JAY MARTIN
285
critics-and also such closely associated European fictionists as Sol–
lors, Calvino and Ricardou, and such defenders of surfiction as
Kostelanetz and Jacques Ehrmann. For added critical support, Feder–
man calls upon Jacques Derrida and the Tel Quel critics in France, and
H.
C. Artmann and his "Vienna Group. " These three books, indeed,
make a varied and valuable little library of critical commentary on the
new fiction, even if in their incestuous overlapping they do at times
recall Robert Graves's remark that the economy of the Scilly islanders
was so impoverished they had to take in each others' washing to
survive.
In Federman's words, "surfictionists" believe that "reality as such
does not exist, or rather exists only in its fictionalized version"; and
therefore they wish to write on (and about) " that level of man's activity
that reveals life as a fiction ." In their hands, the novel "will no longer
be a representation of something exterior to it, but self-representation."
"Fictionists," as Klinkowitz calls them, adhere
to
the conviction,
furthermore, that while the new "non-genre novel" is thriving, the
"traditional novel" is dead. They argue that: since reality is discontinu–
ous, linear narrative lies; since personality is multiple and the idea of
individuality is discredited, the idea of the hero (and indeed of charac–
ter) is absurd. Story is " inessential" -or even, for Oswald Wiener, "a
disgustingly bourgeoisie concept." The suspension of disbelief is
"distasteful. " Even the process of reading has become " boring" and
"restrictive," and thus the conventional methods of reading must be
"demolished." As Maurice Blanchot succinctly and with Gallic arro–
gance remarks, "when one encounters a novel written according to all
the rules ... one has not, of course, encountered 'literature.' '' The
attacks upon the old novel and the defenses of the new in these three
books seem to present surfictionists as an embattled crew of literary
desperadoes.
This, however, is more a rhetorical appeal than an actual condi–
tion. By 1975, these new writers are firmly entrenched in one camp of
the literary establishment. On the simplest level, they are successful.
Partisan Review, Fiction
(coedited by Barthelme) and
fiction interna–
tional
(edited by Bellamy) print them; major journals review their
books; major universities, from SUNY at Buffalo
to
the University of
California, employ them. In literature, as in music and painting,
experimental artists always pretend to be outsiders, but there is no
doubt that surfictionists have had many victories in the battles for
literary position. Klinkowitz repeatedly gives away his own deeply
conventional bourgeois bias when he rejoices in the sales of Vonnegut
