432
RAYMOND FEDERMAN
people and its material, nor will he be able to pUJify or purge himself
in relation to the actions of the people
in
the story. In other words,
no longer being manipulated by an authorial point of view, the reader
will be the one who extracts, invents, creates a meaning and an order
for the people in the fiction. And it is this total participation in the
creation which will give the reader a sense of having created a mean–
ing and not having simply received, passively, a neatly prearranged
meaning. The writer will no longer be considered a prophet, a philos–
opher, or even a sociologist who predicts, teaches, or reveals absolute
truths, nor will he be looked upon (admiringly and romantically) as
the omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent creator, but he
will
stand on equal footing with the reader in their efforts to
make sense
out of the language common to both of them, to
give sense
to the fic–
tion of life. In other words, as it was said of poetry, "fiction, also, will
not only mean, but it will be!"
One should, I suppose, in conclusion to such a presentation, at–
tempt to justify, or at least illustrate with examples, the propositions
I just made for the future of fiction. However, justifications and illus–
trations are readily available. For, I must confess, I am not alone
in dreaming up these wild imaginings. A number of contemporary
writers, each in his own way, have already forged the way into this
new type of fiction: Beckett, of course, in French and in English,
Borges and Julio Cortazar in Spanish, Italo Calvino in Italian, Robert
Pinget, Claude Simon, Philippe Sollers, Jean Ricardou, and many
others in France, and in their own individual manner, a number of
American writers such as Donald Barthelme, John Barth, John
Hawkes, Ronald Sukenick, Steve Katz, Eugene Wildman, Richard
Kostelanetz, Frederick Barthelme, Madeline Gins, and many others
who deserve mention here. But perhaps it is preferable to let the
reader (wherever he might be) reflect on these propositions, and dis–
cover for himself the fiction of which he has now become an integral
part.
I do not pretend to have solved the problems of fiction, nor to
have presented the only possible way for future fiction. I only know
that this is the path, I, as a fiction writer, want to explore in order
perhaps, not to succeed (commercially, socially, or otherwise), but in
order to give fiction another chance, or, as Samuel Beckett
once
said,
in order "to make of failure a howling success."
