the detective with answers.

If any one character has stayed mean, it is Joey the kangaroo. It is illuminating to treat Conrad and Joey's relationship as the central agon of the text. Not only does the kangaroo's participation in several murderous episodes drive the narrative forward, leading to the eventual showdown between detective and marsupial baddie, but it is also made clear that these antagonists embody two contrasting epistemological standpoints that are crucial to Lethem's ethical concerns. (In fact, the opposition is much starker in Gun, with Occasional Music than in subsequent novels.) The following exchange, taken from the first meeting between Conrad and Joey, is illustrative of the key differences:

Initially, it should be noted that Joey's attempts to “play human” reveal a fundamental misconception about evolution itself. As Chris Colby contends, “One common mistake is believing that species can be arranged on an evolutionary ladder from bacteria through ‘lower’ animals, to ‘higher’ animals and, finally, up to man.”Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, there are significant passages in On the Origin of Species, notably one in which he alludes to “our ignorance of the precise cause of the slight analogous difference between species,” where Darwin is happy to compare “differences between the races of man” with, for example, the propensity of cattle of a certain colour to be pestered by flies.Footnote ¹⁸ In The Descent of Man he is famously more explicit: “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”Footnote ¹⁹ Apart from factitiously privileging man in essence, rather than simply as an organism adept at adapting to and imposing upon its environment, the belief in the “evolutionary ladder” is implicated in the melancholic tendencies Joey exemplifies. Attendant upon his aspiration to be human is the desire, which Conrad recognizes, to deny lineage, to erase history.

Evolution here is a form of willed forgetting, combined with a desire to bring the future forward more quickly,and it is epitomized by the sci-fi ingredients of the story. It betrays a melancholic fixation on the futuristic present, despite the ghostly physical evidence of the “past” animal body. Another example would be the babyheads Conrad encounters in the bar later in the novel, drinking themselves to death “to counteract the unpleasant side effects of the evolution therapy” (Gun 145), trying to forget themselves even as they are dressed absurdly in toddlers' clothes and smoking cigarettes. Most importantly, this forgetting stands in direct contrast to the avowed aim of the detective. Throughout the narrative, Conrad is referred to, seldom admiringly, as a “question asker” (Gun 147). Questions have, of course, always been the primary weapon in the detective's armoury, but in this increasingly sci-fi-inflected environment, conducive to individual and collective forgetting, the need to uncover past connections, to re-establish a sense of community in the face of increasing isolationism, becomes essential.

In a neat inversion of Joey's anthropomorphism, Conrad's honest appraisal of himself as “the creature who asked questions, the lowest creature of them all” (Gun 130), reveals the dread and antipathy the population has developed towards the detective function. The detective, as someone who carries “the weight of the past like ballast, something only I was stupid enough to keep carrying” (Gun 234), strives for a sense of connection, ethical responsibility and collective narrative in the face of atomization. Appalled by the “disconnected creatures pass[ing] through the blackness, towards solitary destinations,” Conrad is “stupid enough to think there was something wrong with the silence that had fallen like a gloved hand onto the bare throat of the city” (Gun 130).

Obviously, it is not at all unusual for science fiction to offer dystopian visions. What is interesting here is that the detective tries to maintain classic, romantic hard-boiled genre values in the face of the sci-fi elements – artificially evolved animals, anti-gravity pens, the state-sanctioned accounting and docking of citizens' “karma” (Gun 33) – which repudiate his efforts. Ultimately, the unravelling of the case hinges on another such element – the drug called (making the point explicitly) Forgettol. The novel's “twist” hinges on the discovery that the victim, Maynard Stanhunt, actually orders his own hit. His excessive consumption of Forgettol has caused a radical bifurcation of his personality, such that his professional self cannot even remember that his private self is enjoying an elicit affair in a motel with a woman named Celeste. Tragically, the professional self takes out a successful contract on the private self, with Joey the kangaroo as hitman.

Not only does this scenario represent a narcotically enhanced rehearsal of the Calvinist split self, it also points to an underlying paradox operative both narratively and metanarratively, namely that despite the detective's old-fashioned craving for the facts and thus for communal culpability for past events, it is the radical act of forgetting which creates the very narrative in which Conrad Metcalf is involved. Indeed, Forgettol, if the chemist's analysis is to be believed, can potentially be used as a narrative drug:

As he says, “a sense of continuity” can be achieved if the correct balance between amnesia and memory is found. Discomfiting elements can be strategically rejected in favour of the comforts of concatenation. It appears, then, that narrative is a combination of remembering and forgetting, and that the assumed purity of the detective's drive for recollection is in fact no more palatable than the denial practised by the artificially evolved.

Yet the real problem is, as the chemist recognizes, that forgetting cannot and should not be controlled in this way. Moreover, Lethem has created a fictional world where it is the state that increasingly attempts to control it through manipulation of technology, in order effectively to relax society's critical faculties and disable resistance or freethinking. Evolution therapy is one aspect of this. Mass produced Forgettol is another: later in the novel, after Conrad has spent six years in suspended animation (“the freeze”) for reaching zero karma points (Gun 211), the drug “makery” has become completely mechanized (Gun 239) and the time-release version of the drug, which completely obliterates memory, is now the most commonly used (Gun 216). Indeed, the detective leaves the freeze after six years to find a world more recognizably imbued with the qualities of science fiction than ever before. Most telling of all are the little boxes everyone seems to own which have supplanted recollection. Conrad attempts to interview again several of the people involved in the case, only to find them stripped of integral memory, obliged instead to consult the electronic box for their “memories.” Memory itself has become abstracted, “externalized, and rigorously edited” (Gun 224). Thus the population is condemned to the numbing drudgery of an eternal present, free to listen to the muzak “which was sure to be coming out of the nearest water fountain or cigarette machine” (Gun 224) and divested of the potentially unsettling cognitive maps memory might supply in order to inspire resistance. The ending of the novel is resigned and pessimistic: once the case has been “cracked,” Conrad too looks forward to the anaesthetic pleasures of time-release Forgettol.

Gun, with Occasional Music begins as a noir detective novel with elements of science fiction, and evolves into a dystopian sci-fi text, which has rendered the ethical and literary aspirations of the detective obsolete. Consequently, the narrative trajectory describes a retreat into atemporality and solipsism. Evolution is depicted not as a process whereby living organisms adapt their physical and cognitive faculties to suit their environments, but as one of many techniques, along with the administration of drugs and the seductions of consumerism, for detaching the individual completely from his or her environment and a sense of collective responsibility. Similarly, imaginative use is made of scientific knowledge in order to demonstrate that if one is not careful, all narrative runs the risk of becoming science fiction in the end. Science fiction in this novel is what results when an ideologically charged sense of individual sovereignty overwhelms individual rights. An overly enthusiastic acceptance of Darwin's optimistic evolutionary prediction, that “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection,”Footnote ²⁰ results in its antithesis – social breakdown and withdrawal into a numb individualism. In Lethem's terms, the individual's drive to perfectibility, based largely on “technological opportunities,” suggests “a search for zipless transcendence which [is] usually a mistake.”Footnote ²¹

As its title would suggest, Amnesia Moon is also a novel about the dangers of mass forgetting. And again, it offers an amalgam of generic forms, this time fusing the road narrative with science fiction dystopia. It takes place in a postapocalyptic America but denies both protagonist and reader any knowledge of the exact nature of the cataclysmic event. Various theories are propounded – alien attack and nuclear accident, to mention but two – but the true significance lies not in what happened but in the consequences of, and reactions to, the unnamed event. Indeed, what links the multifarious idiosyncratic individuals in Amnesia Moon is the fact that in lieu of any hard facts about the event, they have all “made a tradeoff. They've exchanged freedom and awareness for some kind of organizing principle or explanation.”Footnote ²² It is a novel in part about the political capital which can be made from fear and ignorance, and again genre evolutions (or mutations) prove to be integral.

To offer a brief synopsis: our hero is a man named Chaos (Lethem is seldom shy about using heavily allegorical names) who, when the novel begins, is living in a disused multiplex cinema in Wyoming. After an altercation with the local self-appointed tribal leader, Kellogg, who appears to be able to control Chaos's dreams, Chaos hits the road in a stolen car and heads out west to California with a young girl named Melinda, in a bid to discover his pre-apocalyptic identity.

Melinda may or may not be Chaos's daughter. It is worth remarking that his possible paternity is marginally less interesting than the fact Melinda is covered in smooth, shiny “brown fur” and resembles a seal.Footnote ²³ Her bodily modification is aesthetically rather pleasing, which is more than can be said for some of the other mutants in Hatfork, Wyoming. Neatly invalidating a weak evolutionary concept of man as the pinnacle of biological adaptation, Lethem depicts a world in which, as Chaos observes, “The animal kingdom is dead” (Moon 5), so that the almost logical outcome is the diversification of human physical forms (and genres) into different subspecies. In this, Lethem's early work displays distinct similarities with the novels of the British science fiction writer and social satirist Jeff Noon, especially his Vurt trilogy.Footnote ²⁴

The second thing to note is the archetypically American character of the journey through the wilderness, the “journey west” (Moon 149). Not only does it echo the move from East to West Lethem himself made aged eighteen (of which more in due course), but it forces us within the textual arena of mutation and accelerated evolution to reflect that the westward expansion so integral to Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis has itself a form of evolutionary thrust. The creation of a kind of national species, characterized by “dominant individualism, working for good and for evil,” is its most devout wish.Footnote ²⁵ If it is a thesis ably challenged by the new western historians such as Brian W. Dippie and Patricia Limerick, who propose a US constituted by regions of distinct personality, Lethem takes this idea yet again to its almost logical conclusion. For in Amnesia Moon's landscape of fear and confusion, regionalism becomes a parochialism so narrow in its perspective that the citizens of California are barely even aware of the existence of Wyoming, or “Little America,” let alone these other regions' distinct reactions to the apocalyptic event. For example, in Vacaville, California, Chaos notices that in the magazines the “cover stories were all about the television and the government, even when they were versions of magazines like Time and Rolling Stone and Playboy, which Chaos knew from before. Nothing referred to anything outside Vacaville” (Moon 98). Another character remarks to Chaos, “I'm sure you've noticed how local things can get nowadays” (Moon 139). Indeed, the primary result of the cataclysmic event is this parochialism, especially in California, and it is a narrowing of perspectives the state government officials (who double as the television and film stars in heroic action films and romances) actively encourage. This is not a classic American regionalism balancing, as Tom Lutz expresses it, “local and larger perspectives,” it is a deliberate form of atomization and hence control.Footnote ²⁶

Memory – of a past when one's identity comprised not only pride in local colour but also a wider civic responsibility – is the victim once again. To exacerbate this loss, the California state government forces people to take different jobs every day and to move twice a week. Quite simply, there is not enough time to accumulate meaningful memories. Like the sci-fi environment of Gun, with Occasional Music, this California relies on the melancholy of the banal, eternal present. Even Chaos acknowledges that his apparent ability to hold on to some of his memories might be a trick of locality:

And he can never be sure whether these memories are real at all, or simply oneiric illusions. What is clear is that even regional identity is merely a media effect.

This might all simply be a familiar satire on the widely perceived provincialism of much of Middle America, as well as the vacuity of media-saturated politics. It can even be interpreted as highlighting the inherent absurdity in mythical American notions of newness, the forgetting of the Old World as one moves out west to forge a new identity. Most of all, however, it is important to emphasize the broader political and ethical connotations. These are most lucidly, if ironically, revealed through the paranoid fantasies of one of the incidental characters, a soldier called Vance. He has a particularly outlandish theory about the cataclysmic event: “Vance waved his hand impatiently. ‘Listen: why do you think the world got broken up? Because the aliens landed. It was a defensive response, an evolutionary step. Reality shattered to isolate the hives’” (Moon 181, original emphasis). Even if the alien theory is false, the defensive reaction it postulates is significant and strangely prescient, when one considers some of the consequences of 9/11. Evolution is, as in Gun, with Occasional Music, a form of retreat into blinkered perspectives even as the idea of progress it promulgates represents a return to grand narratives. It is certainly evidence of adaptive facility in the face of fear, confusion and a destabilized cultural, political (and generic) environment, but its outcomes are isolation, and thus division and rule. Lethem is not, I think, extolling the virtues of a nationalist perspective instead, so much as he is warning against a regionalism which remains unaware of the exquisite tension between differing regional and cultural identities necessary to sustain a sense of identity in the first place. The urban regionalism of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, to which I refer later, comes much closer to such a sophisticated outlook.

I would like now to open out some of the evolutionary ideas discussed in relation to Gun, with Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon and speculate, as it were, on the evolution of Lethem's later work. Lethem has not yet attracted a great deal of critical attention,Footnote ²⁷ and my intention here is to provide some perspectives from which future scholarship, including my own, can proceed. First, it is curious that the kind of narcotic science fiction which characterizes these two novels and the one which followed – As She Climbed across the Table – was Lethem's chosen genre while living in California. After this he produced Girl in Landscape (1998), a science fiction coming-of-age narrative taking place mostly on a distant planet, but beginning in the near future with a family fleeing a Brooklyn blasted by the catastrophic effects of global warming. Lethem has admitted in interview that in these opening chapters “you're seeing me daring myself to open that box and really let it come”; that is, daring to reconnect with and portray elements of his Brooklyn past, including the death of his mother when he was fourteen. “For years,” he admits, “I was overwhelmed by Brooklyn … The richness of my own upbringing was too much for me to contend with, either in my life or my writing, and so I was in a kind of flirtation.”Footnote ²⁸ Despite its interplanetary perspectives, Girl in Landscape reads much more like a regionalist text than the introspective parochialism of Amnesia Moon, though admittedly it is still an unconventional example. But its key themes are familiar from classic regionalist texts such as Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943): the encounter with and embracing of otherness (here in the form of extraterrestrials called the Archbuilders), the establishment and maintenance in adversity of community values, and the rejection of repressive paternal authority.

When he eventually returned to Brooklyn, Lethem produced the more or less conventional detective novel Motherless Brooklyn (notwithstanding the narrator's Tourette's syndrome), followed by The Fortress of Solitude. Both were, as he has acknowledged, much more personal, candid pieces of work, couched in the geographical and cultural specificities of his birthplace. It appears that there is some inherent characteristic of Brooklyn which facilitates a regionalism based in genres more amenable to representing community – detection and coming-of-age, that is – and that the ironic distancing of the author's science fiction is a result of his earlier state of exile. It is, in essence, the initial step in the process of “[d]reaming my way back to Brooklyn.”Footnote ²⁹ Lethem's work, somewhat ironically, reveals a more inclusive and humanistic outlook the closer it gets to a romanticized conception of “home”: what might be regarded as atavism or nostalgic retreat is, in ethical terms, a form of evolution. Conversely, California simply appears too weird, too saturated with postmodern pastiche and alienation to write about without ironic distance.Footnote ³⁰

Second, one cannot study Jonathan Lethem without taking into account the question of literary influence. This, as Lisa Hopkins has observed, is an “example of evolutionary change” in itself.Footnote ³¹ Lethem is typically very explicit about his own influences:

If one accepts that genre functions as a kind of shared cognitive map for protagonist and reader, one might also ask to what extent recapitulated literary ideas constitute cognitive maps, and how far they can be applied and adapted to new historical and cultural circumstances. Might Lethem's deliberate recognition of the enduring influence of certain literary tropes and stylistic devices in some way represent “the survival of the fittest” in terms of canon formation? In which case, intellectual heredity affirms the primacy of authorship as conceptual touchstone. Lethem thereby runs the risk of subscribing to paradigms of dominance in evolutionary theory, against which the novels themselves, as I have shown, appear to militate.Footnote ³³

Finally, one has to acknowledge, for all his literary allusiveness and reflexiveness, that mixing genres constitutes for Lethem not merely metafictional game-playing or an arch demonstration of cleverness. Rather, it addresses a fundamentally human question about how the individual behaves when confronted with alterity, with what is perceived as exotic or out of recognizable context. A story such as “Light and the Sufferer,” for example, quite self-consciously introduces sci-fi elements to a realist urban tale. The “Sufferers,” aliens who suddenly materialize as dogged yet silent companions at the side of humans in trouble, force the individuals concerned to question their own behaviour, as well as their attitudes to otherness and the possibility of external forces participating in their lives. As the author expresses it, “It's a story about interventions.”Footnote ³⁴ Lethem's treatment of genre takes the form of a series of interventions, designed to destabilize the cosy categories with which we orient ourselves, and the equally comfortable categories employed by scholars for their literary interventions.