JAY MARTIN
287
available to authors who arrived at artistic consciousness in the 1950s
and earl y 1960s.
It
reflects a historical period characterized by personal
affluence, social abundance, behavioral permissiveness, and political
indifference, when there seemed to be no urgency for writers to
participate in societal improvement or cultural redefinition. Artists
were encouraged to develop theoretical sophistication and
to
assume
privileged positions precisely because society did not, at the moment,
seem to need them. Surfiction has not noticeably had an impact upon
writers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the writer must
participate in the struggles of his culture.
Surfiction, then, has very clear roots and a large appeal for
acceptance. Thus, we should be assessing its achievements. As Susan
Sontag told Bellamy: " I think all the theories are plausible. It depends
on what you do with them." Fiction is always a rearrangement of
reality according
to
some principles. It
ma~
be a veil or a maze. As veil,
it blurs the inessentials of social and psychological phenomena,
exposing truths through imposing its special perspectives; it gives
what William Carlos Williams called "the imaginative qualities of the
actual things." It is designed to satisfy the writer and serve the reader.
As maze, fiction proceeds from the intellect, taking, as Sukenick says,
the "jigsaw puzzle" as its "model" and the self-gratification of the
aesthetic intelligence as its object.
At its worst, surfiction is a maze-a "triumph of misplaced
intelligence," a phrase used by Barthelme to characterize the work of
Sollars, Butor and other French surfictionists. But the finest new
fictionists-Sukenick, Kosinski, Reed, Gardner, and Barthelme-have
produced fictive veils which insist both that the world can only be
known through the imagination, and also that certainly it
must
be
known.
One of the most interesting of these writers, Ronald Sukenick,
asserts that he wishes to "bang" his audience with reality, to give them
no escape. True, Sukenick offers, as Klinkowitz says, "the highest
profile of theory." As aesthetician, he composes with his right hand,
the instrument of intelligence; but as fictionist he consistently invents
with the left hand, the hand of the dreamer. Like Sukenick, these
writers often begin as surfictionists, pushing us into a maze, but at
their best they change magically into fictionists. And when they make
the maze a veil, they offer us again the truths of the imagination that
fiction, new or old, was always designed to provide.
JAY MARTIN
