InThe Anatomy Lesson, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman — who has authored a book that sounds suspiciously like Portnoy’s Complaint — receives a letter from the editors of his old college newspaper. They “wanted to interview him about the future of his kind of fiction in the post-modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon.” Because Zuckerman is in the hospital suffering undiagnosed pain, the editors have sent a list of written questions: “1. Why do you continue to write? 2. What purpose does your work serve? 3. Do you feel yourself part of a rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition?”

These are not questions of the sort to cheer an ailing writer, but they do summarize the elitist view of post-1960s fiction. From this standpoint, Zuckerman’s humor and ethnicity and his lack of esoteric technique and political commitment demote his work to a “rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition. ” Roth locates this attitude in the self-important undergraduate editors of The Anatomy Lesson (1983), but it is still pervasive in intellectual circles. The metaphor of the rearguard (and its correlate, the avant-garde) and the assignment of the “postmodernist era” to John Barth and Thomas Pynchon are symptomatic of a conception of literary history that itself should be labeled “a rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition,” for the student editors are speaking the language of modernism, the aesthetic ideology of the early twentieth century.