The open stacks of the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington provided the richest part of my undergraduate education. I did most of my studying there and took all-too-frequent breaks to browse in the riches of its collection. It was on the Periodicals floor that I first came across issues of TriQuarterly magazine, then mid-way through a six-issue series devoted to “Ongoing American Fiction.” TriQuarterly was a substantial piece of publishing, its 9¼”x6″ size putting Paris Review in the shade and running as many as 400 pages per issue. By its end in number 40 (1977), the “Ongoing” series totaled over 1700 pages of stories and essays.
“Ongoing American Fiction” began in TriQuarterly 26 (Winter 1973) with three assertions by editor Charles Newman: “(1) At the moment when American has an unprecedented number of good fiction writers, and (2) the novel and short story are undergoing crucial innovation, (3) the response of the conventional market to fiction is as low as it ever has been — let’s say since Melville, to certify it.” The “Ongoing” series modestly intended to provide “a small if not precisely random sample of the rich variety of exciting fictions being written today.” Number 26 offered 18 selections from authors ranging from Joyce Carol Oates, Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover (the first excerpt from his novel The Public Burning), and Thomas McGuane to lesser-knowns like Jerry Bumpus, Warren Fine, and Alvin Greenberg.
Most striking, though, A. B. Paulson’s “2”: two fold-out pages, each intended to be cut out, pasted together, and assembled to form an icosahedron (20-sided shape) with 10 separate stories.
In his introduction, Charles Newman wrote that “Literature is the only artform in our generation whose technology has not been recently and radically challenged by its practitioners.”
Paulson, at least, was proving Newman wrong. He contributed one other story to the series, “The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality: a diagnostic test in two parts,” which took the format of an exam given to prospective employees of the Drummond Fabricating Corporation. Though the two parts — multiple choice questions and statements to be answered as true or false — seemed no different from those on an actual employment exam, a second and third reading reveals a story lurking beneath the surface:
- T F Sometimes I find myself in situations where I am forced to say, “This is not life; this is someone’s idea of art.”
- T F I have worked in this office for five years and they still mispronounce my name.
- T F I have never told people my real name.
- T F I am afraid of heights.
- T F I have given myself a name that even I cannot pronounce.
More than anything in the “Ongoing” series, Paulson’s stories exploded my notion of what fiction could be. Until then, I’d assumed that fiction fit within a frame, like a painting. It had chapters and a narrative arc told in relatively tame prose. I’d read Ulysses and knew some of the techniques of modernistic prose, read Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and knew that a novel could employ a variety of devices. But Paulson not just telling a story: he was inviting the reader to play a game.
Paulson was not the first writer to do this, of course, as I quickly learned as I dug into some of the just-appearing critical studies of these fictional experiments. Raymond Federman called them surfiction. Robert Scholes called them fabulations and metafictions. Jerome Klinkowitz called them SuperFictions and disruptive fictions. Almost every critic — some of them also novelists writing examples of it (Federman, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach) — proclaimed it as something new. Even the term “post-modernist” was rejected: Klinkowitz asked, “What are we to do with the writers who are as distant from Beckett as Beckett is from Joyce?”
This question appears in the prologue of Klinkowitz’s The Life of Fiction (1977), still one of the most innovative, if not fully successful, works of literary criticism ever published. It stood out when I first pulled it from its shelf (PS379.K549, for you Library of Congress classification fans). It’s square-ish, filled with striking and playful collages by Roy Behrens, and full not of chapters and pages of prose but blocks of text, fragments, lists, excerpts from taped interviews, letters between Klinkowitz and his authors, passages from their works.
The Life of Fiction surveys twelve writers (all male) of what he here calls “SuperFiction.” Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick, Hunter S. Thompson (who writes fiction, not journalism, Klinkowitz argues), Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Klinkowitz had published The Vonnegut Statement in 1973) were all relatively well-established at the time. His other subjects — Michael Stephens, Walter Abish, Clarence Major, Steve Katz, Jonathan Baumbach, and Russell Banks — were still building their oeuvres and critical reputations.
Though Klinkowitz declares that these authors were producing “a fiction a world apart from what has gone before,” in the same sentence he then offers the excuse that “There are too many salient features” to characterize it, offering just a few examples: “It is expressive and not descriptive … and sometimes generative”; “It is both self-reflextive and self-reflexive”; “It uses the reader’s imagination as part of the action, just as jazz demands participatory listening” (Klinkowitz played baritone saxophone and later wrote about book about Gerry Mulligan’s recordings). SuperFiction also, he claims, “restores the act of reading to its original pleasure status,” something equivalent to the experience of listening to music or watching a film.
This claim rests heavily on two foundations. The first is that of the contrast between these works, which were often as noisy as a track by Ornette Coleman but never dull, and the widespread and at least partly deserved reputation of the Nouveau Roman for being abstract and lifeless. The second is the obvious extent to which these authors themselves were having fun writing their books, especially with being obvious in the fact that they were writing them. “Enough! Katz, you’re making this all up. It doesn’t make a bit of sense,” Steve Katz interjects on the third page of his first novel, The Exaggerations of Peter Prince (also a square-ish book, by the way). Ronald Sukenick so admired Katz’s comic spirit that he gave his friend a cameo in his novel Up!: “Steve Katz, here briefly on a special guest appearance from his own novel with a team of his tumbling mild-nosed Egyptian spotted rabbits, take a bow Steve.”
What makes The Life of Fiction worth reading today (and I’ve been lugging my copy around for almost 50 years now) is the fun, not the criticism. Klinkowitz knew most of these writers as friends, or at least as drinking and arguing buddies (several excerpts of conversations are quoted from post-conference sessions in some bar in Milwaukee or Cedar Rapids or New York City), and as he later related in Keeping Literary Company: Working with Writers since the Sixties (1999), later fell out with a few. (Keeping Literary Company is a depressing reminder of how much alcoholism and misogyny were displayed like badges of pride by too many writers of that era.)
Klinkowitz made a conscious choice to build The Life of Fiction as a mosaic, a verbal collage to mirror Behrens’ illustrations, a construction of fragments. With the work of writers like Barthelme to draw from, it makes for an entertaining read if you skip past the pontifications. In his chapter on Walter Abish, for example, Klinkowitz recalls visiting Abish in his house on the bluffs above the Hudson River and includes excerpts of their taped conversation.
Abish tells Klinkowitz that he couldn’t have written his first novel, Alphabetical Africa (1974), unless he’d had the experience of writing his story “Minds Meet” (which appeared in TriQuarterly 26):
Each page or less than a page-long section was built around the key word in alphabetically arranged subtitles. A message spelling out my concern with the formation of ideas in a literary context serves as a kind of theme. The message reads, “Is there any other way to live?”…. The key words starting with the letter a in the title act as catalysts…. I wanted the idea, and the words as signifiers to stand out, delineating the entire process of the work.
Abish’s is a highly representative 20th century life. Born in Vienna, raised in a community of exiled Jews in Shanghai, emigrated to Israel soon as its founding, and finally settling in the United States, where he remained, in his twenties. As Klinkowitz notes, Abish’s play with language is rooted both in his own experiences of living in multiple languages and cultures and in the link between language and identity. An arbitrary structure such as starting each section of “Minds Meet” with a words (abandoned, abashed, abated) is just as valid a way of setting a frame of reference as working within a traditional construct of chapters and chronology.
Klinkowitz asserts in his prologue that “The fiction we’re discussing is peculiarly American.” In the case of Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, however, it’s an assertion that reveals the fragility of his “SuperFiction” construct. Klinkowitz mentions the name of Raymond Roussel elsewhere in the book but fails to note the link between Abish’s book and Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, a novel every bit as disconnected from the real Africa, every bit as built around an artificial structure. Both Abish and Gilbert Sorrentino (in Splendide-Hôtel (1973)) used the alphabet as a framework, but nowhere in The Life of Fiction is there mention of Raymond Queneau or Georges Perec, both of whom had multiple novels available in English translation by the time Klinkowitz was writing his book. Only in his chapter on Michael Stephens does he acknowledge that the Irish writer Flann O’Brien “has been named as an influence by nearly every contemporary innovator in fiction.” Isolationism does little to advance a critical argument.
Around the time that the “Ongoing” series was just beginning, V. S. Naipaul — no experimenter he — wrote, “The novel no longer carries conviction. Experimentation, not aimed at the real difficulties, has corrupted response; and there is a great confusion in the minds of readers and writers about the purpose of the novel.” Naipaul’s proclamation seems as shaky as any of Klinkowitz’s, but there’s the kernel of an idea there that I dearly wish he had developed instead of throwing any in a dependent clause: “Not aimed at the real difficulties.”
What are the real difficulties that experimentation should be aimed at? My gut sense is that the real difficulties are conveying a sense of how the big problems of the world — racism, sexism, economic inequality, authoritarianism, environmental destruction — affect us, mostly at the individual level. And here I have to say that Naipaul is at least partly wrong. Can anyone read Ishmael Reed’s The Freelance Pallbearers, with its wild language (“A big not-to-be-believe out-of-sight, sometimes referred to as O-BOP-SHE-BANG or KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG”) and over-the-top absurdity, and not sense the simmering, centuries-long anger against the injustices done to blacks in America? Joanna Russ, like pretty much all women writers, was off Klinkowitz’s radar when he was waving the flag of disruptive/SuperFiction, but she and other women were using science fiction to address issues that weren’t getting adequate exposure in literary fiction (and Doris Lessing would soon venture into SF with her Canopus in Argos series). And whether you agree that Hunter S. Thompson was writing fiction or not, he certainly was firing bazooka blasts of chaos into the suffocating smugness of Nixon’s American establishment.
The Life of Fiction was not well-received as a work of criticism — or even as a book. Guy Davenport complained that the book was “printed in blinding Telephone Book sans serif, with the lines twice as long as the one you are now reading (so that losing one’s place at line’s end adds to the frustration of paying attention to a text that has the organization of a vaudevillian’s scrapbook of notices and billings). “Were it not for Roy Behrens’ splendid collages,” he added, “one would zing the book across the room as an impertinence, the equivalent of a mumbling lecturer who is having rough going with his notes.”
D. P. King agreed in World Literature Today, writing that “the format that Klinkowitz has chosen for his book is too confusing and annoying to make for either pleasant reading or serious study.” Ironically, Doris Grumbach, about to turn 60, was far more generous in her New York Times review: “Presented in this graphic way, [Klinkowitz] is convincing in his thesis that all the writers have fun with fiction; they push the conventional boundaries of cold, grey running type away in order to inject new life into literary forms, and experiment with language as well as other forms of art to enhance the written word.”
Reading The Life of Fiction now is a reminder of the excitement and myopia of a young person’s enthusiasms. At the book’s close, Klinkowitz quotes Ronald Sukenick: “The kind of surprise we want in our fiction is not in the action or in the unfolding of events towards an appropriate and predictable ending, but in the language. Every page of the new fiction must be a surprise for the reader.” Yes, it was thrilling to read “O-BOP-SHE-BANG or KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG” or Steve Katz’s story about receiving a box full of wrists. But it was also thrilling to come across “snotgreen sea” for the first time (and to know in an instance that yes, that was the color of the sea on some days) on the first page of Ulysses. And it was thrilling to spend months seeing the world through the eyes of Miriam Henderson as told by the ever-experimenting Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage.
The last piece in TriQuarterly 26, the first in the “Ongoing” series, is “The myth of the post-modernist breakthrough,” an essay by Gerald Graff. Graff rejects the notion that post-modernism (and his definition stretches to include Donald Barthelme and others whom Klinkowitz characterizes as definitely not post-modernist) represents “the death of our traditional Western concept of art and literature. Graff offers the example of this passage from Barthelme’s Snow White:
“Try to be a man about whom nothing is known,” our father said, when we were young…. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting. A canned good is more interesting.
As Graff points out, Barthelme hopes his reader will recognize the reference to Henry James’ famous adage, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” He’s mocking James, of course, but without the reference, the joke loses a good deal of its power.
A radical critic, Graff argues, would say that Barthelme sees nothingness where James would have us look for subtleties and nuances — but that overlooks the fact that the “interminable ambiguities” of James’ later fiction reflected his recognition that “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility.” James and Barthelme approach experience from different angles, Graff suggests, but they are linked in a common tradition of the writer attempting to capture experience despite the inevitable artificial and arbitrary nature of the task.
“Is it wholly necessary,” Graff asks in his conclusion, “to conclude that the humanist alternative is forever and finally dead?” It’s easy to say that the hydrogen bomb or the Holocaust (or World War One, if you’re an early modernist, or the rise of AI, if you’re alive today) opened a gulf between the past and the present and led to the death of meaning (or the Author or the Novel). But Klinkowitz himself invokes the names of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olsen, and Paul Metcalf as precursors of the SuperFictionists, and no one can mention Charles Olsen and Paul Metcalf without dragging in Herman Melville with them, and suddenly it’s hard to figure out just where that gulf lies. The life of fiction is too long to have just one moment of experimentation in it. When experimentation ends, literature will have to be put on life support. Thank god we can count of the ingenuity and cussedness of future generations of writers to prevent that.