PARTISAN REVIEW
587
NO\'a has no plot, no story, no character, no chronological sequence, no
\'erisimilitude, no imitation, no a llegory, no symbolism, no subject
matter, no "meaning," It resists interpretation: as with Kafka's fiction,
you can expla in it and explain it but it won't go away, The Bossa No\'a
is nonrepresentational - it represents itself. Its main qualities are ab–
straction, impro\'isation and opacity, The degree of abstraction may be
great. as in Donald Barthelme, a \\Titer who is \'ery bos5anO\'a, or it may
be slight as in Douglas ''''oolf. \,'hose fiction seems to hover a fraction
of an inch abo\'e the le\'el of C0l111110n experience, just enough to show
that no experience is e\'er common, \\'oolf. who is in other respec ts
not yery bossanO\'a , is neyertheless different enough to ha\'e been
shouldered aside by "the" nO\'el - or is it just that we can't tolerate
anything serious in fiction unless it's dull or comes from Europe, His
lVall to Wall
and especially
Fade Out,
\\'hirh is a kind of geriatric
Hu ckleberry Finll ,
should be enough to get him ge nerally recognized as
one of the best writers going,
The best contemporary example of illlprovisational style that I
kno\\' is the fi c tion of Ste\'e Katz . a leading Boss<lnO\'a n, who \\Tites
like a seal \\'ith the ball continually about to f:lll off its nose. He is a
surfer on the \\'a \T of chaos and the closcst thing to Rabelais since
Rabelais. but try to find a man in the street who ha s read
'/'he E\Ogg–
geraliollJ of Peter Prince
or
CTealll), and Deliciollf
and you will prob–
ably be taking a long \,'alk, As abstraction freps fiction fro
III
the rep–
resent atio nal and the need to illlit :lte sOllle yersion of reality other
than its o\\'n, so impro\'isalion liberates it frolll :ll1y a priori order and
allo\\'s it to d iscO\'e r ne\\' seq ucnccs and in terconnec tions in the flo\\'
of experience, In a sit uation where traditional patterns of order seem
false or superfluous it may be better to open oneself as completely as
possible to the illllll('diac), of experience and a ll o", in Willi am Carlos
Willi ams's phrase, "nothing that is not green," One way of doing this
is through co ll age. which in fact \\'illiallls uscs extensi\'ely in
Paterson,
and " 'hi ch Pau l Metcalf, a clescend:lnt of M elvill e, puts to similar use
in a fascinating and forgotten nowl published in
196.1
called
Genoa ,
and in
Patagolli.
published last ycar.
Rudolph \\'urlitzer is a writ er whose work gets very close to the
quality that I haye in mind when I speak of opacity, His novels haye
the interesting effect of passing through your mind the way ice cream
passes o\'e r your tongue - you get the taste and th at's it. The ex–
perience exists in and for itseH, It is opaque the wa y that abstract
painting is op:1C] ue in that it cannot be explained as representing some
other kind of experience, You cannot look through it
to
reality - it is
the reality in question and if you don't see it you don't see anything
