PARTISAN REVIEW
441
ment (LeRoi Jones,
Tales).
In technique Kosinski and many of these
other writers seize Barthelme's imaginative freedom to transcend
his–
torical limitations (in Kosinski's case, the matters of his own ex–
perience); but their redirection of theme is no less crucial to the
course of fiction.
The disruption of American fiction is substantial: Barthelme's
cornic disabuse has made it uneasy for writers to write, or readers to
read, in the insipid forms of the past; and Kosinski and others have
discredited that noble theme, the loss of the self, which had fueled
so many novels before. But the most complete disruption goes beyond
theme or form: as practiced by such writers as Steve Katz
(The
Exagggerations of Peter Prince ),
Eugene Wildman
(Montezuma's
Ball),
Gilbert Sorrentino
(Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things),
and of late by William H. Gass
(Willie Master's Lonesome Wife ),
it
questions the entire premise of traditional fiction.
As
Sukenick told
interviewer Joe David Bellamy for the
Chicago Review:
One of the reasons people have lost faith in the novel is that they
don't believe it tells the truth anymore, which is another way of
saying that they don't believe in the conventions of the novel. They
pick up a novel and they know it's make-believe. So, who needs it
- go listen to the television news, right? Or read a biography.
Okay, be more honest. Nobody is willing to suspend disbelief in that
particular way anymore, including me. So once you get to the point
where you admit that you are writing a book and it
is
a book, there
really is no difference between fantasy and realistic action. It's com–
pletely continuous - it's all made up.
Raymond Federman, joining Sukenick and the other disrup–
tionists in a search for viable forms of fiction, brings with
him
the
authority of the modern French experience. He left France for Amer–
ica in 1947, the year Camus was both depicting Joseph Grand's
novel-length effort to write a single opening sentence, and discover–
ing how inadequate was any language at all: "The attempt to com–
municate had to be given up. This was true of those at least for
whom silence was unbearable, and since the others could not find
the truly expressive word, they resigned themselves to using the cur–
rent
coin of language, the commonplaces of plain narrative, of
anecdote, and of their daily paper. So in these cases, too, even the
sincerest grief had to make do with the set phrases of ordinary con–
versation." Federman will not settle for the set phrases or stock form
