II. Jerome Klinkowit%
LITERARY DISRUPTIONS; OR, WHAT'S
BECOME OF AMERICAN FICTION?
Despite the American novel's conservative stability of form
since the experiments of the 1920s, a group of new writers - includ–
ing Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthehne, Raymond Federman, and
Jerzy Kosinski -
has
finally cleared the way for renewed experimen–
tation in the American novel. Ronald Sukenick's latest novel,
Out}
may be the climax of the phenomenon as the new methods of fiction
finally establish themselves in a tradition. Sukenick's object of art
replaces "abstraction, reduction, essentials, separation, and stillness"
with "inclusion, addition, the random, union, and movement." His
model is the Indian shaman, Empty Fox, who shows
him
how his
rational culture with its shabby pretense of signs - both linguistic
and physical- has despoiled the West. "The Wasichus make Disney–
land of all this so they can sell it they get the Indians to pretend
they're Indians they make believe these beautiful mountains are beau–
tiful they pretend that magic is magic they make believe the truth
is the truth otherwise they can't believe anything. There is a place
with a billboard of a mountain in front of the mountain you Wasi–
chus can't see without pretending to see anyway you don't believe it.
Anyway that's why you all have cameras you're not friends with
your eyes only with your minds you can't understand
this."
The
shaman's ambition becomes Sukenick's: "I want to write a book like
a cloud that changes as it goes. I want to erase all the books. My
ambition is to unlearn everything I can't read or write that's a start.
I want to unlearn and unlearn
till
I get to the place where the ocean
of the unknown begins where my fathers live. Then I want to go
back and bring my people to live beside that ocean where they can
