288
PARTISAN REVIEW
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Interruption. Discontinuity. Imperfection.
It
can't be helped. This
very instant as I write as you read a hundred things. A hundred
things to tangle with resolve ignore before you are together. To–
gether for an instant and then smash it's all gone still it's worth it. I
feel. This composure grown out of ongoing decomposition.
(Ronald Sukenick
98.6)
At a time when, so I am told, no work by such different but
brilliant novelists as Stanley Elkin and William Gass (to take only two
notable examples) is in print, such an enterprise as the writers'
cooperative, Fiction Collective, must be welcomed and encouraged.
Writers can no longer afford to ignore the whole mechanics of
publication and distribution as being essentially technical matters
outside their more creative concerns.
It
could be argued that their
activity of producing books extends well beyond the completion of the
manuscript and right into the marketplace where the central problem
of the ownership of the modes of production is more clearly visible.
It
could well be that writers will have to participate-"intervene" is
perhaps the preferred word of the day-in those modes
to
a far larger
extent than hitherto. However, that is a problem for more detailed
consideration than this piece can aspire to provide. Here I can only
consider some aspects of a few of the books which have entered the
market through Fiction Collective.
It
should perhaps be said at the start that the work does not seem in
any way to represent any particular group or coterie. This is not
necessarily a wholly good thing since schools, groups, movements,
often assertive and tendentious, have always contributed considerably
to
the self-transforming energy of literature. But at the moment it is
surely not a wholly bad thing either. Here is Ronald Sukenick's sense
of some aspects of the present moment, from his introduction
to
Statements,
which contains short works by twenty-six di£f.erent writers.
"In a curious turnabout, writers in the seventies-those in this volume
among them-have learned to profit from what is by definition an
impossible situation.
If
everything is impossible, then anything be–
comes possible. What we have now is a fiction of the impossible that
thrives on its own impossibility.. .. Taken together, the stories in this
collection, which run the gamut from social realism
to
Surfiction,
