PAR T ISAN REVI EW
139
OUT.
Or at least must have bee;} OUT there! Because
OUT
(by Ron
Sukenick) is the most obstinate, the most perverse, the most unreason–
able
story I've ever read.
It
obs .:inately maintains its (hopeless, perverse,
hilarious) course of action w;thout ever looking back at its point of
departure. It progresses with total disregard for coherence and credibility.
Stubbornness, moreover, functions outside and beyond temporal justifi–
cations.
OUT,
therefore, does not set itself in motion on the basis of an
occasion which lies OUTside its fiction (in some distant place and some
remote time).
OUT
is an occasion ! An occasion of the present -- of the
HERE and NOW!
OUT
refuses to expand, progress, move, out of the
past. It refuses to project its fiction from a specific point in time.
OUT
begins in a kind of unreal present, and moves further into that unreal
present, thus abolishing that temporal dimension which gives traditional
fiction (the angry, anguished, tranquil novels) a fraudulent space into
which it can write itself.
OUT
uses REAL space to perpetuate its
contours, detours, and movements (its "plots and counterplots").
OUT
uses the REAL space of the pages upon which it is written.
OUT
wriggles
its way OUT of a closed and intricate formal pattern which has no
antecedents outside of itself -- no point of departure in the past, before
the book, and beyond the covers of the book.
OUT
writes itself OUT of
the corner into which it has cornered itself from the beginning:
"It
all
comes together . . . The way we deal with that is as long as everyone does
his job what's the difference ... You're either part of the plot or part of
the counterplot." The fiction then sneaks OUT of the page into empty
space -- blank space: the blank spaces essential to the layout of the
book, blank spaces which augment in whiteness as the fiction empties
itself into the blank pages ' at the end of the book. Or, as Sukenick (not
the author, but the mythic character in the novel) tells us: "I want to
write a book like a cloud that changes as it goes."
This is it!
OUT
is a CLOUD!
OUT,
then, stubbornly goes OUT of itself. Empties itself rather than
fulfills itself (like most novels). Rather than augmenting as it progresses,
rather than establishing its purpose with each new sentence, each new
paragraph, each new page, and with each additional complication (as is
the case with most traditional fiction),
OUT
juggles away its purpose and
its complications.
OUT
improvises its events and occasions before the
reader's eyes, and does so by using techniques of the movies, the comic
strips, the slapsticks, as it is explicitly stated in the pages of the fiction:
"Wake up . Everything up to here has been a movie." Or, further on:
