Claims to immediacy or resemblance to experience are voided by a proliferation of allusions. But these procedures are not enough to distinguish post-modernism from modernism. The Waste Land,'' like Pound's ''Cantos'' and Joyce's ''Ulysses,'' is a tissue of allusions, a confession of belatedness. So we have to add a further consideration, which we owe to the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. In the major works of modernism, however belated, the writer still hopes to tell a story, a comprehensive narrative of life as such, a myth not necessarily floating free of history but unintimidated by the eventfulness of the past.
Myths are meanings and values in narrative form.
A post-modernist writer, by contrast, doesn't believe that one story is more comprehensive, more telling, than another. The third woman carrying a bag of teeth might just as well be the tenth woman carrying a basket of flowers so far as explanatory ambition is in question. Alternative history is just as valid as the official version, anachronism is not a disability, the second chance is no worse than the first, among the moods the pluperfect subjunctive is just as good as the past perfect. It is possible to feel irritated by such assumptions in post-modernist writing, or by any device that makes the words on the page seem willfully arbitrary or weightless. Mr. Fuentes doesn't let the reader off as lightly as that.