582
RONALD SUKENICK
a joke borrowed from Rabelais in
Tristram Shandy.
In the case of
Tristam Shandy
we would point out how the new tradition coexisted
with the old tradition from the beginning, not as the exception that
proves the rule but as an alternative rule. We would then proceed to
articulate the new tradition through groups of similar novels without
regard to period or nationality. We would talk about the qualities
common to each of these types of fiction , qualities that in many cases
they would share with other types within the tradition as a whole.
The Spencer book deals with one such type, in fact it creates the
type - that is, the books were there (Butor, Cortazar, Nabokov, Nin,
Musil, Robbe-Grillet, Gertrude Stein, Gide, many others ) but the type
wasn't before Spencer got hold of them. The "architectonic novel," as
she calls it, is characterized by the spatialization of its form. The spa–
tialization of form serves as an a lternative to the old novel's sequential
organization in plot and narrative. Through such techniques as jux–
taposition and manipulation of the print on the space of the page, the
novelist can create a structure which communicates by means of pat–
tern rather than sequence in a manner approaching that of the plastic
arts. This kind of writing - one immediately thinks of the prose of
John Cage and Raymond Federman's
Double or Nothing -
can be
taken in with something like the simultaneous apprehension of someone
looking at a box in a comic strip. One model for a work of fiction is
the jigsaw puzzle. The picture is filled out but there is no sense of
development involved. When you feel that things are happening to
you without logic or sequence this is a good model to use - situations
come about through a cloudburst of fragmented events that fall as they
fall and finally can be seen to have assumed some kind of pattern.
The sequential organizations of the old novel are coming to seem like
an extravagant, if comforting, artifice - things don 't appear to happen
according to Aristotle any more.
A novel is both a concrete structure and an imaginative structure
- pages, print, binding containing a record of the movements of a
mind. The form is technological the content is imaginative. The old
novel tends to deny its technological reality but, as Spencer points out
with reference to Hugh Kenner, the book is "a spatial phenomenon by
its very essence." A canvas is flat: a painter may wish to affirm its flat–
ness or deny it through perspective. A writer may wish to convey an
illusion, an imitation of reality, or he may wish to create a concrete
structure among the other concrete structures of the world, although
one which, like a piece of music, may alter our perceptions of the rest.
The novel as illusion is no longer credible, so why bother (Spencer
might disagree). But if we treat the novel as a concrete technological
