Avant-Garde and after

American fiction in the 1970s had stood at the brink of degeneration or transformation, of death or rebirth, according to which critical school one heeds. By the end of the previous decade its self-consciously problematic nature, dating back to Hawthorne's prefaces and Howells' theology of realism, clearly had reached the point of crisis. The issues were representation and mimesis-with one group of novelists and critics insisting that the true art of fiction lay in the writing, and the other more interested in what was written about. The division was much deeper than the earlier, nineteenth century debate between romanticism and realism, for the question ran deeper than the imaginative versus documentary approaches to one's subject. The need for subject was now under question. What are we, asks Ronald Sukenick in his artistically self-considered novel, Up, children reading fairy tales or men trying to work out the essentials of our fate.1 It's all words and nothing but Sukenick's stand-in character argues, a view of fiction shared by many innovative writers of the period. Critic and novelist William H. Gass appreciates the dilemma, which raises a question never before voiced in two centuries of rabidly debated American fiction: It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams. The challenge, which more conservative author-critics such as John Gardner and Walker Percy would not face, was abrupt and even terminal. That novels should be made out of words, and merely words, is shocking, really, Gass admits. It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber: the bliss of all those years, the fears... from sponge.2 Not heeding Sukenick's and Gass' advice, in a culture which had long since accepted abstraction in music, art, and poetry, invited dire consequences for fiction. By passing through language onto the projected screen of representation the narrative arist began to rely too heavily on representation's own code -in short, to do less writing and more posturing with content. Novels are

Aesthetics · American literature · Art · Dilemma · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept) · Literature · Nothing · Realism · Romanticism · Subject (documents) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• "Somehow Disturbed at the Core"

  Open Access•Neil Easterbrook•South Central Review•1994

  Add to list