RONALD SUKENICK
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self. The way out of the dilemma of Narcissus lies in the work of art as arti–
fice . As artifice the work of art is a conscious tautology in which there is
always an implicit (and sometimes explicit) reference to its own nature as
artifact-self-reflexive, not self-reflective .
It
is not an imitation but a new
thing in its own right, an invention . The very fact that it has validity only
within its own terms is what cuts it loose from the solipsism of Narcissus .
The successful work of art is a discrete energy system that takes its place
among the other things of our world , available to the experience of anyone
who is interested. Perhaps that is why the art critic ,Jack Burnham , speaking
of a contemporary artist, remarks that the problem he addresses is "how can
sculpture define itself most rigorously as tautology." Instead of hiding its
tautological nature with illusion , contemporary art capitalizes on it . This was
a point that was made well and often in the art of the sixties : one imme–
diately thinks ofthe precedents of Fellini , Genet, Beckett , and behind them
the precedents of Brecht, Shklovsky , Sterne .
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Among other things , full recognition of the art work as artifice rather
than illusion means full recognition of the two realities behind literature :
the reality of the spoken word and the reality of the written word . On one
hand we get a resurgence of poetry as speech, Allen Ginsberg , the impor–
tance of the tape recorder, poetry as song lyric; and on the other hand,
concrete poetry, the importance of arrangement on the page rather than
traditional metric and , for the novel , no longer leaving one of the most
important elements of composition in the hands of the typesetter: the place–
ment of print on the page becomes an expressive resource of the novel . On
one hand we get forms that have to do with time-the time it takes to com–
pose the work or to experience it-that emphasize the process of composi–
tion and make it an important, often the most important , expressive
element ; and on the other hand we get an arbitrary formalism that has
to
do
with space-a decision to arrange all lines and larger segments in groups of
three, for example . One of the curious effects of a shift from art as illusion
to
art as artifact, and an example of how a new theory of composition
subsumes rather than obliterates its predecessors, is the fate of description
in fiction . Since it is no longer the novelist's business to "make us see " as
it was in terms of imitation theories, description in fiction would seem to be
pointless , but this is not the case . Description is too deeply embedded in
the tradition of the novel ever to be lost, but its present significance is
ironically antithetical to its former one . The contemporary novelist describes
things with whose appearance we are already perfectly familiar (through
