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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
The Fiction CollectiveReruns by Jonathan Baumbach; Museum by B.
H. Friedman; Twiddledum, Twaddledum byPeter SpielbergReview by:
Larry McCafferyContemporary Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter,
1978), pp. 99-115Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207893 .Accessed: 14/02/2015
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THE FICTION COLLECTIVE*
The problems facing a writer of nontraditional fiction have
always been enormous and the results fairly predictable: Joyce's
Dubliners was rejected by forty publishers, Beckett's Watt by
forty-seven publishers; other books have equally impressive
records. Because of a variety of economic and critical pressures,
the situation today for serious, innovative writing is probably
worse than ever. In Europe artists have traditionally created their
journals or "Schools" whenever they feel this kind of deliberate,
systematic exclusion, but in America, possibly because of our
heightened sense of competition, we have had few examples of
artists banding together for mutual artistic and economic
interests. Thus, if for no other reason than its novelty, the
forming of the Fiction Collective in 1974 was a significant
literary event, and its successes and failures need to be carefully
examined.
The Fiction Collective is a cooperative conduit for
nontraditional or experimental fiction in which writers make all
business decisions and assist one another with all editorial and
copy work. Formed originally with the assistance of such writers as
Ron Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, Steve Katz, and
B. H. Friedman, and using Brooklyn College as a working base of
operations, the Collective's intentions were to provide a more
readily accessible and more widely distributed alternative to the
big New York City publishers than the small presses or vanity
presses had previously provided. Once a writer has a book accepted
by the Collective (each member has a vote in determining which
manuscripts are to be accepted), he puts up the money for
publication himself (this has come to about $3,000 and grants have
often been available to help defray this cost); this money is
considered a loan and is repaid to the writer from proceeds. After
a book pays for itself-and thus far the books have been returning
the original investment within about a year-the writer and the
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XIX, 1
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Collective split further proceeds 50/50. Perhaps the most
important aspect of the Collective's operation is the fact that the
writer retains complete control in all matters relating to his
book, from stylistic and typographical decisions right down to the
choice of jacket design, blurbs, and photograph. Although the
members do send their manuscripts to each other for editorial
advice, it is the writer, and not the editor, who has the final say
over what will eventually appear. This ensures that the writer
doesn't have to worry about fighting with publishers over each
stylistic or typographic oddity and also means that his book will
not be misrepresented after publication; in short, the artistic
integrity of the work is guaranteed from the start.
In the three years that the Collective has been in operation it
has succeeded in publishing some fifteen works (six more are due
out in 1977) and has achieved a relatively stable financial
position-no mean feats in themselves. Taken as a group, the
Collective's books imply some interesting happenings in
contemporary innovative fiction. They represent an impressively
wide range of innovative approaches, from the typographical
delirium of Federman's Take It or Leave It, to the poetic lyricism
of Marianne Hauser's The Talking Room, to the relatively
conventional format of Thomas Glynn's Temporary Sanity. Despite
their differences, the Collective's works share certain obvious
tendencies. Realism, for example, seems to be pass6 for the
contemporary innovator, with the logic of myth or dreams, along
with the formal dictates of language itself, replacing
verisimilitude as the central method of structuring fictional
discourse. Most of these books should not be viewed as "social
commentaries" except in very indirect ways. Instead, the emphasis
is on the work of fiction as a purely verbal, sensuous object, with
the reader's interest in plot and character being produced not by
the book's "representational quality" but in its reality as
language. The disclaimer at the beginning of Major's Reflex and
Bone Structure reads, "This book is an extension of, not a
duplication of reality. The characters and events are happening for
the first time."Perhaps the most important similarity among the
Collective books is that nearly all of them focus on the
imagination's response to reality, not on reality itself. Indeed,
many of the innovative techniques of these works are designed to
place the process of the imagination at the center of the book and
to blur or deny altogether the usual distinctions we make between
the mind and the outside world. We can turn now to a more specific
look at the Collective's books; for convenience sake, I have
divided up my discussion on the basis of the "series groupings"
used by the Collective.
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Series I: Reruns by Jonathan Baumbach, Museum by B. H. Friedman,
Twiddledum, Twaddledum by Peter Spielberg. * The first series of
the Collective proved to be representative in many respects. The
fact that the books had little commonality in approach, for
example, immediately established the fact that the Collective was
not presenting itself as a unified "school" or movement. The books
by Baumbach and Spielberg are daring, imaginative works whose
unusual stylistic features create the logic of their own
justification; Friedman's more traditional novel seems strikingly
out of place, considering the Collective's proposed aims to produce
nontraditional fiction.
The format of Baumbach's Reruns is strange but effective: we are
given 33 short chapters (or "Nights") that are apparently "reruns"
of events in the life of a central character. These reruns are
nightmarish, frantic, often violent episodes whose characters and
events are created out of a wide variety of cultural cliches, fairy
tales, stories, and movies. In this world of terror, loneliness,
and absurdity, actor Walter Brennan may appear with Dracula or
Goldilocks, and the narrator helplessly confronts peculiar
combinations of senseless violence, inexplicable loss, and utterly
banal chatter. Like Manuel Puig's remarkable novel, Heartbreak
Tango, Baumbach's book succeeds because it is created out of the
language and archetypes through which we respond to everyday life.
Baumbach realizes, for example, that movies provide psychic dramas,
and even an idiosyncratic language, which the public appropriates
for its own purposes. Thus, somewhat in the manner of Coover or
Barthelme, Baumbach builds his narrator's life out of the language
and events of pop culture, although the familiar patterns are often
altered in humorous and frightening ways. Although there is no real
sense of "development" in the book, movement is constant; even
individual paragraphs shift location and direction. The issues
Baumbach raises in Reruns turn out to be at the center of many of
the Collective's books: to what extent is our response to the world
the product of our imagination? What is the value of our fictional
constructs, and to what extent do our lives follow the patterns we
have invented in our movies, books, or dreams?
*Jonathan Baumbach, Reruns. New York: Fiction Collective, 1974.
196 pp. $7.95.
B. H. Friedman, Museum. New York: Fiction Collective, 1974. 169
pp. $7.95. Peter Spielberg, Twiddledum, Twaddledum. New York:
Fiction Collective,
1974. 196 pp. $7.95. Fiction Collective books are distributed by
G. Braziller.
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Of the fifteen books published by the Collective so far, B. H.
Friedman's Museum is probably the most conventional. Its inclusion
in the Collective's works immediately brings up the question as to
whether the Collective should accept novels which are good, but not
innovative. Unfortunately, Museum is neither very innovative nor
very good as a conventional novel. Though it deals with significant
ideas, the book suffers from exactly the sort of mechanical,
overly- familiar presentation that most Collective members are
trying to avoid, and is tied too closely to these ideas rather than
to vital, energetic language.
If Museum was a disappointment, Peter Spielberg's Twiddledum,
Twaddledum was the Collective's first unqualified success. This
grimly funny, often frightening, but beautifully written novel is
divided into two sections, which creates the illusion of action
being carried forward in a familiar bildungsroman formula: a young
Jewish boy named Pankraz begins his existence by starving his twin
brother at his nurse's breast, and as he reaches puberty, he is
publicly and privately forced to endure a series of humiliations
which are often sexual in nature. As section one concludes, Pankraz
is being whisked away by the Nazis in a crowded train;
inexplicably, however, the train reverses direction and becomes the
"Through- Train Special / Le Havre-Amerika / Non-Stop Express."
When section two begins, the setting is New York, and Pankraz has
been mysteriously changed into "Paul." Although it seems at first
as if Paul's transformation is a rebirth, with Amerika offering the
possibilities of a new beginning, this does not turn out to be the
case; indeed, as in a nightmare, the second section is actually
only a mirror-like recapitulation of the first section, with Paul
being forced to experience subtle variations of many of the same
humiliations that he suffered while growing up. In both sections
Pankraz/Paul wanders through a repellent landscape whose
nightmarish qualities and ugliness are rendered in a spare, poetic
style reminiscent of both Kafka and Kosinski in its hallucinatory
vividness and cool understatement. Like Kafka's characters, Paul is
a victim who searches for love, beauty, and sexual fulfillment but
accepts his punishment and constant rejections without question. As
the book ends with Paul on another train, the reader realizes that
the pattern is about to begin again.
The very structure of Spielberg's novel, with its dizzying sets
of twins, verbal games, and self-conscious manipulations of
Freudian patterns, ensures that the reader always confronts the
book as an
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artifact (Spielberg's debt to Nabokov in this respect seems
undeniable, especially in the playful listing of books and names
which can generally be deciphered as referring to Spielberg's own
literary interests). At the same time, however, Spielberg's
precise, carefully controlled prose enables him to engage the
reader on a visceral level.
Series II: Searching for Survivors by Russell Banks, The Secret
Table by Mark Mirsky, 98.6 by Ronald Sukenick.* The Collective's
second series is one of its major triumphs to date, for each of the
books is vital and imaginative in conception and full of wonderful
language. The success of Banks's collection of short fiction and
Mirsky's book, which contains two lengthy stories and several
shorter ones, also points to a fact that seems well substantiated
by experimental fiction of the past fifteen years: innovative
fictional approaches often succeed best at the short-story level,
where the reader can be more easily engaged on the level of style
or formal manipulation.
Banks's Searching for Survivors is one of many Collective books
that deal with the ability of the imagination to rearrange ordinary
existence into whatever patterns seem most useful or appealing.
Most of the fourteen stories present fairly unremarkable men
attempting to reconstruct themselves and their pasts. Consisting
for the most part of quietly lyrical prose, these stories freely
intermingle fact and fancy, with each receiving meticulously
"realistic" treatment. "With Che in New Hampshire" is a
representative story about a young man who returns home with a
romantic, invented past involving his travels "with Che." The visit
itself seems actually to be a fiction which is carefully imagined,
complete with "retakes" of scenes that the narrator is not pleased
with. As we watch the narrator create both his past and his
present, we are given a striking example of the saving process of
the imagination.
Mirsky's book is also about the magical, private sources of the
imagination attempting to confront a drab, frightening, or
mysterious world. The novellas "Dorchester, Home and Garden" and
"Onan's Child" are related tales in which the Jewish experiences of
fear, loss, and paranoia are transformed into vibrant, sensuous
*Russell Banks, Searching for Survivors. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1975. 153 pp. $8.95.
Mark Mirsky, The Secret Table. New York: Fiction Collective,
1975. 167 pp. $8.95. Ronald Sukenick, 98.6. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1975. 188 pp. $8.95.
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language. "Onan's Child" is similar to some of the fiction of
Coover and Barth in that it reinvents a mythic character and
provides the modern reader with a new perspective on familiar
events. As jn Calvino's Cosmicomics and t-zero, the individual
sections of "Onan's Child" are fleshed out with quotations from the
Bible and scholarly texts, which provide a springboard for Mirsky's
own version. "Dorchester" is created out of a series of loosely
related anecdotes about urban, lower-class Jewish life near the
ghetto area of Boston. Centering on a man named Maishe, the
episodes vary considerably in degree of realism. In one episode
Maishe is shown futilely trying to become friends with a young girl
named Barbara, while in the next he is consorting with Pythagoras,
Origen, and other philosophers; later, at the urging of some angels
he has met, he is talked into giving flying a chance.
Mirsky's talent lies not so much in telling stories-many of the
episodes in this collection are obscure and difficult to follow,
especially to non-Jewish readers-but in creating a highly
expressive--one is almost tempted to call it "erotic"-prose that
captures the power and poetry of Jewish speech as effectively as
any of the now-famous Jewish writers of the 50s and 60s. "Is this
the music of Dorchester?" an angel asks of Maishe at one point, and
another one pops up to say, "Who cares if it's true or false?" (p.
40). This is precisely what the reader often feels when reading
Mirsky's prose; indeed, like the musical prose of William Gass and
Stanley Elkin, Mirsky's sentences are themselves sensuous objects
which are able to illuminate his scenes with a radiance of
language.
Ronald Sukenick's ability to create and control a wide range ot
literary styles is given free reign in 98.6, an apocalyptic, poetic
novel which many people feel is the Collective's most significant
book to date. The plot of the book concerns a band of refugees who
have escaped from a destructive society and are desperately
attempting to put the pieces of their lives together again by
creating a utopian home in the wilderness of Northern California.
The first section of the book, entitled "Frankenstein," is a
disjointed series of prose fragments created out of Sukenick's most
hallucinatory rhetoric; taken as a whole this first section
presents a mosaic of ugliness, chaos, and sexual despair-elements
which have produced the "Frankenstein" that the United States has
become. The solutions which offer themselves, such as dope, joyless
sex, murder, limitless but pointless freedom, are clearly
insufficient, and so in the second section, "Children of
Frankenstein," a commune is formed in which
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the members collectively attempt to reshape their fragmented
lives via the process of the imagination. As in Sukenick's earlier
novels, Up and Out, struggle with the threat of chaos is depicted
on three levels: the societal, the personal, and the fictional.
Thus as we watch the commune attempt to create a healthy unity, we
focus our attention on the book's main character, novelist Ron
Sukenick, who is also struggling with self-creation within the
novel we are reading; but we are also aware of the "real" Ronald
Sukenick and his efforts to put together a meaningful text. In
effect, all of these processes mirror each other and suggest
different aspects of the problems created by "The Mosaic Law": "the
law of mosaics or how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes"
(p. 167).
The efforts of the commune predictably fail; greed, sexual
duplicity, and violent encounters with a rival commune are
demonstrated not to be the proper elements out of which a stable,
fully realized "fiction" can be formed. In the third section,
"Palestine," the character Ron remains to create an eschatological
fantasy land of pure harmony (Bobby Kennedy is alive, there is
peace between the Jews and Arabs). Although even this last effort
of the imagination eventually fails, Sukenick's point about the way
in which the imagination can create reality has been embodied not
only in the action within the novel but in our own confrontation
with the text itself. This book, like the commune, is spawned out
of raw, chaotic elements which constantly threaten to decompose
themselves. But the process of imaginative composition (our own and
Sukenick's) which results in the novel before us provides an
exemplary, magical act of the imagination, for it has created a new
reality; this process is exactly the sort of divine creation that
the commune members were striving for, but failed to achieve. As
Sukenick tells us in all his fiction, life is like a novel-you have
to make it up.
Series III: The Second Story Man by Mimi Albert, Things in Place
by Jerry Bumpus, Reflex and Bone Structure by Clarence Major. * The
Collective's third series was significant in part because it
included books by a woman (Albert), a black (Major), and a non-
Easterner (Bumpus)-a signal that the Collective was broadening
*Mimi Albert, The Second Story Man. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1975. 106 pp. $8.95.
Jerry Bumpus, Things in Place. New York: Fiction Collective,
1975. 141 pp. $8.95.
Clarence Major, Reflex and Bone Structure. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1975. 145 pp. $8.95.
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the range of its talents from its previous
white/male/Jewish/East Coast base. Unfortunately the Collective's
first book by a woman, Mimi Albert's The Second Story Man, is also
one of its weakest efforts. Set in the lower Manhattan of the 1950s
and populated by rebellious middle-class youths, the book
episodically traces the story of a triangular relationship between
the 17-year-old narrator, Anna, her roomate, Mary, and Mary's
lover, Florian Rando (the "second story man" of the title).
Somewhat in the manner of Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love,
the "events" here are mixtures of real reminiscences and Anna's
purely invented recreations, and thus the book traces Anna's
efforts to come to grips imaginatively with a situation which she
finds compelling, distasteful, and mysterious. The conceptual
framework is quite interesting, but frequent lapses into lifeless,
uninspired language hurt the novel's effectiveness.
The stories in Jerry Bumpus' fine collection, Things in Place,
are generally not as formally unusual as most of the other works of
the Collective, although many deal with highly unusual, even Gothic
subject matters-Bumpus' most famous story, "The Heart of
Lovingkind," tells the sad story of a man who has a passionate love
affair with Gigi, a kangaroo, and then loses her to suicide. Bumpus
peoples his stories with lonely, inarticulate people who are
haunted by the past and unable to respond to the present. Bumpus
often structures his stories so as to allow the past and the purely
invented creations of his characters to invade their lives and
become palpable, as with the apparently imaginary wolves which lurk
around every corner for the old man in "Away in Night," and the
almost forgotten promise of young love which slowly takes over the
lives of the two old women in "The Idols of the Afternoon."
Although most of Bumpus' stories take place within a realistic
framework, the natural order of things in his world is always
threatening to dissolve before our eyes, with absurd, nightmarish
events often inexplicably erupting into the ordinary. The thin line
that exists between order and disorder, sanity and madness is
considered by the narrator of Bumpus' wildest, most original story,
"Our Golf Balls":
Things usually stay put and when there's a slip he looks the
other way. But nights in bed he closes his eyes and gives over-it
all must end and begin again! Grinning, he skids down the long
cloud hill and attacks the campus of friend and foe alike, ripping
and tearing. Instantly the rampage widens, across the land people
stagger forth in pajamas. The sky is burning, and all the streets
and rooms and people, so laboriously put together come undone.
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. . But wait! All is not lost. A bespectacled baboon in starred
wizard robes and pointy hat, is sifting through it. Tries to fit
this to that-Hipbone connected to the . . . telephone. Tosses the
parts over its shoulder and, peering over the rims of its glasses,
titters self-consciously. Can the baboon get the job done by
morning? (p. 19)
Bumpus' stories deal not only with the precariousness of order,
but with the violent, impersonal nature of human contact today. His
people rarely have significant encounters; more often they are
shown confronting animals (either literally, as in "In the Mood of
Zebras," or figuratively, as in "A Lament for Wolves"), or people
who are metaphorically transformed by language into animals or
insects (thus the motorcycle gang in Bumpus' title story is
described as "a storm of hornets" and "giant insects").
Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure is a strange blend of
Barthelme, Robbe-Grillet, and Mickey Spillane; perhaps the best
comparison, however, is with Robert Coover's metafictional story,
"The Magic Poker," which concerns a magician/writer who has created
an enchanted island and is desperately attempting to keep things
running without himself becoming lost within its operations. Reflex
shares with Coover's story the central narrative tension between a
writer and his creation, as well as its "montage method" of
presentation in which brief verbal sections appear before us
without transition or apparent connection-thus part one of Reflex
is appropriately entitled "A Bad Connection."These verbal episodes
depict events which range widely in tone from the highly erotic, to
the banal, to the sinister. Gradually a dual focus is established:
on the one hand, we have the elements of the "story-line," which
centers around a love triangle and two murders; on the other hand,
we watch the narrator putting the pieces of the story before us and
self- consciously analyzing his performance as he proceeds. The
reader knows at the outset of the book that the murders have
occurred ("The scattered pieces of the bodies were found" flashes
across page one), and naturally expects the author to unravel the
mystery behind the murders; and, indeed, the narrator tells us that
he is "a detective trying to solve a murder" (p. 32). But like
other recent writers who have appropriated the detective novel for
their own purposes (Borges, Queneau, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet), Major
uses this format merely to entrap the reader into a puzzle which
has no real solution. "I can't explain how anything relates to
anything else" (pp.
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15-16), says the narrator early in the novel, and this sort of
epistemological uncertainty is at the heart of Major's book. One of
the points being made by a great number of contemporary writers is
that previous novelistic conventions concerning personality, cause-
and-effect, and "explanations" of any kind are no longer credible-
to paraphrase Barthelme, fragments are the only forms which we can
trust. The writer's job is no longer to try and create the specious
illusion of order by linking these fragments into meaningful
relationships; instead the writer may decide to arrange these
elements in a capricious, or blatantly invented, pattern and allow
the reader to arrange or rearrange, coming up with any solution
which he finds intriguing. When Major's narrator begins to present
a scene which may shed some light on the murders, he suddenly
interjects, "I simply refuse to go into details. Fragments can be
all we have. To make the whole. An archeologist might, of course,
look for different clues" (p. 17).
As in 98.6, then, the real interest of Major's book is in the
narrator's struggle to find a fictional form that will allow him to
work off his own tension. Meanwhile he is unable-or refuses-to
supply the usual descriptions and explanations; thus his characters
remain largely abstractions, their motivations mysterious, their
personali- ties vague. At one point the narrator says of his
principal character, "I cannot help him if he refuses to focus. How
can I be blamed for his lack of seriousness?" (p. 42). In addition,
the narrator constantly reminds us of his own involvement in the
creation of the text, as when he announces of his three main
characters: "Get this: Cora isn't based on anybody. Dale isn't
anything. Canada is just something I'm busy making up. I am only an
act of my own imagination" (p. 85). Despite the absence of the
familiar novelistic devices of tension and character development,
Major's novel, with its spare prose so often full of eroticism and
understated desperation, usually manages to keep the reader's
interest.
Series IV: Take It or Leave It by Raymond Federman, The Talking
Room by Marianne Hauser, The Comatose Kids by Seymour Simckes.* The
fourth series was a "good news/bad news" group. It
*Raymond Federman, Take It or Leave It. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1976. Unpaged. $11.95.
Marianne Hauser, The Talking Room. New York: Fiction Collective,
1976. 158 pages. $8.95.
Seymour Simckes, The Comatose Kids. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1976. 114 pp. $8.95.
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contains the Collective's most ambitious and energetic book,
Federman's Take It or Leave It, and its most lyrical, poetic novel,
Hauser's beautifully rendered The Talking Room; but it also
presented perhaps the Collective's most obviously unsuccessful
book, Simckes' The Comatose Kids, a novel whose failures illuminate
some of the pitfalls which innovative fiction needs to avoid.
Federman's novel is, to date, the Collective's most audacious
work in terms of experimental techniques. In the course of this
long (over 400 unnumbered pages), metafictional journey to chaos,
Federman's autobiographical hero encounters a variety of strange,
amorous, and wonderfully funny adventures as he tries to begin a
trip across America in search of both himself and the meaning of
America. At first glance the story seems to be a self-conscious
replication of the classic American initiation story-and indeed it
is, in part. But this central narrative thread is only a pre-text
which allows the emergence of the more important parts of the
novel. These digressive sections include ruminations reminiscent of
Beckett; lengthy discussions about politics, sex, American values,
and current literary attitudes; Borgesian quotations and pseudo-
quotations, a questionnaire ("Courtesy of Snow White"), and
specific commentaries about the text itself. All this is presented
in frenzied, delirious prose on pages upon which the print is
allowed to compose itself in almost any possible manner. These
typographical games effectively serve to further break down the
syntax and narrative coherence of the novel, demonstrating the
"struggle of word design against word syntax," as we are told at
one point.
Partly as a result of the frantic, delirious tone, partly
because of the many digressions, and partly because Federman
creates a series of ironic reversals and cancellations in the plot,
the "discovery novel" becomes no discovery at all; indeed, as the
novel concludes, the trip in search of America, like nearly all of
our expectations of what a novel should be, has been canceled. As
the narrator constantly spews forth words in the form of stories,
anecdotes, and digressions, we also realize that he is attempting
to avoid a confrontation with his own frightening past. Thus, by
impeding the action, altering the familiar novelistic formulas,
introducing typographical disruptions, and often pointing to its
own fabricated distortions, the book never allows the reader to
"learn" anything or believe in it-in effect, it destroys or cancels
itself as it proceeds. As one of the dizzying series of
narrators-within-narrators proudly exclaims, "the incredible
astonishing magnificent result is that the
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entire work cancels itself out not only as it progresses, but
also in advance!"
The beauty and magic of Hauser's The Talking Room is difficult
to analyze. The key would seem to be in the book's extraordinary
prose patterns, which create in their complex, interrelated images
a sustained vision of loneliness, the desire for love and the
necessity for escape, and, always, a haunting, dreamlike lyricism.
"Again I can hear their voices coming nonstop from the talking room
downstairs. I hear them through the rumble of the trucks in the
night rain as I lie on my back between moist sheets, listening. And
I know they are talking about me" (p. 1). This passage opens the
book and introduces the principal characters: the narrator is a
chubby, pregnant, 13-year-old girl who may (or may not) be a
test-tube baby; she narrates the book while lying in her bed
upstairs, listening to the conversations of her mother, J, and her
mother's possessive lesbian lover, V. Meanwhile the girl's
transistor radio provides a telling counterpoint to the emotional
violence that is constantly erupting downstairs in a house that is
full of mirrors and echoes. Mixing dream with desire, the book's
narrative framework is at once both utterly fantastic and
believable; Hauser also succeeds in creating a novel that is
comically satirical and still full of compassion. The relationship
between J and V, for example, is a poignant portrait of the
destructive impulses which often lie at the heart of our desire for
love and communication. This book is certainly one of the
Collective's major successes and deserves much greater attention
than it has so far received.
Simckes' The Comatose Kids demonstrates that although a writer
need no longer provide realistic characters, credible plots, or
clear relationships, he must still provide a voice which the reader
will want to listen to. Both Take It or Leave It and The Talking
Room succeed, finally, because the reader is likely to find the
delirious or lyrical quality of the prose compelling. A similar
phenomenon keeps us reading the experimental works of, say, William
Gass, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and John Hawkes. But in
Simckes' book, the absence of traditional narrative elements is not
made up for by either ingenious formal manipulations or by
energetic, lively language. As with so many other Collective
novels, the plot here revolves around a central character (Doktor
Tschisch, a 93-year-old psychiatrist, whose speeches occasionally
have their moments of wit) who is attempting to create an
imaginative extension of himself. Dr. Tschisch only has three days
to live and, because he seems to sense
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this, has kidnapped two young mental patients. By "cracking all
mirrors of memory" and "forcing others to share his craziness" (p.
22), the Doktor hopes to reconstitute the young couple into lovers-
a transformation which will presumably provide a continuation of
the Doktor's life. What we watch, then, is the struggle of the boy
and girl attempting to maintain their own psyches in the face of
the Doktor's efforts to change them. This tug-of-war involves a
sort of Beckettian dialectic, with the boy and girl refusing to
assimilate the doctor's stories and instead trying actively to
create themselves through their own invented stories. As the boy
explains it, "By sticking close to his own stories he might avoid
becoming someone he never was" (pp. 34-35). Unfortunately, these
stories-within-the- story are not themselves very interesting, nor
is the confusing, often obscure dialogue animated enough to
maintain the reader's attention.
Series V: Althea by J. M. Alonso, Babble by Jonathan Baumbach,
Temporary Sanity by Thomas Glynn.* The Collective's fifth series
was perhaps its most consistently excellent since the second, and
offers an interesting range of innovative techniques, from Glynn"s
fairly realistic narrative to Baumbach's novel, which mixes dream
and cinematic/literary fantasies much as Reruns did, to Alonso's
peculiar, complex mixture of realism, dream, archetype, and
fable.
Althea might be likened to Lawrence's great novels, for it too
seeks to give literary expression to the deeply felt, hidden
motivations not accessible to most psychological techniques.
Alonso's subject is no less than the sources of "the Divorce of
Adam and Eve" (the subtitle of the novel), the radical shift in
male/female relationships which seems to have become more sharply
defined in the past twenty years. Alonso senses that certain
aspects of contemporary culture, especially deep, psychic phenomena
such as the schisms and affinities which have always existed
between men and women, cannot be dealt with through the easy
solutions of social or psychological realism. His book's peculiar
yoking of myth, dream, and realism occasionally creates objective
correlatives for the kinds
*J. M. Alonso, Althea. New York: Fiction Collective, 1976. 363
pp. $11.95. Jonathan Baumbach, Babble. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1976. 117 pp.
$8.95. Thomas Glynn, Temporary Sanity. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1976. 166 pp.
$8.95.
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of forces he seeks to define. At other times, however, he seems
to mistrust his instincts; certainly his most realistic scenes, for
example the 4trial and the party scenes, are his least convincing.
Fully successful or not, Althea provides a perfect example of why
the Fiction Collective is such a potentially valuable organization,
for one imagines that Alonso would have a hard time indeed getting
this difficult, highly original book accepted by a conventional
publishing firm.
Baumbach's Babble, like his earlier Reruns, effectively
assembles a variety of our culture's stock fears, obsessions, and
desires, and recombines them into a sort of surreal bildungsroman.
The "hero" of this book is a three-year-old child whom we follow
through all the trials and tribulations of youth, love, college,
and old age-all experienced as a three-year-old. The baby's father,
who narrates the book, also treats us to a variety of stories told
by the baby. These stories seem derived, appropriately enough, from
fairy- tales, television, and comic books and contain their own
childish concepts of causality and morality. The baby is constantly
chased and deceived in these tales, something which suggests that
paranoia is not the sole possession of adults. Baumbach implants
within his novel many familiar motifs and conventions drawn from
serious initiation novels, only here they are utterly trivialized.
As he did in Reruns, Baumbach demonstrates that he has a bit of
Barthelme's gift for impersonating the cliches of our society and
implanting them in improbable situations.
Glynn's Temporary Sanity is probably the Collective's most
realistic novel since Museum, but unlike Friedman's novel, it ably
demonstrates that even relatively conventional novels can be
"innovative" if the writer is willing to take sufficient risks with
language. Glynn's novel, of course, is "realistic" only in very
relative terms. Set among the backwoods of the Adirondacks, this
darkly funny book tells the story of two brothers who are trying to
free a third brother from a mental institution. The novel traces
their comic and eventually tragic attempt to escape from their
pursuers and somehow scrape a living out of the rocky land.
Although each of these escaped refugees seems highly unstable and
even dangerously insane, Glynn presents their yearnings for freedom
from the restrictive prescriptions of society with considerable
sympathy. As in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, we come to feel
that the strange logic and obsessions of the insane are more
natural and potentially fulfilling than the civilized
destructiveness of normal society. This is a
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familiar'idea by now, but Glynn's ability to create dynamic
verbal equivalents for his characters' derangements makes his book
seem alive and vital.
Series VI: Null Set and Other Stories by George Chambers,
Amateur People by Andree Connors, Moving Parts by Steve Katz. * The
three most recent Collective books help illustrate the wide variety
of experimental forms available to contemporary writers as well as
the Collective's desire to present material drawn from a wide
variety of areas. The focus of these books is the interaction
between the creative imaginations of characters and the often
alienating effects of the disruptive "real world" they live in.
The stories in George Chambers' Null Set might at first remind
readers of Barthelme's fictions in their fragmented method of
presentation which forces the reader to supply most of the
connections and conclusions. Chambers' stories often suggest the
related inability of contemporary authors and of the average man to
organize the materials of their lives into coherent patterns-an
inability which derives from our society's fundamental
characteristics: violence, epistemological uncertainty, lack of
sexual identities (or any sense of self at all), racism, and
"dangerous language problems" (p. 215). Many of the best stories
here, such as "Accident," "The Survivor," "The Trial," and the
series of related "Jirac Disslerov" stories, are created from a set
of fragmented passages whose disconnected and occasionally surreal
qualities mirror the confusion of their main characters.
Occasionally Chambers slips into obscurity and boredom, but at his
best his method is to juxtapose elements that present ironic,
startling insights into the nature of our divided mind and
culture.
Andree Connors' Amateur People was the winner of the
Braziller/Fiction Collective's First Novel Contest. Chosen from
over 500 entires (which itself says something about the status of
innovative fiction), Connors' novel is a surreal and complex book
whose verbal tricks and obscurities in turn delight and irritate
the reader. Of the Fiction Collective books to date, Amateur
People
*George Chambers, Null Set and Other Stories. New York: Fiction
Collective, 1977. 216 pp. $8.95.
Andree Connors, Amateur People. New York: Fiction Collective,
1977. 159 pp. $8.95.
Steve Katz, Moving Parts. New York: Fiction Collective, 1977.
Each story paged separately. $8.95.
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probably most resembles Hauser's The Talking Room in its
elaborately developed poetic effects and its bizarre interweaving
of the real and the imaginary. Actually, there is no "reality" here
at all except the unfolding of words on the page, for all the
characters are constantly revealed to be illusions and fakes-hoaxes
which momentarily arise, help sustain the other characters'
illusions, and then melt away. Set in a landscape which at
different moments reminds one of Beckett, Lewis Carroll, and Edward
Albee, the story focuses on poet-actress Varia, who is in the midst
of a process of disintegration, a process which each of the book's
three sections develops through distorted, mirrorlike variations.
In her various roles as woman, actress, poet, and character within
a novel, Varia continually discovers that she is nothing but an
extension of others, that, as she puts it, "I stand in front of a
camera and say someone else's words" (p. 154). Amateur People
suffers at times from the sense that everything is being needlessly
drawn out (though this is, admittedly, a part of the way the book
operates); still, Connors' obvious talent at verbal play and
lyrical depiction helps her dramatize Varia's plight in shifting
patterns that are often amusing and, at times, remarkably
touching.
Steve Katz's trademark in his previous work has always been his
ability to create bizarre situations which somehow produce
mysterious resonances that illuminate events in our own lives.
Katz's ability to convincingly create dreamlike situations is
evident in the four loosely related fictions in Moving Parts: in
one story, for example, a man receives a package containing 43
human wrists. Somewhat like Kafka, Katz develops even the most
improbable scenes with careful precision. But the real center of
interest in Moving Parts is Katz's exploration of the various ways
our imaginative systems work their way into the world and affect
our own personal sense of identity. In "Female Skin," for example,
Katz first establishes the story's central premise (a man wearing a
woman's skin) and then records the reactions of various real people
to his story; with the assistance of journal entries, photographs,
and assorted imaginatively recreated experiences, we observe the
way that Katz's story began to have an effect on his own life and
relationships with others. In the last of the stories, "43," Katz
examines the use of the number "43" in his previous fiction and
muses on the strange way this number seems to have begun intruding
into his life. As he explains it, Katz is a "closet 43er" and the
number has become "more of a nagging responsibility than a
guiding
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obsession" ("43," p. 18). This eruption of the arbitrary into
reality is precisely the sort of event that demonstrates for Katz
that "the potential for mystery is everywhere, it's infinite, but
no predetermined order can circumscribe this world of events"
("43," pp. 22-23).
As I noted at the outset of this essay, it is still probably too
early to come to any final conclusions about how important an
influence in contemporary fiction the Fiction Collective can
become. Certainly not all of its books have been successes, and
even its best books aren't "ambitious" in the sense that critics
want important books to be. Judged by almost any standard except
sales, however, it does seem evident that the Fiction Collective
has succeeded in publishing several books which are among the most
significant American works of the past half-dozen years or so; and
it has continued to publish these works despite the general lack of
attention or sympathetic reaction from reviewers or critics. Given
the worsening options for contemporary writers, cooperatives of
this kind may be absolutely necessary if innovative fiction is
going to maintain the momentum it has generated in the past ten
years. Therefore the Fiction Collective's efforts are important not
just because of what it succeeds in accomplishing or fails to
accomplish, but for what it can teach us about possible
alternatives for serious, nontraditional writers.
Larry McCaffery San Diego State University
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Article Contentsp. [99]p. 100p. 101p. 102p. 103p. 104p. 105p.
106p. 107p. 108p. 109p. 110p. 111p. 112p. 113p. 114p. 115
Issue Table of ContentsContemporary Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1
(Winter, 1978), pp. 1-132Front MatterMalcolm Lowry's Metafiction:
The Biography of a Genre [pp. 1-25]Lamming and Naipaul: Some
Criteria for Evaluating the Third-World Novel [pp. 26-47]John
Gardner's "Grendel": Sources and Analogues [pp. 48-57]Ed Dorn's
Mystique of the Real: His Poems for North America [pp. 58-79]Andr
Gide and the Voices of Rebellion [pp. 80-98]ReviewsReview: The
Fiction Collective [pp. 99-115]Review: Surrealism [pp.
116-120]Review: Robert Desnos [pp. 121-123]Review: D. H. Lawrence
[pp. 124-127]Review: British Women Novelists [pp. 128-131]
Back Matter [pp. 132-132]