RONALD SUKENICK
101
Since we live in fictions , the job of the novelist is the almost impossible
one of specifically not writing fiction, of unwriting novels- through our
particular excellence creating books which suddenly, as we look over our
shoulders, we realize have become , inevitably, novels. We are in a totally
different position from those Moderns who were trying to transcend the real
in isolated and unique visions . Instead , we are trying to plunge through
literature into the world and commonalty (though on our own terms-the
terms created in our novels).
Our
yen is union, not separation-to break
through those cheap or outlived fictions which separate us from our world .
It
isn't a question of the validity of this or that kind of fiction, but of the
fictive process itself,which, far more than being a literary matter, involves
those of belief, myth , and the ways we understand experience . We live in
language , and only writers are free-only they know how to move into a
more and more spacious syntax. The Moderns questioned the idea of a priori
form; we question the idea of form itself. The innovative fiction writers of
the American sixties were still writing "novels " even though they under–
stood that " the" novel as defined at that time in this country-quite
provincially, it is necessary to add-was a form whose credibility was ex–
hausted. We write beyond any definitions of form because we believe that
fiction is always in process of defining itself. Not the form but the imagina–
tive process that creates the form is exemplary . Form is the embodiment, the
temporary context of the imagination, an embodiment that is the conse–
quence of the questioning of form by the imagination. The result of this
point of view can be seen for the fiction of the seventies in a proliferation
and variety of formal options . At the same time , the formal opening out of
the sixties has raised the problem of how a work can remain continuous with
experience while sustaining an internal structure that distinguishes it from
other areas of experience . The slackness and characterlessness of much recent
poetry that still bears the mark of the art of the sixties is the result of its
failure
to
confront this problem. What Raymond Federman calls Surfiction
has been essentially an exploration of the formal geometry of the open field
by the imagination which, in so engaging it, generates the unpredictable
text. The future novel, says Federman, will be "a kind of discourse whose
shape will be an interrogation, an endless interrogation of what it is doing
while it is doing it. " In a world that pushes constantly in the direction of the
impersonal and systematic we need fiction (and criticism) that is subversively
personal and unsystematic-Miller, Sterne, Rabelais-unruly, unpredic–
table, threatening
to
humanists with its humanness.
