286
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Pynchon, notes that Kosinski has won a National Book Award
and smugly observes that Vonnegut is "rumored
to
be a leading
candidate for the Nobel Prize, " and predicts that soon "post–
contemporary fictionists will establish their work as the major literary
mode" and rule the field.
More generally, they are clearly part of a century-long tradition of
avant-garde art. Experimental modernist writing since Baudelaire has
proceeded on one basic assumption-that to advance, it must demolish
the barriers existing between it and the other arts. Ishmael Reed rather
naively remarks to his interviewer: "Writers will try to collaborate with
other fields of art. Maybe this is what the new fiction is all about."
Burroughs's experiments in merging literature with music, Sontag's in
doing so with cinema, Barthelme's literary collage, Gardner's cartoon–
like compositions, and similar efforts, all follow a familiar pattern.
These authors are applying to fiction the same reduClive techniques–
the rejection of narrative, for instance-by which poets of fifty years
ago moved from Victorianism to modernism. They also mirror more
recent tendencies in visual art-of the period 1967-78-to render
painting reductively by emphasizing its conceptual or narrative bases,
making painting entirely literary, as in John Baldessari's work. Con–
trariwise, surfictionists strive to make literature anything
but
literary,
pushing it toward music and painting or film, on the one hand, and
toward theoretical criticism on the other. They do so, moreover, as part
of the avant-garde tradition.
Philosophically, of course, they are part of an even older current of
post-Kantian idealism, which in aesthetics proceeded through Croce
and the New Critics to end reductively in Krieger's contextualism.
Sukenick arrived at his aesthetic through Wallace Stevens, while
Federman was influenced by Beckett and the Tel Quel, and Gass by
Wittgenstein. But all hold
to
idealistic-existentialist aesthetics that are
very familiar, if not by now outright cliches, and thoroughly accept–
able. Surfictionists and fictionist-critics so often give the reader what
Bellamy calls "comprehensive ideological frames" instead of stories or
characters because they recognize that it is much more agreeable to
write about books that should be written than to write or read them.
Indeed, they are sometimes so tired of fiction that they take the position
reached by Gilbert Sorrentino in
Imaginative Qualities of Actual
Things:
"the reader is asked to write the book that I have no interest in
writing." The reader could well do so since they are working in an
easily recognizable aesthetic tradition.
Finally, surfiction is clearly a result of the cultural conditions
