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The writer John Barth believes the works of Italo Calvino exemplify postmodernism as a “literature of replenishment,” which is a more “democratic” reaction against the “exhaustion” or “used-upness” of the modernist aesthetic it replaced. (Calvino’s) materials are as modern as the new cosmology and as ancient as folktales, but whose themes are love and loss, change and permanence, illusion and reality, including a good deal of specifically Italian reality. Like all fine fantasists, Calvino grounds his flights in local, palpable detail…A true postmodernist, Calvino keeps one foot always in the narrative past of Boccaccio, Marco Polo, or Italian fairy tales—and one foot in, one might say, the Parisian structuralist present; one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality…I urge everyone to read Calvino at once…not only because he exemplifies my postmodernist program, but because his fiction is both delicious and high in protein (Barth, p. 70). While Barth may believe that Calvino ought to represent his postmodernist program, the evidence that postmodernism has more democratic appeal than modernism is slim. Is Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow any less difficult or more democratic in its appeal than Joyce’