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RONALD SUKENICK
thing that impedes his sense of it, even if it happens to be the novel.
Especially if it happens to be the noyeJ. But it takes form to destroy
form and a new form is highly noticeable, It's a lmost inevitable that
a writer who is luerely trying to get closer to his experience will at first
be called self-consc ious, formalistic , or literary, The kind of form em–
ployed by Laurence Sterne is, in this sense, st ill new to us, "Writing
about writing" the criti(,s like to sneer about this type of nO\'el - too
self-(,onscious, :'\e\'e rthelE'ss
I'll
bet that the multifaceted, antisequential,
surrational
'j'ristralll Shandy
is closE'r to the truth of your experience
these days than
Robinson Crusoe,
Sterne's calcu lated demolition of the
conventions of "the" no\'C1 is a thrust into reality rather than a retreat
into literature, Let's do away with make-belie\'e, we aren't children,
Why suspend disbelief - is Disneyland really necessary? It's as if we
ha\'e to make belie\'e before we can work up the confidence to believe,
as if belief in good conscience \\'ere the pri\'ilege of primiti\'es or maybe
Europeans, Disney. like Coleridge, found an excuse to escape statistics,
but Sterne knew we nE'\'er needed an excuse.
One slogan that might be drawn frolll Sterne's antiart technique
is that, instead of reproducing the form of previous fiction, the form
of the novel should seek to approximate the shape of our experience.
In
this respect and in many others, Diderot's ignored masterpiece,
.Tacques the Fatalist,
which literally begins and ends with
Tristram
Shandy,
is the direct descendant of Sterne,
In
its emphasis on the act
of composition, among other things. Gide's
The Counterfeiters
has
much in common \\'ith Sterne and Diderot on the one hand , and Genet
and Beckett on the other. And of course there is Viktor Shklo\'sky's
great novel of the Russian Revolution.
A Sentimental .J ourney,
trans–
lated only last yea r, which is as deE'ply indebted to Sterne as is Diderot's
.Jacques.
The Russian formalist's book, in turn , has many similarities
with
7'he Counterfeiters,
especia ll y in its technique of "retardation,"
which comes to much the same thing as Gide's intentional destruction
)f continuity, Perhaps the fundamental assumption behind this line of
fiction is that the act of composing a no\'el is basically not different
from that of composing one's reality, which brings me back to a slogan
I draw from Robbe-Grillet's criticism that the main didactic job of
the contemporary novelist is to teach the reader ho\\' to im'ent his
world, Writers like Genet, Beckett and Nabokov, especia ll y in
Pale
Fire,
1I10\'e away from the pretense of imitation and representation to
pure and undisguised invention.
There have to be many ways for fi ction to dea l with the multi–
plicity of experience, and still another live alte rna tive to "the" no\'el
might be grouped around the axis of Kleist, K afka and Borges,
If
