Jerome Klinkowitz
JOHN BARTH RECONSIDERED
If
American CritiCS were to follow the practice of their
Spanish and Latin American colleagues, John Barth and certain of
his contemporaries would be called "the Generation of '31." Give or
take a few years on either side of that date, one can list the birthdates
of a constellation of fiction writers who for lack of a better word have
been consistently call ed "new": John Barth (1930), Donald
Barthelme (1931), Ronald Sukenick and Robert Coover (1932), and
Jerzy Kosinski (1933), to name the most commercially prominent.
Just a few years older are Raymond Federman, John Hawkes, and
William H. Gass; and a few years younger are Thomas Pynchon,
Clarence Major, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Steve Katz, and Ishmael
Reed.
Though their differences are more numerous than their
similarities, all have taken part in the trend which, for a time in the
late sixties and early seventies, introduced antirealism to
mainstream American fiction. Often against their will, they have
been grou ped together as a school of metafiction, superfiction,
surfiction, disruptive fiction, and the like. Joe David Bellamy's
The
New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers
and Jack
Hicks's
Cutting Edges: Young American Fiction for the '70s
are sympto–
matic of the critical habit of collectively calling these writers "new"
and "innovative," tacitly assuming that youth (however inappro–
priate to a writer forty-four years old at the time, or even fifty-one) is
superior to age and that "innovative" means "better." But virtually no
critic or literary historian of these years, including the author of this
essay, can evade responsibility for such facile label making.
If
indeed
there was any sort of breakthrough in fiction, never-as many of
these same critics now admit - was it
0
inaccurately described.
What becomes clear in terms of simple historical observation
(someth ing much eas ier from the distance of 1982) is that the self–
reflective innovationists of the Generation of '31 wrote their fiction
under tremendous critical pressure: hav ing been told that the novel
was dead, they fdt compell ed to challenge and reinvent conventions
of fiction. Bu t the very success of their work - artisticall y, commer-
