JOHN TYTELL
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Gaddis, Kosinski, Wurlitzer . .. }. These writers sometimes seem more
eager to play with form than to entertain with story, and their ambition
is to capture the full chaos of consciousness rather than any orderly
progression simulated by more linear and omni cient modes of story–
telling. The avatars of this spirit were Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound
who, at the century 's turn , became the imaginative levers of an
emerging artisti c voice that would dominate the future. The literary
lineage here goes to Poe and American grotesque, not just the pathetic
weirdness of Anderson 's Winesburg, but the more viciously embittered
anger and frenzied mania of Nathaniel West's Los Angel es.
The writers in the Fiction Collective are old enough to have
experienced as children the tail end of the Depression, and World War
II. Their primary aesthetic influences are the theater games inspired by
Artaud and Beckett (see Marianne Hauser's tour de force,
The Talking
Room ),
"new wave" cinema of filmmakers like Godard, pop art and
the sense of audience reciprocation it invites, rock electronics, and what
loosely may be called the liberation movement of the sixties. The group
has been broadly anthropological in outlook, intrigued, for example,
by the ways in which a South Pacific island tribe worshipped U.S. Air
Force fliers and their planes while they were engaged in an unofficial
occupation during the Vietnamese War. The politics of this group has
been Left-progressive, but this was clearer ten years ago when the Left
had an apparent standard. Now, strong political positions do not seem
as fashionable as they were in the sixties, and the intricate theory of
conspiracy on all fronts that informs many of our artists and intellectu–
als has not yet found its appeal with any large public.
The writers in the Fiction Collective continue the modernist
priority of multiple perspectives and collage form, and they often test
reality with an elaborate series of fictional games (which creates a
sometimes baffling complexity that is uncongenial to direct political
statement). These games rupture the surface texture of the prose with
an idea of visual disorder that Cummings first popularized. Some of
these tricks are as venerable as Sterne, some derive from Joyce, others
may resemble McLuhanesque media gymnastics. Some Fiction Collec–
tive writers have used devices like double and triple columns, tele–
graphic headlines, concrete poems and photographs. All of this has
been part of a general program to redefine the traditional masking
functions of the persona, and to deepen the illusion of the writer's
personal revelation as well as the reader's participation.
The result is a highly relative sense of the real, and considerable
fluidity . Add to this an arbitrarily comic shifting of point of view and
