138
RAYMOND FEDERMAN
It's incredible!
It's a book that erases all books!
It's a holdup! It's a crash out! Stop everything I'm getting OUT!
It's a novel --
OUT --
by Ron Sukenick (Swallow Press,
Chicago, 1973).
It's
OUT!
Hey, you guys OUT there, go get it! Full speed!
Now some novels are written in anger.
Others in anguish.
And others in a state of tranquillity and reflectiveness.
Usually,
these types of novels merely represent (as best they can) the author's
perception of certain occasions which, supposedly, occurred in some
distant historical, social, or psychic past, and, as such, are efforts to
make sense out of those occasions -- efforts to arrange rearrange
organize reorganize the past into a coherent and credible story.
OUT
(this is it -- by Ronald Sukenick) is written in stubbornness.
Out
is a
stubborn novel -- a deliberately stubborn novel which refuses to
conform (especially in tone and syntax) to any predetermined notions of
what fiction usually does .
Those angry, anguished, tranquil, reflective novels
usually
invent for themselves, in order to progress, a fake temporal
space in which to suspend the dumb reader's disbelief.
OUT
is incredible!
It
knocks you OUT with disbelief!
It's a stubborn novel.
It
progresses with total disregard for credibility,
and with a kind of determination that negates the logic of continuity
because "when ya gotta go ya gotta go," and here anything goes! Those
novels written in a state of anger, anguish, or serene reflectiveness
perpetuate their fake fiction along the lines (the straigh t lines) of a
temporal dimension which allow the elements of the story to be organ–
ized in a meaningful manner.
OUT
stubbornly refuses to make sense -- to make sense out of itself,
and out of the past. Indeed, as one of the characters in the story says of
his own unpredictable predicament:
"J.t
makes deep nonsense of my
trivial sense ."
Stubbornness, in fact, rejects the possibility of reflective perception.
If
one reflects, logically, calmly, obediently, reasonably, on one's course of
action, then it is not possible to be stubborn about it. Or, as my
WEBSTER
tells me: to be stubborn is to be "unreasonably obstinate,
obstinately perverse"; to be stubborn is to "obstinately maintain a
course of action." The guy who wrote the
WEBSTER
must have read
