450
RONALD SUKENICK
my experience is that everywhere I go young people are writing out of
Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Kafka, Genet, Beckett, in other words out of the
Moderns and their successors. I agree that the Modern period is dead,
but in the same sense that Symbolism is dead or Surrealism is dead–
dead but not dead-end. It is the Moderns now to whom we look back
and it is the problems they raised that we have to contend with. Their
greatness is precisely in the centrality of their diagnosis and we can't
avoid the disease by ignoring it. There is no way to evade them, no
way to go back to Tolstoy, much as we may love him, and start over
again. It's impossible, no matter how convenient for anybody's ideology,
even one's own. Those of us who sense the absence of what Wallace
Stevens called "sovereign images" for our reality can't write in the
mode of social realism because it is exactly our idea of realness that
is in question. Our particular moment and place is located in our heads
and our bodies and at the risk of solipsism we must start there and
push 'Outward. The moral risks of such a situation are admittedly great
and personally I would prefer a Genet with the moral disposition of
Wordsworth but you can't have everything. Perhaps if there is a new
climate those critics who have felt the necessity of attacking the excesses
of the Modern tradition will be able to return to the job of disentangling
its successes from its failures and elaborating its accomplishments. Cer–
tainly a significant body of work is beginning to accumulate along these
lines - in terms of recent publication I think of Ihab Hassan's
The
Dismemberment of Orpheus
and Sharon Spencer's
Space, Time and
Structure in the M odern Novel.
In any case we haven't such a wealth
of first rate works in the UngrQss National Product that we can afford
to break up int::> factions over it. Any kind of programmatic approach
is damaging - whether of narrow realism or narrow modernism. In this
regard it might not be a bad idea to deemphasize criticism of art in
an ideological and political perspective - a perspective which has been
the great contribution but also the vice of nonacademic criticism. Of
course anything can be seen from a political point of view if you want
to look at it that way, but unless at some point art is considered as
absolutely distinct from ideology it tends to become indistinguishable
from it. It is undeniably illuminating to look at the
Commedia
in pol–
itical terms but let's not forget that the
Commedia
is already looking
at politics in imaginative terms. Any criticism that moves the attention
from the work to the ideas behind it is ultimately distracting.
I don't see that the current eddy of "conservatism" goes very deep
or that it will have any lasting effect. We now have a mass youth–
campus audience that shows signs of developing some kind of literary
taste, even if you think it's bad taste. It has progressed in recent years
from Kahlil Gibran to Hesse to Vonnegut to Brautigan and lately to
Anais Nin in its effort to find some correspondence for and illumination
of its own experience. Every attempt should be made to cultivate and
deepen, rather than attack, that taste and it seems to me that in this
respect the new fiction anthologies that have been appearing, largely
for use as texts, and which consist mainly of what might be called the
"new" short story, will have a significant impact on the fiction audience
