438
JEROME KLINKOWITZ
are not simply arguments in the dialectics of fonn, but are rather
imaginative volcanoes, revitalizing our language, our conceptions,
and our experience itself.
Barthelme's innovative techniques can be seen in other writing
tending away from the mainstream: in W. S. Merwin's vignettes
(which have joined Barthelme's in the pages of
The N ew Yorker ),
and in Richard Brautigan's novels, particularly
Trout Fishing in
America,
where by a similar method of unconventional juxtaposi–
tions the banal facts of America may be imaginatively transcended.
An indication that such style may be winning larger acceptance was
the selection of
Steps,
a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, for the 1968 Na–
tional Book Award.
Steps
has as many short chapters as
Snow White
in even fewer pages; plot is replaced by more inventive associations;
and its entire thrust is as an imaginative transcendence of otherwise
documentary material. Moreover, Kosinski works from an aesthetic
which turns away from the craft of such earlier modernists as James
Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. These writers "stretched language into
new fonus," Kosinski notes in
Tijd van Leven
-
tijd van kunst
(my
translation). For modern, sophisticated times they offered "an explo–
sion of words" to compensate for the sensory limitations of printed
characters. Kosinski prefers instead to write the bare minimum, so
that "the reader is forced to imagine what the novel merely suggests."
He feels he can trust this minimal expression because he writes in an
adopted language, with complete confidence that no subconscious
motivations or traumas interfere with his artistic selection of words.
"A writer who writes in an accepted language which he has learned
as an adult," Kosinski concludes, "has in that language
one more cur–
tain
that separates him from spontaneous [or otherwise uncontrolled]
expression."
Kosinski's theme is the self versus society; but rather than lament
the loss of self and accuse society for its repressive force, as main–
stream modernists might, Kosinski explores the self's survival, and
just how terrible its surviving power may be. His first novel,
The
Painted Bird,
tells of a self surviving incredible and grotesque trials:
a little boy from Warsaw is lost for six years in the war-tom coun–
tryside and is gruesomely brutalized by the backward peasants, who
fear he is a Gypsy, a Jew, or a devil straight from hell.
The Painted
Bird
is a ghastly involution of the picaresque novel and
biLdungs-
